Day 104 1 Kings 10-11

            Solomon was a major celebrity among the rulers of the world for his wisdom.  Kings from all over paid him tribute and Israel was very wealthy.  Eventually though, he took a bunch of wives from nations that Israelites aren’t supposed to interbreed with and they perverted his faith and got him to worship their gods and build altars to them around Jerusalem and the city of David.  God told him that this slip up was going to cost him the kingdom, but, because of his father David’s faith, He would wait until after Solomon died to take the kingdom away from his family.

            God lifted up a couple people to irritate Solomon, one of whom served as Solomon’s official.  Jeroboam rebelled against Solomon and the prophet Ahijah told him that God would give him 10 tribes to rule over, but one would still be left for David’s line.

            Solomon died and was succeeded by his son Rehoboam, but I have a feeling there’s going to be some changes soon.

Day 73 Joshua 16-18

            The half tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh are not allotted very much land for all of their people and there are Canaanites living in their part of Israel to boot.  The Canaanites are only allowed to do forced labor there, which I guess must be good enough to fulfill the law against having treaties with the native people.

            Joshua tells the tribes that they can have all the land they want up in the forested areas.  They just have to drive out the people living there first.  They gripe about it, but end up doing just that, even though the people living there have chariots and iron weapons.  Why a people living in forested lands would invest a lot in chariots is an interesting question, but the half tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh seemed to regard them as powerful combatants so it must have worked out well for them.

            The other tribes have still yet to clear out their lands completely either.  Joshua orders the remaining land surveyed and he casts lots in the presence of the Lord to determine the lands allotted to the clans in the tribes left over.

Day 72 Joshua 12-15

            Joshua led the army to defeat 31 kings in all, but when he was old, God told him there was still lots to conquer.  For the time being though, they went ahead and started dividing up the land by tribe for the inheritances.  Gad and Reuben and half of the half tribe of Manasseh set up east of the Jordan river and the other nine tribes and the other quarter tribe of Manasseh took the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean sea, although the tribe of Levi didn’t get the same kind of plot of land, but cities spread throughout Canaan.

            Caleb shows up again at 85 years old and just as strong and spry as the day Moses first sent him to scout out the promised land according to him.  He was promised a bunch of land for his faith so Joshua gives him Hebron.

            I’m glad to see Caleb get something good.  I thought it was weird that we kept hearing in Numbers about how great Joshua and Caleb were and how much faith they had, but then only Joshua got to lead the camp afterword and we never heard about Caleb again.  I guess he is a Kenizite though, which it looks like makes him not actually an Israelite.  He mentions something about his fellow Israelites though so he’s clearly part of the nation.  He doesn’t seem to have a tribe attached to his name now even though back in Numbers, he scouted out Canaan as a representative of the tribe of Judah, so I have no idea what the politics are here.

Day 68 Deuteronomy 32- 34

            I’m just going to get this out of the way now because it’s going to come up a lot later on.  I can’t make heads nor tails of pretty much any kind of poetry.  I know that’s a sweeping generalizations, but it’s especially true for poetry that was written in a very different time or culture than mine, or that’s been translated from another language.  I tell you this now because I’m sifting through the song of Moses which he recites to the whole assembly of the twelve tribes of Israel right before he dies.  This is his concluding argument, so you know it’s important, but it’s kind of obtuse in the way it’s worded.  So, I’m doing the best I can, but you may be better off reading it for yourself.

            This is going to come up again in the book of Psalms.

            Moses says that God is perfect and amazing and created everything, but all of you (Israelites) are going to screw up this good thing you’ve got going and God is going to absolutely ream you for it.  Like no punishment or plague we’ve seen so far, God is going to destroy everything you love and spread you to the wind.

            This is going to happen.  God already knows it even.  You’re going to fail at this one thing that the Lord has told you to do.  But eventually, once all this hardship knocks some sense into you and you come back to the Lord, then He’ll take you back and things will be good again.

            After his speech, Moses gives each tribe a blessing, just like Jacob gave each son a blessing.  Ephraim and Manasseh have to share one.  They’re all mostly about prosperity and the accumulation of more land, which is odd because I thought that land ownership was permanent, but it’s still a nice sentiment.

            Finally, Moses climbs to the top of a mountain as God instructs him, sees all the lands promised to them from the time of Abraham, and dies.  The people grieve for 30 days, then Joshua is filled with wisdom and takes control of the camp to prepare for the invasion of the promised land.

Day 27 Exodus 31-32

            God pointed out to Moses that He had blessed the Israelites with a couple craftsmen of considerable talent.  He had given the Israelites all the skill they would need to create all the things God was telling Moses to have them make, all the furniture and incense and decorations and fancy robes needed for the ark and the tabernacle.  God then reiterates the importance of the Sabbath.

            The Sabbath, by the way, is super-important.  Anyone who works or who fails to worship properly on the Sabbath is to be cut off from the people.  It seems harsh, but I guess we’ve already seen plenty of examples of how quickly the people can be led astray when there’s a bad influence around.

            In fact, we’re reminded of this again in the very next chapter when Moses comes down from the mountain with all that God said on two stone tablets.

            I wonder about those tablets, incidentally.  There’s a lot more than the ten commandments on there.  My Bible is written in tiny, tiny print and the stuff that God told Moses on Mount Mariah fills seven and a half pages, over ten chapters of text.  Single spaced.  Can you write that small on stone tablets?  Three and a half pages worth of text on each slab?  A lot of those building specifications would have been tempting to include some diagrams too.  Why stone anyway? They just came from Egypt, there must have been some papyrus in the camp.

            Anyway, when Moses comes back down with his two vary densely worded stone tablets, he finds that Aaron, in the relatively short time he’s been in charge of the camp, has forged a golden calf and is leading the people in a big pagan orgy.  Yes, this is the same Aaron who just acted as God’s mouthpiece in the court of Pharaoh himself.  Aaron who helped hold up Moses’ arms because he believed God would grant them victory over the Amalekites as long as Moses’ staff was raised to the sky. 

            The people immediately assumed Moses was dead or lost or somehow gone the second he left their field of vision, so they told Aaron to make them some new Gods to lead them.  Apparently they were tired of the one who parted the Red Sea and decimated two different armies for them.

            Moses is furious and smashes the two tablets, which seems like kind of a big deal to me no matter how angry you are, but God doesn’t seem to have a problem with it.  Aaron kind of mumbles some story about how the people are simple fools and he threw all their jewelry into the fire and out came this calf, and isn’t that a funny coincidence? *nervous chuckle*

            Moses informed Aaron and the people that no, in fact it’s not a funny coincidence and furthermore, everybody who’s still loyal to God, come stand over here with me.  All the Levites joined him at the entrance to the camp, which may have had more to do with Moses being a Levite himself than their actual loyalty to God, and then Moses told them to do a lap, from one end of the camp to the other, killing everyone.  Sons, brothers, friends, everyone.  About 3000 people in all.

            It seems like that should mean that everyone who’s left must be Levites, but I know that later they split up all the land they get according to their tribes so there must still be a few of each tribe left alive.  I guess everyone who escaped the slaughter was allowed to come back and still live in camp, or Moses must have just meant to kill everyone who was worshipping this calf.

             God threatens to wipe out everyone and just take Moses to the promised land, but Moses talks Him down and convinces Him to take everyone.  God relents, but adds that He will blot out everyone who sins against him.  Then he sets a plague on the Israelites.

Day 16 Genesis 46-48

Everyone gets to Israel. Pharaoh meets the family and Jacob blesses him. They are given the land of Goshen, also called Ramases, which is supposed to be really good for farming and herding. It’s a ways away from Egypt proper though because, according to Jacob, Egyptians despise shepherds.

The cornerstone of the Egyptian way of life was the flooding of the Nile depositing delicious nutrients into their farm land every year, so Egypt would have been just about 100% agrarian at the time. It’s pretty obvious that’s the case anyway since the entire last several chapters have been about the grain supply during this drought. The fact that these farmers hate shepherds so much speaks again to the conflict Daniel Quinn outlines in his novel Ishmael which possibly influenced the Hebrew creation story.

During the rest of the drought, no one has any food, obviously, so all the Egyptians have to keep coming back to Jacob and the Pharaoh’s store houses. Once they sell everything they own for grain, Jacob buys up their livestock, then their land and finally the people themselves for food. In the end the pharaoh owns every piece of land in Egypt as well as all of the goods and people therein.

It sounds like he pretty much just turns around and gives everybody their land back insofar as they get to live their and farm it again, they’re not all waving giant palm fronds in the palace or anything, but now they have to give one fifth of their crops to the government every year because they’re technically servants farming on what is technically Pharaoh’s land.

That one fifth portion is the same tax that Pharaoh levied at the beginning of this whole thing, and all he did then was tell the people to give it to him, so it kind of sounds like Pharaoh could demand this payment whenever he wanted anyway. Also, he got the grain, which is what he used to buy everything of value in the nation, for free, so it actually seems like kind of a bastard move to turn around and sell it back to everyone depending on how you want to look at it.

Eventually Jacob dies, but first he makes Joseph promise to bury him back in Canaan with his ancestors. After that’s settled, Jacob has Joseph bring his two sons, Ephram and Menassah, to be blessed before he dies. He gives Ephram, the younger brother, a better blessing, but declares that both of them will be very prosperous and have lots of descendants. The two grandchildren inherit from Jacob just like they were sons of his.

It must have been awkward dealing with that inheritance issue where Joseph was concerned. This is the first time we see a such a self-made man as Joseph, who becomes wealthy and powerful without dad’s help. With Abraham and Isaac’s families, God favored the head of the household until God’s blessing was passed along to the next generation. God rained land and possessions on the father, then the father passed them, as well as the family God, onto his sons.

I think this is the first time we see God taking that initiative to support the family without going through the head of the household. In fact, the way God is often mentioned in Genesis, as the God of my father or the God of Abraham and of Isaac, it seems almost like they thought that God only worked with one person at a time. I’m sure Jacob was elated to hear about how Joseph had come through his ordeal with God’s help, but I’ll bet it must have also been kind of jarring to realize oh, I guess He’s not only my God after all.

day 13 Genesis 38-40

There are some interesting milestones in chapter 38 in the story of Judah and his household. First, God kills his first son because he’s wicked. I believe this is the first time we see God strike down a member of Abraham’s line. I guess maybe each of the twelve sons only has a twelfth as much of a blessing as their father. Then his widow is married to Judah’s middle son, but he dies too, more on that in a moment. Judah promises her his youngest son once he’s old enough to marry, but he doesn’t really mean it because he’s afraid she’s cursed or something so he just sends her home and forgets about her.

Once the youngest son is old enough to marry, she finds out she was lied to and dresses up like a prostitute in Timnah where she knows Judah is going to be. He propositions her, which I guess was her plan all along, and offers her a small goat from his flock for payment, leaving some of his effects with her as collateral.

She gets pregnant and Judah hears that his daughter in law is having a baby from prostituting herself so he demands she be killed. She confronts him with the proof that he was the one who impregnated her, so he lets her off the hook and marries her to his son after all. There must be some cultural assumptions there that elude me because no part of that story makes any sense to me. Did she know Judah had an overwhelming desire for sex workers? Did she intend everything to go that way? Why didn’t she confront Judah sooner in Timnah? Why does Judah spare her when she proves it was him who got her pregnant? I mean it’s not like it changes any of the reasons he wanted her killed to begin with. Maybe you just had to be there.

Judah’s middle son was named Onan, like from Onanism or the sin of Onan, which means masturbation. Now the theory goes that God was so disgusted with Onan’s spilling his seed on the ground that he smote him, so you shouldn’t play with yourself or God might just smite you too.

But the twist is that Onan wasn’t even masturbating, God took issue with his pulling out so his new wife wouldn’t get pregnant. He wasn’t spilling his seed on the ground just for fun, he was doing it for political reasons. His first son would actually be his older brother’s heir, so he threw a tantrum and decided he’d rather have no heirs at all than have his first son belong to his dead brother under the law. The text specifically says that God thought it was a jerk move to deny his dead brother an heir; that’s why He killed Onan. It baffles me how some of these old ideas came about. I mean how can you read that and take away “God hates it when you masturbate?” I guess that’s what we get for allowing ourselves to be spoon fed the Bible by people with agendas.

Meanwhile, Joseph is bought by Potipher, who works for the Pharaoh. God favors him on Joseph’s behalf and all his business runs smoothly. Potipher recognizes that this success has something to do with Joseph so he keeps promoting him and giving him more responsibilities and privileges until he’s basically second in command around the household. Potiphar’s wife takes a shine to Joseph and when he won’t sleep with her, she accuses him of trying to rape her so he gets thrown in prison.

In prison, the whole scenario starts again from the beginning. The jailer sees that everything Joseph touches works out well so he keeps promoting him and putting him in charge of other prisoners. Eventually he is put in charge of two guys from the Pharaoh’s personal court and he interprets a couple dreams for them. The cup-bearer’s dream says he’s going to be reinstated in the court so Joseph asks him to mention Joseph’s case to the Pharaoh since he never actually did anything wrong, and the cup-bearer agrees. Then he does get reinstated and promptly forgets all about Joseph. Bummer.

Day 12 Genesis 35-37

God told Jacob/Israel to move back to Bethel where he’d first heard from God. Rachel had one more son and then died. Isaac also died much later very old and happy, and was then buried by his sons. Jacob and Leah’s son Reuben slept with Jacob’s concubine Bilah, who was also Rachel’s maidservant.

Esau settled in Seir and his descendants became the Edomites. Lot’s of leaders of people groups I’ve never heard of came from Esau, so that’s nice for him. I’m glad to see that everything seems to go pretty well for Ishmael and Esau. I think it’s interesting that they are connected through Esau marrying a woman from Ishmael’s people, which, you’ll recall, he did to try to make Rebekah happy. I feel like this Ishmael, Esau line would be a good place to look for some kind of recurring villain troupe if we were telling a dramatic story.

I can see why Islam is happy to claim that lineage. They seem like nice enough guys who kind of get the short end of the stick. Often they seem like better men than the line of Abraham actually. I suppose there’s probably a lesson in that, but I don’t know what.

In Chapter 37 we meet Joseph for the first time. It says he’s favored by Jacob because he was given to Jacob in his old age, which sounds like Jacob had a soft spot for him because he’s the youngest, but his brother Benjamin is younger than him and not as favored. Also, there’s a reference to Joseph doing something with his brothers and my text refers to them as the sons of Bilah and Zilpah, but it doesn’t mention Leah. There was so much bitterness and politics in Leah and Rachel’s relationship. I wonder if that omission is intentional for some reason.

For whatever reason, Jacob loves Joseph most even though he’s kind of weird and talks about having dreams which sound like they’re about the rest of the family all worshiping him. His brothers are jealous so, once they get the chance alone out in the desert, they start thinking about killing him and telling their father he was eaten by an animal or something. Rueben, the one who had an affair with his step-mother earlier, says “No no, don’t shed his blood, let’s throw him in this cistern and leave him there in stead.” I’m not really sure what the difference is, but he sounds like he thinks he’s doing Josheph a big favor by lobbying for him to be left alone in the desert to die in stead of just stabbing him.

Judah sees a caravan of Ishmaelites coming along down the road (nice name-drop) and convinces his brothers to sell Joseph into slavery because, hey, they wouldn’t turn any profit from just offing Joseph. This way they get rid of their irritating little brother and make a tidy 20 shekels in the process. Then they dip Joseph’s robes in goat blood and take them home to tell their father that Joseph’s dead.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: the leaders of the twelve tribes of Israel.