tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-78763638239127639992024-03-13T03:06:57.297-07:00Chapters, Verses, Lines and WordsMusings on The Bible: Thoughts both reverent and irreverent about the greatest achievement of Western culture.David W. Karpookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05928085897898539598noreply@blogger.comBlogger42125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7876363823912763999.post-71554965875121016562024-02-03T08:30:00.000-08:002024-02-03T08:51:37.918-08:00Who Is a God Like You?Reading the book of the prophet Micah is a bit of a roller-coaster ride. It alternates graphic doomsaying with utopian visions not just for the Hebrews but for the entire world. At least three such reversals take place within its seven short chapters, announced by the classic prophet’s call to “hear” or “listen”; not unexpectedly, this has given rise to thousands of years of speculation over whether Micah is the work of multiple authors, as well as how many, and when they may have written the various documents redacted into the book we read today.<div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.art-prints-on-demand.com/kunst/jan_van_eyck_579/Genter-Altar-Prophet-Micha-Jan-van-Eyck.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="225" src="https://www.art-prints-on-demand.com/kunst/jan_van_eyck_579/Genter-Altar-Prophet-Micha-Jan-van-Eyck.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jan van Eyck: The Prophet Micah, Ghent altar</td></tr></tbody></table><div><p>Micah is revered among Christians primarily for the opening of chapter 5, which has been interpreted as predicting the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. That’s arguable – the passage can be read in other ways – and also one of the least interesting things about Micah, in my opinion.</p><p>
In the Hebrew Bible, the book of Micah sits between Jonah and Nahum. It shares some common ground with both. All three books focus on Israel and Judah’s antagonistic relations with their neighbor Assyria, whose capital Nineveh is used as a synecdoche for that country and its people. Jonah is called to preach repentance to the Ninevites; Nahum portrays their total destruction. Micah addresses the threat that Assyria poses to the cities and towns of the two kingdoms, predicting that they will wreak destruction that will drive the Hebrews to repent their evil ways and ultimately lead to an earthly utopia.</p><p>
Like Jonah, Micah takes a globalist view of God’s justice. While Micah is a much more traditional book of prophecy than is Jonah – unlike Jonah, Micah speaks to the Hebrew people about their behavior and their need to repent – he is clear that God’s love and mercy extend to all the peoples of the world. However, Micah makes clear that the Hebrews hold fate in their hands.</p><p>
Micah’s book begins with a frightening set of images of God coming down to Earth to trample the entire planet because of the sins of Israel and Judah (similar imagery is used by Nahum). “Listen, all you peoples, earth and its fullness,” Micah begins. He goes on:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">
</p><blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">“For the Lord is about to come out from his place.<br />And go down and tread on earth’s high places,<br />And the mountains shall melt beneath Him and the valleys split open, </blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">Like wax before the fire, like water pouring down a slope.” (1:3-4)</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p></p><p></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">
<p></p><p></p></blockquote>
Universal destruction so far. But then there’s a twist:<div><p></p><blockquote><p></p></blockquote></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div>“For Jacob’s trespass all this has happened </div><div>And for the house of Israel’s offenses.” (1:5)</div></blockquote><div><blockquote></blockquote><blockquote><p></p></blockquote><p></p><p>
Already in 700 BCE, Jews were being blamed for all the troubles of the world. Some things never change. </p><p>
</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e8/3e/0e/e83e0ea18fe8ab7ff4776d50739b3508.jpg" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="516" height="640" src="https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e8/3e/0e/e83e0ea18fe8ab7ff4776d50739b3508.jpg" width="413" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr></tbody></table>
Following this global cataclysm, Micah gets specific: Samaria will become “a ruined heap in the field.” Further, the threat will reach as far as Jerusalem’s gates, clearly a threat of an advancing army – the Assyrians – reducing Samaria to rubble and threatening, the Judean capitol in the south.<p></p><p>
As Micha’s first prophecy proceeds, it becomes clear that the sins of the Israelites are to a large degree about corruption within their governmental and religious institutions. Judges demand bribes, preachers and prophets demand payment and offer lies in return, the rich and powerful rob the poor. Widows and their fatherless children are thrown out of their homes. Although “whore’s pay,” money spent on cultic prostitutes who then use it to purchase idols and other riches for their altars, is mentioned, Micah is not primarily about faith in the one God of the Hebrews. It is about how we behave toward each other in society and around the world.</p><p>
Later on, Micah makes clear what would constitute behavior acceptable to God:</p><p></p></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">“It was told to you, man, <br />What is good
And what the Lord demands of you – <br />Only doing justice and loving kindness <br />And walking humbly with your God.” (6:8)</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote><div><p style="text-align: left;">That last clause is interesting. “Your God.” Does that imply that your god might not be my god? It’s hard to say what the implication is at this point in Micah, but a few chapters earlier, presenting a utopian vision of a world at peace, he makes it clear that achieving this paradisiacal state does not demand that everyone adhere to the same religion:</p></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">“For all the peoples shall walk </blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">Each in the name of his god <br />But we shall walk in the name of the Lord our God forevermore.” (4:5)</blockquote><p style="text-align: left;">The future world at peace envisioned by Micah is duplicated almost exactly in Isaiah chapter 2. The two prophets (assuming 1st Isaiah here – Isaiah appears to have been written by at least three distinct authors) were contemporaries, and may have known each other or certainly of each other, so their content-sharing is not a complete surprise. We don’t have a clue who borrowed from whom. But Isaiah does not repeat the “Each in the name of his god” clause.</p><div><p>
Micah and Isaiah position Jerusalem, site of God’s restored temple, as the center of this peaceful world, and as a place where God will be “arbiter to vast nations from far away.” (4:3) But while Isaiah seems to assume that the entire world will follow the Hebrew God, Micah does not require faithfulness to Yahweh of anyone but the Hebrews. Just as God in Jonah did not require conversion of either the sailors or the Ninevites, God in Micah does not mandate the conversion of anyone outside the Hebrew community. He just wants the pervasive maltreatment He observes to stop.</p><p>
What kind of a god is Yahweh, who does not demand fealty to Himself, but instead demands that we recognize all of his human creation as worthy of decency and respect? One who places love and forgiveness above power and vengeance, it seems. The question arises both in the meaning of Micah’s name, “Who is like God?”, and explicitly in the final chapter of his prophetic book:</p></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">“Who is a God like You dismissing crime <br />And forgiving trespass for the remnant of His estate?” <br />He does not cling forever to His wrath, <br />For He desires kindness.” (7:18)</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote><p style="text-align: left;">Like Jonah, Micah seems taken aback by God’s determination to forgive, but unlike the other prophet, Micah is not angered by God’s graciousness. Micah sees tolerance and acceptance as key features of the universal utopia he envisions. It may take destruction and repentence to get there, but it awaits us as, in essence, its own reward. Would that today's children of Abraham recall what Micah knew.</p><div><p>
</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p></div></div>David W. Karpookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05928085897898539598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7876363823912763999.post-73027833669184500002024-01-15T11:32:00.000-08:002024-02-03T08:34:58.342-08:00The Questions of JonahThe Book of Jonah stands out as an oddity even within a work as teeming with oddities as the Bible. Consisting of a mere four chapters – a trifle, in terms of the Bible – Jonah is by far the best known of the books of the Prophets despite the fact that it is completely unlike any of the Bible’s other prophetic books.<p>
For one thing, it contains almost no prophecy. Although it is nestled among the 12 short works known as the “Minor Prophets,” Jonah is uniquely a plot-driven narrative mostly remembered for the episode in which the protagonist is swallowed by an enormous fish. The only words of God shared by Jonah are, “Forty days more, and Nineveh is overthrown.”</p><p>
That statement represents another oddity: Jonah delivers his prophecy not to the people of Israel or Judah, but to their sworn and feared enemy, the Assyrians, conquerors of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Nineveh was the Assyrian capitol. Jonah is the only biblical prophecy delivered to a non-Jewish audience. Other prophets wrote of the fate of the Hebrews’ non-Jewish neighbors -- the book of Nahum, indeed, prophesies the destruction of Nineveh – but the pagans are not the audience for those words</p><p>
We are not told what language Jonah was speaking when he uttered those scant prophetic words while making his way through the streets of Nineveh. He is a self-described Hebrew, commanded by God to deliver his prophecy to the great city’s residents. But whatever language he spoke, The Ninevens must have understood him, because he was remarkably effective. Unlike the stubborn and recalcitrant Jews who received the other prophecies, the people of Nineveh immediately donned sackcloth and repented their evil ways. When their king decided to hop on the bandwagon, he added the city’s animals to the penitents required to put on sackcloth. Seeing their repentence from unnamed “evil,” God abandons his plan to destroy Nineveh and saves the heathens. Notably, their salvation does not involve religious conversion, simply their repentance.</p><p>
Similarly, in the first chapter of Jonah, the episode detailing the storm at sea, God saves the ship full of religiously diverse – and presumably polyglot – sailors who reluctantly follow Jonah’s instructions and throw him overboard as appeasement of the God that Jonah had tried to flee. When the storm immediately stops, the sailors pray and make sacrifices to the Hebrew God, but there is no suggestion that they have converted.</p><p>
One of the key messages of Jonah may be, indeed, that belief in the god of the Hebrews is not a requirement for God’s mercy, but abstaining from evil is.</p><p>
Those casually acquainted with the story of Jonah often think of it as a tale for children, the story of a man who disobeyed God, was swallowed by a fish in whose belly he spent three days and three nights, repented and was saved. But that is a seriously understated depiction of this book. Jonah may be brief, but it is far from simple or straightforward.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgjWOTaR5NFsdvCWIeFuhk_d0NU7ugelxXh90wlCMLkY0yhKyShdGnxiDN7MsciqCD_KrX42PsXGeDAWgRPkn77_tiQQfrobK_yxIvZIvpQuJxQ7PlYZIFfe0STkY598n4omHTCmen8ysgL4WjiY4rkoZ7ypmsco0ZT4qzN3BTx-K3cTMGISsVHn38VQayV" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="695" data-original-width="1024" height="271" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgjWOTaR5NFsdvCWIeFuhk_d0NU7ugelxXh90wlCMLkY0yhKyShdGnxiDN7MsciqCD_KrX42PsXGeDAWgRPkn77_tiQQfrobK_yxIvZIvpQuJxQ7PlYZIFfe0STkY598n4omHTCmen8ysgL4WjiY4rkoZ7ypmsco0ZT4qzN3BTx-K3cTMGISsVHn38VQayV=w400-h271" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jan Brueghel the Elder: Jonah Leaving the Whale </td></tr></tbody></table><br /></div><p>
Jonah is by convention divided into four chapters that play out as follows:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">
• God commands Jonah to go to Nineveh to deliver a prophecy, which at this point is not defined. Jonah, in fear of confronting that city’s populace, instead decides to flee from God, traveling to the port of Joppa (Jaffa) and purchasing a fare on a ship bound for the distant city of Tarshish. When the ship sets sail, a fierce storm develops. The crew prays to their various gods for salvation, to no avail. Jonah, who has gone down into the vessel to sleep, is confronted by the ship’s captain who asks him about his god. Jonah acknowledges that he is a Hebrew and, evidently having previously told the sailors he was fleeing from God, says that in order to save themselves they must throw him overboard. Although the sailors are reluctant to do so, they eventually see that as their only option and cast Jonah into the sea, which immediately calms, leading to the sailors’ prayers and sacrifices.</p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p>
• God instructs a gigantic fish to swallow Jonah, who then spends three days and nights in its belly. While in there, he recites a prayer, a psalm about salvation and deliverance. Hearing this, God instructs the fish to “vomit” Jonah out onto shore.</p><p>
• God again commands Jonah to travel to Nineveh and deliver his prophecy, which this time Jonah does, inspiring the city’s population – and eventually their king and their animals – to don sackcloth, fast, and repent. Hearing their repentance, God changes his mind about destroying the city.</p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">
• Jonah is incensed by God’s change of mind, and goes east of the city to sit and sulk. He builds a small shelter. God causes a shade tree to grow to protect him from the sun, but after the first night, God sends a worm to destroy the tree and a wind to make conditions unbearable for Jonah. God confronts Jonah about why he is angry, to which Jonah responded that the reason he ran away in the first place was that he knew that God was compassionate and was likely to save the Ninevens. He tells God he wants to die. The story ends with a questioning retort from God to Jonah: “You – you had pity over the qiqayon (tree), for which you did not toil and which you did not grow, which overnight came and overnight was gone. And I, shall I not have pity for Nineveh the great city, in which there are many more thousand human beings who do not know between their right hand and their left, and many beasts?”
</p></blockquote><p>That final question, which gets no answer, is a radical one in biblical terms, making it clear that despite the fact that God is worshipped by the Hebrews, he is God of the entire world, and sees care for all of humanity as his obligation. This from the God who so often in the Bible has protected the Israelites from their enemies, dispatching Egyptians, Phoenicians, and assorted pagans.</p><p>
Although the residents of Nineveh are said to have been condemned for their evil ways and are saved by repentence, it is never made clear what evil they have perpetrated to deserve the destruction God has proposed. Whatever the moral of this story is, it does not have to do with specific, named acts. Instead, it suggests that we know evil when we see it; it doesn’t have to be spelled out to us.</p><p>
One thing that is clear is that Jonah’s God likes to be recognized and communicated with. The sailors in Chapter 1 do it and the storm is quelled; the Ninevites in Chapter 3 do it and their city is spared from destruction; and Jonah does it in his psalm in Chapter 2, after which God engineers his release from the belly of the beast. It has been widely noted that neither the sailors nor the citizens of Nineveh are said to convert to Judaism; however, they recognize the Hebrew god as a powerful agent whose wishes need to be obeyed.</p><p>
So, what is the Book of Jonah, exactly? That’s a question that continues to stump both scholars and the faithful. As the Yale Anchor Bible series volume on Jonah puts it:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">
“The question of the genre of the book of Jonah is a thorny one. It has been described as history, satire, parody, allegory, midrash, parable, biography, prophetic narrative, novella, tragedy, myth, and folklore, among others. Almost as common as the assigning of Jonah to a specific literary genre is the insistence that the book defies genre categories … The matter is further complicated by the fact that many of the genres that appear in discussion are foreign to the ancient biblical world.”</p></blockquote><p>
If Jonah is satire, or parody of the other writing prophets, how did his jab at them end up in the Bible? Well, the Bible is an anthology – even an anthology of anthologies when you consider how many of its books appear to have had multiple authors whose work was stitched together by editors who have come to be known as redactors. Like many anthologies, its point of view is not consistent. The so-called Wisdom Books of Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are similarly off-the-main-stream message.</p><p>
It’s very hard to know when the books of the Hebrew Bible were written much less accepted into the canon. Guesses about Jonah’s authorship and era are all over the board. The prophet is mentioned in 2 Kings as having lived during the reign of Jeroboam II in the northern kingdom, a 41-year span lasting from approximately 790 to 750 BCE. But his association in Kings with reestablishment of an eastern border bears no relation to the Book of Jonah.</p><p>
The Anchor Bible commentary posits that the book we read today as Jonah is a blending of at least three distinct components:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p>
• A straightforward original story in which God commands Jonah to travel to Nineveh to deliver his prophecy and Jonah obeys – in other words, the opening of chapter 1, followed immediately by chapter 3.</p><p>
• An interpolated story about Jonah’s attempt to flee from God by boarding a ship to Tarshish, the storm at sea and the swallowing by the fish – most of chapters 1 and 2</p><p>
• The psalm in chapter 2, which virtually everyone agrees was an independent, pre-existing work absorbed into Jonah’s story.</p></blockquote><p>
If this theory is correct, each of these pieces likely was written at a different time, and their redaction into one narrative may have occurred quite late in the compositional stream of the Hebrew Bible. That would make sense if Jonah is indeed a satirical commentary on other prophetic works (Nahum and Joel are likely candidates). The author(s) of the fish story and God’s final interaction with Jonah in Chapter 4 may well have had a more universalist view than the often fiercely national pre-exilic prophets.</p><p>
Remember, too, that the Priestly writer (P) credited with the first, universalist creation story in Genesis 1 is believed to have lived long after the Yahwist writer (J) who composed the domestically scaled creation story in Genesis 2. Adam and Eve can be seen as the beginning of the story of the Jewish people; the Priestly creation story covers all of us.</p><p>
But is that all that we are seeing at play here? I think there is more, and that something more may be more subversive expected in a book of the Bible. Let’s take another look at the sailors, the citizens of Nineveh and Jonah. What do they have in common? It’s clear that they all changed their behavior to attain God’s mercy. They prayed, they fasted, they repented their past behaviors. But did they really change?</p><p>
As mentioned before, there is no suggestion that either the sailors or the Ninevites converted to the worship of the Hebrew God. Jonah seems to fully accept God’s rule in the Chapter 2 psalm, but since he appears to be reciting a pre-existing prayer, is that really evidence that the man who tried to escape and hide from God has truly changed? Chapter 4 tells us that the answer is a resounding no. It reveals Jonah as headstrong and petulant, incensed that God showed mercy on the people of Nineveh. Moreover, it reveals that this mercy is just what Jonah expected and was rebelling against when he decided to run away. In his eyes, he has been proven right. It seems Jonah has learned little, despite his time in the belly of the fish.</p><p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgkf__VDU-qyE-uKmCpRDRDGEkMm1hKBZQ14P92hTrtiz077iXvUej0eGj4NYdFHM3uw0yJszMXF7hdUqhS6qsbkzm0EeaHqkwcyWLiO2tKr3Nl9iYkhTN1FPAZpIls8FHOFpzYfI0cbpLf-Qq2iJhn_qPsNq0Ua3CAQQF0nUnSba5c4ehDRsMB7StS-RSI" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="366" data-original-width="480" height="305" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgkf__VDU-qyE-uKmCpRDRDGEkMm1hKBZQ14P92hTrtiz077iXvUej0eGj4NYdFHM3uw0yJszMXF7hdUqhS6qsbkzm0EeaHqkwcyWLiO2tKr3Nl9iYkhTN1FPAZpIls8FHOFpzYfI0cbpLf-Qq2iJhn_qPsNq0Ua3CAQQF0nUnSba5c4ehDRsMB7StS-RSI=w400-h305" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Antonius Wierix: Jonah Under the Gourd</td></tr></tbody></table><br /></p><p>
No wonder the book ends with that challenging question from God. How can Jonah, it asks, waste his sympathies on a triviality – a tree that provided temporary shade – while criticizing God for saving an entire population of his creatures? Have the Hebrews, including their prophets, learned nothing from their experiences, the loss of their kingdoms and the destruction of their temple? Why are they wasting their time mourning over trivialities? Staying alive is relatively easy, the stories show. Pray, fast, repent, repeat.</p><p>
But if that doesn’t translate into care for all of God’s creation – including our perceived enemies – we’ve missed the point.</p><p>
</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p>David W. Karpookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05928085897898539598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7876363823912763999.post-58127210797996021822023-10-10T14:17:00.002-07:002023-10-10T14:17:35.886-07:00Of War, Terrorism and Other Family DisputesOn social media today, positions are hardening, tempers are flaring and friendships are ending over the tragic events in Israel and Gaza. A terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas, the political organization that controls the Gaza strip, has resulted in has resulted in unspeakable carnage, cold-blooded murder and victimization of innocent civilians, including taking of children as hostages. In retaliation, the Israeli government has promised a siege of Gaza, home to 2.2 million people, that would include shutting off the fresh water supply as well as electricity. An inexcusable act of genocidal terror is met with an unjustifiable threat of more genocide.<p>
Piling on the wrongs has no chance of resulting in a right, but mention that at your own peril. War is hell. </p><p>
The attack on Israel is said to have resulted in the most Jewish deaths in a single day since the Holocaust. That is beyond shocking, beyond reprehensible. As everyone knows, it is also the latest episode in a struggle that has lasted on-and-off for thousands of years in a tiny corner of the globe that cannot support the passions that are bound to it.</p><p>
Last weekend, as I was trying to make some sense of the news, I came across an essay by Jonathan Sacks, the late theologian and author who served for many years as Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. The essay is titled, “On Judaism and Islam.” It is part of volume 1 of Sacks’ series of reflections on Torah, collectively titled Covenant and Conversation.</p><p>
The essay turns on three intriguing moments in the telling of the story of Abraham, the founding figure of both Judaism and Islam (Christianity attaches to Abraham via its Jewish roots). </p><p>
The first incident is that when the servant who had been sent to secure a wife for Abraham’s son Isaac was returning with the young woman, Rebecca, she spotted Isaac, who had “returned from Be’er-lahai-ro’i.,” and was on his way to meditate. Be’er-lahai-ro’i was the place where Hagar, the slave who bore Abraham’s first son, Ishmael, was found by an angel when she fled during her pregnancy from abuse by Sarai. The angel directed her to return to her home with Abram and Sarai, promising her to “multiply your offspring so that they cannot be numbered for multitude. This same angel instructed Hagar to name her son Ishmael, “because the Lord has listened to your affliction.” Hagar herself named the place of this encounter because it was the place where God saw her. Thus God both heard and saw this abused slave girl, who had been impregnated without her consent and then tormented for supposedly being ‘uppity’, and promised her a reward through her offspring.</p><p>
</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiauwEP1sv-79H1-5RUJ357qrs0FKTlY7MmgYrodqXx0VVIB2w9Bj2i8e_nmJub3m06x5Dg6NfdrCza-UEkZSromN6TY0U2W7NzC7-I0MxsY5Wq285DV6tXf9jdSCiKSX0IzmenhcpeOW0OPjo9W9LqGmsdV7YBt4ez_NJGpvIJsx4fnKD7LvbQRNhMz_P3/s800/beer-lahai-roi.jpeg" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="534" data-original-width="800" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiauwEP1sv-79H1-5RUJ357qrs0FKTlY7MmgYrodqXx0VVIB2w9Bj2i8e_nmJub3m06x5Dg6NfdrCza-UEkZSromN6TY0U2W7NzC7-I0MxsY5Wq285DV6tXf9jdSCiKSX0IzmenhcpeOW0OPjo9W9LqGmsdV7YBt4ez_NJGpvIJsx4fnKD7LvbQRNhMz_P3/w320-h214/beer-lahai-roi.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The ancient site of Be'er-lahai-ro'i<br /></td></tr></tbody></table>
Immediately following the episode introducing Isaac to Rebecca is the revelation that after Sarah’s death, Abraham married again, to a woman named Keturah, who bore him six children. We are given no details about Keturah, but we do get a genealogy of the next few generations of Abraham’s offspring through her children, and are told that when Abraham died, he left “all that he had” to Isaac, but that before his death, he had given gifts to “the sons of his concubines,” and sent them away from Isaac, “eastward to the east country.”<p>
</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwKUDfoCL6rqHMkDqlgPH9XHNhek4Kf8cBiS8CHobaM9QO6td8jYWuRoXw5licaQ06_1P8Uq1znVGVUBx4ERTCMmUiMsxjAqA8ZpUwOuSKDdJxvVfjEsOGw31A7f7UZ-4gjTxJkQ75D7Qen4BSZZhhcVSZwAAqLbudibaCrs03UxjHkVVRr6WNucnz4_g1/s1280/keturah.jpeg" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwKUDfoCL6rqHMkDqlgPH9XHNhek4Kf8cBiS8CHobaM9QO6td8jYWuRoXw5licaQ06_1P8Uq1znVGVUBx4ERTCMmUiMsxjAqA8ZpUwOuSKDdJxvVfjEsOGw31A7f7UZ-4gjTxJkQ75D7Qen4BSZZhhcVSZwAAqLbudibaCrs03UxjHkVVRr6WNucnz4_g1/s320/keturah.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A video about Keturah<br /></td></tr></tbody></table>
Finally, Sacks notes that the Torah tells us that when Abraham died – recounted immediately after the story of Keturah and her children -- his sons Isaac and Ishmael came together to bury him (nothing is said about whether his children by Keturah are there). But there’s a detail that Sacks did not note that adds intrigue: “After the death of Abraham, God blessed Isaac his son. And Isaac settled at Be’er-lahai-ro’I,” the very place where God’s angel encountered Hagar. And immediately after this statement, we are given the names of the sons of Ishmael, whom we are told are “twelve princes according to their tribes.” <p>
</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8Aj4l93hDd6jZpTkshqrV3SddP2fhYQ2MOFHuJkMORxQHKehh0-gEA_CtUilGy_ZoF80biMzXYZnjJwwgDFSsY2xgmwNu5GvaVPUdNdcp0-b84OuynN-XFae4F7g9JLEK_e_-VChVswyvAuug8X_q1RvS0_TkLJCe7mRvis8xxCvksarWnkYzbOia9ml9/s600/384px-Figures_Isaac_and_Ishmael_Bury_Abraham.jpeg" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="384" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8Aj4l93hDd6jZpTkshqrV3SddP2fhYQ2MOFHuJkMORxQHKehh0-gEA_CtUilGy_ZoF80biMzXYZnjJwwgDFSsY2xgmwNu5GvaVPUdNdcp0-b84OuynN-XFae4F7g9JLEK_e_-VChVswyvAuug8X_q1RvS0_TkLJCe7mRvis8xxCvksarWnkYzbOia9ml9/s320/384px-Figures_Isaac_and_Ishmael_Bury_Abraham.jpeg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Burial of Abraham (1728) by Gerard Hoet</td></tr></tbody></table>
People familiar with the work of the ancient and medieval Midrashic Jewish scholars (the sages, in Sacks’s words) knows that they took the words of the Torah as a jumping-off point for their teachings. Where they saw gaps and discontinuities in the Bible’s narratives, they did not hesitate to jump in to fill those gaps. The narratives recounted above are not explicitly connected, although they occur in a short space in Genesis chapters 24-25; they are quite literally slammed together as in a collage. The sages provide the missing links that turn the collage into a cohesive picture.<p>
The French scholar Rashi is the most prominent of several rabbis to consider these connections. The theory expounded by Rashi and his peers is that Keturah was in fact the same person as Hagar, who had been sent away with Ishmael to the Arabian peninsula. Noting that many figures in the Hebrew Bible have multiple names – Abram and Sarai became Abraham and Sarah, Jacob was renamed Israel, Moses’s father-in-law is called Jethro, Reuel and several other names, Solomon was also called Jedediah – they say that Hagar was called Keturah because “her acts gave forth fragrance like incense (ketoret).”</p><p>
In the sages’ telling, after Sarah’s death, Isaac engineered the reconciliation of Abraham with Hagar, renamed Keturah, bringing his far-flung family back into one whole.</p><p>
Why is this relevant to this week’s events? For one thing, Jews trace their lineage back to Abraham through Isaac, while Muslims trace their lineage back through Ishmael. The sons’ appearance together at Abraham’s burial suggests reconciliation, further supported by the sages’ interpretation of the final years of the patriarch’s life.</p><p>
Sacks finds in this an optimistic message for our times: “Yes, there was conflict and separation; but that was at the beginning, not the end. Between Judaism and Islam there can be friendship and mutual respect. Abraham loved both his sons, and was laid to rest by both. There is hope for the future in this story of the past.” </p><p>
It will take more than hope to get us through the current strife. It will take hard work, difficult understanding, and a willingness to find new ways to look at age-old hostilities. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p>David W. Karpookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05928085897898539598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7876363823912763999.post-15486753250922051462023-10-08T10:56:00.003-07:002023-10-10T14:22:50.095-07:00On Kindness to Strangers
Having immersed myself for the past several months in the judicial and political elements of Torah, I find it impossible to view certain current events without recalling imperatives and admonishments in the Bible.</p>
This weekend has been full of horrors in the Middle East that recall millennia of hostilities among the people who call that part of the world their home – the Israelites and Canaanites, Moabites, Ammonites and so many other nations that fought over these territories for reasons not terribly different from what we witness today.</p>
But my thoughts recently have been more consumed by issues of immigration and refuge, which have reached a fevered intensity in the United States over the past several months. Politicians of all stripes agree that we are in the midst of an immigration crisis. Some call for closing of our borders, others for greater attention to the causes of migration from places like Haiti and Venezuela. What strikes me most is that few call for kindness to these strangers in our midst, one of the Bible’s most urgent and persistent commands.</p>
My own community, Quincy, Massachusetts, last month saw a neo-Nazi rally targeted at an immigrant shelter at a local college, a counter-protest the next day, and a few days later a tumultuous town meeting at a school auditorium that brought out 500 or so residents, all determined to be heard and few interested in listening.</p>
“You shall neither mistreat a stranger nor oppress him,” God tells Moses in Exodus 22, “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Strangers – also referred to as sojourners and resident aliens – are named over and over again, along with widows and orphans, as disadvantaged people to whom we should show generosity, sympathy and brotherhood. Often, God’s exhortations on this subject are framed in the notion that, as in the quote above, the condition of these strangers is akin to that of Israelites in the kingdom of Egypt.</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg84HODPr3U-_Zczv2tX8mTEnlglCc9T6JMe2DZGFyUbkJT_TjfMzCeNRDhu6VvatN5OGNJ66oquXwoRQCMfxl8b_9MKj_4jNeBs5cAiRk7450N74r_Sq7wW49btWK0-61KdIKqR5ZnRVjaKb3eu8h5eQn83qqyXWC9Th54LGvNx3ERj8YCET5O0ebmwn2h/s300/You-Were-a-Stronger-300x300.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg84HODPr3U-_Zczv2tX8mTEnlglCc9T6JMe2DZGFyUbkJT_TjfMzCeNRDhu6VvatN5OGNJ66oquXwoRQCMfxl8b_9MKj_4jNeBs5cAiRk7450N74r_Sq7wW49btWK0-61KdIKqR5ZnRVjaKb3eu8h5eQn83qqyXWC9Th54LGvNx3ERj8YCET5O0ebmwn2h/s320/You-Were-a-Stronger-300x300.jpeg"/></a></div>
But in a society that is quick to evoke the Ten Commandments as well as sexual and behavioral prohibitions named in the Torah, there is next to no acknowledgement of this requirement that we show kindness to strangers in our midst.</p>
Instead, the mainstream effort appears to be centered on ensuring that these people get nowhere near us.</p>
Hospitality to travellers has been a core value in the Middle East since time immemorial. The sin of Sodom was not, as is so often supposed, homosexual activity but rathe failure to of the Sodomites to show hospitality and respect to the angels whom Lot welcomed as strangers into his home.</p>
How is it that we have lost track so thoroughly of this basic requirement from God, in a population that largely claims to be believers in that same God?</p>
I’m not going to argue that the world hasn’t changed enormously in the three millennia since the Torah was set down on paper. The world is vastly more populated, as well as politically, economically and technologically more complex than that of the Biblical-era Israelites. But in human terms, we are largely the same as our long-ago ancestors. We live, die, scratch out a living, raise families, seek safety and shelter, provide for our children and our aging loved ones, and interact with those around us in ways very similar to those distant predecessors.</p>
One of the reasons the Bible remains so central to our society is how shockingly familiar the emotional lives of the ancient Israelites are to our own. Reading about the rivalry between Esau and Jacob, Leah and Rachel, Joseph and his brothers, Sarah and Hagar, we connect immediately to the conflicts in our own personal lives. Moses’s many frustrations with the people he is leading to freedom, as well as the skepticism and stubbornness of those people, are nearly identical to feelings we encounter today. Is anyone surprised that the first person born on Earth turns out to be the first murderer?</p>
While I don’t take the Bible literally, I do find it useful to discuss it as if its stories are real. I do the same thing with other great literature. We continue to read Dickens, Eliot, Fitzgerald and the other great writers because there is so much resonance in our own lives with the experiences of their characters.</p>
So in that spirit I want to suggest that the reason God finds it necessary to repeat over and over again the requirement of hospitable and generous behavior to strangers is exactly because it is not the sort of thing that comes naturally to most people. We hardly need reminders to do what we were going to do anyway. As Jesus put it near the opening of the earliest Gospel, “They that are whole have no need of a physician, but they that are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” (Mark 2:17)</p>
We need reminders to care for the needy – for the strangers, widows and orphans among us – because it is both easy and tempting to ignore them. They get in the way of our easy enjoyment of life. Historically, churches and government institutions have provided reminders. But we live in an age where some churchgoers complain that teaching the words of Jesus amount to liberal indoctrination. (see “Evangelicals Are Now Rejecting ‘Liberal’ Teachings of Jesus,” Newsweek, 9 August 2023). Meanness has overtaken charity in much of our discourse.</p>
It is unlikely that public policy would ever reflect exactly the teaching of the Bible – and I would be the first to complain vociferously if it did so – but I believe that in the past it informed public policy in a way that has largely disappeared. Today, we fight to post crosses and the text of the Ten Commandments as a substitute for thoughtful consideration of the meanings of religious teachings.</p>
The Bible is used as a weapon rather than as a guide. When that happens, there may be little room for kindness to strangers.
David W. Karpookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05928085897898539598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7876363823912763999.post-91342770487425266632023-07-16T06:13:00.003-07:002023-07-16T06:13:53.960-07:00In the Wilderness<p> The wilderness, the untamed space between human settlements, plays an enormous role in the Bible. One entire book, the one that we today call Numbers in English, is titled Bemidbar, meaning “In the Wilderness” in Hebrew. It takes place entirely in the area between Egypt, the place from which Hebrew slaves fled, and the land that God promised in His covenant with the Israelites. </p><div>In our human-dominated biome, wilderness exists between constructs, whether they are gardens or cities or agricultural areas. Wilderness may be avoided, it may be explored, it may be traversed. In the Bible it serves as a place of refuge, of contemplation, of isolation, of passage, of rest, of conflict. In Leviticus, it is where the scapegoat is released, carrying away with it the sins of the Israelites. In the Gospels, it is the place where Jesus is tempted by the devil. </div><div><br /></div><div>At times, it is the where humans make contact with God. It is where we are given the opportunity to grow, to see God’s intentions more clearly, to receive His instructions to us.
</div><div><br /></div>In Chapter 2 of Genesis, the second creation story, human life begins in a garden. Not in the wilds of nature, but in a defined place where nature is contained, tamed. We are told that God fills this garden with “every tree lovely to look at and good for food.” (We are told that this garden is “in the east” but the east of what is not made clear – we can surmise it is east of the Levant where the Israelite audience of the time lived. Geography is uncertain in this Biblical episode but the river Euphrates is named, which could suggest a Mesopotamian setting for Eden). I have spent a lot of time over the years thinking about gardens as an architectural element, and contrasting the garden with the wilderness, where nature is not cultivated and tamed, where things that may not be lovely to look at or good for food may thrive. <div><br /></div><div>When Adam and Eve are expelled from the garden, they presumably are sent into the wilderness outside of the garden’s boundary, where God has told them life will be tough. It would appear that at this time, everyplace that was not Eden was wilderness. </div><div><br /></div><div>After Adam and Eve settle again in this wilderness and bear two sons, the first murder occurs when Cain slays Abel. Like his parents before him, Cain is banished into the wilderness where, we are told, he and his offspring create cities and, presumably, civilizations that provide refuge from the surrounding wilderness. </div><div><br /></div><div>The most elaborate and important wilderness story in the Bible is the aforementioned story of the Israelites’ journey from Egypt to Canaan, the Promised Land. This journey, which comprises the last four books of the Torah, is the foundation of both the state of Israel and the Jewish religion.
</div><div><br /></div><div>The five books of the Torah have a structure that may be diagrammed as A-B-C-B-A, where A – Genesis and Deuteronomy – are about the creation of the nation; B – Exodus and Numbers – are the stories of transit; and C is an internal climax, where God approaches the incipient nation most closely and gives it the structure and regulations needed for it to serve as His home on Earth. </div><div><br /></div><div>Exodus and Numbers – or, to be more accurate, the first 60 percent or so of Exodus and the last two-thirds of Numbers – depict in great detail the human story of the Hebrews’ liberation from enslavement in Egypt and their 40-plus yearlong migration to the Promised Land. I stress that this is a human story, because so much of its contents reveal the mental and emotional state of the people as they make this arduous journey. </div><div><br /></div><div>Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in his brilliant series of Torah commentaries, <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Covenant-Conversation-Numbers-Wilderness-Reading/dp/1592640230/ref=asc_df_1592640230/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312281483245&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=10761634106580967618&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9002014&hvtargid=pla-321830715000&psc=1">Covenant & Conversation</a></i>, brings in a notion from political science to help elucidate what is happening in the hearts and minds of the Hebrews. Sacks cites Ronald Heifitz’s theory of technical and adaptive challenges. Heifitz, a scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, posits that these technical challenges are difficulties that can be resolved by external means – medicine to treat an illness, for example – while adaptive challenges require a person to change internally – a doctor’s recommendation to lose weight, exercise more, or alter one’s diet, for instance. </div><div><br /></div><div>In Exodus, Sacks writes, we see multiple examples of technical challenges resolved via God’s intervention. The escaping slaves are trapped at the edge of the Red Sea; God instructs Moses to divide it to allow safe passage. When the Israelites have eaten all of the food they brought with them and complain of hunger, God provides manna from Heaven. When they are thirsty in the desert, God tells Moses how to draw water from a rock. This works quite well for the sojourners until they reach Mount Sinai, where God calls Moses to the mountaintop, leaving the people behind for 40 days.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEsHSNTVRiQX9e-TVtfKMO2VVBVhvRcSdQ_zT84M2IoTI2-cixv0bn3yAqSTiQ3TIrssKC4lsVkoMusnMBO1GvyAhaHB956Mj2vWQyl-FKqCFKk2iuqzNiztIl7LC40c8yxxgrR22Daua0wwFHtW7KEfxhJC7F-HywT21Z0dU09enrkdN45B9-AMFX_QEy/s1200/golden%20calf.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="627" data-original-width="1200" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEsHSNTVRiQX9e-TVtfKMO2VVBVhvRcSdQ_zT84M2IoTI2-cixv0bn3yAqSTiQ3TIrssKC4lsVkoMusnMBO1GvyAhaHB956Mj2vWQyl-FKqCFKk2iuqzNiztIl7LC40c8yxxgrR22Daua0wwFHtW7KEfxhJC7F-HywT21Z0dU09enrkdN45B9-AMFX_QEy/w422-h220/golden%20calf.webp" width="422" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div>Without Moses, who has been their intermediary with God, the people languish. In desperation for the presence of God, they talk Moses’s brother Aaron into making an idol, the golden calf, for them to worship. This of course, is a disaster, a pivotal event that changes the entire course of history. But it is the first time the Israelites have attempted to set their own course, solve their own problem. As wrong-headed as their solution was, it was the first time the people have tried to take hold of their destiny, to adapt to circumstances. How many of us have floundered terribly the first time we tried, unprepared, to solve a difficult problem? <div><br /></div><div>In the Bible, the narrative is broken off at this point to focus on creating a religious structure – literally – to bring God close to the people. The last part of Exodus is devoted to the construction of the Tabernacle. The entire book of Leviticus details the rituals of worship as well as the religious calendar. And the first chapters of Numbers describe the people’s preparations to resume their travel. </div><div><br /></div><div>In the rest of Numbers, the people face challenge after challenge, and Moses as their leader becomes frustrated, even distraught, at one point asking God to “just kill me.” These challenges are more difficult because they require the people to change. They must shake their slave mentality in which decisions were made for them, and learn to become self-directed. </div><div><br /></div><div>In response to hardships, we see the people become nostalgic for their lives in captivity. Growing tired of their diet of manna, they long for life along the Nile, where at least they had fresh vegetables and fish to eat. They stage a rebellion and look to name a leader to take them back to Egypt. A team of scouts sent to scope out the Promised Land comes back and reports that it is inhabited by fearsome giants who will surely defeat them in battle. Even Moses’s siblings turn against him at one point. </div><div><br /></div><div>God ultimately realizes that the people are not ready to become free and shape their own destiny. It will take generational change, and so He tells the people that those who fled Egypt will not enter the Promised Land. Only the next generation will do so, led by Joshua and Caleb, the only two of the scouts who gave an honest report about the current population of Canaan. God sets them wandering in the wilderness for 40 years. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0r_H3iwuMMhQk0MVGLZc5rgPeGglImTa4Mz7_jFvNc6S00FGAFnPIqa-yQt4-iXL9HfWakL26MX4XlVqZbdfttwIjS879YA_vK6b1038rosK5fykVzssScMW8h9TJafnTFXUMKqsTJqLMLQVNEyPnUY5AiUPu4B1k9jaDY3DEKy6uulyrR7h394uNtaFu/s584/wilderness.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="328" data-original-width="584" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0r_H3iwuMMhQk0MVGLZc5rgPeGglImTa4Mz7_jFvNc6S00FGAFnPIqa-yQt4-iXL9HfWakL26MX4XlVqZbdfttwIjS879YA_vK6b1038rosK5fykVzssScMW8h9TJafnTFXUMKqsTJqLMLQVNEyPnUY5AiUPu4B1k9jaDY3DEKy6uulyrR7h394uNtaFu/w378-h213/wilderness.jpeg" width="378" /></a></div><br /><div>The point of all this, in Sacks’ analysis, is that adaptive change takes time. Self-transformation is not easy. And once again I am staggered by the brilliance of the Bible in elucidating the intricacies of the human mind. </div><div><br /></div><div>In this light I would like to look at the figure of Hagar, whose story is related in Genesis 16 and 21. She is an Egyptian and a slave, who works as a handmaid to Sarai, the wife of Abram. We are not told how Abram and Sarai acquired her, although one might speculate that the couple picked her up when they traveled to Egypt to escape a famine in the Levant. We don’t know how old she is, or what she looked like. She clearly is still in her child-bearing years, and is in some favor with her mistress, who selects her to bear a child for her husband, a child the mistress has grown to old to produce. But that’s about it.</div><div><br /></div><div>Because the Bible reveals so little about Hagar, her “back story” has been filled in by numerous other writers. Some rabbinical sources have speculated that she was actually an Egyptian princess, given to Abram and Sarai by the Pharoah whose hospitality Abram and Sarai enjoyed until the king found out that they had lied about being brother and sister rather than husband and wife (they later are revealed to be half-siblings). </div><div><br /></div><div>One Islamic tradition holds that she was the daughter of an early prophet. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzYb5s__bwUMl2RJyQyWUp8bk6XlJBSqVQCy_l9PMiDcZPNCYGnTLl5rqCrGfhgrWm4PvnyQYiJQ3C5o1VpzHgrE5_kQRsetcRwziyEMNFnGN4-1LkPhLSD_i0dzjM9tXP3_iu_7fTiINpe20szhFh6gVZqIuUO5gluaQhmXO0aiYapnKc--kabFR-pKXQ/s750/hagar-in-the-wilderness-1729.jpg!Large.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="518" data-original-width="750" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzYb5s__bwUMl2RJyQyWUp8bk6XlJBSqVQCy_l9PMiDcZPNCYGnTLl5rqCrGfhgrWm4PvnyQYiJQ3C5o1VpzHgrE5_kQRsetcRwziyEMNFnGN4-1LkPhLSD_i0dzjM9tXP3_iu_7fTiINpe20szhFh6gVZqIuUO5gluaQhmXO0aiYapnKc--kabFR-pKXQ/w384-h265/hagar-in-the-wilderness-1729.jpg!Large.jpg" width="384" /></a></div><br />But let’s focus on what the Bible actually says about Hagar.
Twice, in Genesis 16 and 21, she is found by God in the wilderness. The first time, she is pregnant by her master, Abram, and has fled due to abusive treatment from her mistress. Sarai’s complaint is that now that she is pregnant, Hagar “looks down” on Sarai. Sarai goes off on Abram, blaming him for the situation even thought it was Sarai herself who engineered the coupling. Abram takes the passive route, telling Sarai she is free to do as she pleases with the slave girl. </div><div><br /></div><div>The second time, Sarah (God has given her a new name by now) has succeeded in convincing Abraham to drive Hagar and her son, Ishmael, away, so that there can be no question about who will be Abraham’s heir. </div><div><br /></div><div>Hagar addresses God using a name that occurs nowhere else in the Bible: El Roi, the God who sees me. That’s a fascinating detail, coming from a slave who, despite having been impregnated by her master, is essentially not seen as human. Sarai and Abram determine her fate without her input or her consent. The child she is to bear is expected to be raised as the child of Abram and Sarai, not of Hagar. It is only her hostility that draws attention – and that is suspect, given the way Sarai also lashes out at Abram over the results of Sarai’s own scheming. </div><div><br /></div><div>One of the things that distinguishes the Judeo-Christian God is His focus on the weak and the poor, a characteristic also strongly present in the Islamic tradition. Hagar is not held up as a heroine in the Bible, although she is in Islamic tradition. </div><div><br /></div><div>It is not surprising, in light of all this, that Hagar has become a revered and much-studied figure in African-American womanist theology (see <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Sisters-Wilderness-Challenge-Womanist-God-Talk/dp/1626980381/ref=sr_1_1?crid=ROVYFG4ZN527&keywords=isters+in+the+Wilderness%3A+The+Challenge+of+Womanist+God-Talk&qid=1689513108&s=books&sprefix=isters+in+the+wilderness+the+challenge+of+womanist+god-talk%2Cstripbooks%2C82&sr=1-1">Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk</a></i>, by Delores S. Williams). Williams writes of Hagar’s encounters with God:
“The two times that God relates directly to Hagar are in the context of helping her come to see the strategies she must use to save her life and her child’s life. The first strategy is to go back to her oppressor and make use of the oppressor’s resources. The second survival strategy not only has to do with the woman and child (family) depending upon God to provide when absolutely no other provision is visible, but also includes, upon God’s command, the woman Hagar lifting up her child and “holding him fast with your hand.” </div><div><br /></div><div>In other words, Hagar is told that she must change in order to survive and to realize her potential and that of her son.
God promises to “make him (Ishmael) a great nation.” But in order for that to happen, Hagar must develop the survival skills to keep herself and her son alive in the wilderness. When she does so, we are told that Hagar raises Ishmael and secures him an Egyptian wife. No more is heard from them until Ishmael returns to Canaan for his father’s burial. </div><div><br /></div><div>Two great nations, Israel and Arabia, survive to this day. Arguably, both exist because their founders were able to adapt.</div>David W. Karpookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05928085897898539598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7876363823912763999.post-74649395016698297442023-07-04T11:10:00.005-07:002023-07-04T11:14:00.575-07:00Protection<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Defining boundaries is the great work of the creation. Maintaining and honoring those boundaries is the great challenge of Leviticus. The first days of the Genesis 1 creation story depict God creating the boundaries between heaven and Earth, the waters aove and the waters below, land and sea. In Leviticus we are given explicit instructions on how to keep separate the holy and the profane, the clean and unclean, the pure and impure.</div><div><br /></div><div>Some of the more mystifying strictures in Leviticus 19 – the heart of what has come to be known as the Holiness code -- have to do with the prohibition on creating garments from mixed fabrics, interbreeding livestock and planting diverse seeds in a single field. The best explanation I have read for these prohibitions is that this mixing would weaken the boundaries God set in place at creation, and thus weaken God’s intentions for the universe. </div><div><br /></div><div>The sexual prohibitions in Leviticus 18 and 20, which surround the code’s central chapter, appear to be put in place to distinguish the Hebrews from the Canaanites, whose land they are to take over, as well as the Egyptians, from whose land they have fled. Child sacrifice, sodomy and bestiality are dealt with in one compact passage of chapter 18, after which God tells Moses that the land itself was defiled by the practitioners of these deeds: “And the land was defiled, and I made a reckoning with it for its iniquity, and the land spewed out its inhabitants.” Israelites as a whole will not be “spewed out” for these offenses, God says, but the perpetrators will be “cut off from the midst of his people.” </div><div><br /></div><div> In chapter 20, he makes makes it even more explicit. After pronouncing death sentences for a host of sexual transgressions, he orders Moses to tell the Israelites:
“And you shall not go by the statuses of the nation which I am about to send away before you, for all these things they have done, and I loathed them. And I said to you, it is you who will take hold of their soil, and as for Me, I shall give it to you to take hold of it, a land flowing with milk and honey. I am the Lord your God Who set you apart from all the peoples.” </div><div><br /></div><div>Boundaries. I’m telling you. </div><div><br /></div><div> It makes sense that the Torah, a work whose overarching purpose is to define a nation, would be preoccupied with boundaries and with specifying what is allowed and what is forbidden within those boundaries. Many of the rules of Leviticus focus on things that may be considered to pierce, or to blur, those boundaries. Included are things that violate the boundary between the creator and the creation: God and the people. </div><div><br /></div><div>The anthropologist Mary Douglas is one of many who have commented on the “squeamishness” of the priestly author of Leviticus when it comes to blood and other bodily fluids. Blood, identified with the life force, is intended to stay on the inside, and when it is released, as in ritual slaughter of animals, it must be reserved for dedication to God, most often sprinkled around the sacrificial altar. It is strictly forbidden to consume blood. Menstrual discharge and sexual emissions also release inner fluids to the outside and are considered to make the emitter unclean, unready for admittance into the presence of God.
Childbirth, with its emission of not only the baby but voluminous contents of the pregnant body, renders a woman unclean for a long period of time – thirty-three days for a boy and double that for a girl. It requires an offense offering before the woman is seen as fit to re-enter the community. It may seem strange that the very act for which God intended humanity is one that renders the chief actor unclean, but holiness operates in strange ways, at least in Leviticus. </div><div><br /></div><div>Leviticus also evidences an obsession with the skin, and in particular diseases of the skin. Although classic translations of the Bible typically refer to these as leprosy, modern translators more often say that the skin diseases that render men and women impure and subject to isolation are not leprosy, which was not known in the Middle East until centuries later, during the Hellenistic period (according to a note in Robert Alter’s Hebrew Bible translation). The skin being the primary boundary that keeps us separate and intact, It makes sense that skin conditions would be treated as uniquely important. Consider also that along with skin diseases, Leviticus discusses mildew in clothing and mold in the walls of houses, and it becomes clear that the overriding concern is with these protective coverings that preserve our bodily integrity. </div><div><br /></div><div>The integrity of the skin is the subject of other restrictions, such as chapter 19’s ban on tattoos as well as laceration of the skin to mourn the dead. </div><div><br /></div><div>The pivotal Leviticus 19 begins a directive from God to Moses that is repeated throughout the chapters of Leviticus that have come to be known as the Holiness Code: “Speak to all the community of Israelites, and you shall say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” </div><div><br /></div><div>The distinctive feature of the Holiness Code is that its pronouncements are meant to be delivered to all Israelites, not just to the priestly caste – the Levites, particularly Aaron and his descendants – or to Moses as their prophet. Just as Moses was selected from among all of humanity to be the bearer of the Law, and as the Levites were selected from all of the Israelites to serve as priestly intermediaries between the Israelites and God, so the people of Israel were selected from amongst all of humanity to be holy, close to God.
A series of boundaries is drawn, concentric circles, each of which contains fewer members as we move toward the singular figure of Moses. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqxRQwg8DXsor7u2OGLOUtS2ZW2KTESAblYJgxAEqyJNxDEGgIC6jaNl2HLwRO6EmXOk7x5qjhVAib75fz-YY9kBuBXqMUXi0eebMOfIaZY6R9cwR7fByKaXSZpeisgqkOPb3VQ33GVUFwnVjVPQ7fzHDzrN1BK_xiIH22vx_Cbff0EfYe_zc04MvgBIZX/s690/Tabernac;e.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="452" data-original-width="690" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqxRQwg8DXsor7u2OGLOUtS2ZW2KTESAblYJgxAEqyJNxDEGgIC6jaNl2HLwRO6EmXOk7x5qjhVAib75fz-YY9kBuBXqMUXi0eebMOfIaZY6R9cwR7fByKaXSZpeisgqkOPb3VQ33GVUFwnVjVPQ7fzHDzrN1BK_xiIH22vx_Cbff0EfYe_zc04MvgBIZX/s320/Tabernac;e.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Successive boundaries separate the spaces of the Tabernacle</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div><br /></div><div>The boundary encircling Israelites is one of holiness. And that is a distinction fraught with risk.
Holiness requires adherence to a broad set of behavioral rules, and transgressions against them – piercing of the boundary defining holiness – elicits consequences that may range from the need for washing to banishment (either temporary or permanent, depending on the transgression) to death. The boundary of holiness must be protected, as are the successive boundaries of the Tabernacle and of the body.
Holiness allows the people to come near to God – but not too near. The separation of God from humanity is strictly enforced. </div><div><br /></div><div>Repeatedly, examples are made of people who transgressed the boundaries, whether the sons of Aaron who were incinerated for an unspecified transgression of the Tabernacle’s rules, or Miriam who was stricken with a skin condition after questioning God’s decision to distinguish Moses from all others, or a man who touched the Ark in an effort to steady it during transport. </div><div><br /></div><div>The boundaries protect both God and the people.
The importance of separation – protection of people from God and God from people – is given additional weight in Chapter 4 of numbers, with its detailed instructions on how the Ark of the Covenant and other contents of the innermost sanctum of the Tabernacle – the Holy of Holies – must be wrapped in cloths for transport as the Israelites move through the wilderness. </div><div><br /></div><div>The boundaries set out in Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy provide the definition of the Jewish people, and may be one of the reasons this population has survived millenia of oppression, ill treatment and hatred. By remaining separate and distinct, their identity is protected and preserved.</div>David W. Karpookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05928085897898539598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7876363823912763999.post-36378828905288644922023-06-18T12:59:00.004-07:002023-06-18T17:19:36.620-07:00Leviticus as Literature<p>A footnote in Robert Alter’s masterful translation of the Hebrew Bible referenced what I saw as an unlikely title: <i>Leviticus as Literature,</i> by the British anthropologist Mary Douglas. I have thought about Leviticus as many things over the years – a book of laws and regulations, a guide to proper living as a Jew (at least an ancient one), the source of much of the repellant weaponization of the Bible that we are forced to deal with in today’s society – but literature would not have been one of the ways I would have characterized the third book of the Torah. </p><div> Coming after the stirring narratives of Genesis and the first half of Exodus, the second half of Exodus and Leviticus together are like stumbling blocks put in the way of enjoyment of the Bible. Exodus’s long, detailed instructions on construction of every detailed aspect of the Tabernacle at least captured the part of my attention that has always drawn me to architecture and woodworking. I have sometimes wanted to try to follow these instructions to see what would result. But Leviticus has been a book I have had to force myself to slog through; I recognized its importance in the history of the Jewish people, but have found little in its repetitive instructions for animal sacrifice and priestly ritual, or its strictures regarding sexual behavior and other human interactions, to hold my attention. It has seemed the most ancient of books, and the least relevant to modern life. So this unexpected title intrigued me. </div><div><br /></div><div> When I read -- especially when I read the Bible -- I follow trails of footnotes as a detective might follow clues in solving a mystery. One reference often leads me to another, and pretty soon I have accumulated a reading list that I may or may not be inclined to tackle. This footnote sent me straight to Amazon, where I found this 1999 title available as a Kindle book. </div><div><br /></div><div>Thus I got my hands on a book that has had a greater impact on my reading of the Bible than any since John Shelby Spong’s The Fourth Gospel a decade ago. </div><div><br /></div><div>Douglas approaches Leviticus as a cultural artifact rather than as a holy object. She situates it in its time and place – the Middle East, probably at the end of the Babylonian exile, when the author we refer to as the Priestly writer was active. (The Priestly writer also is credited with the first creation story, In Genesis chapter 1).
Douglas expends much effort in contrasting Leviticus with Deuteronomy, which she sees as a work of rational, scientific, modern thought. Leviticus, by contrast, operates by analogy, a more ancient form of understanding than science. Although she briefly addresses the question of which writer was earlier – the Priestly writer or the Deuteronomist – she knows that would be an endless debate and instead focuses on the difference in perspective. </div><div><br /></div><div>The fundamental analogy she sees at work in Leviticus is the structure of concentric circles, which are applied to Mount Sinai, to the Tabernacle and to the animal body. The innermost circle in all of these, in her analysis, is the dwelling place of God: The peak of the mountain (think of it as the center if looking down from above), the “Holy of Holies” in the Tabernacle, and the guts – the reproductive organs and the intestines – in the body. The latter may be difficult for us to comprehend. Douglas explains:</div><div><br /></div><div></div><blockquote><div>“Bashfulness apart, it is important to ask why the innards should be at the point of highest esteem, the position that corresponds to the holy of holies, instead of the face or head or heat to which we accord more honour. The question calls for difficult comparative psychography, but at least recall that there has always been in the Jewish culture a strong association between body and tabernacle in respect of fertility. </div><div><br /></div><div>“The Bible locates the emotions and thought in the innermost parts of the body; the loins are wrung with remorse or grief; the innermost part is scrutinized by God; compassion resides in the bowels … The temple was associated with the creation, and the creation with fertility, which implies that the innermost part of the tabernacle was a divine nuptial chamber. Even from complete ignorance of mysticism, the analogy of the inner sanctuary with the centre of creation is intelligible. It was fitting that the sanctuary was interpreted as depicting in a most tangible form the union between God and Israel.” </div></blockquote><div></div><div><br /></div><div>This central idea, the association of the tabernacle with “creation and … ‘abounding fruitfulness’,” should inform our reading of the entire book of Leviticus, Douglas contends. </div><div><br /></div><div><blockquote>“Deuteronomy distances God, he does not abide in the tabernacle, only his Name and the glory of it are present, whereas Leviticus and Numbers believe God to be present, close to his people at all times, and meeting with them in the tent of meeting.” </blockquote></div><div><br /></div><div>One mistake we make, Douglas says, is to view Leviticus as a laundry list of rules and regulations and not as an overall composition: </div><div><br /></div><div><blockquote>“Leviticus has been read in an itemized way, items of law corresponding to elements of morality, or to elements of narrative, or to elements of hygiene, but not to their place in an integral composition.” </blockquote></div><div><br /></div><div>For today’s readers, familiar with modern astronomy, the theory of concentric circles may bring to mind our understanding of the solar system, which after all of an interconnected systems of concentric circles in rotation and revolution. </div><div><br /></div><div>Douglas extends the analogy linking Mount Sanai to the Tabernacle to the body to the book of Leviticus itself, comparing its first seven chapters, which focus on sacrifice, to the forecourt of the Tabernacle, where the entire community could gather and where the sacrificial rites took place. The next three chapters comprise a narrative leading up to God’s killing of Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu for a vaguely defined offense having to do with bringing “alien fire” toward His altar. Douglas sees these chapters as an analog to the screen that separates the forecourt of the Tabernacle from its interior, the sanctuary, which can be inhabited only by the priestly caste. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifrmVV8SO8fdKgtbeuGzsDcf-whVjExd3sdisFcvSBCKFlJTZB5SuOq8DjdeIGY0DYHakmAxlg5CcwHN23-S9lFw000ZPpjGeSdmfHxqcI9GI6fIwqAoMZm6Vs_10QlPP9KR2O7hVUuNtd8IDzMdDXqEOYjJH6Axe8UfN7_a71rUCf_RNpfo1BOB4kYQ/s2160/thumbnail_IMG_0696.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2160" data-original-width="1620" height="397" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifrmVV8SO8fdKgtbeuGzsDcf-whVjExd3sdisFcvSBCKFlJTZB5SuOq8DjdeIGY0DYHakmAxlg5CcwHN23-S9lFw000ZPpjGeSdmfHxqcI9GI6fIwqAoMZm6Vs_10QlPP9KR2O7hVUuNtd8IDzMdDXqEOYjJH6Axe8UfN7_a71rUCf_RNpfo1BOB4kYQ/w298-h397/thumbnail_IMG_0696.png" width="298" /></a></div><h4 style="text-align: center;">Douglas's diagram of Leviticus superimposed on the plan of the Tabernacle</h4><div>Although these chapters bring us to the first screen, Douglas contends that the next 6 chapters, which give us the series of law, regulations and strictures regarding food; bodily emissions, including both sexual fluids and blood; and diseases of the skin, continue a circuit around the forecourt. Chapter 16 provides detailed instructions for the preparation that Aaron must make before entering the sacred space where the ark presides. And in chapter 17, we get a more explicit prohibition on the slaughter of animals in any context except sacrifice, as well as the rationale for the high degree of concern – she calls it squeamishness -- over blood. From Leviticus chapter 17: </div><div><br /></div><div><blockquote>“The life of the flesh is in the blood … for it is the blood that ransoms in exchange for life. Therefore, have I said to the Israelites: no living person among you shall consume blood, nor shall the sojourner who sojourns in your midst consume blood.” </blockquote></div><div><br /></div><div>With chapter 18 and its delineation of prohibited sexual practices, we move into the sanctuary, where we stay through the middle of chapter 24. In these chapters we learn, among other things, about righteous living, first for the people and then for the priestly caste; the importance of using only “unblemished” livestock in the sacrifice as well as the importance of human cleanliness in these situations; and the holy calendar. </div><div><br /></div><div>In chapter 24, we get the second piece of storytelling in Leviticus, the story of the man who curses God and is stoned by the people. Douglas sees this as analogous to the second screen, the one that separates the interior of the Tabernacle from the Holy of Holies, where the Ark of the Covenant resides, and where only the high priest may enter, on only the holiest of occasions. Finally in chapters 25-27, we are in the Holy of Holies, where we learn about the Jubilee to be celebrated every 50 years, when debts are forgiven, slaves are freed, and the world is “reset” to one of equality for humanity. </div><div><br /></div><div>Unlike the narrative books of the Bible, which are grounded in time, Leviticus is grounded in space. Reading it as a whole, we move deeper into the Tabernacle until we reach its most holy space. The importance of the narrative components as screen is that they serve as barriers to the next chamber. In Douglas’s words: “They are warning clear enough against sacrilegious approach.” </div><div><br /></div><div>Given the climactic importance of the Jubilee, it may strike us as odd that instead of this celebration and return to equality lasting through history, it has been abandoned while the strictures on sexual behaviors have been so thoroughly weaponized that they have informed public policy in many places. By carefully reading and digesting Leviticus, one might get the idea that the “radical socialists” have it right, while the tsk-tsking church ladies and gentlemen are focused on less serious matters. Oh, well. That’s human nature for you. </div><div><br /></div><div>Like many commentators, Douglas identifies chapters 18-20 as the “heart” of the book, with the two chapters identifying sexual offenses and their penalties framing a chapter on righteous living. Here is what Douglas has to say about that structure: </div><div><br /></div><div><blockquote>“There could not be a stronger framing of the central chapter at the apex of the pediment. Leviticus’ scheme very deliberately puts the laws of righteous and honest dealings at the centre and the sexual sins at the periphery. Less a pedimental composition, these two chapers are more like two massively carved pillars on either side of a shrine, or like a proscenium arch.” </blockquote></div><div><br /></div><div>Noting that this structure is introduced by a passage cautioning that, “You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you dwelt, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you,” Douglas sees the entire structure as one leading away from the idolatrous Egyptian and Canaanite cultures, which indeed were known for incest, in the case of Egypt, and temple prostitution, both heterosexual and homosexual, in the case of Canaan. Douglas summarizes it this way: “These chapters contrast the pure and noble character of the Hebrew God with the libidinous customs of the very strange false gods.” </div><div><br /></div><div>Douglas’s innovative and insightful reading of Leviticus gives us new perspective on many of the familiar prohibitions, but perhaps none is more startling than her take on animal life. Connecting Leviticus back to Genesis, she reminds us that God created all of the creatures, and pronounced there that all of his creations were “good.” Keeping that in mind, she argues that conventional readings misinterpret many of the words and practices detailed throughout Leviticus. </div><div><br /></div><div>She urges us, for example, to disassociate the emotions of disgust and revulsion from the term “unclean,” which she argues is a technical term related to inappropriateness for the temple, applied to menstruating women and men who have had wet dreams as well as to certain animals. Again, she notes differences between the ways Leviticus and Deuteronomy use words such as “unclean,” “impure,” and “abomination,” this last of which she sees as applying (in Leviticus) to the act of consumption rather than to the animal under discussion. </div><div><br /></div><div>Douglas’s take on prohibition grows most interesting when she discusses the “swarming” creatures whose consumption is prohibited. These she sees as prolific breeders exemplifying God’s command to be fruitful and multiply. She also notes that many of these have few natural defenses, so that the prohibition on killing and eating them may be a way of protecting them and allowing them to thrive. </div><div><br /></div><div>On the other hand, she is pretty much mystified about the ban on consumption of pork – arguably the most famous and widely heeded food proscription, detailing a variety of hypotheses without really coming to a satisfactory explanation. </div><div><br /></div><div>While connecting the practice of sacrifice itself to the milieu of the ancient Middle East where sacrifice was endemic, she contends that sacrifice is a moment at the border between life and death where the animal is both killed and honored. The details of the butchering and the order of placement on the sacrificial altar is critically analogous to the three levels of Mount Sinai and the Tabernacle. The ban on killing and consumption of land animals outside the sacrificial setting – an important distinction from Deuteronomy – is testament to the reverence for the life of God’s creations. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_CmUyUJMhzwXazbJ3jCHz-XYjXfRh9Ui6H3pp4cT9YrOnLeK0SRT-E7m4gmOLDP0tjA0ZQyC3noHIQ2P4CGrtY4K02OYL5tn_-CuBtkmXzi_fAW6W4PVtnX05J_luXNwiPKwTGDePCh8IcqKY92tUbH8U3X0nPkXjRfLtvt14ohMY-jle6a6CYSPeXA/s878/Scapegoat.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="878" height="262" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_CmUyUJMhzwXazbJ3jCHz-XYjXfRh9Ui6H3pp4cT9YrOnLeK0SRT-E7m4gmOLDP0tjA0ZQyC3noHIQ2P4CGrtY4K02OYL5tn_-CuBtkmXzi_fAW6W4PVtnX05J_luXNwiPKwTGDePCh8IcqKY92tUbH8U3X0nPkXjRfLtvt14ohMY-jle6a6CYSPeXA/s320/Scapegoat.webp" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div>In a fresh take on the ritual of the scapegoat, described in chapter 16, Douglas points out that while conventional readings suggest that the scapegoat is sent out into a fearsome wilderness where it will surely become prey and suffer an awful death, Leviticus itself makes no such prediction. It simply says that the scapegoat is sent away; it does not at all suggest a fate, positive or negative. It is God’s creature, not punished but set free, released into God’s wilderness, just as its partner, the sacrificial goat, is turned to smoke – which Douglas sees as transformation rather than destruction – allowing it to rise to God. </div><div><br /></div><div>This essay could go on and on, becoming like Lewis Carroll’s ever more detailed map that ends up recreating the landscape it sets out to describe. To avoid that, I’ll stop here. I’ll save Douglas’s insights on skin and penetration (both sexual and not) for another time. But in resting, I hope that I have provided a reason for others to open this remarkable book and develop and understanding that moves beyond the widespread weaponization of some of its messages.</div>David W. Karpookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05928085897898539598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7876363823912763999.post-77399778322828145292023-06-03T13:40:00.003-07:002023-06-04T06:45:14.119-07:00Banning the BibleIt has finally happened. In a season of frenzied book bannings, a Utah school
district has banned the Bible as inappropriate reading for elementary and junior
high school students. In its decision, the David School District cited
“vulgarity or violence.” According to The Salt Lake Tribune, a parent had asked
for review of the “sex-ridden” book last December, on the basis that the Bible
contains, “incest, onanism, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation,
fellatio, dildos, rape and even infanticide … You’ll no doubt find that the
Bible, under Utah Code Ann. 76-10-1227, has ‘no serious values for minors’
because it’s pornographic by our new definition.” <div><br /></div><div>As ironically humorous as we
may find the situation, it is appalling that children in the district’s 59
elementary schools and 17 junior high schools will not have access to the
western world’s greatest work of literary art. Knowledge of the Bible is not
simply a matter of religion. It is a vital key to understanding the visual arts, literature,
music, and drama. </div><div><br /></div><div>It’s also important to acknowledge the truth in the parent’s
contention. The Bible has some of the most horrifying stories of sexual violence
ever put on paper. The story of the Gibean concubine in Judges gets my vote for
the most terrible, but the Biblical narrative also includes the rapes of Jacob’s
daughter Dinah and David’s daughter Tamar, the rape and forced child-bearing of
Abram and Sarai’s slave Hagar, the decision by Lot’s daughters to get their
father drunk and have sex with him, the human sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter
(also in Judges).</div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://cdn.jwa.org/sites/default/files/styles/scale_width_640px/public/mediaobjects/066.The_Levite_Carries_the_Woman's_Body_Away.jpg?itok=bxeTqYdM" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="639" height="640" src="https://cdn.jwa.org/sites/default/files/styles/scale_width_640px/public/mediaobjects/066.The_Levite_Carries_the_Woman's_Body_Away.jpg?itok=bxeTqYdM" width="511" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Gustave Dore: The Levite Carries the Woman's Body Away</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div>Even some of the comic episodes, such as the story of the Mandrake root
involving the sister-wives Leah and Rachel, and the theft of Laban’s household
gods, which Rachel hides by placing them under the pillow on which she is seated
and then claiming that she is menstruating, are sexually charged.</div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="Marc Chagall: "Rachel Hides Her Father's Household Gods."https://altmansgallery.com/upload/iblock/140/1401956edb52276ae46bb3544d5ef2eb.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="595" height="800" src="https://altmansgallery.com/upload/iblock/140/1401956edb52276ae46bb3544d5ef2eb.jpg" width="595" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">March Chagall: Rachel Hides Her Father's Household Gods</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div>These are not
the stories we hear about in Sunday school – and I am willing to bet that many
cafeteria “Christians” are unfamiliar with them -- yet they are critical pieces
in the extraordinary tapestry of the Bible. Yet it is undeniable that, coupled
with Leviticus’ detailed inventory of proscribed sexual practices, these
Biblical stories could expose a child to a a thorough, if eccentric, education
in sexual practices and mores. That’s not surprising. </div><div><br /></div><div>If there is a predominant
theme in the Hebrew Bible -- what Christians call the Old Testament – it is
God’s command in Chapter 1 of Genesis to, “Be fruitful and multiply, and
replenish the earth and subdue it.” God forms covenants with Adam and Eve, Noah,
Abraham and Sarah, and Moses in all of which He promises enormous fertility in
return for faith and good behavior. It would be far too simplistic to
characterize the Abrahamic religions as fertility cults, yet fertility is never
far from the center in the Biblical narrative. The complainant in Utah is not wrong in contending that the Bible is "sex-ridden."</div><div><br /></div><div>To quote the anthropologist Mary Douglas, writing of Leviticus's many regulations about sexual matters:</div><blockquote>"Religions which ritualize sex are usually more in favour of it than against. To suppose that the numerous sexual regulations of Leviticus exhibit a narrowly puritanical attitude to sex would be like expecting a culture with numerous food rules to condemn good food. It is where sex is recognized as a potent elemental force, at once the source of desire, fulfillment, and danger, that religion seeks to appropriate sex and to bind it with rules."</blockquote><div>So what’s the answer for a school
district concerned with protecting children from sexually charged material?
Well, one good answer would certainly be to be less obsessed with children being
exposed to material with sexual content. The Utah case is a perfect illustration
on how that obsession can (and should) backfire. Another would be to understand
that children ask questions honestly when they encounter new ideas. Hiding
things from them and/or lying about their meaning is never a good idea. Honest discussion in the classroom with a well-informed, caring teacher could help to undo the damage that ill-informed and prejudiced parents and clerics can inflict.</div><div><br /></div><div>The Bible ban in Utah's second-largest school district is in a Mormon community, but lest anyone feel comforted by that, it should be noted that another parent has challenged the Book of Mormon (the sacred text, not the musical) in Utah schools.</div><div><br /></div><div>In my opinion, what is lost in banning the Bible -- and many other important works of art and literature -- far outweighs any the challenge of answering uncomfortable questions a child might ask.</div><div><br /></div><div>While I
don’t believe that public education should ever embrace a single religious
doctrine (or sexual orientation), I believe that we owe our children exposure to
the world of ideas, and that emphatically includes religion. I believe in teaching religion
in public schools in the same spirit that we teach literature: Examine important
ideas that run through human culture, and look at the different ways that
religious traditions deal with them. </div><div><br /></div><div>Allowing children to explore, especially a work as central to western culture as the Bible, gives students a license to inquire, something many parents seem to be afraid of, but which should be encouraged in any society.</div><div><br /></div><div>We might actually end up with a generation
of students less ignorant about religion, sexuality and other sensitive subjects
than are today’s leaders.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br />David W. Karpookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05928085897898539598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7876363823912763999.post-88481046640194962772023-04-08T08:27:00.081-07:002023-04-10T06:39:45.806-07:00The ChosenWhen I sat down, belatedly, to watch the crowd-funded biblical series “The
Chosen,” I hoped to find it as entertainingly ridiculous as I find most
Bible-based dramatizations. But while it certainly has a few cringeworthy
moments comparable to Hollywood classics like “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” I
have mostly found it to be thoughtful and absorbing.
Most biblicaldramatizations seem to me to be at least a little infused with faith (the
primary exception being Mel Gibson’s homoerotic S&M fantasy, “The Passion of the
Christ”, which has maybe 15 seconds of inspirational content). <div><br /><div>This series is
thoroughly immersed in faith, and yet is far less self-righteous than most
biblical entertainments. The writers are not only familiar with the storylines
of the Gospels, but are confident enough in their faith to allow questions and
interpretation. </div><div><br /></div><div> The episodic, series format gives the Gospel stories breathing room that
allows for development of context around the scriptures. This is not merely a
rushed, two- or three-hour tour, but an extended contemplation of the meaning behind the
narratives . And perhaps because of the
expansive format, now in its third season, Jesus comes across much differently
here than in the many movies, and even in Franco Zeffirelli’s mini-series “Jesus
of Nazareth”, that also have drawn their plotlines from the Gospels. </div><div><br /></div><div> One of the problems with portrayals of Jesus is that He never seems quite human – although
many of us have learned that He is both fully human and fully God, that doesn’t
seem to be the case in when He is portrayed as a sad, stoically suffering
sphynx. Whether portrayed by Max Von Sydow, or Jeffrey Hunter, or Jim Caviezel,
Jesus has always been a man without a personality. By contrast, the Jesus of
“The Chosen” actually talks to people and listens to what they have to say, gets angry, smiles and laughs. At one point he tells a "too soon?" joke. He clearly enjoys His ability to bring joy into the lives of
the beneficiaries of His blessings. The only comparable portrayal I have seen is the impatient, short-tempered Jesus played by Chris Sarandon in the long-forgotten (although not by me) TV movie, "The Day Christ Died." In that take on the Passion, Sarandon played Jesus much as he is depicted in the Gospel of Mark, I think.Granted, we haven’t gotten yet to the
Passion story, in "The Chosen," but I’m going to predict an eventual, fresh take even on that most overtold climax. </div><div><br /></div><div> Also unlike most dramatic portrayals, the apostles are shown here as
having distinctive personalities, and given back stories that help to explain
their willingness to follow this nonconformist hero. Peter’s relationship with
his wife, here called Eden, is explored; Matthew is depicted as an autistic man
whose condition gives him the mathematical abilities that have made him a
successful tax collector. We see Matthew at his work, wheeling and deadling with
his Roman overlords, in a way that gives real color to the scene where Jesus
defends His association with those shunned by Jewish society (it is not the
healthy who need healing but the sick). </div><div><br /></div><div>The first season of "The Chosen" ends with the story of the Samaritan woman at the well, from the Gospel of John. The second season begins with John conducting interviews to document Jesus' life for what will become his Gospel; that episode ends with a lovely scene that marries the opening of Genesis with the opening of John; two magnificent texts brought together in a logical and heartfelt way. Although episodes unique to John are prominent in the series -- the wedding at Cana, the nighttime visit from Nicodemus -- all four Gospels figure into the episodes. The series format gives space, I think, for the stories to be woven together more gracefully than in movies that rush to give a complete depiction of the events of Jesus's life. The second-season opening, for example, while elaborating on the backstory of the Samaritan woman, takes time to provide context for Luke's parable of the Good Samaritan.</div><div><br /></div><div> There is a lot more that could be said about this series, but I think it is better for me to recommend it to anyone
interested in the Gospels. Enjoy it for yourselves, and most of all, think about
the depictions of the characters and the stories as they are portrayed here.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>I was convinced to check out this series after reading the opening paragraphs of a New York Times interview by Tish Harrison Warren with Jonathan Roumie, the actor who plays Jesus. Unlike Warren, I love Biblical dramatizations, but mostly because I so often find them ridiculous -- white men in frayed robes speaking an uneasy English meant to simulate, I suppose, Biblical language. But on many points I am in complete agreement with her. Having been duly impressed, I was inspired to revive this ten-years-dormant blog. I salute Tish Harrison Warren for providing this inspiration; if I have at times hewed too closely to her words, I apologize. The intent was not to plagiarize but to spread the good news.</div>David W. Karpookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05928085897898539598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7876363823912763999.post-9178448059755640842013-09-02T15:23:00.000-07:002013-09-02T15:36:13.821-07:00A Couple of Johns<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal">
One of the pleasures resulting from an obsession with the
Bible is the opportunity to read some of the superb writing <b><i>about</i></b>
the Bible that is produced every year. This summer, for example, we have seen a
very good book about Jesus, Reza Aslan’s <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Zealot-Times-Jesus-Nazareth-ebook/dp/B00BRUQ7ZY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1378160087&sr=8-1&keywords=zealot">Zealot:The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth</a></i>, climb to the top of the
best-seller lists. But more importantly for me, it has seen the publication of
a remarkable new study of the Gospel of John, John Shelby Spong’s <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_17?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=the%20fourth%20gospel%20tales%20of%20a%20jewish%20mystic&sprefix=the+fourth+gospel%2Caps%2C326">The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic</a>.</i></div>
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<i><br /></i>
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<i><br /></i>
<i>The Fourth Gospel</i>
was my introduction to the writings and perspective of Rev. Spong, the
long-time Episcopal bishop of Newark, now retired. But following my discovery
of this refreshingly down-to-earth cleric and scholar, I have been voraciously
devouring his works. <i>The Fourth Gospel</i>
is his 23<sup>rd</sup> published book, and I look forward to reading them all,
because this one has altered my perspective in
way that few written works ever have.<br />
<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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John can be a troubling gospel for those of us who question
the supernatural content of the Bible. For us, it can be relatively easy to read
the other three gospels, called collectively the synoptics, for their
philosophical wisdom, focusing on the brief, pithy, parables and beatitudes as
evidence of Jesus’ incomparably beautiful philosophy, and to gloss over the recounting
of miracles as so much filigree added unnecessarily to embellish His brilliant
teachings. But the gospel of John is a different animal; it is distinguished by
what is called its “high Christology,” its insistence on the godly and timeless
nature of Jesus, characterized as the “only begotten son” of God. There are no
parables in John, and few brief statements of wisdom. Instead we get that
gorgeous prologue, a poem of unsurpassed beauty, followed by a narrative of
Jesus’ ministry that focuses on seven “signs”, in turn followed by several
lengthy chapters of monologue known as the “farewell discourses,” and finally
the passion, crucifixion and resurrection. Much of what is told in John is told
only in John, and the telling has an altogether different feel than do the
other three narratives (which are called synoptic because they view Jesus “with
the same eye”).<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEm-EZCXAtRuvKkkp0QsYUXx6WcToZiEMLsVp_IoepxdJnn7cTG-EooVyfnoEvijY5M9EGRNDWDNu4IPJeb-5FUR8t06DwG34ThQ9kdu6JXhs7yZdPKsOumb-8g3Tj_fdeRv_BzEfizR6J/s1600/wedding-at-cana-3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="252" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEm-EZCXAtRuvKkkp0QsYUXx6WcToZiEMLsVp_IoepxdJnn7cTG-EooVyfnoEvijY5M9EGRNDWDNu4IPJeb-5FUR8t06DwG34ThQ9kdu6JXhs7yZdPKsOumb-8g3Tj_fdeRv_BzEfizR6J/s320/wedding-at-cana-3.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
Over the past 2000 years, John seems to have been the
loudest voice inviting us to worship Jesus rather than to learn from him. And
as one who views Jesus primarily as a teacher, a “rabbi”, who meant for his
words to be listened to rather than his life fetishized, I sometimes found John’s
gospel a little bit hard to take.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The new John in my consciousness, Rev. Spong, has blessedly
corrected my view. Indeed, Spong says, he had to correct his own view of the
gospel, which he had often found “repellent,” due to the creeds and dogmatic
thinking and abuses done ‘in the name of the Lord’ for which he blamed John.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Because this book was thought to
have spelled out ‘orthodox Christianity,’ John’s gospel also helped to fuel
such dreadful events in Christian history as heresy hunts and the Inquisition.
As the centuries rolled by, John’s gospel seemed to make meaningful discourse
on the nature of the Christ figure almost impossible.”</blockquote>
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He goes on to say:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Throughout most of my career, both
as a priest and as a bishop, I saw John’s gospel more as a problem in ministry
than as an asset. So my tactic was to avoid it, if possible, to ignore it
whenever I could not avoid it, and simply to resign myself to the reality that
it was in the canon of scripture. Sometimes I walked around this gospel. At
other times I attacked it or at least attacked those I thought misunderstood
and/or misused its message. I certainly never wanted to spend much time on it.”</blockquote>
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The change in his thinking came about, Spong says, when he
began to view the fourth gospel as a Jewish book and to examine its connections
to Jewish experience, Jewish history and, especially, Jewish mysticism. He
describes his journey in some detail, but the climax is this:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“I began to rethink and ultimately
to dismiss the theistic definition of God and started moving away from an
understanding of God as ‘a being’ to an understanding of God as ‘Being itself,’
or as Paul Tillich, the formative theologian of my early training, would say,
as ‘the Ground of Being’ … John’s gospel began to unfold before me as a work of
Jewish mysticism and the Jesus of John’s gospel suddenly became not a visitor
from another realm., but a person in whom a new God consciousness had emerged.
Now, seen from that new perspective, the claim of oneness with the Father was
not incarnational language, but mystical language.”</blockquote>
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And, because I can’t keep myself from quoting this amazing
volume that has resulted from Spong’s years of study:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“John’s gospel is about life –
expanded life, abundant life, and ultimately eternal life – but not in the
typical manner that these words have been understood religiously.”</blockquote>
<o:p></o:p></div>
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From what I have gleaned so far in his writings, Spong has
built his notable career on an effort to free Christianity from a literalism
that he believes imposes first-century thinking on contemporary life, to no
good end. A heaven that is above the sky and disease caused by demons are not
concepts we can tolerate in the face of today’s science, but a literal reading
of the Bible – an atrocious insistence that the words and events of the gospels
are “literally true” – demands that we accept what we know to be nonsense.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Thus, it is no surprise that his new approach takes on the
issue of literalism. One of the most striking aspects of <i>The Fourth Gospel</i> is Spong’s illumination of the many passages in
this gospel that speak directly to this issue, and which ridicule or dismiss the
notion that its words should be taken literally. For example, when Jesus tells
the Pharisee Nicodemus, who in chapter 3 has come to visit him in the dark of
night, that, “Unless you are born from above, you cannot see the kingdom of
God,” Nicodemus’ response is a comically literal reading of Jesus’ words: <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“How can one be born when one is
old? he asked. “One cannot enter a mother’s womb a second time and be born.”</blockquote>
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the next chapter, the Samaritan woman at the well reacts
in a similar manner to Jesus’ statement that,” Whoever drinks the water I give
them will not be thirsty again. The water I give them will become in them a
fountain of water springing into eternal life.” Taking His words literally, the
Samaritan woman sees the “living water” as a great labor-saving innovation:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Sir, give me this water so that I
won’t be thirsty or have to come here to draw it up.”</blockquote>
<o:p></o:p></div>
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Once Spong has pointed it out, it’s clear from these
passages that those who apply literal meaning to the words given to Jesus by
John are meant to be seen as foolish, misguided. The Samaritan woman, whose
visit with Jesus happens in the light of day, comes to understand what Jesus
meant and goes on to convert her townspeople, while Nicodemus chooses to
retreat back into the darkness from which he briefly emerged (and from which he
will make additional brief appearances).<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So, if we aren’t meant to take this gospel as literal
history, what does it mean? Does it have any meaning for us? Oh yes, Spong
says. The meaning derives from Jewish mystical tradition. The magnificent
prologue to this gospel, which I consider to be among the most beautiful words
ever written, is often said to reflect Greek thinking, but Spong argues that
this tone-setting poem reflects instead a deep understanding of Jewish spirituality.
The prologue is shaped, of course, by reference to Genesis 1, the priestly
creation story in which God creates the world entirely with words. Since this
gospel, like all of the others, appears to have been written in Greek, the word
“logos” has been given primary importance, and with it all of the connotations
in Greek thought and Greek usage that come with it. But Spong urges us to look
at the Hebrew word for word, “dabar,” and to understand that, “The Hebrew
concept of <i>dabar</i> indicated that this ‘word’
had power to shape the world, to reveal the presence of God, to call people to
a heightened sense of selfhood, a heightened consciousness.”<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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And so it makes great sense for John to say that, ”What came
to be in the word was life, And the life was the light of the people.”<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The equation, then, of the word to life and to light and to
Jesus tells us that Jesus brought the light of life to the people he
encountered, that in fact his mission was to bring this light in the form of a
new consciousness that allows us to experience life fully, abundantly,
gloriously.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The wedding at Cana, a story specific and unique to John’s
gospel, takes on a new cast in this new light. A wedding marks the beginning of
new life, the life of a new family. This wedding takes place significantly on
the “third day,” a reference that may seem mysterious because we have just been
told about three preceding days, which would make this at least the fourth. But
again, don’t take the reference literally. The third day is, as we know from
all of the gospels as well as from Paul, the day of resurrection, the day when
new life is given to something or someone that has died. So we can understand
this a symbolic setting, one that is about the moment of new life, a reading
which may help to explain why in this wedding story we are told nothing of the
bride and groom or why Jesus, his mother and the disciples have all traveled to
attend.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We see that the wedding has run out of wine. The old wine is
gone. After his mother’s urging, Jesus directs the servants to a set of six
large jugs meant to hold water for ritual use. But the jugs are empty. Not only
is the old wine gone, the ritual water is gone. Jesus tells the servants to
fill the jugs with water (the jugs are said to hold two or three measures, an
amount equivalent to 20 or 30 gallons each) and then to dip from them and take
the liquid to the master of the celebration, who congratulates the bridegroom effusively
on his brilliance in serving a superior wine late in the celebration. The new
wine, brought on by Jesus, is a superior wine as well as a transformation of
old, empty ritual into new life. Jesus, we are being told, is bringing new life
to replace old, tired traditions and rituals that have lost their meaning.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’m going to end this post here, because I know I will write
about the Rev. Spong and his wonderful books again soon. And I can’t tell this
story with anything like his brilliance. <o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Read <i>The Fourth
Gospel. </i>Buy it, borrow it, steal it if you have to. But read it.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
David W. Karpookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05928085897898539598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7876363823912763999.post-84881844704088118262012-08-25T15:43:00.000-07:002012-08-25T15:56:41.351-07:00The Bible I Love<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The Bible is the greatest achievement of western culture. I say that without a touch of irony, because I believe it – if I have a reservation, it is only about whether ancient Israel should be considered “western.” But I’ll move past that reservation because the Bible is foundational to the west. It is the bedrock upon which our art, literature, music and philosophy rest. Our world would be unrecognizably different were it not for the Bible.<br />
<br />
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The wonder of the Bible is in its vastness, its complexity, its vivid narratives, its passionate polemic and its gentle expressions of love. An anthology – some would say an anthology of anthologies – spanning more than 1,000 years of the greatest writing of the ancient Middle East, the Bible takes us from the beginning of the world to its end. It’s hard to be more comprehensive than that.<br />
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The Bible is endlessly enjoyable, filled with familiar stories that form the background of our lives and less familiar ones that may shock people who think they know what’s within its covers. It is both high art and lowdown, raucous entertainment.<br />
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It is important, I think, that it be appreciated as art. The many authors of this text were adults writing for adult audiences. They wrote complex texts that can support a multitude of readings; they are meant to be studied, torn apart, argued over. They span a wide variety of styles – prose and poetry, fable and fairy tale, domestic and wartime drama, thoughtful and probing essays, warnings and celebrations.<br />
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The Bible is many, many things. What it is not is a factual history or a science textbook – and it is the insistence that it fill these roles that leads to the intolerance and demagoguery that is too often associated with those who claim to live by “the Book.” I would argue that taking the Bible literally as either history or science is in fact an insult to its authors, a manifestation of deep disrespect for their achievements as artists.<br />
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Yes, the Bible is meant to teach us, but not in this literal fashion. Various portions of the Bible – in particular the Gospels – are in fact quite direct in pointing to the parable as their preferred form of storytelling. It’s not just the stories Jesus told directly that should be understood as parables.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWhKFaC04ZRqZ9BZbvUaOQJpRd6dtVvZ5Nvd6TjO2reFitcvO50qVfQBAHC-On5PQctH9pPshBpwC51sLdjqSMsLiPrs6yT1ivmXyrVM5B1aqw9VO02KJs4vAKrogcE0jUcmTBKZKnK_eN/s1600/bernini-david.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWhKFaC04ZRqZ9BZbvUaOQJpRd6dtVvZ5Nvd6TjO2reFitcvO50qVfQBAHC-On5PQctH9pPshBpwC51sLdjqSMsLiPrs6yT1ivmXyrVM5B1aqw9VO02KJs4vAKrogcE0jUcmTBKZKnK_eN/s320/bernini-david.jpg" width="242" yda="true" /></a></div>
I’ve spent most of the past year teaching about the story I consider to be the heart of the Bible – the David narrative in the books of Samuel . In my view, everything that comes before David in the Bible looks forward to his reign, and everything after looks back. Seen in this light, the stories of the patriarchs, of the exodus, and especially the tales of the judges all are told to prefigure the coming of David, whose kingdom represents the height of earthly power for the sons and daughters of Israel. Afterward, beginning with the reign of his son Solomon, things begin to fall apart and nothing that subsequent rulers, prophets and military leaders can do will restore the glory of the time of David.<br />
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It is, of course, a story that has strong parallels to the much later legend of Arthur. But the David story as told in Samuel (and the first few chapters of I Kings) is more complex, more believable and more memorable than that of Arthur (which I also love, but which has to yield ground to the David narrative). David combines domestic drama -- his many wives; the betrayal that allows his marriage to Bathsheba; the rape of his daughter Tamar by her half-brother Amnon; the revolt led by his son Absalom – with the military exploits of David and Saul, and the religious narrative focusing on the life of the prophet Samuel, the anointing of Saul and David, and the subsequent prophecies of Nathan.<br />
<br />
The storytelling in Samuel is vivid, the detail is stunning. Although there is no undisputed archaeological evidence of the united, prosperous kingdom of the Jews described in these texts, the power of the narrative is so strong that I tend to believe there was a real David, and that his story – a prime example of a “warts and all” biography – was written down close to the time of his life. Although a popular theory holds that Samuel is part of what is called the Deuteronomistic history, composed or compiled after the Babylonian exile, I suspect that the David story was an existing narrative that was edited and woven into the larger narrative cycle.<br />
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That doesn’t mean I believe the David story is accurate history, just that there is a core of truth on which the story is built, much in the manner of a historical novel.The author of Samuel shaped the David story as a work of art, designed for impact. We are meant to see -- and we do see -- David as Messiah, as the pinnacle of Israelite history and culture. We are meant to understand that his unwavering faith in Yahweh places him there, despite his otherwise very human failings.<br />
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Chronicles retells the David story without the warts. It's still a majestic story, but it doesn't have the immediacy or the impact of Samuel. It's respectful and respectable -- as the Samuel telling manifestly is not. Chronicles contains no hint of the betrayal of Uriah, for example. We don’t hear about Saul’s gradual descent into madness, leading to his deadly pursuit of David through the wildernesses of the Holy Land. When David’s first wife, Michal, the daughter of Saul, watches the procession that brings the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem, Chronicles dutifully repeats the Samuel author’s observation that while watching David dance ecstatically she “despised him in her heart,” but leaves out the compelling detail that a good part of the reason for her displeasure was that while David was dancing, his short ephod flipped up, exposing his genitals to the view of everyone in town.<br />
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It’s details like that that make the David story so absorbing. Like all great literary art, the David story transports us into its world and crowds out doubt. By itself, it would be a staggering achievement. That it is one of so many powerful stories in the collection that is the Bible, makes its existence all the more astonishing.<br />
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David W. Karpookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05928085897898539598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7876363823912763999.post-87740890001674450942011-09-24T13:07:00.000-07:002011-09-24T13:11:04.767-07:00"Am I My Brother's Keeper?"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div dir="rtl" style="text-align: right;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It’s the first question asked by a human in the Bible, and one of the most resonant questions of all time. God is a veritable question box in the early chapters of Genesis (he seems far from omniscient in these stories), and the serpent famously asks Eve a challenging question about her allowed diet. But not until Cain defensively poses this question to God has a human made an inquiry of any sort.</span></div><div dir="rtl" style="text-align: right;"><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;"></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> God’s response to Cain comes in the form of banishment for the murder of Abel. The answer is essentially that if you don’t consider yourself the protector of your sibling, you can no longer be considered part of the family. However, Cain’s sentence is tempered not only by the mark of protection he places on him but the opportunity to create his own family and to understand the protective relationship from a different perspective. Where that wife of his came from is never answered, but Cain does become a husband and father. God teaches Cain a lesson, but one that gives him the opportunity for redemption, for a new life in a different setting.</span></div><div dir="rtl" style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And the sibling relationship becomes one of the great themes of the Bible. It is explored over and over again both in the literal sense – in the stories of Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, Abimelech and his 69 brothers, Amnon and Absalom, Adonijah and Solomon, and others – and in a broader sense through the fact that all of the nations with against which Israel goes to war are shown to come from a common ancestry, generally well documented. Not until we hit the Romans in the New Testament does a culture seem truly alien (the story of Rome’s integration into the family is post-biblical but certainly no less stunning than the Bible’s stories of familial/cultural relationships).</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Many have noted that throughout the Bible, it is the younger son – usually one perceived as physically weaker – who receives God’s favor. Certainly the nation of Israel is perpetually portrayed as weaker than its enemies but stronger in its relationship to God (in the story of Gideon, for example, the Israelite army is forced through a selection process into a position of physical weakness over which it prevails).</span></div><div dir="rtl" style="text-align: right;"><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;"></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As the stories of warring siblings and warring nations unfold, a related topic is brought into play: Our responsibility to care for the weakest and most vulnerable members of society. “Widows and orphans” is the shorthand most often used.</span></div><div dir="rtl" style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Here is God laying down the law to Moses in Exodus 22: “You shall not afflict any widow or orphan. If you afflict them in any way and they cry out to Me, I will surely hear their cry; and My wrath will become hot, and I will kill you with the sword; you wives shall be widows and your children orphans.”</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">In Deuteronomy, Moses repeats and elaborates on the requirement, insisting that the Israelites have an obligation to feed not only widows and orphans, but resident aliens and the homeless (the Levites, descendants of Israel who were not given a portion of the Holy Land). In addition, debts are to be forgiven every seven years, and failure to honor this obligation is considered a serious offense:</span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><blockquote dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;">If there is among you a poor man of your brethren within any of the cities in your land the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not harden your heart, nor shut your hand from your poor brother; but you shall surely open your hands to him and willingly lend him sufficient for his need, whatever he needs. Beware lest there be a hidden thought in your heart, a transgression of the law, saying, ‘The seventh year, the year of remission is at hand,’ and your eye be evil against your poor brother, and you give him nothing, and he cry out to the Lord against you, and it be a great sin among you. You shall surely give him and loan him as much as he needs, and your heart should not be grieved when you give to him, because for this thing the Lord your God will bless you in all your works and in everything to which you put your hand. For the poor will never cease from the land; therefore, I commdn you to do this word which says, ‘You shall surely open your hands to your brother, to your poor and needy in your land.’</blockquote></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">In Job, Eliphaz the Temanite poetically speculates that failure to care for the needy is one of Job’s sins (although we certainly can’t be sure about the veracity of Job’s supposed friends): </span><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAtdnyy4KrMSKJfLeRSZUlweALwAqOrtHodQjLZ8r-CzkSvJ-fg8Ma2X8E_mvWFQO50073rAoSaABn9B8LcKIiVLOknYBr_ls1vwdA1UEGa0PAMyScmhRc28xgwTnsRhi2oxdiyzTW0Xl2/s1600/Eliphaz+the+Temanite.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAtdnyy4KrMSKJfLeRSZUlweALwAqOrtHodQjLZ8r-CzkSvJ-fg8Ma2X8E_mvWFQO50073rAoSaABn9B8LcKIiVLOknYBr_ls1vwdA1UEGa0PAMyScmhRc28xgwTnsRhi2oxdiyzTW0Xl2/s1600/Eliphaz+the+Temanite.jpg" /></a></div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAtdnyy4KrMSKJfLeRSZUlweALwAqOrtHodQjLZ8r-CzkSvJ-fg8Ma2X8E_mvWFQO50073rAoSaABn9B8LcKIiVLOknYBr_ls1vwdA1UEGa0PAMyScmhRc28xgwTnsRhi2oxdiyzTW0Xl2/s1600/Eliphaz+the+Temanite.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAtdnyy4KrMSKJfLeRSZUlweALwAqOrtHodQjLZ8r-CzkSvJ-fg8Ma2X8E_mvWFQO50073rAoSaABn9B8LcKIiVLOknYBr_ls1vwdA1UEGa0PAMyScmhRc28xgwTnsRhi2oxdiyzTW0Xl2/s1600/Eliphaz+the+Temanite.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><div style="text-align: left;"></div></a><div style="text-align: left;"></div><blockquote>For you have taken pledges from your brethren for no reason<br />
<br />
And taken away the clothing of the naked.<br />
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Neither have you given the thirsty water to drink,<br />
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But have even withheld a morsel from the hungry.<br />
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You have also admired the personality of some<br />
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And have transplanted those already settled on earth.<br />
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Your have sent widows away empty<br />
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And have have mistreated orphans.<br />
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Therefore snares are all around you, <br />
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And a serious war has troubled you.<br />
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The light has turned to darkness for you,<br />
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And water has covered you as you fell asleep.</blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In Psalm 68, David calls God “the father of orphans and the judge of widows,” and in Psalm 82 we are told to, “Defend the poor and fatherless; do justice to the afflicted and needy. Deliver the poor and needy; rid them out of the hand of the wicked.”</span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">In all, we are instructed more than 40 times in the course of the Bible to care for those who are least able to care for themselves: The widows, orphans, resident aliens and homeless who live among us. Because “widows and orphans” is the shorthand most often used, some may be tempted to identify them as a special class, but the inclusion at key times of resident aliens and the homeless Levites should make it clear that what the Bible is talking about are the most needy and vulnerable among us.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Given that this message of familial responsibility toward all of humanity is so explicit and so often repeated, it has been more than a little disturbing in the past few weeks to hear people in the audience at political debates here in the United States cheer for the idea of letting an uninsured 30-year-old die if he has no insurance, whoop at the notion that Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme,” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and boo at the thought of respectful treatment <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>for a homosexual soldier defending this country in a theater of war. That these reactions came from political factions that loudly self-identify as Christians makes the behavior even more disturbing.</span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">While I try not to make this blog too overtly political, neither my political beliefs nor my moral ones are ever far from me. And when behavior like this erupts at political events, I often wonder whether these supposed believers use the Bible as anything more than a hard surface upon which to thump.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There are many topics upon which the Bible is internally contradictory. But the obligation to care for the neediest in society is not one of these. David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Zechariah, Malachi, James and many of its other authors repeat the message and reinforce it. And lest anyone try to argue that the Bible extends this charity only toward like believers, get over it. The Bible argues that we are all of common descent; charity is extended without requirement of a test of belief.</span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">“All men are brothers” may be viewed by some as a trite and sentimental statement, but the Bible is quite clear in laying out the idea (through its descriptions of the genesis of nations and societies) and even more clear about our obligations toward each other. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I’ll end with the simple words of the prophet Isaiah: </span>"Learn to do good. Seek Judgment and redeem the wronged. Defend the orphan and justify the widow."<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span></span></div><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><blockquote></blockquote></span></div>David W. Karpookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05928085897898539598noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7876363823912763999.post-25735781321335912642011-08-27T11:30:00.000-07:002011-08-27T11:50:21.960-07:00They Shall Have Dominion ...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The day after a magnitude 5.9 earthquake struck the east coast of the United States, I read<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-edward-bernstein/jewish-environmentalism-shema_b_929921.html"> this thoughtful article</a></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> by Rabbi Edward Bernstein of Temple Torah in Boynton Beach, Florida. So, as thoughts all over the east coast turned from the earthquake to an approaching hurricane, my own thoughts, as usual, turned to the Bible.</span><br />
<img class="rg_hi" data-height="267" data-width="189" height="267" id="rg_hi" sb_id="ms__id3453" src="http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSxe9xdNG4LjI8CEKvUhjSdKENY81gyJBMOCXsfvgeyT33krj4Tvg" style="height: 267px; width: 189px;" width="189" /></div><span style="font-family: inherit;">I had some help. That the Washington, D.C., area was facing a one-two punch of natural disasters had set the political blogosphere and the Facebook populace afire. There were <a href="http://signpostsofthetimes.blogspot.com/2011/08/quake-rocks-washington-area-felt-on.html">prophecies of doom and of impending salvation</a> based on <a href="http://www.mswm.org/earthquakes/earth_quakes/superearthquakes_superearthquakes.htm">readings of biblical passages</a>. There were jokes about the founding fathers turning over in their graves because of the sins of the right or the left; there were attempts to label the earthquake fault line “Obama’s fault” or “Bush’s fault”; there was Pat Robertson making his usual pronouncements about the events being signs from God. I got into the act with an observation that the epicenter of the quake was in Rep. Eric Cantor’s district and thus was a Tea Party phenomenon; it was fun for a day or so.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But when I read Rabbi Bernstein’s article, I began to reflect more seriously on humanity’s impact on the Earth. Now anyone who has read this blog knows that I am in no way a believer in the Bible as literal truth. It’s certainly not anything approaching literal history or science. I don’t believe in an anthropomorphic God and have no use for the idea that He sends down specific earthly judgments.</span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;">But I do believe in providence. And I believe that the Bible supports the idea of providence. I’m also a believer in a concept of universal law and justice that is not wholly based on biblical teaching but is in part expressed through the teachings of Jesus, Paul, James, Isaiah, Jeremiah and other biblical figures. All those ancient Middle Eastern philosophers were on to something big, in my opinion.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Sh’ma – the topic of Rabbi Bernstein’s piece – is one place in which the Bible gives us a poetic portrait of humanity’s responsibility for the “behavior” of the Earth. The paragraphs on which Bernstein focuses read (in the translation available online in the <a href="http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Bible/jpstoc.html">JewishVirtual Library</a></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">:</span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><br />
<div style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">And it shall come to pass, if ye shall hearken diligently unto My commandments which I command you this day, to love HaShem your G-d, and to serve Him with all your heart and with all your soul,</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> that I will give the rain of your land in its season, the former rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> And I will give grass in thy fields for thy cattle, and thou shalt eat and be satisfied.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Take heed to yourselves, lest your heart be deceived, and ye turn aside, and serve other gods, and worship them;</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> and the anger of HaShem be kindled against you, and He shut up the heaven, so that there shall be no rain, and the ground shall not yield her fruit; and ye perish quickly from off the good land which HaShem giveth you.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Therefore shall ye lay up these My words in your heart and in your soul; and ye shall bind them for a sign upon your hand, and they shall be for frontlets between your eyes. And ye shall teach them your children, talking of them, when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">And thou shalt write them upon the door-posts of thy house, and upon thy gates;</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> that your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children, upon the land which HaShem swore unto your fathers to give them, as the days of the heavens above the earth.</span></div><div style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</div><span style="font-family: inherit;">(HaShem, literally “The Name,” is a Hebrew term for God that Jews often use as a way of referring to Yahweh while avoiding other names that are limited to ritual use).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This passage -- part of Moses’ grand valedictory address to the Israelites who are approaching the Holy Land after 40 years in the wilderness – suggests a direct relationship between the Israelites’ behavior and weather events in the Holy Land. We may reject that one-to-one correspondence – I do – and yet, as Bernstein points out, find in it a broader truth: That humanity’s behavior toward the Earth does have an impact on the Earth’s “behavior” toward humanity.</span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;">To explore that, we might go back to Genesis 1:26, in which God, having created humanity in His image, gives our species a level of control over the rest of creation:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And G-d blessed them; and G-d said unto them: 'Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that creepeth upon the earth'.</span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This passage was famously cited a few years ago by the political provocateur Ann Coulter (I’m never sure how to refer to Coulter, but provocateur seems as good a term as any) in an anti-environmental rant:</span><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"></span><br />
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"></span></div><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><div><blockquote>God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, 'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.’</blockquote></div></span><div></div><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Giving Coulter the benefit of a great degree of doubt, I will assume this was one of her typical attempts to start a fire by exaggerating a position. But it’s a particularly feeble one, even for her. Coulter is representative of a small, vocal minority that rejects environmental science, using a misrepresentation of scripture to support right wing political/economic ends. I’m pretty sure there’s no implication in Genesis that we should rape the Earth.<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Indeed, we are told to replenish the Earth, a command that I think is best read broadly. Although it is coupled with the instruction to “be fruitful and multiply,” I would argue that the injunction to “replenish the Earth” is not limited to promoting the survival of humanity. And while “dominion” is a term implying rule – it shares an etymological root with “dominate” and “domain” – I don’t think it in any way suggests reckless rule.</span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I share with a lot of religious people a belief that when God placed his creation in our hands, he did so in the sense that we should care for it and protect it as something holy, something to be revered. And in this sense, taking responsibility for human behaviors that have exacerbated global warming is entirely consistent with the Bible.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It’s important to point out that Genesis 1 is attributed by most biblical scholars to the Priestly source, a person or group of writers who worked during the post-exilic period, around 500 B.C., a time when the Jews, recently allowed to return to the Holy Land from forced exile in Babylonia, were rebuilding their cities and places of worship, in particular the Temple in Jerusalem. The God depicted by the Priestly source is one who values law and order; this source is also deemed responsible for Leviticus and the portions of Numbers that are concerned with laws of human behavior.<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Sh’ma, the passage of Deuteronomy cited earlier, is attributed, in contrast, to the Deuteronomist, who is also believed to be the author(s) of the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. This author, who wrote in the years prior to the conquest and exile, was focused on telling the story of the founding of the Jewish nation.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And the second creation story, in Genesis 2, is attributed to the Yahwist source, or J, who wrote something very different, a narrative focused on humanity in which God plays an important role but human behavior is really in control of events. It is through J’s narrative that we learn about Adam, Eve and the serpent; Abram and Sarai’s wanderings; the complex family dynamic of the patriarchs and matriarchs, and Moses’ leadership of the Israelites out of Egypt and through the wilderness.<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I know that many people reject this standard scholarship and believe that the <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Torah was handed down by God to Moses in its current form (notwithstanding the fact that there is no universal agreement on that current form). For those who hold to this belief, there is a compelling sequence in the events of Genesis 1 and Genesis 2-3, culminating in the Fall of humanity.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">After Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, the whole concept of dominion over the Earth seems to fly out the door. Instead of being overlods, we are told, humanity will be at the mercy of the Earth. The angry God, after condemning the serpent to wander on its belly and Eve to endure labor pains, passes sentence on Adam:<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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<div style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And unto Adam He said: 'Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying: Thou shalt not eat of it; cursed is the ground for thy sake; in toil shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken; for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.'</span></div><div style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><br />
</div><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We’re no longer above the rest of creation. We came from the Earth and we will return to be part of the greater whole upon our deaths. Disrespect for the environment – the Earth – is disrespect for ourselves, for our roots and for our destination.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>David W. Karpookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05928085897898539598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7876363823912763999.post-67945344522297127242011-08-20T10:43:00.000-07:002011-08-20T14:55:13.292-07:00The Enemy Within<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In the quasi-historical rollercoaster ride that is the book of Judges, the Israelites are forever tormented and besieged by their neighbors – the Canaanites (Deborah), Moabites (Ehud), Midianites (Gideon), Ammonites (Jephthah), and Philistines (Samson) take turns subjugating and oppressing the descendents of Israel who, we are told over and over, asked for trouble by deciding to worship the gods of these nations.</span><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The nations that bedevil the Israelites are portrayed as enemies, but in the grand scheme of the Bible they are not outsiders. All of them can claim a heritage of descent from key biblical figures: The Moabites and Ammonites from the incest of Lot and his daughters; the Canaanites and Philistines from Ham, the disrespectful son of Noah; the Midianites from Abraham and the wife he married in his old age, Keturah. While their lineage sometimes strikes me as a set of “yo’ mamma” insults, it is clear they are cousins of the chosen people and might have remained among the chosen themselves except for a wrong turn here and there.</span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Looking at the battles of Israel from a distance, one might interpret the history – as I often like to do – as a metaphor for the individual struggles we all face. Who do we battle with the most? Those who are closest to us. Who do we resent the most? Those in whom we see those aspects of our own character what we dislike. I don’t know whether the author of Judges intended for his or her work to be viewed this way, but I don’t doubt it. As I have written before, the author evidently pulled these stories together from oral tradition, and may well have understood their connection to each other and to our psychic battles.</span><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In one of the curiosities of translation with which biblical history abounds, the Septuagint version of the Bible, on which Orthodox Christian churches base their scripture, has a significant addition – as compared to the Mazoretic text of the Hebrew Bible and most western Christian translations -- to the end of the book of Joshua, which precedes Judges. In the Mazoretic text, Joshua ends with the death and burial of the priest Eleazar. But the Septuagint adds the following:</span></div><div><blockquote> <span style="font-family: inherit;">"On that day the children of Israel took the ark of God and carried it about among themselves, and Phinehas held the office of priest in place of Eleazar his father, until he died and was buried in his own place at Gabaath. But each of the children of Israel departed to his own place and to his own city. Then the children of Israel worshipped Astarte and Astaroth of the gods of the nations round about them. So the Lord gave them over into the hands of Eglon the king of Moab, and he ruled over them for 18 years."</span></blockquote></div><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">This extra passage links the events of Joshua explicitly to the story of Ehud and Eglon in chapter 3 of Judges, but also turns the ending of Joshua – which in the Mazoretic version is a sequence of closure documenting first the death and burial of Joshua, then the reburial of the bones of Joseph and finally the death and burial of Eleazar – into an ominous foreboding of the future.</span><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Joshua, whose devotion to Yahweh (usually translated as the Lord or the Lord God in modern English Bibles) never wavered, had, in his final speech to the Israelites, warned them to destroy the idols of the nations they had conquered and not be tempted by their gods and temples. But, as the history makes clear, these conquered nations were never annihilated, and in Judges the Israelites are swayed over and over again by their gods and temples and rituals. If we view, again, the stories of Judges as a metaphor for the individual struggle, we see that we are continuously tempted by those stray thoughts that have remained in our heads despite our efforts to ignore them. To a dedicated twelve-stepper like myself, this is a familiar concept. Alcoholics sometimes speak of the “itty bitty shitty committee” in their <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>minds urging them to relapse; Al-Anons and Nar-Anons speak about battling the urges to “rescue” their addicted loved ones.</span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> It should be no big surprise, then, that the worst of the many villains in the book of Judges – at least the one whose evils are most elaborately documented – is not from one of these enemy kingdoms but is in fact the son of one of the greatest judges, Gideon. Abimelech, whose story of villainy is told in chapter 9 of Judges, is one of seventy sons of Gideon, born from Gideon’s relationship with a concubine rather than by one of his many wives (concubines were a sort of second tier wife). After Gideon’s death, Abimelech conspires with his uncles, his mother’s brothers, to kill Gideon’s other sons so that he can take over the Israelite nation. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When they carry out their plan, all of the other sons are killed except the youngest, Jotham, who manages to hide from the murderers.</span><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And while Gideon had refused an explicit request to become king, Abimelech has no qualms about assuming the trappings of power. His reign is one of terror inflicted upon his own people. He demolishes the cities of those who politic against him, sows them with salt, and burns down a tower filled with people who have taken refuge there.</span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Meanwhile Jotham, the one escapee from the mass murder of Gideon’s sons, goes to the city of Shechem – part of the land given to the tribe of Manassah and later the first capital of the northern kingdom of Israel -- and addresses its population with what is credited as the first parable in the Bible, the Parable of the Trees. In this tale, the trees go looking for a king to reign over them. They first ask the olive tree, known as the most useful of all trees in the Holy Land for its fruit, oil and wood. The olive tree refuses the request, because it has a more important role in the world, of providing riches that are used in rituals that glorify God. The trees then ask the fig, which also refuses because its proper role is to produce its sweet fruit. Third, the trees nominate the vine, which says it should not cease its job of providing wine, “which cheers both God and man.” Finally the trees turn to the bramble, the thorny bush that was the plague of the region’s farmers. The bramble happily accepts the kingship, but even as he assumes the role, he warns of the danger that he will spawn fire that will “devour the cedars of Lebanon.” </span><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The message is clear: Beware of the person who is anxious to rule over you. In the previous generation, Gideon has been a reluctant leader throughout his life; his son Abimelech, by contrast, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>plots to take power and then uses that power against his own people. (It might be interesting to ask some of our current presidential candidates – particularly those who blanket themselves in scripture – to comment on this parable).</span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> It may not be inconsequential that the Abimelech of Judges bears the same name as the Philistine with whom Abraham makes a treaty in chapter 21 of Genesis, and who later provides refuge to Isaac and Rebeccah during a famine (this latter story is one of several accounts in Genesis of a man who misrepresents his wife as his sister while in exile). This earlier Abimelech, though a foreigner, behaves honorably toward two of the Hebrew patriarchs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The later Abimelech, though born within the tribe, is a thorough dirtbag. Going back to my earlier interpretation of these stories as metaphors for our internal struggles, we see that the closer we get to the center, the worse the baggage we must deal with.</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQCHSbW_ENU9HHY54Z2Pp9ihMvxxJui0-lN9587KTcfK0WCelLvoN2GoYvvBQUnAX0nb-QBEl0KVr5xpAM5CddARTUu3fNJVm3tOOQ68Y5thzrZYHVy689IlQTqeSEWDP1_1KIWNDmSF7P/s1600/www-St-Takla-org--077--Death-of-Abimelech-at-Thebez-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="253" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQCHSbW_ENU9HHY54Z2Pp9ihMvxxJui0-lN9587KTcfK0WCelLvoN2GoYvvBQUnAX0nb-QBEl0KVr5xpAM5CddARTUu3fNJVm3tOOQ68Y5thzrZYHVy689IlQTqeSEWDP1_1KIWNDmSF7P/s320/www-St-Takla-org--077--Death-of-Abimelech-at-Thebez-1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">To everyone’s relief, Abimelech doesn’t last long. His reign of three years ends when, besieging another tower, a woman drops a piece of a millstone on his head, breaking his skull (as stated before, women are extremely important figures in the book of Judges). The dying Abimelech asks one of his soldiers to kill him off with his sword, so that he doesn’t bear the shameful legacy of having been killed by a woman. As if he need<span style="line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">ed more shame than the oppression and murder of his own people.</span></span></span></div>David W. Karpookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05928085897898539598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7876363823912763999.post-35597791039149074752011-08-16T07:46:00.000-07:002011-08-16T08:16:03.238-07:00Older Women<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In a society whose first commandment from God was to “go forth and multiply,” infertility must have been a dispiriting burden. Even today, when fertility clinics abound and pharmaceuticals can provide considerable hope for women who desire children, the inability to conceive and bear children can have serious psychological consequences: Feelings of guilt for unknown or imagined sins, questioning of self-worth, devaluing of relationships. In ancient Israel, when the only cure for infertility was a miracle, one suspects the effect on women was exponentially worse.</span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;">No wonder, then, that the phenomenon of an aging woman – who has long given up hope for motherhood – finding herself unexpectedly pregnant plays such an important role in the biblical narrative. It happens over and over again, with slight variations, beginning with the 90-year-old Sarah, who laughs (understandably) at the suggestion that she will bear a child. Her daughter-in-law Rebecca, Rebecca’s daughter-in-law Rachel, Samson’s unnamed mother, Hannah and Elizabeth all play out the story of the unexpected pregnancy of a long-barren wife.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The recurrence of this narrative strain constitutes what the biblical scholar Robert Alter calls a “type-scene”. These repeated stories show up in different parts of the Bible, affecting different characters, and with differing details; scholars debate why they are such a common convention. There is the story of a romance sparked by a chance meeting at a well – it happens to Jacob and Rachel, it happens to Moses and Zipporah, it happens by proxy to Abraham’s servant – who is off to seek a bride for Abraham’s son Isaac – and Rebeccah. Tantalizingly, it happens to Jesus and the Samaritan woman (at Jacob’s well!) although in that case it is never taken beyond a flirtatious exchange of dialog. Other type-scenes include the wife whose status is misrepresented as that of sister (Sarah, Rebbecah); the captive youth who makes his reputation through interpretation of a ruler’s dreams (Joseph, Daniel); the reluctant leader called to service by God (Moses, Gideon).</span><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But I’m not aware of a motif that occurs as often as the barren wife who gives birth after many years. As identified above, it occurs at least six times in the biblical narrative. Often it is accompanied by an angelic visitation, an annunciation. Inevitably it serves as an introduction to the career of a notable biblical figure.</span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;">To varying degrees, the women in this repeated story have been desperate for children. Rachel tells her husband, Jacob, that she will die if she does not conceive. Hannah, overcome with despair, stops eating and weeps incessantly. Sarah turns to her handmaid, Hagar, and enlists her as a surrogate, to bear a child with Abraham that will legally be Sarah’s. That last one, of course, doesn’t turn out so well; Hagar lords her fertility over Sarah and the resulting conflict leads the pregnant maid to run away (an angel turns her back). But the child ultimately bears, Isaac, is favored over his half-brother, Hagar’s son Ishmael (At least in the Judeo-Christian telling. In Islam it is Ishmael who is the key ancestral figure).</span><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Sarah’s granddaughter-in-law Rachel also ends up resorting to the handmaid/surrogate strategy, enlisting her servant Bilhah; the maid in short order produces two sons, Dan and Napthali. And while we don’t hear of any particular conflict between Rachel and Bilhah, we know that there is an intense rivalry between Rachel and her sister-wife Leah, whom Jacob does not love but who is remarkably fertile, bearing him seven children.</span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel, also has a fertile sister-wife, Penninah, who, like Leah, is unloved but fertile.</span><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">All of these women ultimately conceive and give birth, and all of their offspring are pretty special characters in the biblical narrative: Sarah’s son is Isaac; Rebeccah’s twin sons are Jacob and Esau; Rachel gives birth to Joseph and Benjamin (she dies in childbirth with the latter); the unnamed wife of Manoah mothers the Israelite judge Samson; Hannah’s son is Samuel; and Elizabeth, many generations later, becomes a mother in old age to John the Baptist. That the Greek evangelist Luke chose to repeat this Hebrew story in the New Testament context shows its lasting and cross-cultural power.</span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;">These births are miracles, as an unexpected, late-in-life pregnancy must have seemed at the time and still may seem, despite the availability of fertility treatments today. Surely God took special care in the conception of these children. Thus we have angelic annunciations as a common rider to these stories.</span><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The story of Samson, presented in Judges 13-16, is a peculiar combination of Hebrew biblical conventions and Mediterranean demigod conventions. Samson may be the first – and only Jewish – superhero. In his career he slays a lion with his bare hands, defeats an army of a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass as his only weapon, annihilates his enemies (and himself) by pulling down a temple on their heads. Like the Greek Achilles, he appears to be invincible except for one hidden weakness. For Achilles, it was his unprotected heel; for Samson it is the hair that has never been cut.</span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;">But his story begins with the familiar Hebrew motif of the barren older woman. Unlike the other older moms, Samson’s mother is never given a name. She is identified as the wife of Manoah, a man from the tribe of Dan living in the Judean city of Zorah. This unfertile woman is visited by an angel who gives her instructions to raise her soon-to-be-born son according to a law laid down in Numbers 6 for men and women who devote a period of their lives to the service of God: No wine or intoxicants, no unclean foods, and “no razor shall come upon his head.” While these rules are voluntary in Numbers, Samson’s mother is commanded to raise her son from birth in this way, “for the child shall be a Nazirite to God from the womb, and he shall begin to deliver Israel out of the hand of the Philistines.” (the term Nazirite means consecrated or separated). It's a vow that Hannah will later repeat with regard to her son Samuel.</span><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When his wife tells Manoah about her visitation, Manoah asks God to send the angel back to provide more explicit instructions. God does so, and the angel, after sharing the instructions once again, disappears spectacularly in flame, convincing the couple of his supernatural provenance.</span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Like the other biblical sons of older women, Samson is a powerful figure, but like them – certainly like Jacob -- he is not without flaws. He has a weakness for exotic women, falling in love and demanding in marriage a Philistine woman (“What, you can’t find a nice Jewish girl?” is a paraphrase of his parents’ reaction) and then, of course the famous Delilah, introduced as a harlot from the Philistine city of Gaza. He also seems to get a sexual charge from being tied up, as evidenced in his repeated ruses to get Delilah to do so.</span><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But it’s the hair that ultimately does him in. Is his uncut hair really the source of his strength, or, as one of my students suggested, is it his belief in the source of his power that makes it so? The story of Samson to a large degree follows the conventions of demigod mythology and so one may be justified in suggesting that it really is the uncut hair that gives him his strength. But the story of Samson's conception and birth ties him to the somewhat more naturalistic conventions of biblical narrative. I say somewhat more naturatlistic because, of course, the Bible is full of the supernatural, including the angelic visitations that mark these repeated stories. But Samson -- a fool for love if there ever was one -- also hews to the biblical tradition of characters with recognizably human traits, behavior that ties these ancient stories to our lives today. The girl-crazy he-man, the heartsick older woman yearning for a child -- these are characters that we could and do come across in our lives every day.</span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><br />
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</div></div>David W. Karpookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05928085897898539598noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7876363823912763999.post-66389931236081819532011-08-06T12:53:00.000-07:002011-08-06T13:02:58.014-07:00Tales From The Dark Side<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><span style="font-family: inherit;">One of the more tiresome complaints I hear about the Bible from people who don’t know what’s in the Bible is that, “It’s just a bunch of fairy tales.” I have several problems with that statement, beginning with the disparagement of both the Bible and fairy tales.</span><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Many of us consider the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson to be among the giants of world literature. Their stories – and those of countless other “fairy tale” writers and transcribers – are vibrant, powerful shared memories that connect us across time, culture and technology. There’s a reason we pass these stories on from generation to generation, and that artists in other media continue to seek new ways to interpret and portray them for new audiences.</span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Unquestionably, some of the narrative portions of the Bible resemble fairy tales and other forms of traditional story-telling: The legends, romances, and fables that often began as oral transmissions and only came to be written down later. The reason for that resemblance is that some of these Bible stories undoubtedly began in just the same way. The Biblical authors – like the Grimms – were documenting for future generations the stories their kinfolk and fellow tribesmen had passed down to them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">That doesn’t discount the worth of the Bible stories any more than it discounts the work of other fairy tale scribes. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The term “just fairy tales” implies a lack of value that doesn’t bear out under any level of scrutiny.</span><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Moreover, characterization of the Bible as “just” anything is ridiculously wrong-headed. To my knowledge, world literature contains no other collection of comparable complexity or inclusiveness. The contents of the Bible range from these folk tales to the complex moral and philosophical writings of the Prophets, Paul and James, encompassing the elegiac reflections of Ecclesiastes, the poetry of the Psalms, the political history of Chronicles, the aphorisms of the Proverbs, the stunning psychological portrait of King David in Samuel and much more.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I’ve been spending a lot of time lately re-reading and examining the books that have in the last century come to be known as the “Deuteronomistic History”: Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Samuel and Kings. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> Even within this small portion of the Bible, which may have been written<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>by a single author (the Biblical scholar Richard Elliott Friedman has posited that that writer is the prophet Jeremiah), the breadth and diversity of topics and treatments are astonishing. Apparently written in a time of great turmoil, when the northern kingdom of Israel had been overrun by the Assyrians and the southern kingdom of Judah was under threat of annihilation by Babylon, the books collectively portray a society rife with conflict and confusion, uncertain whether to put their faith in the supreme god Yahweh or to spread their bets among a pantheon of traditional middle eastern deities. The Jews of the Deuteronomistic history are at war with enemies external and internal – and the internal enemies include both their neighbors and themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The strongest enemies of all are their own psyches, struggling to find meaning in this war-torn landscape.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The history begins majestically, with the long, valedictory address of Moses to his people. This greatest of Biblical figures has been denied the triumphant climax to his career – entry into the Promised Land -- because he failed to follow an explicit instruction from God. Told to bring forth water from rocks for his thirsty people with words, Moses instead struck the rocks with his staff, twice. As a result, he is allowed a brief view of the Promised Land from just outside its borders, but is forbidden to go further and dies in the mountains to the east. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Israelites are led across the Jordan and into Canaan by his hand-picked successor, Joshua, whose eponymous book can be read as a model of effective project management. Joshua never takes his eyes off the prize – in Biblical terms he looks neither to the right nor the left – and as a result, the conquest of the Promised Land proceeds from success to success, with one brief interlude of failure when one of his followers steals and hides for personal gain bounty that should have been part of a collective sacrifice. But while triumphant, Joshua is incomplete in his victories. At the end, the Israelites dwell ominously in a land peppered with enemy tribes: The Canaanites, Moabites, Midianites, Ammonites and more.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And after Joshua’s demise, things go sour quickly. The books of Judges, Samuel and Kings constitute a roller-coaster ride through a history that careens back and forth repeatedly from spectacular triumph to unimaginable disaster, giving us along the way some of the most memorable heroes and villains in the historical record: Gideon, Deborah, Samson, Delilah, Samuel, Elijah, Elisha, Ahab, Jezebel, Saul, Goliath, David, Absalom, and Solomon, to name just a few. These are the characters we learn about in Sunday School, but too often our training doesn’t put these stories together in a way that illustrates the wild ride of the Jewish people during this remarkable period.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZ5H_doAUXLRwLsEC4kdYZ2MLe3y8AwzZq7RBliu3ZrAUR_nRKftcJbXMGpiQ1Mx3KUwV_ThDXzv8ZscoSeHAKUrDAV56IuHqxv_b4OEZFyp6vde-6Q5tQksDlZI86A2ajJSpjZZzupDbT/s1600/Gomer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZ5H_doAUXLRwLsEC4kdYZ2MLe3y8AwzZq7RBliu3ZrAUR_nRKftcJbXMGpiQ1Mx3KUwV_ThDXzv8ZscoSeHAKUrDAV56IuHqxv_b4OEZFyp6vde-6Q5tQksDlZI86A2ajJSpjZZzupDbT/s320/Gomer.jpg" width="253" /></span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;">Other writers of the time addressed the same tumultuous history that is the focus of the Deuteronomist’s account, perhaps none more poignantly than the prophet Hosea. A resident of the northern kingdom, who apparently lived and wrote about 100 years before the Deuteronomist, Hosea fell – madly, head over heels – in love with a prostitute, Gomer. His feelings for Gomer were so strong that he experienced them as a message from God. But Gomer, though she agreed to marry Hosea and bore three children by him, was drawn back to her earlier life. When she left Hosea and her children, he chased after her and purchased her back, unwilling to give up the great love of his life. (The writer Karen Armstrong believes that Gomer was a cult prostitute in a temple of Baal, the mighty Canaanite god, but I think the Biblical evidence for this is questionable). In his writings, Hosea sees his history with Gomer as a metaphor for the Israelite people, torn between worship of Yahweh and worship of pagan gods. Like Hosea, Yahweh is powered by love for these faithless people. Over and over, he forgives them and welcomes them back. But like Gomer, the Israelites can’t stay away from the temptations offered by the pagan pantheon.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJld0Fj8MYi7tAyivu3xTs1Ph3cmIgSJ6O9WUKqPBXb-635HmE5zJbFtlvuKvf6pR3OBpM2Er3jl-039uEbhEq4AmJOiFllYzN3hDhsTkcXnI2VZ0kUCDPPP0EAETxgbQUzoUewpfNN_fC/s1600/hosea_watching_gomer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJld0Fj8MYi7tAyivu3xTs1Ph3cmIgSJ6O9WUKqPBXb-635HmE5zJbFtlvuKvf6pR3OBpM2Er3jl-039uEbhEq4AmJOiFllYzN3hDhsTkcXnI2VZ0kUCDPPP0EAETxgbQUzoUewpfNN_fC/s320/hosea_watching_gomer.jpg" width="282" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hosea compressed the history of the Israelites into a single story of a faithful man and his faithless wife. The Deuteronomist takes a more leisurely approach,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>telling the story through a thousand years of history and incorporating a host of stories that may have circulated among the various tribes of Israel throughout the generations.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Nowhere is the Deuteronomistic history more obviously a collection of stories than in the book of Judges. The eight major stories and several minor ones that constitute this collection are linked in only a rudimentary way to each other. Essentially, the author tells a story, says that its hero or heroine dies, says that the land was at peace (or not) during the central figure’s time, and then talks about the people backsliding before the next hero emerges. Thus Caleb gives way to Othniel gives way to Ehud gives way to Gideon, etc.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The story of Samson, probably the most familiar of the Judges tales thanks for Cecil B. DeMille, resembles a Greek or Roman myth. Samson is a Hercules-like figure of superhuman strength, killing a lion with his bare hands. But like Achilles, he has a weak spot: If his hair is cut, he will lose his strength. Enter Delilah and the tragic conclusion in which the weakened Samson is put in chains before he regains the strength to bring down the palace on both himself and his captors.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Many people are familiar to some extent as well with the story of Gideon and the fleece, but many of the stories in Judges get left out of Sunday School class and with good reason: These are some of the most disturbing stories you will ever read, rife with human sacrifice, rape, torture, and violent murder.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyeyJKzNt8YF1MZ5E895da292HH_hGSpEYG5yKAGNVxKCMfbDeNswtrnQOsYFD_En5OBKuWz4ew7XVfwU3mNqw8XF3xikXQgLoA-kJjUJPcMIS5FkzmGwLhrAXpO5Az_DyNfvNOEPD9zLk/s1600/Ehud+and+Eglon.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyeyJKzNt8YF1MZ5E895da292HH_hGSpEYG5yKAGNVxKCMfbDeNswtrnQOsYFD_En5OBKuWz4ew7XVfwU3mNqw8XF3xikXQgLoA-kJjUJPcMIS5FkzmGwLhrAXpO5Az_DyNfvNOEPD9zLk/s1600/Ehud+and+Eglon.bmp" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: inherit;">At least one story – that of Ehud – is a comically scatological tale that might have survived because it held the attention of teenaged boys over the generations. The Israelites are under the thumb of a Moabite king, a hugely fat ruler named Eglon. Ehud, who is described as ambidextrous, gains a private audience with Eglon and – having hid a dagger under his clothing against his right thigh – manages to stab the king to death, the dagger disappearing in Eglon’s folds of fat, so that Ehud cannot remove it. As sometimes happens at the point of death, Eglon has a bowel movement – “the dirt came out,” in the words of the King James translators. Ehud then sneaks out a back door. Meanwhile Eglon’s guards notice the foul smell and joke crudely that the king is really stinking up the place ("Whew! Smells like something died in there," you can almost hear them saying), before getting worried after a period of time passes with no activity and opening the door to find their slain ruler. Ehud’s murder ushers in an era of peace for the Israelites, with the usual backsliding after his death. All in all, a story worthy of a summer frat-boy movie.</span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;">In other parts of Judges, women are key figures, In a way they rarely are in the Bible. Deborah, for example, is not only a prophetess who serves as a Judge, but a warrior heroine whose battlefield victories against Canaanite foes are punctuated and sealed by the actions of yet another fierce woman, Jael, who lures the Canaanite general Sisera into her tent, lulls him to sleep and then drives a tent spike into his forehead.</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZO7Tup-1sjeLG9FrAWoi0oyuz06FaMmEwRGQ94j9uO0h2nOeLS83ukZ3VZJp9iV3eqbqmRGPkILhwq1tSlyLYt9OcY0UJpsPGIuKnhh_lxQsOP4uTtoMd3iYzklTzBlzCi_mx7QVBq5m-/s1600/JAEL-_Jael_and_Sisera_Artemisia_Gentileschi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="227" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZO7Tup-1sjeLG9FrAWoi0oyuz06FaMmEwRGQ94j9uO0h2nOeLS83ukZ3VZJp9iV3eqbqmRGPkILhwq1tSlyLYt9OcY0UJpsPGIuKnhh_lxQsOP4uTtoMd3iYzklTzBlzCi_mx7QVBq5m-/s320/JAEL-_Jael_and_Sisera_Artemisia_Gentileschi.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Other women, though central to the stories of Judges, are not so lucky in their fates. Jephthah, a later judge who is introduced as the son of a harlot, has a beloved daughter who is his only child. In the heat of battle, Jephthah promises Yahweh that if he is allowed to be victorious and return home, he will sacrifice to Yahweh the first living thing he sees when he enters his front yard. Upon his arrival home, that first thing turns out to be the daughter who has run out to greet him. At her request, Jephthah allows her to go off for two months with her girlfriends to bewail her virginity, but when she returns home he carries out the promised sacrifice.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And in perhaps the most disturbing story in all of the Bible, a woman who is a concubine (concubines being a sort of second-tier wife) to an unnamed Levite, runs away from her husband and returns home to her father. The Levite goes after her, spends several days in the father’s house, and in an undescribed way regains his concubine. On the way home, they stop in the city of Gibeah in the land of the Benjaminite tribe and are offered a bed for the night in the home of a hospitable old man. In an echo of the Genesis story of Sodom and Gomorrah, the locals turn up at the door and demand the Levite be turned out so they can gang-rape him. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Like Lot in the earlier story, the old man offers women -- his daughter and the concubine -- as alternatives to the rapists, and in this story the concubine ends up being handed over to them. After a horrific night, the concubine crawls back to the door in the morning and dies at her husband’s feet. The husband takes her body home, cuts it into pieces and sends a piece to each of the Israelite tribes with the exception of the Benjaminites, sparking a war between the Benjaminites and the other tribes of Israel.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If these horrifying stories have a moral purpose, it is hard to discern. I could come up with something in each case, but, frankly, the morals would be baloney. As far as I can tell, these stories are the tabloid shockers of their day, and I suspect they were retold in the ancient culture in just the same way the Casey Anthony and O.J. Simpson murders are recounted at backyard barbecues today. They are told over and over again for the sheer shock value. Eventually, the Deuteronomist collected and assembled them, linking them together in a quasi-historical way as part of the shared history of his culture.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Cautionary tales? Maybe, in part. Certainly Jephtah and his daughter could be a warning not to make solemn oaths without thinking through the possible consequences. Or maybe just a collection of stories, the <em>Hollywood Babylon</em> or <em>Urban Legends</em> of their day. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But given conditions in the Holy Land at the time they were assembled into book form, I think they serve as a portrait of a culture struggling to understand how it found itself in its current condition. What horrors had we perpetrated to justify this onslaught from all sides, you can almost hear the writer asking. Shocking, and shockingly well told, the stories of Judges survive as artifacts of an ancient culture in much the way that the stories of the Brothers Grimm tell us about the psyches of central Europeans on the cusp of the modern age. And our world is richer for it.</span></div></div>David W. Karpookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05928085897898539598noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7876363823912763999.post-41137745034184430702011-05-30T12:59:00.000-07:002011-05-30T13:00:23.969-07:00The Wondrous Book of James<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Being forced to select one book of the Bible as one’s favorite would be a sad task, but if I had to do it, I would almost certainly pick the Epistle of James. This brief essay – just five chapters, presented as a letter to Christianized Jews – encapsulates for me the moral lessons of the Bible in a way that no other does.<br />
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James is at once one of the simplest and one of the most challenging books of the Bible. It is challenging because of its simplicity, its directness. He tells us to have unwavering faith, to express that faith through good works, to love without judgment all of humanity, to hold our tongues, to care for the poor and the oppressed.<br />
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James is the gentlest of preachers, a soothing voice whose tone matches his lesson of peace. There’s a brief passage near the end where he exhorts against the rich leading lives of luxury and self-indulgence while cheating the poor and hoarding worldly, ephemeral treasure, but it’s like a quick shout to wake us up, after which he returns to counseling patience and kindness in the face of life's challenges.<br />
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Because James is so beautifully composed, it’s tempting just to quote one passage after another. After all, no essay about James could present his thoughts more clearly and powerfully than he does himself.<br />
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“Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning,” James writes in the first chapter of his letter. He goes on: “So then, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath, for the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of love.”<br />
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There are passages of other books that have a comparable beauty – in particular, Paul’s astonishing discourse on love in I Corinthians 13 – but I don’t think that any of the other biblical writers sustained such a powerful expression of love throughout an entire work.<br />
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A born-again Christian friend of mine once described the book of James as “rules for living.” I think she is exactly right. I find myself turning to James when I’m vexed about things, when my head is in a bad place, when I’ve had enough. And reading James never fails to calm me down, to provide the loving perspective I need.<br />
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More than anything, James is about living with integrity. He tells us to act in ways that align with our beliefs about what is good and right.<br />
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“ Who among you is wise and understanding? Then let him show it by good conduct and works he does with gentleness that comes of wisdom.”<br />
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Perhaps not surprisingly, this simple message about how to live a good life has generated a fair amount of controversy over the millennia. It was only slowly accepted into what became the New Testament canon as it was codified in the early centuries of the Christian era, perhaps because it mentions Jesus only peripherally. Centuries later, Martin Luther wanted to strike the book of James from the Bible, calling it an “epistle of straw,” with little to offer readers. James also insists on the importance of doing good works in a way that clashes with Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone.<br />
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Luther’s doctrine derives from Paul, who in chapter 3 of his letter to the Romans tells us that, “we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law.” Paul was speaking, of course, about the Jewish law, particularly the dietary restrictions and insistence on circumcision that became barriers to conversion when Christianity spread from Jewish communities to the gentile ones that were Paul’s audience.<br />
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In the book of Acts and in some of Paul’s writings, we are told of the conflict between the traveling evangelist Paul, on the one hand, and Jerusalem-based James and Peter, who believed that Christian converts must follow Jewish law as set forth in the Torah. Paul’s flexibility on matters of Jewish law is quite likely a major factor in allowing the rapid spread of Christianity in Europe. It’s doubtful that pagan men would have lined up en masse to be circumcised; the promise of eternal life is a much more attractive message for a proselytizer.<br />
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Ironically, Paul’s message that faith, rather than obedience to Jewish law, is the key to salvation -- which was an effort to be inclusive, to make Christianity a universal faith -- has in recent times become its own barrier in those Christian communities that contend it is impossible to “get to heaven” other than through a particular strain of Christian belief.<br />
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And if the James of Acts is a stickler for Jewish law, the James of the epistle is bound only by the concepts of truth and integrity.<br />
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Who was this James? The most common belief is that he is a brother of Jesus, indeed the brother who became the first bishop of Jerusalem (those who believe that Mary was “ever virgin” call him a kinsman – perhaps a half-brother or cousin). There are two other Jameses in the Gospels – the son of Alphaeus and the son of Zebedee – but they usually are not considered strong candidates for authorship, because the author introduces himself as a “slave” of God and of Jesus, not as a disciple. Of course, there is always the possibility that the introductory attribution of the book is a later addition, designed to give its message more credibility as scripture.<br />
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Bottom line is we don’t know exactly who this author was. The text doesn’t really give us any clues other than that the author was knowledgeable of the Hebrew Bible, was apparently addressing an audience of Jews, and wrote beautifully in the Greek language. The name James is an Anglicization of the Hebrew name Yaakov (Jacob), a common name then as now, among Greek-speaking Diaspora Jews as well as in the Holy Land. So it’s probably best to just be grateful that whoever thought these thoughts had the will and the wisdom to write them down, and that others found them sufficiently worthy to preserve.<br />
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I won’t say a lot more about James. If you have a few minutes to read, read James’ words rather than mine. But of course, I’ll close with another passage, one that is at the heart of the controversy over James, but also at the heart of James’ beauty and lasting value:<br />
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<blockquote>“What good is it, my brothers, if you say that you have faith but have no works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked, short of daily food, and one of you says, ‘Go in peace. Keep warm and eat,’ but you give nothing for the body’s needs, what good is it? So even faith, if by itself and not backed up by works, is dead. Someone will say: ‘You have the faith and I have works.’ Show me your faith apart from works and I will show you from my works my faith. You do believe that God is one, and you do well. As it reads in Deuteronomy: Even demons believe and shudder. O hollow man, are you prepared to know that faith alone, without the works, is barren?”</blockquote><br />
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</div>David W. Karpookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05928085897898539598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7876363823912763999.post-54238039768896648752011-03-12T11:05:00.000-08:002011-03-12T11:05:32.408-08:00Lines In The Sand<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Following the fast-paced and stirring narrative of the first half of Exodus, which gives us the familiar story of Moses and the flight of the Israelites from Egypt, the Torah changes pace and tone. The next three-and-a-half books, which constitute the balance of the story of Moses and his followers, alternate between narrative episodes and long, detailed expositions of the Law. <br />
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I’ve been wrestling for the past month or so with how I want to discuss the Law with my Bible study class. I read A.J. Jacob’s funny, surprisingly spiritual memoir, <em><span>The Year of Living Biblically<iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=chaverlinandw-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0743291484&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align: left; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe></span></em>; I moved on to Karen Armstrong’s study of fundamentalism, <em>The Battle for God</em>; I dug into archaeological studies and literary analyses; I dipped a toe into Spinoza and Teresa of Avila; most of all, I pored over the legal passages of the Torah, taking notes and pondering the implications. And I’m not really any closer to a coherent approach than I was when I started thinking about it.<br />
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People have been interpreting the Law, arguing about it, trying to follow it, questioning it, going to war over it for more than 3,000 years; I’m unlikely to come up with anything new. I have learned a lot about biblical history and varying interpretations of the Law, but what I face my class with is a collection of topics rather than a single story.<br />
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That’s okay, I think. The Law as documented in the Torah is such a vast and varied set of affirmations and strictures, covering everything from ritual sacrifice to sexual behavior to skin disease to inheritance of property, that a coherent summary might be more problematic than my scattershot approach. Well, there’s self-justification for you.<br />
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Among the many, many things that it is, the Tanakh is the story of how the Jewish nation came to be. The Law is, of course, central to that, defining in extraordinary detail what it means to be a member of this community and what sets Jews apart from their neighbors and non-Jewish kin. Presented as it is, interwoven with the narrative of the Israelites wanderings in the desert, we can see the Law as the ”lines in the sand” that define the boundaries of Judaism in terms of behavior and belief. <br />
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It’s a brilliant construction. The Jews lay down their lines in the sand literally and literarily through the final 3-1/2 books of the Torah. As they make their errant way toward the promised land -- the property that God has promised to them -- they learn the regulations of propriety that will secure their physical and spiritual nationhood. Anyone who doubts the place of the Bible in the canon of great literature need only ponder the sophistication with which this story is presented – the way the narrative strain etches physical lines across the Levant landscape while the legalistic strain etches moral boundaries – to understand the high level of artistry in this text.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaZ3OLRkw_fmK3w6W5tSOENSk0R2oCr-oQ3IqzU7HZGaGO6greY6fsw1bbNeKZPFbPLDzxAeEkaUiXXHIhhmUzWvSSSuG4wBmIDlTmPqQmQ9GrNLJX6TvOfLplWMIbBAHFRrJ1UME41tlV/s1600/wildjour.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" q6="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaZ3OLRkw_fmK3w6W5tSOENSk0R2oCr-oQ3IqzU7HZGaGO6greY6fsw1bbNeKZPFbPLDzxAeEkaUiXXHIhhmUzWvSSSuG4wBmIDlTmPqQmQ9GrNLJX6TvOfLplWMIbBAHFRrJ1UME41tlV/s320/wildjour.gif" width="262" /></a></div>Funny thing about that expression, “line in the sand.” We generally use it to designate an absolute boundary, a limit beyond which we will not go. But, in reality, is there anything more impermanent than a line traced in the sand? Winds, water, the shuffling of subsequent feet, all act to muddle the line that has been demarcated; the line may shift, widen or disappear under even minor external pressure. <br />
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That, of course, makes it a perfect metaphor for the Law. There is arguably nothing that has caused more strife, internal and interpersonal, than the question of where the boundaries of the law reside. Which laws do we need to observe today? Which are timeless, and which are time-bound? Should they be interpreted literally or do they contain a deeper meaning that can only be understood through probing, questioning exploration?<br />
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Although the first ten commandments have been privileged in western culture, the Torah’s list of rule by no means stops with them. The traditional number of commandments, or Mitzvot, recognized in Judaism is 613 (for a concise list of them, see http://www.jewfaq.org/613.htm). A.J. Jacobs, who took a more expansive approach to the Law in <em>The Year of Living Biblically</em> – looking beyond the Torah to the rest of the Tanakh and even the New Testament – came up with more than 700 that he attempted to follow for a year.<br />
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Among the things I learned from Jacobs was the term “cafeteria Christianity”, a derisive label used by some fundamentalist Christians to describe those whom they see as selective about which of the biblical laws they attempt to adhere to. At the end of his book, having spent time with fundamentalists and more liberal believers, both Christian and Jewish, Jacobs makes the – I think accurate – observation that, “everyone practices cafeteria religion. It’s not just moderates. Fundamentalists do it too. Otherwise they’d kick women out of church for saying hello.”<br />
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Although Jacobs’ efforts to follow biblical law are a stunt designed to generate a best-selling memoir in the vein of his earlier book that focused on an attempt to read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica, Jacobs found himself surprised by the spirituality that emerged as he became more conscious of his behavior and its consequences. Even the most puzzling of laws – an early one he deals with is the stricture against wearing clothes made of more than one kind of fiber – forced him to confront himself, his preconceptions, his wilfullness, his snarkiness. At the end of the year, he found himself a more thoughtful, tolerant person, and bit reluctant to loosen up his behavior.<br />
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He says this about picking and choosing amongst the biblical laws: “Cafeterias aren’t bad per se. I’ve had some great meals at cafeterias. I’ve also had some turkey tetrazzini that gave me the dry heaves for sixteen hours. The key is in choosing the right dishes. You need to pick the nurturing ones (compassion), the healthy ones (love thy neighbor), not the bitter ones.”<br />
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I think everything Jacobs says here is right. We all cherry-pick the Bible, whether in reading the Law or the stories, focusing on the things that support our own beliefs and conceptions. The Bible has often been used as a weapon, a blunt object with which to beat on opponents, and no part of the Bible is more easily weaponized than the Law. I am guilty of it; so, most likely, are you.<br />
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As much as I love exploring this amazing text, I know that I am much more likely to focus on something like the Sermon on the Plain or the Antitheses or the story of Ruth, which I find support my political and moral views, than I am on the apocalyptic Olivet discourse. I may find it troubling that others focus on the prohibition of homosexual behavior but don’t call for the public stoning of those who choose to wear cotton-polyester blends, but in essence we are doing the same thing. I like to think that I’m cherry-picking those things that stress inclusion and love, as opposed to exclusion and hate, but so be it.<br />
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In terms of the Law as defined in the Torah, I smile each time I read about leaving the grain at the edges of the field for the poor, or welcoming and comforting strangers; I want to rush past the passages that place restrictions on the diseased and the maimed. I may find it troubling that others focus on the prohibition of homosexual behavior but don’t call for the public stoning of those who choose to wear cotton-polyester blends, but in essence we are doing the same thing. I like to think that I’m cherry-picking those things that stress inclusion and love, as opposed to exclusion and hate, but so be it.<br />
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But it’s important to understand, I think, that even some of the Laws that seem harsh to us today may have advanced compassion and humane behavior in their time. Exodus 21:23, for example, gives us the famous formulation, “And if there is a mishap, you shall pay a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot, a burn for a burn, a wound for a wound, a bruise for a bruise.” Tit for tat. But, of course, what this law does is put limits on retribution – taking an eye for an eye also means that one cannot take a life for an eye, or an entire city worth of lives in retribution for one life. If one compares this law to the vengeance that Simeon and Levi took on an entire city over the rape of their sister Dinah, on e can see it as perhaps a necessary setting of bounds (of course, this interpretation doesn’t do much to explain the various slaughters that take place with God’s apparent asset later in the Bible, but that goes back to that shifting sands thing).<br />
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The laws of the Torah include things that almost everyone can agree on – “Thou shalt not kill” seems like one of these, although, again, God seems not to mind taking some liberties with that when it’s convenient – and some that make almost no sense to us today, such as the many regulations around animal sacrifice, or the fact that it’s forbidden for a farmer to plant two kinds of seed in one field. But whether they adhere to our contemporary common sense or not, all of the laws serve to set boundaries, to define what is allowed and what is not, what is good and what is not.<br />
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The British scholar and author Karen Armstrong, in <em><span>The Battle for God<iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=chaverlinandw-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0345391691&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align: left; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe></span></em>, suggests that the Bible’s documentation of the law – which historically almost certainly did not happen in the time of Moses but during the decline of the southern kingdom or even during the Babylonian captivity – was a “response to the dislocation of exile … the text of the Law had become a new ‘shrine’ in which the displaced people cultivated a sense of the Divine Presence. The codification of the world into clean and unclean, sacred and profane objects, had been an imaginative reordering of a shattered world.”<br />
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I know that many, many people believe that biblical law was handed down from God to Moses, just as described in Exodus. My own belief is that biblical law is a searching, heartfelt attempt by humans to define what God would want them to do, to set down an ideal of human behavior as well as to describe a set of rituals that might help them move closer to that ideal. Although at their best and most inspired, the laws are timeless and transcendent, they are often not at their best and most inspired. Many are time- and culture-bound. <br />
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I often say that one needs to read the Bible at multiple levels: Historical, Cultural, Ethical, Spiritual. Reading at any one level distorts the meaning. This is nowhere more true than in the documentation of the Law. <br />
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The lines in the sand that these early Jews set down have been blown around, distorted, trod upon, hidden, exposed and reformed for 3,000-plus years. The history of Judaism, that most intellectually challenging of faiths, is one of probing, digging, teasing, challenging, questioning the law in order to expose deeper and more eternal truths. The Bible is not a closed book designed to be thumped on and used as a weapon; it is an open-ended text, inexhaustibly rich in meaning, but dense and defying of an easy understanding. It’s worth the challenge of wrestling with it.<br />
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</div>David W. Karpookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05928085897898539598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7876363823912763999.post-84301622115831709462011-02-17T08:09:00.000-08:002011-02-17T16:23:12.728-08:00A Library of Questions<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/?ie=UTF8&tag=chaverlinandw-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&search-alias=aps&field-keywords=Timothy Beal" target="_blank">Timothy Beal</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=chaverlinandw-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important;" width="1" />, a Bible scholar and professor at Case Western Reserve University, has written a fine <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/timothy-beal/in-the-beginnings-an-acci_b_822703.html?ref=fb&src=sp">article in the Huffington Post</a> on the extraordinary complexity of the Bible, as well as the problem of those who insist on a literal reading of the text yet seem to have little comprehension of its inconsistencies and multiple points of view.<br />
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To provide an example, Beal focuses on the creation, two versions of which are familiar stories to most of us: Chapter 1 of Genesis, in which God generates the universe through speech, and Chapter 2, in which he is a hands-on craftsman, planting a garden and fashioning animal life, including Adam and Eve, with his hands. Beal points out a number of other brief creation stories, in Job and in at least two Psalms.<br />
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Acknowledging and exploring these contradictions, he argues, is at the heart of a real understanding of the Bible and its importance:<br />
<blockquote>"The Bible canonizes contradiction. It holds together a tense diversity of perspectives and voices, difference and argument -- even and especially when it comes to the profoundest questions of faith, questions that inevitably outlive all their answers. <br />
"The Bible is not a book of answers but a library of questions. As such it opens up space for us to explore different voices and perspectives, to discuss, to disagree and, above all, to think. Too often, however, that's not what happens."</blockquote>Most of us were introduced to the Bible as young children. We were told stories that match the general outline of biblical narrative, but which often leave out "adult" details that make the stories compelling, and relevant to our lives today. We learned about Jacob sleeping on a stone pillow and having the vision of the ladder to heaven, and about Joseph and his coat of many colors, and about Moses leading the Hebrews across the Red Sea to freedom, but not until much later in our lives -- if ever -- did we know about the psychologically complex characters who populate these stories, their motivations, fears, jealousies, mistakes and triumphs over, in most cases, their own weaknesses of character.<br />
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For many people, it seems, a child's version of the Bible suffices. And if this provides them sustenance and hope, I'm somewhat okay with that. But to limit one's vision in this way is to deny oneself the richness and challenge of the complete story. And I fear that failing to understand -- or at least acknowledge -- the complexity and contradiction in the Bible is one of those things that leads to intolerance and a general misunderstanding of what the Bible tells us about our relationship with God and with each other.</div>David W. Karpookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05928085897898539598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7876363823912763999.post-25838752031141656992011-02-12T09:13:00.000-08:002011-02-12T11:59:26.259-08:00Power Plays and Pity Parties<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Although Exodus begins in the fertile Nile Delta, where the land has been made rich by flowing water, we sense immediately a drought of sorts. It’s a spiritual drought, marked by the absence of God, who has been off the scene since the Israelites Egyptian adventure began back in Genesis. God, who was directly present up through his wrestling match with Jacob, has kept quiet throughout the Joseph story and now, through the Egyptian captivity. In the final chapters of Genesis and the first two chapters of Exodus, we get a sparse reference here and there to God, but no intervention by God. <br />
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Finally, at the end of Exodus 2 we learn that, “The children of Israel groaned because of their labors and cried out; and their cry came up to God because of the labors. So God heard their groaning, and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Then God looked down upon the children of Israel and was made known to them.”<br />
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Really? It’s as if God’s attention had been diverted elsewhere for the past several hundred years. What was He doing? Maybe trying out that creation thing on another, far away planet to see if He could get it right? We’re not told, but all in all, it’s a rather strange passage, suggesting that the covenant had somehow slipped God’s mind all these years.<br />
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That changes in a spectacular way in chapter 3, when God makes a physical reappearance, not to the enslaved Israelites but to Moses, who is off in Midian working as a shepherd for his father-in-law, Jethro (who was briefly introduced as Reuel before being renamed). Although in previous appearances – walking in the garden where the evening breeze cooled his skin, visiting Abraham in his tent, wrestling with Jacob over a long, troubled night – God seemed to take a human form, this time he appears in the famous burning bush. Actually, we are told (at least in translation) that an angel of God appeared, but then it is God’s voice that speaks to Moses.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1qafuFMmTu08q5-iqmQzBzc4kI1bng0jh1SzYVvwEOtiiP9rLYt9jMhlvB09TYvfof0SPkIsy1OWvajLpC8N6_yiwtsL1IR8EAJmg6N2nLMuboXkCXh1CBm1yW9bbwapXjwW4zcO6sdLU/s1600/Moses_Burning_Bush_Bysantine_Mosaic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" h5="true" height="304" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1qafuFMmTu08q5-iqmQzBzc4kI1bng0jh1SzYVvwEOtiiP9rLYt9jMhlvB09TYvfof0SPkIsy1OWvajLpC8N6_yiwtsL1IR8EAJmg6N2nLMuboXkCXh1CBm1yW9bbwapXjwW4zcO6sdLU/s320/Moses_Burning_Bush_Bysantine_Mosaic.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
It is interesting that in a story dominated by the element of water, God takes a form that may in some ways be considered the opposite of water. And since fire can be quenched by water, it’s not necessarily a superior element. In some ways that sets the tone for the subsequent chapters, where God seems to be impressive but not all-powerful in the eyes of those who witness his appearances and his actions. What we see is a God struggling to assert his authority.<br />
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Moses is afraid to look at the sight – all in all, a sensible reaction when confronted with a fiery, talking plant – but not afraid to argue with the instructions that emanate from the vision. Moses repeatedly questions God’s order that he return to Egypt to rescue His people, reiterating that He became aware of their suffering when He heard their cries. Famously, Moses argues that he is “weak in speech and slow of tongue,” leading many generations of biblical scholars to speculate that he had a speech impediment. If so, that handicap doesn’t stop him from spending the rest of his career delivering long speeches.<br />
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Moreover, Moses says, why should either the Israelites or the Pharaoh listen to Moses? It’s a reasonable question, compounded by the fact that at this point in the story, we haven’t even been told that Moses knew his own heritage. As readers, we know that Moses was the child of a slave from the tribe of Levi, but does Moses know this? He was nursed by his birth mother, but later raised in Pharaoh’s court by his adoptive mother. God tells him that Aaron the Levite, his brother, will speak for him, and it’s said in a way that suggests Moses knows Aaron, but when and how did he learn that Aaron is his brother?<br />
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Omissions like this have inspired scholars – the rabbis of the Midrash,as well as Josephus, Philo and many others – to attempt to fill in the gaps. Perhaps the most famous of the retellers, Cecil B. DeMille, acknowledges these sources in the opening credits of his film, <i>The Ten Commandments<iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=chaverlinandw-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=B000CNESNA&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align: left; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe></i>, which, among other things, includes an elaborate episode in which Moses’ true parentage is revealed to him on the night of the first Passover when both his birth mother and his adoptive mother show up. In fact, the first couple hours of the film are based almost entirely on elaborations external to the Bible, including Moses’ return from a military campaign in Ethiopia (in one ancient story, Moses actually reigns as king of Ethiopia after fleeing Egypt and before heading off to Midian) and the sinister plotting of his rival Dathan, who in the Bible itself only appears in Numbers 16 when he leads a rebellion against Moses and is swallowed up by the ground, but who in DeMille’s version, as well as some Midrashic writings, is the witness to Moses’ murder of the Egyptian. DeMille also portrays Dathan, in the form of Edward G. Robinson, fixated on the nubile girlfriend (Debra Paget) of young Joshua, nubile girlfriends of biblical figures being an important fixture in DeMille’s oeuvre.<br />
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It takes a couple of miracles – transforming Moses’ shepherd’s staff into a snake and back, turning Moses’ hand white with disease – as well as the promise of Aaron as a mouthpiece before Moses is convinced to take on God’s mission, but then he travels back to Egypt with his wife and sons. Along the way comes another strange, mystifying encounter with God, in which He appears, presumably in human form, to try to kill Moses, the man he has just appointed as his messenger. He is stopped from his deadly mission only when Mrs. Moses, Zipporah, performs an impromptu circumcision of one of her sons – with a sharp stone! -- and flings the bloody foreskin at God’s feet (many interpreters suggest that “feet” is used here, as elsewhere in the Bible, as a euphemism for the genitals). That episode, ignored by DeMille and by most retellers of the Moses story, has been argued over for three millennia, with no consensus on what prompted God’s murderous impulse.<br />
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Back in Egypt, Moses connects with Aaron and the two proceed to meet with a very accessible Pharaoh. Was Pharaoh so available to Moses because they were raised together? It seems likely, but is never addressed directly, and anyway, Pharaoh seems also to be directly accessible to the slave overseers when they come to complain about their hardships.<br />
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Thus we enter into the story of the ten plagues, where God’s spectacular series of natural disasters is met not with awe and submission, but with resistance and prevarication. When Aaron repeats the miracle God first taught Moses, of turning a rod into a snake, Pharaoh’s magicians easily replicate the transformation with their own sticks. They do the same with the first two plagues, turning water to blood and causing frogs to spring from the water, only getting stumped by the third plague, variously called an infestation of lice or mosquitoes.<br />
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The Israelites, for their part, are just as resistant to Moses as Moses had predicted they would be. And Pharaoh’s hard-headedness is epic. I love his reaction to Moses’ first exhortation to “Let my people go.” The Egyptian god-king is defiant, and seems to be insulted that Moses would suggest there is a power greater than his own: “Who is He, that I should obey His voice to let Israel go? I do not know the lord, nor will I let the people go.” The words are spoken with peerless arrogance by Yul Brynner in DeMille’s film, and they resonate because they seem such an appropriate reaction from a figure who has been raised to believe he is the supreme power. I never ceased to be amazed at the Bible’s spot-on depictions of human attitudes and reactions: These stories, set thousands of years ago, show us people whose behavior we might encounter on any given day. Hosni Mubarak’s reaction to the protests of the Egyptian people is, after all, not that far removed from Pharaoh’s reactions to Moses and to God’s plagues.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjq8hHxUNaQh2yHpX7ngwwaP4eg0-pnEAnSpNSV5qDXUnqxqCDD3gUgERucpSpYkwtS-zNZ4AXbO3JzLGHpoLp_h3BRJLYED3yNnK-X7cDzy6lmKDAAYGJki7yizM2rtjC2m08XShyoEPwu/s1600/Plagues.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" h5="true" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjq8hHxUNaQh2yHpX7ngwwaP4eg0-pnEAnSpNSV5qDXUnqxqCDD3gUgERucpSpYkwtS-zNZ4AXbO3JzLGHpoLp_h3BRJLYED3yNnK-X7cDzy6lmKDAAYGJki7yizM2rtjC2m08XShyoEPwu/s320/Plagues.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
The entire episode of the plagues is presented as a power play between God and Pharaoh, a clash of the titans. Each time God ups the ante with a new horror, Pharaoh suggests he will comply with God’s wishes, but then either tries to negotiate terms or simply changes his mind before the Israelites can make their way out out of Egypt. Even after the final plague, when all of the Egyptian first-born, including Pharaoh’s son, are killed, Pharaoh’s submission is only temporary. He allows the Israelites to leave, but then sends an army after them, leading to the astonishing parting of the sea to provide safe passage for the Israelites and sudden death to the pursuing troops.<br />
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If Pharaoh’s arrogance becomes predictable and tiresome after a while, so does the complaining of the Israelites. Despite their delivery from servitude, it’s seemingly a matter of only hours before they start asking what God has done for them lately. Over and over again, God provides sustenance – water from a rock, manna from heaven, multitudes of birds for roasting – and over and over again, the Israelites keep up their complaints and rebellions. Their self-pity and ingratitude are, again, recognizably human traits that help to connect us three millennia later to the story. Gratitude is a notoriously short-lived feeling for many of us, something we have to work at sustaining beyond the immediate circumstances that inspire it.<br />
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I’ve been reading a lot lately about the efforts of archaeologists to unearth evidence of the Egyptian captivity and the Exodus. There is precious little to suggest that either occurred in anything like the form described in the Bible. That’s fine with me. It doesn’t detract from the importance of the Moses story, which lies not in history or in the recounting of miracles, but in the very human ways that the characters respond to their circumstances, questioning and challenging even the most persuasive evidence, changing their minds with lightning speed, forgetting the goodness that has been visited upon them, focusing their thoughts not on the events surrounding them but on their own delusions of power and entitlement. It’s not the magic of an unearthly God that connects us to Exodus, it’s the fact that God’s creations haven’t changed at all in the ensuing time.<br />
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</div>David W. Karpookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05928085897898539598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7876363823912763999.post-15191792378228887532011-01-08T11:28:00.001-08:002023-06-19T04:35:04.608-07:00Water, Water Everywhere<span></span>When did God create water?<br />
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That’s kind of a trick question. If you read the creation story in Genesis 1, it seems water was already in existence when God began his six days of work: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”<br />
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Water appears to be a precursor to the creation of life, a necessary condition, just as the scientists tell us.<br />
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In the second creation narrative, the one attributed to the author J, in Genesis 2, water also appears to be sort of already there – at least it’s not made clear that water was ever “created”. We are told that “the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground. But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.” In other translations, it’s called a spring or a fountain, but in any case we see water bubbling up from the ground to sustain life.<br />
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We are told that a river runs through the garden, branching into four as it leaves – the well-known Tigris and Euphrates of Central Asia, and two others, the Pishon and Gihon, about which scholars have puzzled and argued for millennia.<br />
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The power of water to both sustain and to destroy life flows as a theme throughout the Bible, most dramatically in the stories of the Flood and the Exodus.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQjxJfGpsxavCRKwgZMyXbzIQWk0Olc46qPbGVOp7n84eCFyQlEHwQ5F5Qk0cCdCjMCzaln9_HF41-2uVVWeUXd6n3kUgAhgKKLyKPPPf4lkdYyWNtXvgahM1Lvj-gJ8GNX6q8x2TtOsCq/s1600/moses+charlton+heston.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="209" n4="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQjxJfGpsxavCRKwgZMyXbzIQWk0Olc46qPbGVOp7n84eCFyQlEHwQ5F5Qk0cCdCjMCzaln9_HF41-2uVVWeUXd6n3kUgAhgKKLyKPPPf4lkdYyWNtXvgahM1Lvj-gJ8GNX6q8x2TtOsCq/s320/moses+charlton+heston.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
Both the Flood narrative and the Exodus narrative begin with portraits of fertility. In the former we are told that God’s original creatures have propogated according to instructions. Chapter 6 of Genesis begins, “Now it came to pass that men began to exist in great numbers on the earth, and daughters were born to them.” How daughters were born to men is not elaborated upon, but we are immediately plunged into an even stranger narrative stream: “So when the sons of God saw the daughters of men were beautiful, they took wives for themselves of all they chose.” Sons of God? Hmmm. Did John the Evangelist not know about this passage when he called Jesus the “only begotten” son of God? Who were these other sons? Who were their mothers?<br />
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It gets stranger. God reacts to all of the breeding by limiting the life of the offspring to 120 years. But the Bible goes on to tell us: “There were giants [Nephilim is the Hebrew word, and it may not translate exactly to “giants” but that’s how the King James translators saw it] on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men of old, men of renown.” Damn. I didn’t learn about those giants in Sunday school, nor was I taught about these sons of Gods jumping human girls.<br />
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People have been puzzling about this little episode for millennia, and I’m not going to be able to solve the mystery now, but I note it as one of those inconvenient passages in the Bible that can throw conventional notions of its narrative way off course.<br />
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At any rate, we are told that God saw that these humans were wicked: “every intent of the thoughts within his [man’s] heart was only evil continually.” And, as we know, he decided to destroy His creatures, with the exception of Noah, who “found grace in the presence of the Lord God.” We had been introduced to Noah in the genealogy of Chapter 5; he is a tenth-generation descendant of Adam. <br />
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The story of Noah, the ark, and the great flood follow this odd prelude.<br />
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Last year, when I taught my church class about Genesis, I skipped over the story of the Flood, not because I didn’t think it was interesting – in fact, I find the story of God’s regret to be one of the most fascinating episodes of the Bible -- but because I was eager to get on to the patriarchs, especially Jacob, whose wrestling match with God I saw as an overarching image of the Biblical narrative as a whole.<br />
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For now, let’s note that God’s chosen vehicle for destruction is water, that primal substance that, according to the narrative, was already there when He began the work of creation.<br />
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I want to compare that tale of mad procreation in Genesis to the opening of Exodus, where we read about the progeny of Jacob in Egypt. We read in Exodus 1 that, after Joseph’s death, “Then the children of Israel [the new name God had given Jacob after the wrestling match came to a draw] increased and multiplied, and became numerous, and grew exceedingly mighty; and the land was filled with them.”<br />
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These fertile humans came to the attention not of God, but of the Egyptian god-king whose land they were evidently overrunning. Now this was not the pharaoh who took such good care of Joseph, but evidently his son – at least it’s a “new king over Egypt.”<br />
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Like God in Genesis 6, the god-king of Exodus 1 decides he can’t tolerate the situation. He first enslaves the Israelites, then decides to kill off their male children. Failing to secure the cooperation of the Hebrew midwives (we are told there are only two to service the astonishingly fertile Israelite population – no wonder they didn’t have time to pay attention to Pharaohs’ command! Actually, we are told the midwives refused to obey the god-king’s command because they feared God, and that God took care of them – “dealt well” with them, the Bible says – as a result. It’s the only time God is mentioned in the first few chapters of Exodus, until he makes his spectacular return in the burning bush.), so the king enlists the entire Egyptian population in the task of throwing male babies into the river. <br />
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For the second time, water becomes the means of destruction. This time it’s more selective, but the power of water as both life-giver and life-taker continues its strong presence in Exodus. As we all know, the Hebrew baby Moses is put into an ark (in another echo of the Noah story, the same word is used to describe both vessels, despite an enormous difference in scale) and set into the water by his mother. And as Noah was saved by his refuge in the ark, so is Moses saved when he is rescued by the maids of Pharaoh’s daughter. By extension, the entire Israelite population is saved by this second ark, since Moses’ survival ensures their own.<br />
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Through a clever subterfuge engineered by Moses’ sister, the baby’s birth mother becomes his wet nurse and the child survives to be raised as the adopted son of Pharaoh’s daughter. The Bible tells us that it is his Egyptian adoptive mother who gives him the name Moses, for an oddly Hebrew reason: “Because I drew him out of the water.” Scholars tell us that an etymological link between the name Moses and the act of drawing someone from the water would indicate that Pharaoh’s daughter was familiar with the Hebrew verb “mashah”, which means just that. Are we to understand that this young woman was fluent in Hebrew? Since Moses is a well-known Egyptian name meaning “birth”, isn’t it more likely that she gave him his name for purely Egyptian reasons? Many scholars have pondered this, but the Bible says what it says. Just another one of those mysteries that keeps the academic world busy.<br />
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The astonishing economy of Biblical narrative allows Moses to grow up in the Egyptian court; murder an Egyptian whom he sees abusing a Hebrew slave; flee the country; take refuge with a Midianite priest; marry the priest’s daughter; and father a child all by the end of Chapter 2.<br />
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That narrative economy leaves so many gaps that an entire industry of Biblical scholars and commentators – not to mention Cecil B. DeMille – have spent millennia filling in fanciful details. In <i><span>The Ten Commandments<iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=chaverlinandw-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=B000CNESNA&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align: left; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe></span></i>, everybody’s favorite Bible movie, DeMille acknowledges drawing not only on the Bible but on the Midrash, and the writings of Philo and Josephus to flesh out his story. Even so, I’m pretty sure the romance with Anne Baxter – which features my very favorite piece of Hollywood Biblical dialog, when Baxter, as the princess Nefretiri, confronts Moses with the line, “Oh Moses, you stubborn, splendid, adorable fool!” – was made up by screenwriters in Southern California.<br />
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Various stories over the millennia have posited that Moses led a successful military campaign against the Ethiopians as a service to Pharaoh; that he wandered southward to Ethiopia in his early exile and for a time became that country’s king (in Numbers he is said to have a Kushite wife, while in Exodus the only wife mentioned is the Midianite Zipporah); that he was a renegade Egyptian priest who raised an army of lepers to battle the Egyptians; even that he was schooled in magical arts by his father-in-law, Jethro, hence his ability to turn his rod into a snake and transform the Nile into a river of blood. Jonathan Kirsch in his <em>Moses: A Life</em> provides a good survey of the extra-biblical Moses legends from various sources.<br />
<span><iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=chaverlinandw-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=B002RLBK5O&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align: left; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe></span><br />
One of the most interesting Moses speculations comes from Sigmund Freud, in his book <em><span>Moses and Monotheism</span></em>. This work, published in the last year of Freud’s life, posits that Moses was not an Israelite at all, but a follower of the monotheistic religion briefly imposed on Egypt by the Pharaoh Akhnaton. Further, Freud argues, this original Moses was murdered by his followers in the Egyptian desert and replaced by a second Moses, a Midianite priest and follower of the god Jahve. <br />
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Freud speculates on the similarity between the Egyptian god’s name, Aton, and the Hebrew word Adonai, translated as “My Lord”, one of many terms for God, as well as the Phoenician or Syrian god Adonis, although he quickly drops the topic saying he has no scholarly way to make a connection.<br />
Freud also connects the Moses narrative to other classical stories dealing with the exposure of infants to the elements in an effort to kill them, and their miraculous salvation (Romulus, Cyrus, etc.) In particular, he cites the purported autobiography of the Babylonian King Sargon, who reigned in the 28th century BC and whose story is a startling parallel to that of Moses:<br />
<blockquote>The most remote of the historical personages to whom this myth attaches is Sargon of Agade, <br />
the founder of Babylon about 2800 B.C. From the point of view of what interests us here it would perhaps be worth while to reproduce the account ascribed to himself: <br />
<br />
" I am Sargon, the mighty king, King of Agade. My mother was a Vestal; my father I knew not; while my father's brother dwelt in the mountains. In my town Azupirani it lies on the banks of Euphrates my mother, the Vestal, conceived me. Secretly she bore me. She laid me in a basket of sedge, closed the opening with pitch and lowered me into the river. The stream did not drown me, but carried me to Akki, the drawer of water. Akki, the drawer of water, in the goodness of his heart lifted me out of the water. Akki, the drawer of water, as his own son he brought me up. Akki, the drawer of water, made me his gardener. When I was a gardener Istar fell in love with me. I became king and for forty- five years I ruled as king.'</blockquote><br />
Similarly, he links the Moses story to other well-known stories of royal children hidden away from danger and raised in obscurity by commoners, although in the case of Moses, the story is actually a reversal of the <iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=chaverlinandw-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0394700147&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align: left; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe>pattern.<br />
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Back to the main topic. The power of water continues to be an overarching topic in the story of Moses. That his story begins in the fertile Nile delta, a place like no other in the Near East, sets the stage. Water was the reason for Egypt’s rise, and yet the periodic flooding of the Nile also held great danger. Water gives, water takes away.<br />
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In the land of Midian, he meets his future wife, Zipporah, at a well, in a manner similar to the way that Abraham’s servant encountered Rebekkah, and Jacob first laid eyes on Rachel (and Jesus later had that intriguing encounter with the Samaritan woman). Wells were evidently the meet-cute spot of the ancients, which makes sense since they were one of the few places women could appear in public.<br />
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Sent back to Egypt by God (who then tries to murder him in one of the Bible’s most mysterious episodes), Moses turns the Nile into a river of blood in his first attempt to convince the king to release the Hebrews.<br />
The parting of the sea to provide safe passage for the Hebrews and death to the Egyptians pursuing them probably needs no further introduction.<div> <br />During the 40 years of travel in the wilderness, Moses twice brings forth water from rocks – on the second occasion, his hubris in striking the rock with his rod results in God’s banishment of Moses from the land of milk and honey that has been his lifelong goal. Moses dies in exile, and his burial spot is unknown.<br />
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Drawn from the water that is a pre-condition of life, the events of the Moses story are bound up in water as creator and destroyer. Freud saw the image of flowing water in these stories as a metaphor for the passage through the birth canal (fertile delta, anyone?). Through these stories birth was given to a great religion, and an endless stream of creative interpretation.</div>David W. Karpookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05928085897898539598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7876363823912763999.post-32589634548245208482010-12-22T09:34:00.000-08:002010-12-22T09:34:03.685-08:00Addendum: Another Fascinating Female in the Line of David and JesusIn my discussion of the genealogies of David and Jesus, I neglected to mention an intriguing twist set forth in the New Testament. Matthew – the evangelist most concerned with Jesus’ ties to historic Judaism – says that Boaz’ mother was one Rahab. Matthew also mentions Ruth and Tamar, as well as David’s wife Bathsheba, although the last is not named but described as “her who had been the wife of Uriah.”<br />
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Although it is not made explicit, Rahab would seem to be the same woman whose story is told in the book of Joshua, a “harlot” living in Jericho who becomes a heroine after she hides two Israelite spies from town soldiers who are looking for them.<br />
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Ruth, Tamar and Bathsheba, the only other women named in Matthew’s genealogy, are all famous old Testament figures, so it makes sense that the Rahab mentioned here would also be the subject of an Old Testament story. While some theologians have argued that this is not the case – and have constructed imaginative alternate narratives – I think the Jericho connection is most likely. (None of the women are named in Luke’s reverse genealogy, which also varies significantly in other ways from Matthew’s – it posits, for example, that Jesus was descended from David’s son Nathan, rather than from Solomon as related in Matthew).<br />
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It’s interesting that these four women, all subjects of stories that present them in provocative sexual situations, should be the only members of their gender named explicitly as ancestors of Jesus. The matriarchs Sarah, Rebecca and Leah are in there, of course, given that their husbands are all ancestors of Jesus, but are not mentioned by name.<br />
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Jesus’ encounters with women of dubious reputation are well known – the Samaritan woman and the woman about to be stoned are both adulteresses, and there’s the enigmatic Mary Magdalene, who is difficult to pin down but who is said to have been possessed by seven demons and who was later made by church fathers into an uber-prostitute figure – so it is perhaps not surprising that he counts among his ancestors a group of women who are no strangers to sexual controversy.<br />
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I don’t know what to make of it, I just think it’s interesting and worth noting.David W. Karpookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05928085897898539598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7876363823912763999.post-16337907365614497072010-12-11T17:01:00.000-08:002010-12-11T17:01:07.146-08:00We Have Met the Enemy and He Is UsThe Book of Ruth begins, like many a legend, on a “once upon a time long ago” note: “In the days of the judges there was a famine in the land. And a man went from Bethlehem of Judah to sojourn in the land of Moab, and his wife and his sons.”<br />
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What follows is a brief tale – just a vignette really – about a pair of women from different nations who form a bond of love and respect. Naomi, the wife mentioned in the opening lines, survives her husband and both her sons, along with the sons’ wives, Orpah and Ruth. Ruth, against her mother-in-law’s advice, travels with Naomi back to Bethlehem and takes a job as a farm worker to support them.<br />
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The work that Ruth does, gleaning, is the lowest task in the farming hierarchy. Basically, she follows the threshers and collects what is left over at the edges of the field or dropped along the way. It’s a task set aside for society’s lowest members, the illegal alien migrant farm workers of their day. It’s a task appropriate for Ruth, a member of a hated enemy tribe despite her marriage to a Bethlehem Jew.<br />
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Despite her low status, Ruth attracts the attention of the field owner, a relative of Naomi’s late husband, and ultimately marries this wealthy man, cementing her relationship to the Jewish people.<br />
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Although the narrative of Ruth can be read satisfyingly as a one-off, a standalone short story, the genealogical connections within the story link it to both the genesis of the Jewish people and to the birth of Christianity. Importantly, I think, these connections involve some of the Bible’s most disturbing stories.<br />
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Ruth herself is a Moabite, a descendant of the nation founded through the incestuous union of Lot and his elder daughter, who (along with her sister) seduced her father in desperation because she believed that her family was all that was left of humanity after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. I’ve written previously that naming the Moabites as descendants of this incestuous union (in Genesis 19) seems to me a gratuitous ethnic slur. That Ruth, one of the most famous heroines of the Bible, is identified as a Moabite is particularly striking.<br />
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Ruth’s second husband, Boaz, with whom she has a child, is descended from the illicit relationship between Judah and his daughter-in-law, Tamar, who posed as a prostitute in order to deceive him. Tamar had first been married to Judah’s eldest son, Er, who was killed by God because “he was evil in the sight of the Lord.” Judah then married Tamar off to his second son, Onan, who in short order was also put to death by God, evidently for the sin of masturbation. By this time, Tamar seems to have acquired a black widow reputation; although Judah has a third son, Shelah, he does not marry this one off to Tamar, “Lest he also die like his brothers”. Instead, Judah tells Tamar to remain a widow in her father’s house until Shelah is grown. The frustrated Tamar then disguises herself as a prostitute and sells her services to the widowed Judah. She becomes pregnant, and Judah orders her to be burned to death for adultery. Before that happens, she reveals her act of deception and is allowed to live because Judah recognizes his error in not giving her to his third son. <br />
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Tamar is carrying twins, and when it’s time to give birth we are treated to one of the strangest images in all of Genesis. A hand of one of the babies emerges and the midwife ties a scarlet string around it. But then the hand is withdrawn and the other twin emerges, followed by his brother whose hand was the first to appear. The twin who “broke through” and was born after the emergence and withdrawal of his brother’s hand is Perez, great-great-great-great-grandfather of Boaz, as we are told at the end of the Book of Ruth.<br />
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The son born to Ruth and Boaz is Obed, the grandfather of David, Israel’s greatest king and, as described in the gospels of both Matthew and Luke, the most significant ancestor of Jesus. These two towering figures, arguably the most significant in Biblical history, are thus descendants of illicit relationships and intermarriage of the chosen people with a despised adversary.<br />
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So much for ethnic purity.<br />
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In this episode, the Bible makes the point that we are all mongrels, impure mixtures -- even the most exalted among us. Furthermore, those we most revile are a part of us. We can’t view ourselves as separate or better because those “others” both sprang from us and have been reabsorbed back into us.<br />
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Given the history of ethnic strife over the past several millennia, one has to wonder whether these cultural implications of the Book of Ruth have been much studied. How do today’s anti-immigrant activists, who seem to generally think of themselves as serious Christians, square their views about illegal aliens with the lessons of Ruth? Had the Bethlehemites dealt with Ruth the way modern xenophobes would like to deal with the undocumented, we might not have either David or Jesus.<br />
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Ruth’s low standing in Bethlehem is indicated by the episode in which Boaz negotiates with a relative over a field that had belonged to Naomi’s husband, Elimelech. Boaz suggests that the man, who is evidently Elimelech’s closest living male relation, purchase the field; and says that if this man will not purchase it, Boaz himself, who is next in line, will do so. The unnamed relative intends to make the purchase until Boaz tells him he must take Ruth as well, “so as to raise up the name of the dead through his inheritance.” At this point, the man demurs, saying, “I cannot redeem it for myself, lest I ruin my own inheritance. You redeem my right of redemption for yourself, for I cannot redeem it.” The man takes off his sandal, in what is described as an ancient custom, and gives it to Boaz to seal the agreement.<br />
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He would be ruined if he took the Moabite woman. Boaz, not concerned about this, buys the land, gets Ruth as a wife in the bargain, and the rest is history. Boaz makes a public proclamation to which the witnesses respond, “May the Lord make the woman who is coming to your house like Rachel and Leah, who together built the house of Israel and wrought mightily in Ephrathah. She will have a name in Bethlehem. And out of the seed which the Lord will give you from this young woman, may your house be like the house of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah.”<br />
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The Bible is full of accounts of ethnic wars among the Seminitic tribes – the Jews, Canaanities, Philistines, Edomites, Moabites, Midianites, etc. Ruth offers a counterpoint, a call for understanding and acceptance as well as acknowledgement that when we meet our enemy, the enemy is us.<br />
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By the time of Ruth’s descendant Jesus, the Jewish people’s chief enemy was the hated occupier, Rome, but there was still room for discord between closely related tribes. One of the most famous New Testament stories involving two antagonistic groups is Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman, at the well of Jacob.<br />
Christians generally focus on the Samaritan woman’s realization that Jesus is the Messiah, but there’s a lot more to this story, as Jack Miles brilliantly explains in <em><span>Christ: A Crisis In the Life of God<iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=chaverlinandw-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0679781609&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align: left; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe></span></em>. Miles focuses on the troubled relationship between the Jews, descendants of the tribe of Judah, and the Samaritans, descendants of Joseph who believe themselves to be the true chosen people. The schism between the Samaritans, a small community of whom survive today, turns on several issues, including the proper site for animal sacrifice. Samaritans hold that they are descended from Hebrews who were left behind when the majority of the population was transported to Assyria and enslaved. <br />
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Galileans, Miles writes, were an “in between” group, not recognized as fully Jewish but not set apart like the Samaritans. Some Galileans were true Jews, worshiping in Jerusalem, while others evidently held with the Samaritans, who held (and continue to hold) that the northern town of Shechem, site of much of the patriarchal narrative and the final resting place of Joshua and Joseph, should be the site of worship. It is in Shechem, in fact, where the encounter with the Samaritan woman occurs.<br />
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Although Matthew and Luke take great pains to place Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, the city of David (and of Ruth), he was raised in Nazareth, a Galilean town, a fact that made him suspect among Jews, even though he clearly . Note the famous quote from Nathaniel in John 1:46: “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?”<br />
The conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman in chapter 4 of the gospel of John is the longest dialog that Jesus has with any woman in the gospels. And, Miles argues, it is a teasing, almost flirtatious banter about the discord between the Jews, the Samaritans and the Galileans. It results in the woman’s acceptance of Jesus as Messiah, but Miles makes it clear that with a few minor turns of phrase it might have moved in another, more carnal, direction.<br />
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Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman occurs at a well, one of the few places in which women of the time could appear in public unaccompanied by a man. The fact that he speaks to her privately is potentially scandalous; his disciples “marvel” at the fact that he talked with a woman even though, John says, they chose not to mention it to him.<br />
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Ruth and the Samaritan woman are two prime examples of the status of women in biblical times, both made more striking in that the women are also members of unpopular ethnic groups.<br />
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It’s worth noting that Ruth’s message of acceptance has been taken up by another group often unpopular in religious circles: While researching Ruth for a church lesson, I came across several internet posts indicating that the book is a favorite in the gay and lesbian community. Evidently the Hebrew words used to describe the relationship between Ruth and Naomi are those used to describe the relationships between heterosexual married partners. In particular, the Hebrew word “dabaq”, translated in the King James Version as “cleave”, used in Ruth 1:14 when Ruth chooses to stay with Naomi while her sister-in-law Orpah returns to her birth family, is the same as that used in the famous passage of Genesis (2:24) often quoted in wedding ceremonies: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh.”<br />
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Ruth’s words to Naomi in 1:16 are seen in this view as more like those a lover would speak than what one would expect from a daughter-in-law: “Do not ask me to leave you, or turn back from following you; for wherever you go I will go, and wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God, my God. And wherever you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord cause this to happen to me, and more also, if anything but death parts you and me.”<br />
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Til death do us part, indeed.<br />
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One essay I read notes that while Leviticus forbids a man to lay down with another man as with a woman, it says nothing to forbid same-sex relationships between women. <br />
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If Naomi and Ruth were lovers, why would Naomi promote the relationship between Ruth and Boaz? Naomi goes so far as to send Ruth to the threshing floor -- a place notorious for the prostitutes who came there to service the agricultural workers (see the book of Hosea)—to spend the night with Boaz. Naomi’s actions are explained in these alternative readings by the status of women in ancient society; without a man in their lives, Naomi and Ruth had no protection, no hope of a decent life.<br />
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Let’s finish with a puzzler -- How do we square the acceptance of Ruth into the Jewish community with this dictate from Deuteronomy 23: “An Ammonite or a Moabite shall not enter the assembly of the Lord; even to the tenth generation none of his descendants shall enter the the assembly of the Lord forever, because they did not meet you with bread and water when you came out of Egypt, and because they hired against you Balaam son of Beor from Mesopotamia to curse you.”<br />
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I don’t know, other than to say that clearly the Deuteronomist and the author of Ruth weren’t on speaking terms. Given the differing messages, I’ll take Ruth's.David W. Karpookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05928085897898539598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7876363823912763999.post-79745940734041381132010-08-07T13:37:00.000-07:002010-08-07T13:37:50.636-07:00The Charms of TobitThe various books of the Bible can be described in many ways – powerful, thought-provoking, inspiring, even frightening – but there are few that I would describe as charming. Tobit is an exception. This book – canonical in the Catholic and Orthodox Christian churches, considered apocryphal in most others – is a stand-alone short story that is full of charm. By that I mean that it is gentle, sometimes humorous, and captivating, a tale of faith, good behavior, reward for patience and a love story to boot.<br />
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Biblical scholars tell us that Tobit was probably written in what is called the Intertestamental period, the centuries between the compilation of the Tanakh by the Men of the Great Assembly (perhaps around 450 BC) and the writings of the new Testament.<br />
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Although not part of the Tanakh, the book of Tobit was included in the Greek translation of the Jewish Bible, called the Septuagint, that was the primary text used by diaspora Jews throughout the Roman Empire for several hundred years (Greek was a commonly spoken language for these Jews, whereas many of them were evidently not fluent in Hebrew), and a fragment of Tobit in Hebrew has been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls in Qumran.<br />
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The Septuagint (roughly, the book of the 70) is named for the process by which it was supposedly created. Seventy-two scribes were said to have been housed separately in 72 cells, and in 72 days produced translations of the Bible in Greek that were word-for-word identical.<br />
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According to the Talmud:<br />
<blockquote>"King Ptolemy once gathered 72 Elders. He placed them in 72 chambers, each of them in a separate one, without revealing to them why they were summoned. He entered each one's room and said: 'Write for me the Torah of Moshe, your teacher.' God put it in the heart of each one to translate identically as all the others did."</blockquote>The resulting text included 10 books that are not part of the Tanakh, plus additions to the books of Daniel and Esther.<br />
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When Jerome translated the Bible into Latin in the 5th century, he included Tobit along with six other books of the Septuagint that are not part of the Hebrew text. Thus, Tobit became part of the Roman Catholic canon (the Orthodox churches use the Greek Septuagint as their Old Testament biblical source).<br />
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When Martin Luther came in for his cleansing of the church, he threw out those extra books, including Tobit, because they were not part of the Tanakh. And when the great King James translation into English was done, the extra seven books of the Catholic Bible were separated out into a middle section called the Apocrypha (the King James Bible, beautiful and powerful as its language is, was a child of politics – an attempt to create a translation that all English-speaking faithful could use, regardless of their particular brand of faith. Its creation is detailed in Adam Nicolson’s wonderful account, <em>God’s Secretaries</em>. <br />
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So today, Tobit is canonical for roughly two-thirds of the world’s Christians, while for most Protestant churches it is considered extra-canonical, and sometimes even heretical.<br />
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When Tobit was removed from the Protestant canon, church leaders had to justify its exclusion, and I suspect that arguing that the Jews didn’t consider it canonical didn’t hold much water, given the regard in which Jews were held. So the argument was made that Tobit was full of devilish magic. The argument had to be made strongly, because Tobit was a much-beloved book, for reasons that I will try to make clear (it continues to be beloved in the churches that consider it canonical, and its text is often used in Catholic wedding ceremonies).<br />
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Tobit tells the story of a Jewish family in exile from the Holy Land, part of the Assyrian captivity. The character who gives the book its title is a faithful Jew who, even before the captivity, rebelled against his neighbors in the tribe of Napthali who had turned to worship of Ba’al. Unlike them, Tobit continued to travel regularly to Jerusalem, to tithe at the temple. A man of faith and goodness, he also notes that he shopped in Jerusalem, supporting the local economy by spending another tenth of his income there, and gave a third tenth to charity.<br />
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The first two chapters of Tobit are narrated in the first person. Tobit tells of being taken captive to the city of Nineveh, on the Tigris, where he remained observant to Jewish dietary law while other Jews turned to the local fare; rose to the rank of purchasing agent in the government of King Shalmaneser; married a kinswoman, Anna, and sired a son, Tobias; and then became a fugitive when he rebelled against the cruel policies of Shalmaneser’s son and successor, King Sennacherib. Sennacherib was a murderous sort, who killed his enemies and cast their bodies to rot outside the city walls. Tobit made it his mission to give those bodies a proper burial, and when the king found out, Tobit had to go into hiding, leaving his wife and son behind. <br />
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Fortunately for Tobit, Sennacherib’s reign was short-lived. Within 50 days of Tobit’s flight, Sennacherib was m,urdered by two of his sons, and replaced by one of those sons, Esarhaddon. Esarhaddon, evidently a kindlier sort, appointed Tobit’s nephew as a sort of chief of staff – a sort of analog to Joseph in Egypt – paving the way for Tobit’s return.<br />
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But as Tobit and his family are preparing to celebrate the feast of the Pentecost, another crisis occurs. Tobit has sent his son, Tobias, out to find some local poverty-stricken Jews and invite them to the table. But Tobias returns, saying that a Jew has been strangled and dumped in the marketplace. Tobit rushes out to find and bury him, resulting in ridicule from his neighbors. Weeping over this, Tobit goes to the courtyard of his home and falls asleep. Some sparrows poop on his face and into his eyes, causing cataracts that blind him. Oy!<br />
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With Tobit out of commission, Anna has to go to work, evidently doing some sort of piecework – perhaps as a seamstress – for the local rich folk.<br />
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In chapter 3, we cut to an another scene, in a city called Ectabana of Media (Media being another district of the kingdom). There we learn of a relative of Tobit, Sarah, the daughter of Raguel, who has married seven men, all of whom died on their wedding night, before consummating the marriages. <br />
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Sarah is being mocked by her maids in a scene that recalls an earlier Sarah, Abraham’s barren sister-wife, being mocked by the pregnant slave girl Hagar. The maids suggest that Sarah of Raguel has strangled her husbands, and hope that she never is able to bear children.<br />
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In cross-cutting that strikes me as very cinematic, we return to Nineveh and Tobit, who suddenly remembers that years ago he left some money for safe-keeping with a friend in another Median city, Rages. This money could now be useful, since Tobit can’t work and he has argued with Anna over her income (he suggests that she stole a goat that she was given in payment, and she calls him a “know-it-all”).<br />
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So Tobit enlists his son, Tobias, to travel to Rages to collect the cash.<br />
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Enter Raphael, an archangel. Raphael has been sent to help the family out, both the Tobits in Nineveh and the Raguels in Rages. Tobias goes searching for a traveling companion and finds Raphael, who presents himself to the family as a distant relative (the angel’s deception is another basis for early Protestants arguments against the canonicity of Tobit – angels don’t lie!) and is given Tobit’s blessing to accompany his son on the journey. <br />
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The archangel Raphael is mentioned by name only in the book of Tobit. In Daniel, we have two other named archangels, Michael and Gabriel (Gabriel shows up again in the gospel of Luke, to speak to Zacharias about the unexpected late-in-life pregnancy of Elizabeth). A fourth named archangel, Uriel, shows up in several deuterocanonical books (Enoch, 2 Esdras) and some Gnostic texts. These angels act as messengers and guides – the word angel comes from the Hebrew for messenger – and only marginally act in supernatural ways. Thus Raphael gives Tobias what one might call unconventional medical advice (it may have been conventional at the time, for all I know), but doesn’t really provide anything in the way of supernatural assistance, at least in my reading of the book.<br />
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The boy and the angel set out, with – wait for it – Tobias’ little dog in tow. This is the first time in the Bible we hear about a pet. The dog doesn’t play any sort of pivotal role, and is only mentioned twice – on the journey to Rages and the journey home – but still. A pet. Another reason to love the story. (that dog has captured the imagination of many writers, including Swift, Voltaire and Smollett--- all of whom refer to him in their works – as well as that of painters, who inevitably include the dog in their depictions of Tobias and Raphael).<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu47sL0WuPzlVV_rNdbV73K6sAtdH8oZvACwDj12Aofnau6Z6xqOB1lH3N6ESkSXH-dbEk_sWWfhmGXu3fYLwE82BggKRxVc_o2Dv52msHMt16LRUNuAO9dAD_6X-lffJxzv97Dd1WlCKY/s1600/Tobias+Sets+Out+on+his+Journey.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" bx="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu47sL0WuPzlVV_rNdbV73K6sAtdH8oZvACwDj12Aofnau6Z6xqOB1lH3N6ESkSXH-dbEk_sWWfhmGXu3fYLwE82BggKRxVc_o2Dv52msHMt16LRUNuAO9dAD_6X-lffJxzv97Dd1WlCKY/s320/Tobias+Sets+Out+on+his+Journey.jpg" /></a></div>On the road, the trio stop to fish for dinner, and Tobias catches a big one. Raphael tells him to save the liver, the heart and the gall, because they make useful medicine (this is the source of the charges that the story is magical in nature. I don’t know, sounds like folk medicine to me).<br />
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So on they go to Rages, where they stop in at their relative Raguel’s house and Tobias falls in love with Sarah. The pair marry as the family and the maids look on in fear, but Raphael has told Tobias that if anyone is troubled by a demon (Sarah’s woes are ascribed to the demon Asmodeus), burning the heart and liver and surrounding the afflicted person with the smoke will drive the demon away. Tobias does as he has been told, lives through the wedding night, and emerges in the morning to the delight of all involved.<br />
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Tobias asks Raphael to go to Rages and collect his Dad’s money (they have the receipt), which Raphael does, allowing Tobias and Sarah to spend some time with Sarah’s folks before they move back to Nineveh. On their arrival in Nineveh, Tobias rubs the fish gall in Tobit’s eyes (yuk, but I can see why the caustic gall might have been tried as a remedy for cataracts), curing him.<br />
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And, essentially, they all live happily ever after.<br />
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Woven through the story are testament’s to Tobit’s faith and kindness. He not only buries the dead, he tithes, gives to the poor and loves his family deeply. I want to quote extensively from Chapter 4, where Tobit gives fatherly advice to Tobias before sending him off on his journey.<br />
<blockquote>“My son, if I die, bury me, but do not disregard your mother. Honor her all the days of your life. Do what is pleasing to her; but do not grieve her. Remember, my son, that she experienced many dangers for you while you were in the womb … My son, remember the Lord our God all your days, and do not desire to sin or to disobey His commandments. Do righteousness all the days of your life, and do not walk in the ways of wrongdoing. For if you walk in the truth, you will be successful in your works. Do almsgiving from your possessions to all who do righteousness. When you do almsgiving, do not let your eye be envious. Do not turn your face away from any poor man, so the face of God will not be turned away from you. Do almsgiving based on the quantity of your possessions. If you possess only a few, do not be afraid to give according to the little you have … So now, my son, love your brothers and do not be arrogant in your heart against your brothers, the sons and daughters of your people. Take a wife for yourself from them, for arrogance brings destruction and great disorder, and in such worthlessness there is loss and great defect … Do not keep overnight the wages of any man who works for you, but pay him immediately. If you serve God, He will pay you. Give heed to yourself, my son, in all your works, and be disciplined in all your conduct. What you yourself hate, do not do to anyone … From your bread, give to him who is hungry and from your clothing, give to the naked … Seek counsel from every sensible man, and do not treat any useful advice with contempt. At every opportunity bless the Lord God, but more than this ask that your ways may become straight, and that all your paths and purposes may prosper.”</blockquote>Beautiful, wonderful advice for living. I’ll say no more, because there is no way I could say it as well.David W. Karpookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05928085897898539598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7876363823912763999.post-71425336949073252252010-06-12T10:43:00.001-07:002023-06-19T07:30:39.234-07:00Fear and Loathing in the Holy LandGod is love. Fear God. The two antithetical sentiments are pervasive in Judeo-Christian culture. How do we reconcile them?<br />
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Growing up, I was often told that the key difference between the portrayal of God in the New Testament vs. the Old Testament centered on this issue: That the New Testament we see God as loving, while in the Old Testament we see Him as angry and vengeful.<br />
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Certainly, the Bible gives us ground for such an interpretation, but, as is usual with such extreme distillations, the truth is somewhat less simple. And, I would add, a hell of a lot more interesting. It shouldn’t be surprising that a work as rich and complex as the Bible can’t be boiled down to a black and white statement, but, depending on the way we live our lives, we may be tempted to categorize God in one way or the other.<div><br />
I’d like to personally thank God for not being so easily compartmentalized. Because if things were so black-and-white, we might be missing a few of the legacies the Bible has handed down to us: Literature, art, music, drama, just to name a few examples. And I don’t think our lives would be better for it.<br />
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It is a fact that in the New Testament, we read that God is love. We see this expressed directly in documents like 1 John (“He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love” 4:8) and Paul’s brilliant and moving 1 Corinthians: 13, but also through the entire ministry of Jesus.<br />
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And, in the Old Testament, we have the famous stories of God’s anger and vengeance: The Flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the tribulations of Job and many more (Personally, a story that has always gobsmacked me is that of Uzzah, struck dead when he touched the Ark of the Covenant to steady it during transport. It just seems so unfair, so outsized a punishment for a mistake that was intended to be helpful).<br />
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On the other hand, we can find plenty to be fearful about in the New Testament (many careers have been built on scaring people about the visions in Revelation), while evidence of God’s mercy and compassion abound in the Old. And often, the two poles are brought together in ways that illuminate our own mixed-up natures.<br />
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Nowhere is this more true than in the patriarchal stories that comprise the mid-section of Genesis (roughly, chapters 11-36).<br />
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Because I tend to let my thoughts about the Bible guide and inspire my other reading, I often find Biblical significance in works of other authors. I began reading Erich Fromm’s <em>Escape from Freedom</em><iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=chaverlinandw-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0805031499&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align: left; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe> last winter, because I had read a reference to his interpretation of the Fall, and I’ve progressed slowly through Fromm’s famous analysis of the appeal of fascism as a political movement, putting it down and picking it up as the mood strikes me.<br />
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On a recent morning I read the following in <em>Escape from Freedom</em>:<br />
<blockquote>“The fact of human individuation, of the destruction of all ‘primary bonds,’ cannot be reversed … We have seen that man cannot endure this negative freedom, that he tries to escape into new bondage which is to be a substitute for the primary bonds which he has given up. But these new bonds do not constitute real union with the world. He pays for the new security by giving up the integrity of his self.”</blockquote><br />
My thoughts went immediately to Jacob, oscillating between the poles of danger and servitude, fleeing first from the wrath of his angry twin and finding solace in a life of servitude with Laban, and then, 20 years later making the journey in reverse, escaping the security of his life in Laban’s service by heading to the long-deferred confrontation with Esau. In each case, Jacob is destroying primary bonds with family members; ultimately he comes into self-actualization by, in rapid succession, striking a pact with Laban and making peace with his estranged brother.<br />
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I thought about Esau as a self-actualized man, someone who overcomes rejection by his family to build a successful life, one that allows him to forgive his brother’s hurtful deception and embrace him. Esau has moved naturally to the state that Jacob comes to through slow and painful evolution of his thinking.<br />
And my thoughts returned to the story that has occupied my attention for a couple of weeks now, that of Jacob and Esau’s grandfather, Abraham, who is honored as the founding figure of the world’s three great monotheistic religions.<br />
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Abraham is a traveling man. When we first read of him, he is traveling from Ur, an ancient city on the Persian Gulf, toward Canaan, with his wife Sarai, his father Terah, and his nephew Lot. The family settles first in Haran (usually equated with the Turkish city of Harran). God urges Abram (as he is called at that time) on southward to Canaan. We are told that he goes on to Egypt – where he first presents Sarai as his sister out of misguided fear for his life -- and then back to Canaan, which God has promised to him and his heirs.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-MExblM24voMHGqPP4bepG82FZd5Re25xJ389YkelYbdQJ4pt51CrAH84JFjCIaGPZJZXhq2eH9DtZqc-4F4IEN4lfxfwGKq4d1ARbGrJL12375O-spZVtnEedNC7RZ9zFbQOz81Ut803/s1600/Map+of+Abraham+Journey.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" qu="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-MExblM24voMHGqPP4bepG82FZd5Re25xJ389YkelYbdQJ4pt51CrAH84JFjCIaGPZJZXhq2eH9DtZqc-4F4IEN4lfxfwGKq4d1ARbGrJL12375O-spZVtnEedNC7RZ9zFbQOz81Ut803/s320/Map+of+Abraham+Journey.jpg" /></a></div>Fear is a driver for Abram/Abraham, as we see in several places. <br />
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We aren’t told in the Bible why his father Terah chooses to uproot the family from Ur and head westward; Thomas Mann muses in Joseph and His Brothers that political oppression is the catalyst. But Abram/Abraham’s parallel actions in the court of the Pharoah and the court of Abimelech – each time he presents Sarah as his sister out of fear for his own life if his hosts lust after his beautiful wife – demonstrate his willingness to sacrifice his integrity in the face of fear. And the stunning story of his attempt to sacrifice his beloved son, Issac, shines a harsh light on his fearful behavior.<br />
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I grew up being told that the sacrifice of Isaac was meant to show us the rewards we earn for obedience to God. But when I read the episode at this stage in my life, I see it differently. <br />
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We all know the outline of this story, related in Genesis 22. God decides to test Abraham, ordering him to take his son to a mountain in the land of Moriah and to sacrifice him as a burnt offering. Abraham, who has been happy to question and negotiate with God on previous occasions (see Genesis 18, where he bargains with God on the conditions for destroying Sodom and Gomorrah), for some untold reason blindly follows the horrifying instructions this time. He leads his son to the mountain, ties him up and places him on the woodpile and is about to slice him open with a cleaver when a messenger of God stops him.<br />
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Here’s what the angel says to Abraham (in Robert Alter’s translation): “Do not reach out your hand against the lad, and do nothing to him, for now I know that you fear God, and you have not held back your son, your only one, from Me.”<br />
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This is what I hear in those words: “Hold on there, fool! Do you have any idea what the hell you are about to do? This is what fear drives you to, and you’re damn lucky I’m here to stop you before you do something you will regret for the rest of your life.”<br />
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Now I know I am taking a leap here, but I think it’s a reasonable interpretation of the story.<br />
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I want to cite the following passage from <em>Escape from Freedom</em>:<br />
<blockquote>“In watching the phenomenon of human decisions, one is struck by the extent to which people are mistaken in taking as ‘their’ decision what in effect is submission to convention, duty, or simple pressure.”</blockquote>Abraham’s behavior in Genesis 22 is, I think, perilously close to what Fromm describes as “automaton” behavior, the kind of blind obedience that can lead to the rise of fascism (a word I want to use sparingly, because of its overuse in what passes for contemporary political discourse). Fromm contrasts this automaton behavior with “positive freedom,” which he describes as “… the realization of the self [which] implies the full affirmation of the uniqueness of the individual."<br />
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I think that’s what the patriarchal stories are all about: The development of the individual, of individual consciousness and, ultimately, self-consciousness.<br />
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The strange little story of the Tower of Babel, which serves, in literary terms, as a prelude to the Abrahamic stories, abstracts the theme of individuation, which is then explored in haunting detail through the three generations of the patriarchy and the culmination in the story of Joseph and his brothers.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2uGaor400eUFnxxRvzs7RI5xhrbuLISINXUBO_iKRM-dH7DfWjEDRVK54KRNCmdqidmtDGUxl1iLPcTis26uo4yrJxGYAlxyjFdRxLv_SRzxkCej5m3bwp3HqOHBy0W88qgVg5WLvTBCq/s1600/350px-Brueghel-tower-of-babel.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" qu="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2uGaor400eUFnxxRvzs7RI5xhrbuLISINXUBO_iKRM-dH7DfWjEDRVK54KRNCmdqidmtDGUxl1iLPcTis26uo4yrJxGYAlxyjFdRxLv_SRzxkCej5m3bwp3HqOHBy0W88qgVg5WLvTBCq/s320/350px-Brueghel-tower-of-babel.jpg" /></a></div>From Fromm again:<br />
<blockquote>“Men are born equal but they are also born different. The basis of this difference is the inherited equipment, physiological and mental, with which they start life, to which is added the peculiar constellation of circumstances and experiences that they meet with. This individual basis of personality is as little identical with any other as two organisms are ever identical physically.”</blockquote>I’m drawn here to the promise that God makes twice to Abraham and once to his grandson Jacob. I want to quote all three passages:<br />
<blockquote>Genesis 13:16: “And I will make your seed like the dust of the earth – could a man count the dust of the earth, so too, your seed might be counted.”</blockquote><blockquote>Genesis 22:17: “I will greatly bless you and will greatly multiply your seed, as the stars in the heavens and as the sand on the shore of the sea, and your seed shall take hold of its enemies’ gate.”</blockquote><blockquote>Genesis 28:14: “And your seed shall be like the dust of the earth and you shall burst forth to the west and the east and the north and the south, and all the clans of the earth shall be blessed through you and through your seed.”</blockquote>It’s a promise of great fertility, of course. But there’s also a suggestion that with those great numbers comes a certain anonymity, a lack of differentiation, at least from a certain distance. Looking at the dust of the earth, the stars in the sky and the sand on the shore, we may see them at one scale as a solid mass, at another scale as a collection of indistinct particles. Upon very close examination, we may begin to see that each particle is unique.<br />
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That’s what we do in the patriarchal stories: At a broad scale, we read about the birth of many nations (and while Israel is in some sense chosen, it is not strictly privileged – these other nations are powerful and prosperous, worthy adversaries on the earthly playing field), then we move in for the extreme close-up, and see, for the first time in the Bible, the complexities of character in each individual. And fear -- fear of bodily harm, fear of retribution, fear of isolation, fear of abandonment, fear of God – plays an important role in those characters.<br />
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As a dedicated 12-stepper, I’ve learned – and come to believe – that fear is a dangerous driver, that it leads us to make bad decisions. And that’s what I see happening here. But, in good 12-step fashion, I don’t think the point is simply that Abraham must ignore his fear. It’s that he needs to stop and look at the consequences of fear, and examine his decision to follow it to its grisly climax.<br />
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In one of those strange coincidences that I can only attribute to spiritual guidance, I picked up the other day a book that I had purchased several months ago and had set aside: Mark C. Taylor’s <em>Altarity<iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=chaverlinandw-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0226791378&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align: left; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe></em>. I had purchased this book while I was rapidly reading through several other works by Taylor (well, as rapidly as you can read Taylor, whose prose, while clear and lucid, is rather dense with meaning). But at the time, I felt the need to spend time with some other sources – chiefly Freud and Fromm. Picking up <em>Altarity</em>, and opening to the spot where I had inserted a bookmark, I was struck dumb by the image on the page: a Rembrandt sketch (it later became a painting) depicting the sacrifice of Isaac.<br />
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Taylor uses this illustration as the jumping-off point for an explication of Hegelian philosophy, and in particular of Hegel’s characterization of the three stages in the development of consciousness: Primal unity, separation, reconciliation. Hegel matches these three developmental stages to three cultures: Greek, Jew, Christian. And while I will steer clear of challenging Hegel on his characterization of these cultures – I don’t think I’m ready to argue with Hegel – I do want to say that I see the three stages playing out in the narrative of the patriarchy, both in its overall arch -- beginning with the disruption of originary unity at the Tower of Babel, then personalized in the story of Abraham’s departure from Ur and completed in the reconciliation of Joseph with his brothers and father in Egypt – and in the individual stories of Abraham and of Jacob (Joseph is not considered a patriarch, although his story is continuous with that of his ancestors).<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiy3L6hZ0-kuLgMJXWiVpZS9O-hz-0pcCqQzL80Xxip0CRRicPJ6Rra3pd3D8HnwyE-TJq4dkWHQkIQ_LwuuxZVeGrfwgDVp87-Y9W4XZ4K-iGXMgB7_fTb4-TrbET1BJopf7ZCs6jZJDs1/s1600/Sacrafice+of+Issac.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" qu="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiy3L6hZ0-kuLgMJXWiVpZS9O-hz-0pcCqQzL80Xxip0CRRicPJ6Rra3pd3D8HnwyE-TJq4dkWHQkIQ_LwuuxZVeGrfwgDVp87-Y9W4XZ4K-iGXMgB7_fTb4-TrbET1BJopf7ZCs6jZJDs1/s320/Sacrafice+of+Issac.jpg" /></a></div>These stories are all about identity and difference, and their reconciliation in the recognition of identity in difference and of difference in identity. By this I mean (as Hegel meant) that the two notions are inextricably bound to each other. Neither means anything except in relation to the other. And the recognition of that relationship is necessary to the development of the self-conscious individual and the emergency of the philosopher.<br />
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Taylor writes:<br />
<blockquote>“For Hegel, spirit is ‘pure self-recognition in absolute otherness’ … Within Hegel’s panoptical system, difference always returns to identity.”</blockquote>Taylor further cites Hegel’s reference to a moment of “fear and trembling” that is a necessary precursor to the emergence of self consciousness, an instant where these paradoxical notions seem utterly irreconcilable. To get to the other side, we need to work through that moment. That’s the function of art, of writing, of creativity which, as I have written before, allows us to criss-cross the boundary between earth and heaven and to behave as the image of God in whose spirit we were created.<br />
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There’s a certain parallel between the Hebrew story of the sacrifice of Isaac and the Christian story of the crucifixion of Jesus. In the first, an earthly father prepares to sacrifice his son out of fear, and is stopped before he takes the fatal action; in the second, the heavenly father completes the sacrifice of his Son out of love (see John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.”)<br />
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Why the difference in outcomes? The difference between acting out of fear and acting out of love is part of it. So is the stage of consciousness. The father Abraham is at this point not fully self-conscious; although his son is part of him, Abraham sees him as other, as an object suitable for sacrifice – at least he does until God wakes him out of his stupor. In the New Testament, especially in John, father and son are different manifestations of one, universal spirit, which God of course recognizes because, well, He’s God.<br />
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In Hegelian terms, love privileges identity over difference, while fear privileges difference over identity. There are a number of ways we can process this. We can, for instance, accept the contradiction that God is love AND God is fear. We can look at fear as a necessary way-station on the path to true love. We can focus on one and ignore the other. We each make our own choices, and our choices may evolve over time.<br />
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I don’t have a conclusive statement on this, because I’m still working through the complex of paradox and contradiction myself. Instead, I want to close this rumination with another couple of quotes from <em>Altarity</em>:<br />
<blockquote>“Identity, in itself difference, and difference, in itself identity, join in contradiction, which Hegel defines as the identity of identity and difference. Inasmuch as identity and difference necessarily include their opposites within themselves, they are inherently self-contradictory … In Hegel’s System, such contradiction is the root of all movement and vitality; it is the pulse of life universal.”</blockquote><blockquote>“Since every living being is a concrete embodiment of universal life force, nothing can be fully comprehended until it is conceived as an integral member of an intricate totality. Inasmuch as life is all-encompassing, its divisions are internal differentiations, which, in the final analysis, must be taken up within the whole of which they are necessarily parts.”</blockquote></div>David W. Karpookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05928085897898539598noreply@blogger.com0