133 2 Chronicles 28-31

  This is getting ridiculous.  It's taking me longer to get through first and second Chronicles than the entire rest of the bible combined so far.  I thought it was going to get more interesting once I got through the laws of Moses, but those were actually pretty interesting.  These kings are so boring that God had to write them all down in two different places in the Bible just so we wouldn't miss them if we fall asleep in 1 and 2 Kings.  It's like there are only two kings in Judah and they just alternate for 600 years.  Once king is wicked and defiles the temple and puts shrines to other Gods up everywhere.  He dies of something gross and isn't buried with his people.  The other king is pretty good like David was.  He is allowed up to one major sin or personality flaw and still finds favor with the Lord.  I think on my next pass through the Bible I'm going to have to come up with some kind of short hand for writing about these guys.

  Anyway, Ahaz is king for around 16 years, but he's one of the first type of king.  After he dies his son Hezekiah becomes king and he's one of the second type.  He opts out of his one freebie sin and seems to live completely virtuously, so he's really favored by God.  Not being as ambitious as some of the other kings though, he mostly seems to use his favor to help out the people in their dealings with God, so he sounds like a pretty good guy.  He intervenes on behalf of a lot of people who try to enter the temple without cleansing themselves first and God is okay with it.  That's the kind of thing that God has shown no reservation about killing people with fire over so you can tell Hezekiah must have had some serious pull.

  What's really interesting about the story of Hezekiah, in its own way, is how boring it is.  The history of Israel and Judah seems so full of political conflict and rebelion against God and all this nasty stuff, but reading this story, and thinking about how much I wished it wasn't included in the final draft of the Bible as I went through, made me realize that there are probably a ton of stories far more boring than Hezekiah's that actually did get cut.  After all, we already know that we're getting an incomplete account because every story ends with a reference to a book of kings that we don't have anymore.  So, there could have been whole families that were left out of Kings and Chronicles because they were deemed uninteresting and their account is only available in the official Book of the Kings of Judah.  King Steve ruled for 6 years and did all the same things his predecessor did, but not quite as much.  He neither pleased nor angered God and then he died.  That would certainly explain why all these kings seem to fit into one of two archetypes, they're all the extreme cases.

  I guess trying to go through the history of this many kings this quickly will always seem incomplete though.  We just don't hear about anybody long enough for me to start caring about what happens to them.  This book has poor character development.  The next couple are named after specific people though so I've got high hopes for them.

132 2 Chronicles 25-27

  Ahaziah was a pretty good king.  Not the best king, he was maybe like a 7 as far as kings go.  He followed the Lord most of the time.  Like, when he bought some soldiers from Israel once, a prophet came and told him that he was acting against God using Israeli soldiers since God did not favor Israel.  Ahaziah paid them what he'd promised and then sent them home unused, even though it was not a popular decision.  When he conquered the Edomites though, he ruined his pious streak by bringing their gods home and consulting them about things.  This seems like a baffling thing to do, seeking the counsil of these, what I assume were some kind of little clay figurines or something, when he had seen first hand what the true God was capable of.

  I guess people thought about gods differently then though.  The only way I can make any sense of it is in thinking about Ahaziah like a rich man.  Jesus says sometime later that *spoiler alert* it will be difficult for a rich man to enter heaven.  This is because (I believe) a rich man accustomed to feeling secure and safe and believes that his own resources can sustain him and protect him.  So it's easy for a rich man to have a little bit of faith because, hey, what's it going to hurt?  Even if he's wrong, he's still got some layers of contingency plans tucked away.  In ancient Judah, you couldn't just buy insurance plans and bullit proof vests and parachuets.  Even rich men had to be a little bit wary of what was happening around them.  So maybe having extra gods around felt for Ahaziah  kind of like having extra money around feels for us, like a harmless back plan.

  Anyway, God killed him for that later on.  His 16 year old son, Uzziah, took over and did what was right in the eyes of the Lord.  At least for a while, until he bacame a little conceited because of his victories and went to go light some incense in the temple.  The priests confronted him and told him that that was not his place, but that just made Uzziah angry.  While he yelled at the priests, leprosy broke out on his forehead and he suffered from leprosy until the day he died.

  Jotham, Uzziah's son, became king next and he walked with the Lord for reals.  Even though the people of Judah were not doing a great job of following the law at that time, Jotham followed the Lord and so he grew powerful and ruled for 16 years.

Political blog day

  I'd like to make the claim that I'm not posting today to show solidarity with internet giants like Wikipedia, Reddit and XKCD, but there's a good chance I wouldn't have gotten a segment done today anyway.  I will point out however that in a world with SOPA and PIPA as they are currently written, free casual blogging sites would not be possible because domain holders would be held legally and financially responsible for the content posted anywhere on their networks.  That means any user-generated content has to make it through the legal department before it can be put online.  So no more comments sections, no more online fora and no more blogs from U.S.-based websites.

  All of the copyright infringement will still happen because there's obviously nothing our government can do about foreign web servers, but the hope is that by enacting tough legislation that gives devastating powers to the Justice Department and several large corporate copyright holders to shut down American websites, they can cut off some traffic and intimidate most of the rest.  Support from Congress generally seem to split between those who are willing to cripple American online industry in favor of taking mediocre action to protect the intellectual property of a handful of major companies, and some old guys who just don't know how the internet works.

  At the end of the day I don't have a lot of personal stake in this.  I'll be fine either way, but it kind of seems like as a nation, online industries are about the only ones we're making money with right now so I would be hesitant to monkey with the way they work.

http://blog.reddit.com/2012/01/technical-examination-of-sopa-and.html

Day 119 1 Chronicles 3-5

            More recap, genealogies from David through the sons of Elioenai.  We haven’t heard about that guy so far, the book says that he came after the exile so I guess we haven’t gotten there yet.  The narrative kind of jumps around here.

            Jabez is mentioned in this section for the first, and I believe only time in the Bible.  The prayer of Jabez is a popular thing, spawning a multitude of books on its own.  All of this hype is based on a throw-away line in 1 Chronicles chapter 4 about how Jabez was more honorable than his brothers, which, lets not forget, does not mean he was honorable, but merely more honorable than his brothers.  He was from one of the other clans of Judah, the ones that weren’t directly related to David.  Jabez prayed for his lands to increase and for nothing bad to happen to him. 

            Revolutionary, I know.

            I’m certainly not saying that some parts of the Bible are not important.  The prayer of Jabez is a part of the history of God’s interaction with humanity.  I feel like this section is well-known for the wrong reasons though.  I worry also that it is famous at the expense of other passages that may have a more profound day-to-day influence on our faith.  This is getting kind of frustrating honestly.  Methuselah, Onan, Jabez.  If these guys didn’t have catchy stories attached to them, there is no way they would be better known in our culture than the people of real importance to the narrative of the Bible.

Day 85 I Samuel 4-6

            God punishes Eli’s sons and the rest of Israel by letting the Philistines win an important battle against them.  After the first defeat, the ark of the covenant is brought out, but God isn’t with Israel so Eli’s two sons are killed and the ark taken by the Philistines.  When Eli heard about this, he fell over and died too.  Samuel had gained quite a reputation by now though as someone with a direct line to God, so he was in a prime position to move in politically.

            Meanwhile, the Philistines were jazzed about having captured the God of the Israelites and took the ark to live with a giant statue of their god, Dagon.  When they came back the next morning, the statue of Dagon was on its belly on the ground in front of the ark of the covenant.  This happened a couple more times, along with some nasty curses and stuff.  Everyone started getting bad tumors.

            They moved the ark to another city, but then that city started having problems too.  Finally they decided that the ark was more trouble than it was worth and they needed to give it back.

            Once the ark was back in Israel’s hands, Samuel got everyone to worship the Lord properly again without trying to mix in a bunch of foreign gods and idols, and then organized an army to meet the Philistines, who had still been steadily soaking up more and more of Israel’s land.

            When Samuel prayed for God to help them in the battle, there was so much thunder and noise that the Philistines were routed before the battle even started.  Samuel’s army just waded through and killed them all.

            After such a high-profile victory, of course Samuel was the people’s choice for a leader.  For years he did laps around Israel mediating and teaching.  They wanted him to give them a king too, but he balked at that.  God was supposed to be the king, that was what was to set them apart from other people, what made them set apart for God.  The Israelites specifically wanted a king to make them more like the other nations around them though, and finally Samuel gave into their demands for a king.

            God told him first to explain to the people that a king would roll in and take all their best stuff for himself and his court and require taxes and tribute and service and all this material stuff on top of what was to be set aside for God.  Samuel di his best to convince them that they didn’t want a king, but the people had made up their big, loud, communal mind and they would not be swayed.

            Samuel told God about their demands for a king and He said to give them one.

            I have a friend who’s an anarchist as well as a Christian.  Well, he might not identify himself as an anarchist, but he’s sympathetic to their cause.  I don’t agree with him all the time in his interpretations of scripture, but I feel like the last couple books have really promoted an anarchistic political system.  Obviously there are clans and priests and all these official sounding social artifacts, but in practice, the way things work is that a need arises and then God drops in a judge with the skills needed to resolve the situation.  If there’s a battle that needs to be fought, God calls up a good general and tells him to build an army.  If there’s a whole bunch of Philistines that are going to need to be put in their place, God releases a super-human psychopath to terrorize them.  If there had been some great need to build a relationship with the Latin tribes in Italy, God would have called a judge who was really into the shipping industry or something.

            Now contrast that system with America today.  If there’s a battle to be fought, we have a standing military already prepared to keep us safe.  If there’s a famine or a natural disaster, we have federal programs already set up to deal with them, the national guard, FEMA, and so on.  This reminds me of another facet of the arguments made in Steven Levitt’s Ishmael which I mentioned several times back in Genesis.  Levitt opines through the titular character that it’s ridiculous to insist upon such a high degree of personal control over the world as we exercise in our culture.

            On a personal level, Jesus talked about how we shouldn’t spend all of our energy worrying about where our clothes or shelter or even our next meal are going to come from because those things are under God’s control.  When we spend all our energy trying to bring them under our own control, it’s disrespectful and only serves to show our own ignorance, but I’m getting ahead of myself now.

            I’m interested to see how this king thing works out.

Day 64 Deuteronomy 21-23

            The following things are not allowed under the Law:

Denying your first-born son his rightful inheritance because you don’t like his mother

Leaving the body of a criminal on display on a pole overnight

Seeing your neighbor’s animal wandering off and not stopping it

Taking a mother bird from the side of the road with her young

Not building a railing around your roof

Planting two kinds of seed in your field

Plowing with an ox and a donkey together

Wearing cloths of more than one kind of cloth woven together

wearing a cloak without tassels           

Littering in the camp

Handing over a runaway slave to their master

Being a shrine prostitute

Having anything to do with the money made by a shrine prositute

Charging another Israelite interest

Harvesting in your neighbors fields, although you may snack in them as long as you take none home with you.

Marrying your father’s wife

            The following things prevent one from entering the tabernacle to worship:

Having something wrong with your testicles

Being descended from a forbidden marriage

Being an Ammonite or Moabite

            The following things will get you killed with rocks

Disrespecting your parents

Raping a woman in the city or in the country

Being raped in a city

Sleeping with another man’s wife

Sleeping with a virgin pledged to another man

Cheating on your husband

Cheating on your fiancé

            I would feel a lot better about sifting through these piles of strange rules if I understood better what my relationship was as a Christian to the law of Moses.  Jesus says later on that he’s not there to change the law, but He very clearly does, or at least changes the way it affects us.  I’ve never seen a Christian who takes the Law seriously.

            At least not the whole law.  Sometimes people like to latch on to a specific verse or two when there’s politics involved.

            I guess it may be more complicated than this once I get to what Jesus specifically said, but it seems like we either have to follow these rules or we don’t.  I don’t understand this kind of half-obedience, half-unaffected attitude that I see in American Christian culture.

Day 61 Deuteronomy 11-13

            This is a heavy section with two very dangerous pieces of scripture.  Chapter 11 relays both a blessing and a curse from God.  If we follow God’s commandments, He says we will have food and comfort, health and safety.  But if we disobey, then we will have trouble, sickness and war.  This seems at a glance to say that your situation in life is determined by how obedient you are to God, by your own righteousness.  I can think of half a dozen places across both testiments that clearly state the exact opposite of that though, so I think it’s important to dig a little deeper on this one.

            A certain interpretation of this passage is one of the cornerstones of what we like to call health and wealth, or name it and claim it theology.  This theology is bullshit.

            Once we start going down this road, it starts to seem like all of the good things in our life are coming from our own awesomeness in the eyes of God, which entitles us to have nice things.  Likewise, people dying of AIDS and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa are naughty in the eyes of God and deserve what is happening to them.  That’s why missionaries who’ve devoted their lives to serving God all live such glamorous lives and why we’re always hearing about the righteous, God-centered lifestyles of the wealthy.

            We’ve seen already that the Israelites were unable to follow the Law even with God standing right in front of them the whole time they were in the desert.  That entire trip was one long line of plagues and rebukes from the Lord, so it’s possible that this is exactly as it seems, but only vacuously true since no one can ever live up to God’s law.  Even Moses managed to piss God off and they were, like, best friends.

            It’s also possible, although equally open to abuse, that the ‘you’ in this passage is referring to people at the national scale.  This is still dangerous though because then we get to hear obnoxious things like this from our church pedagogues all the time.  Which I guess could be true, but I think it’s unlikely.  I could rant about this all day, but I’ll wait until I get to some of the other counterpoints for this one, like some of the things in Ecclesiastes, or most the stuff Jesus said about justice and grace.

            Or the entire book or Job.

            Okay, moving on.  Moses also explores the dangers of being led astray to false gods.  He says not to allow anyone to even mention worshiping other Gods to you, and he says it three times in slightly different ways, which is how you can tell when Moses is super-serious about something.  If someone shows you miracles and then tries to lead you astray, kill them with rocks.  If a friend or family member tries to lead you astray, kill them with rocks.  If you hear about trouble-makers in another town leading people astray, kill them all with rocks, destroy the city and never rebuild it.

            That first one I think is the most interesting because it touches on something more personal to me I think.  I mean all of my family and most of my friend either believe the same basic things that I do or are not religious at all, and I’m not really one to get caught up in popular local movements, so I don’t feel very vulnerable to either of those traps.  I am pretty impressed by neat things I can’t explain though.

            At this time in history also the natural sciences were just starting to get moving.  In ancient Greece, some men with a surplus of spare time started analyzing patterns in nature, watching the progression of the stars, weather, rivers and whatever else they saw around them.  Many of them very selflessly took all they learned and tried to share it with those around them, but a couple were real jerks about it.  One guy in particular comes to mind, the philosopher Heraclitus picked up a couple tricks and some catchy rhetoric and built himself a good-sized cult.  All he had to do was predict an eclipse and he convinced everyone around that he had an understanding of the heavens, the realm of the gods, and therefore he must be a god.  Maybe he even believed it himself.  Now, in 2011, my phone can predict eclipses.  Want to be a god?  Done.

            There are countless examples of this same thing happening all through history, showing off some fancy technology of knowledge about the world and convincing everyone that you’re a god.  The Romans did it to the Germans, the Japanese did it to the Koreans, the Spanish did it to the Aztecs.  When Lewis and Clark explored the Luisiana Purchase for President Jefferson, they took this goofy looking steampunk air-gun thing that had just been invented with them for the sole purpose of impressing natives along the way.

            I guess Deut 13:1-5 is kind of restated by Arthur C. Clark’s third law of prediction: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Day 39 Leviticus 24-25

            Priests have to maintain the lamps in the tabernacle.

            There’s a rare break in the deluge of laws and festival as we hear about a young man from an Israelite mother and an Egyptian father who swore the lord’s name during a fight as a curse.  The Israelites held him until God told Moses what to do with him, which ended up being to take him outside the camp and stone him to death.  Now anyone who blasphemes the name of the Lord, native or alien, must be put to death.  Also, damages done against someone else must be paid back equally, an eye for an eye.  If you kill someone, then the people have the right to kill you back for it.

            God declares that the land itself is to have a rest of its own.  Every seventh year is a Sabbath year and no crops can be harvested.  God promises to provide such a bounty on the sixth year that you will be able to get by through the next one.  Every seventh Sabbath year there’s a Sabbath of Sabbaths, which we call a year of Jubilee.  Every fifty years all property reverts back to the original owner, so when you buy or sell property, the price should be based on how long it is until the next year of Jubilee because you’re not really buying it, but only leasing it for a while.   The same is true for Israelite slaves.  Really you’re supposed to help out your neighbors if they fall on hard times so they don’t ever have to go so far as to sell their land or themselves off for food, but if that does happen, they get the chance to redeem themselves later on.  If they can come up with the money to buy back their house or themselves, then they have to have the option to do so.  If you buy foreign slaves, you can keep them forever, will them to your relatives, do pretty much whatever you want with them, but Israelites were slaves in Egypt so they are not allowed to be harsh or permanent owners to other Israelites.

            This is also enforced for foreign buyers.  Hopefully they let them know before hand, but either way, anyone who buys an Israelite slave has to give them the opportunity to be redeemed or to redeem themselves and even if no one does, they have to release them during the year of Jubilee.

            This one’s kind of tough to get my head around because of the idea of an original owner gets complicated after so many years.  I guess when they first get to the promised land everyone is going to go stake out their family plot, but after even a few generations those family claims are going to be complicated.  When I was in Israel, I was amazed that the whole idea of the original building or original owner were almost meaningless.  The Cardio is a famous road in the old city of Jerusalm, the original site (if you don’t count the city of David).  If you want to find out about the original roads though, youn find out that the cardio was built by the Romans thousands of years after the Israelites had settled there.  The city itself was already thousands of years old when the Isralites got there even.  Most modern Israelis don’t even know what tribe their from, let alone where their family parcel of land is.  And that’s if you don’t consider the confounding factor of the entire population of pre-israel Palistine living there for hundreds of years in the interim.  This system of ownership reverting back every fifty years is an unenforceable mess.

            I guess it was only designed to last for a few hundred more years though.  Once the messiah comes these rules become largely obsolete.

            I dated a Catholic girl in high school and when the year 2000 rolled around she said that the pope had declared a year of jubilee.  According to her there was a list of things you had to do in a year of Jubilee, personal, unquantifiable stuff like perform a merciful act, and if you completed the list then you got a free pass to heaven, or you got all your sins forgiven up through that point for free or something like that.  I wonder if that policy is based on this section of Leviticus.  It’s pretty loose if it is.   I think that sometimes the Catholic Church still likes to just make stuff up though.

Day 32 Leviticus 5-7

            Chapter 5 finishes up some details about the rules for sin offering.  To summarize, not being aware of your sin is not a good enough excuse.  Even if you don’t realize you touched something or did something or thought something that makes you unclean, you’re still unclean and need to deal with it as soon as you find out.  It’s also stipulated that you’re supposed to offer a lamb for this offering, or two doves if you can’t afford a lamb or some nice flour if you can’t afford two doves.  The other sacrifices have similar tiers.  I can’t believe I didn’t notice yesterday, through that whole rant about regressive taxes, that the entire sacrifice system is progressive.  And not only progressive, but it sounds like it’s also self-regulated.  You are the one who decides what you can afford because it’s between you and God.  Although I’m sure, in practice, there was a lot of brow beating done by the priests to keep people honest.  After all, they’ve got a vested interest in how extravagant an offering you make.  They’re the ones who get to eat the left overs.

            The last type of offering is the Guilt offering which is like a Sin offering, but, and again, this is coming mostly from commentaries and websites, the Guilt offering was more appropriate for a Sin for which proper restitution could be made, where the Sin offering was more for things that couldn’t be set right.  If it was a sin against someone else then you had to compensate them for it as well, for the full value times 1.2.

            God gives Moses the rules to hand off to Aaron’s sons regarding how to handle these offerings and what parts they’re allowed to eat, then He says something really interesting.  No Israelites are allowed to eat the fat of cattle, sheep or goats.  Now the Israelites, for all their flaws, are awesome at following the letter of the law.  To this day the practitioners of the Jewish faith have an astounding capacity for allowing themselves to be inconvenienced for the sake of the Law.  I mean this as a compliment.  I was able to visit Israel recently and we were surprised to find that you could not get cheese burgers anywhere.  It turns out, the popular way to interpret the kosher laws these days is so strict that they take that passage from back in Exodus about not boiling a baby goat in it’s mother’s milk to mean that you cannot prepare or serve any meat and dairy together.

            This is the first I’ve ever heard of this thing about not eating any fat though.  If I were trying to avoid eating any fat, I would have to become a vegetarian because there is some amount of fat in everything.  If I were trying to follow that no fat command to the same degree as the no baby goat milk command then I could never eat any meat.  This one is tricky because the sacrificial system designates certain meat that the priests are supposed to eat so obviously that meat doesn’t make one unclean.  Maybe what they meant to say is that you just can’t eat hunks of pure fat, like the chewy white sections of bacon.  Well, maybe that’s a bad example.  But then there’s no such thing really as pure fat right?  I think that even the white, greasy bits have meat in them, and even the purest meat pieces have fat, so where’s the line?  I guess since the sacrificial system is no longer active even within the Jewish community, the safest interpretation is just to never eat meat.  That puts me on the wrong side of like 4000 years of rabbinical tradition though.  They think it’s fine to eat meat.

            I don’t think I like this rule.

Day 26 Exodus 28-30

            Priests have to wear special clothes.  They are very ornate and God is very specific about how they are to be designed.

            Very specific.

            Priests also have to be dedicated through a ceremony where they ritualistically kill a bull and a couple rams, and then a bunch more animals over the next week.  These are all sons of Aaron’s going through this, which is interesting since all of the Israelites are supposed to be a nation of priests.  Maybe Aaron’s line is supposed to supply the high priests or something, or maybe this goes back to the Israelites being afraid and electing a delegate to talk to God for them, like that was their one chance to have this relationship as an entire nation and they immediately just gave it up.  That’s kind of sad.

            Plans are also laid out for an altar for incense, a washing basin for Aaron and his priests and tithing/taxation systems for getting money, incense and oil for rituals.  The special oil and incense for anointing and purifying things they’re just supposed to sort of come up with, but actual rules are given for donating money to the tabernacle.  I suppose donating is the wrong word because it’s compulsory for every man over 20.  My NIV Bible calls it a ransom.  Every time there’s a census, every man has to pay one fifth of an ounce of silver; the rich do not have to pay more and the poor do not have to pay less.

            Regressive taxes obviously favor the rich heavily, but only if it’s for at least a moderate amount of money.  If everyone in America had to pay a dollar for example, that would be a regressive tax, but it wouldn’t really be that much of a problem for anybody.  If everyone had to pay a thousand dollars, then that would be trivial for some, but very difficult for many others.  I have no idea how much a fifth of an ounce of silver amounted to relative to the cost of living for the Israelites.  I’ve heard this tax in Exodus used as an argument in favor of regressive, or t least flat taxes, since it’s the first tax handed down by God, it must be the best kind of tax and we should not be taxing the rich more heavily than the poor as we often do.  Silver prices fluctuate a lot and I guess right now is actually a good time for silver in the commodities market.  It’s more than doubled in price in the last year.  Of course I don’t know what the silver market was like in the ancient middle eastern world, but even with that incredible growth we’re seeing now, it’s still not much more than $20 an ounce today.  One fifth of that would be $4. So yes, the first tax was a regressive tax, but it doesn’t sound like they had to tap into their life savings to come up with it.

Day 20 Exodus 11-13

There was only one plague left, the plague of the firstborn, where God declared He would kill every firstborn son, from the sons of the slaves to the prince of Egypt himself. God told Moses that this was the one that was going to change Pharaoh’s mind and they would finally be allowed to leave Egypt.

The bulk of this section of the book is about how the Israelites are supposed to prepare themselves. The last plagues all avoided the Israelites in Goshen automatically. The darkness didn’t touch them and the frogs and gnats and flies all just stayed away, but now Moses was given a very complex set of rules for avoiding the plague. They had to slaughter a lamb and smear a little of the blood on their doorway so God would know Israelites were there and not go in and kill anyone in that house. That’s the Sunday school version, but they also had to cook it a certain way and eat it with bread with no yeast in it, and then they had to be sure to eat it all, if there were any leftovers at all they had to burn them. Also, everyone was supposed to go ask their neighbors for pieces of silver and gold and God made all their Egyptian neighbors feel generous that day, or else made them feel terrified of the Israelites who kept cursing them all the time. Either way, they gave away lots of gold.

The Israelites also had to make a commitment to commemorate this plague every year with the Passover feast and nearly a month of spiritual services and prayer and special meals. A major theme is eating bread with no yeast in it.

The final obligation is that Israel’s first-born sons are now God’s, both man and animal. Not just now, but forever it sounds like. Everyone has to take their first born son and explain how the Passover works and why they do it and all about God. We’ve finally got our first dogma. Until now everyone’s relationship with God was completely personal. God told them to do stuff and did stuff for them and usually only seemed to really be with one person at a time. Now there’s a codified system of worship though, that everyone is supposed to do.

The fact that all the firstborn sons of the Israelites are now set aside for God is interesting given the plague that’s going on around them at the time. It’s like God is saying that the miracle happening here isn’t that He’s killing all these Egyptians, but that he’s saving all the Israelites from it. All those sons would be dead if it wasn’t for God interceding on their behalf so now they’re His, even though He’s the one who is running the plague anyway. That’s the kind of distinction you get to make though when you make the rules I guess.

Actually, now that I think about it it’s a lot like the old Pharaoh’s arrangement once everyone in the nation was his slave to have them return to their lands and farm them for him. It seems benevolent but it wouldn’t be possible unless Pharaoh had annexed all their grain to sell back to them to begin with, but then they’d all have starved to death if he hadn’t. Similarly, God not killing al those first-born Israelites seems benevolent except He’s the one killing all the other first-borns anyway, but if He didn’t do this, then the Israelites would be doomed to stay imprisoned in Egypt.

Maybe that’s kind of a thin comparison.

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 2 Genesis 4-7

Things are getting really weird here.

Cain kills Abel. By the Quinn interpretation, this is story is about how the pastoral Semites believed farming people came to be. Or, if you prefer, it’s exactly literal and about two brothers who didn’t get along. Either way, I think it’s interesting that Gen 4:20 talks about Cain’s descendants as innovators and inventors, the first to live in tents, the inventor of musical instruments and the first to work with metal.

More important than our interpretation of the Cain v Abel fight is Gen 6:2. This is right before the flood when it’s casually mentioned that the sons of God like to mate with human women and the results are giants and heroes. I’m not really sure how to take that, and whatever interpretation you have is, I’m sure, fine, but it kind of bugs me that passages like this get kind of swept under the rug. Methuselah is mentioned in this section. He’s kind of famous as the person who lived the longest in all of human history, but he didn’t actually do anything. He’s only mentioned as part of a line of genealogy. In fact, the way the math works out, it kind of implies he died in the flood, so he may not even have been a great guy. But we know about him, and we can mention him in casual conversation and people will know who we’re talking about. If you talk to most Christians about God’s sons interbreeding with humans though, you’re probably going to get some odd looks.

After Abel died and Cain was banished to the land of Nod in the east, Adam and Eve had another son, Seth. It was in Seth’s son’s time that people started worshipping the Lord. I’m not certain what that means, but later God also mentions to Noah the kinds of animals suitable for sacrifice, so I think this is the transition from the time in the garden of Eden when God and people just kind of hung out together to a more formal relationship where people need priests in special outfits to burn incense and cast spells to get God’s attention and blessings.

There’s a guy named Zecharia Sitchen who got really into ancient Sumerian texts and claims that the Nephilim, the giants and heroes that came from the sons of God breeding with human women, are actually related to aliens who genetically modified humans to develop a nearly-sentient population of laborers to mine gold. That’s about as reasonable as any other explanation I’ve heard for what’s going on there.

God flooded the world because people were such stupid jerks that He regretted ever creating us. The idea of God regretting something or changing his mind seems to be coming up a lot. Got seemed to change his mind about Eden too when things didn’t work out as planned. But that doesn’t really make sense, does it? Things always go to God’s plan, that’s sort of the point. I’ve heard it said that God just sort of played through these elaborate ruses in the ancient times, allowing people to believe he was changing his opinion about things. I’ll buy that I suppose.

I mean it stands to reason that God would have to cut early humanity a little slack when it comes to faith; it’s not like He had things like dogma or church politics to push people into doing His bidding.

And how come we always capitalize pronouns when they refer to God but they’re not capitalized in the Bible?