126 2 Chronicles 3-5

  2 Chronicles is boooorrrriiing.
  I was just rereading some of my older posts from Genesis when everything was all about God walking around telling people off and angels doing stuff.  2 Chronicles is about Solomon building the temple to God in Jerusalem.  Specifically, it's about Solomon negotiating a trade contract with a foreign king for some lumber and craftsmen, then overseeing, in minute detail, the dimension and decoration of the temple.  To summerize: it was really big and pretty much everything was covered in gold.

  For me, the real take-away message is about how our deeds are so different in their scope to God's deeds.  My problem reading 2 Chronicles today was really that I was trying to compare Solomon's administration of the temple building project to God literally creating the universe from nothing.  I'm not saying that the Israelites lost sight of that difference when they were building the temple, but I know how easy it can be to be wowed by a big building project.  It would probably seem quaint to us today if we saw the first temple, since we would try to compare it to the great wall of China for size, the taj mahal for majesty and the white house or Versailles for opulence, and it would probably come up with three strikes.  So it seems silly to us to see something like Solomon's temple and compare it to the majesty of God himself, but we still do the same kind of thing constantly today, just with bigger and better buildings.
  We do this with the things we learn about how the universe works.  And don't get me wrong, I am absolutely all for scientific exploration and advancement, but anyone who gets up in arms about some struggle between science and religion must have some serious misconceptions about one or the other.  Our learning and understanding has increased a thousand fold over the last few hundred years, but it's still not that significant when you start looking at it as a percentage of the whole, of all the learning and understanding there is to be had.

  Of course, in the story of the Tower of Babel God looked at the big tower that was going up and said that He couldn't allow men to work together in such a way because then nothing would be impossible for them, and he confused all their language and made them split up into different nations.  So maybe the things we accomplish are really profoundly important on a Godly scale.  Who knows?  The book of Genesis was weird.


  The ark of the covenant is placed inside the temple once it's complete.  The text says that the only things inside are the stone tablets with the law given to Moses, but wasn't there other stuff in there too before?  Yes, I've found some other mentions of Aaron's staff from that time it grew and budded and a pot of manna from when Moses led everyone through the desert.  I wonder what happened to them.

Day 99 2 Samuel 22-24

            David sings the praises of the Lord, calling Him his fortress and singing of how God protected him and destroyed his enemies.  The song is presented as the last words of David, but David goes on to do other things afterword, so maybe David just wanted to make sure to get his legacy written down before it was too late.

            The best of David’s fighting men were also mentioned honorably and some of their exploits told so they would not be forgotten either.

            David takes a census of all the fighting men in Israel and Judah (which are different enough to warrant separate mentioning now I guess) at God’s behest, but after it’s done, David goes to the Lord apologizing and begging mercy for what he’s done.  I have no idea what David is supposed to have done wrong in this passage, but it warrants a plague from God.  He goes pretty easy on them all told, he let David chose from among famine, military conquest, or sickness.  David chooses the disease, but then is guilt-stricken when people start dying for his own sin and he runs off to build an altar and pray to God.

            Another thing that I don’t understand in this passage is David’s burnt offering.  It’s been the case so far that only priests can make burnt offering, and maybe prophets once in a while.  Being king is pretty clearly a political position and does not give you any special rights with God.  When Saul tried to make a burnt offering because Samuel was running late that time, God and Samuel were both furious with him for it.  Maybe when it says David made a burnt offering it actually means that David just prayed and had his priests make a burnt offering.  It’s a pretty minor point today I suppose, since we don’t make these offerings anymore and anyone can petition God personally, but people have died over this before in the old testament.

Day 88 I Samuel 15-17

            God decides it’s time to make good on that curse He laid down back in I think Exodus about how He would wipe out the Amalekites for interfering with the Israelite’s flight from Egypt.  He tells Saul to wipe out every man, woman, child, goat and cow among the Amalekites.

            Saul goes down south to Amalek and sets an ambush.  He tells the Kenites to go take a walk because they’ve been good to the Israelites and he doesn’t want them to accidently get vanquished as well.  After they leave, Saul slaughters all the Amalekites.  Well, almost all of them.  He takes the Amalekite king prisoner and sets aside a few of the choicest of their livestock to sacrifice to the Lord, but that hardly counts.

            Well, actually, it turns out that it counts a whole lot.  God is so incensed at Saul’s impertinance, and his fundamental misunderstanding of how to make the Lord happy, that He tells Samuel that He’s done with Saul.  He is withdrawing Saul’s divine mandate.

            God tells Samuel to go up to Bethlehem to anoint a new king form the sons of Jesse.  Saul is beset by demons though and no longer connected to God at all so Samuel has to hide his intentions to keep Saul from killing him.  He goes up to Bethlehem and anoints David as Israel’s new king.

            Unfortunately, being anointed king doesn’t automatically give David any super-powers or an army, so Saul’s still running the country for now.  Saul’s attendants suggest that maybe he’ll get some relief from this whole evil spirit thing if he listens to some nice music, and you’ll never guess who just so happens to be a great musician.  Yes, David is brought in to sooth Saul’s episodes.  Saul feels much better and keeps David around as his armor bearer.

            Shortly after this, Saul completely loses all memory of David, because when a giant Philistine starts causing trouble in the battle field and David shows up and kills him, Saul shows no sign of recognition.

            Obviously, the philistine’s name was Goliath, by the way, and David showed up that day simply to deliver some grain to his older brothers who were following Saul.  When Goliath issued a challenge to all of Israel to come and fight him one on one, no one would respond except David, who was confident that the Lord would see him through it.

Day 83 Judges 19-21

            A Levite in the land of Ephraim had an unfaithful concubine.  Ephraim seems to be over-represented in this book.  The concubine runs off to her father’s house and the Levite goes after her.  After staying for a few days, they head back home, but by the time they reach Jebus, the sun is starting to set.  The Jebusites are not Israelites so the Levite does not want to stay there.  They press on and make it to Gibeon, which is a Benjaminite city, so they are Israelites.

            No one would take the Levite and his party in for the night though so they were ready to stay in the town square for the night.  Luckily an old Ephraimite man came in from the fields and invited them into his house.

            Now this story plays out exactly like the story of Sodom and Gomorrah for a little while.  The wicked men come and want to have sex with the Levite, but the head of the household in stead offers them his daughter.  This time though, the wicked men accept the offer and the host’s daughter and the Levite’s concubine are both dropped outside in the crowd and the concubine is raped to death by the mob.

            The Levite slung her body over the back of his donkey the next morning, took her home and cut her into twelve pieces which he sent to the heads of the twelve tribes.

            All of Israel came together and met so the Levite could tell them the story of what had happened.  They told the tribe of Benjamin to hand over the men of that wicked town, but they refused and mustered an army.  They were beaten though and most of the town was killed.  All the men of the other eleven tribes swore that they would never give a daughter in marriage to a Benjaminite.

            What happened next is a little unclear, but it sounds like there was an assembly sometime later and everyone felt bad for the tribe of Benjamin because they had no women and would die out.  Now no one from Jabesh Galead bothered to show up to this meeting, so the rest of the assembly went in and killed all the men and all the women who weren’t virgins there.  I’m not sure what tribe Jabesh Galead was a part of, but I think they must have been Israelites because they were expected at the meeting.  The Israelites gave the women who weren’t killed to the Benjaminites, but there weren’t enough to go around.  The solution they came up with was to wait until the next big festival and have all the available girls run around through the fields and the Benjaminites hide in the grass waiting for them.  Then the Benjaminites could steal some women and they would have Israelite wives without anyone having to break their vow.  If any of the girls fathers started asking questions about what happened to their daughters at the festival, the tribal elders would let them know that they had been given to the Benjaminites but don’t worry because the vow hadn’t been broken.

            This is the last story in Judges and I’ve got to say, I don’t think I’ve taken away a single message or lesson from this entire book.  It’s interesting to read, but no one seems to be following the law, even when the book seems to imply that they’re doing the right thing.  The first story didn’t make much sense, and then each one after that made progressively less.  There’s a recurring assertion that this was the time before Israel had a king and people did as they pleased.  Is this whole book just a statement about what a mess things are when we try to govern ourselves without anyone who has a direct line to God?  I would certainly accept that teaching but isn’t that kind of what we’re trying to do now?

Day 82 Judges 16-18

            Some time later, Samson went to Gaza and saw a prostitute he wanted to spend the night with.  The Philistines still hated him though so when they found out about it they shut the gates of the city to trap him so they could kill him.  Samson just tore the gates off the wall and carried them off when he felt like leaving.  This kind of scenario was not uncommon with Samson.

            Eventually he fell in love with a Philistine woman, a different Philistine woman than the one from before though.  Her name was Delilah and shortly after they started sleeping together, some Philistine leaders promised to pay Delilah if she could learn Samson’s weakness.

            Three times she asked him the secret of his strength and each time he lied to her, and when she tried to weaken him and called the Philistines, he broke free and killed them all.  I mean all of them except her.  Finally the forth time, when Samson had had a lot to drink one night (again, breaking his vow to never drink) he showed incredibly poor pattern recognition skills and told her the truth, that he was a Nazarite and that he could never cut his hair.

            So, of course, Delilah cut his hair.  The Philistines came to capture him, he fought back, but his strength was gone and he was taken.

            The Philistines put out Samson’s eyes and threw him in jail.  Later, they brought him out at a party to dance for their entertainment.  Samson prayed to God and was given back his strength just long enough to push over a pillar and topple the building they were in, killing himself and all of the Philistines.

            It seems to me in this reading though that Samson still didn’t learn anything about humility to God or glorifying God.  His final prayer isn’t apologetic for any of his own sins or even about showing God’s power to the Philistines or helping the oppressed Israelites.  Samson asks for the strength to take revenge on the Philistines for putting out his eyes.  But it still works.

            Man, God must have really hated Philistines.

            Okay, next judge:

            Micah and his mother made an ephod and a bunch of household gods.  Just to round out their collection of blessings, Micah also hired an errant Levite to be their household priest.  I guess an ephod is an okay thing to have now.  I know idols are forbidden, and you can only worship God properly with the help of some priests at a stone altar at the temple, but maybe an ephod doesn’t count as an idol.  I understand the desire for a physical object to focus your worship, but these ephods seem like bad policy, especially when it’s surrounded by other little idols.

            I guess I’m not in any position to judge the practice of displaying ephods though when I go to a church with an 18 foot tall cross hanging over the stage.

            So Micah’s got all his god ornaments in order and everything’s going great when some scouts from the tribe of Dan come through looking at land.  The Danites still haven’t received their inheritance so they’re looking around for land to conquer.  These scouts stay with Micah and they get a blessing from his priest before heading out again.  With this blessing, they find some nice land just past the lands of the tribe of Ephraim.

            The scouts return home and report what they saw and the Danites move out to conquer this good land.  On the way, they stop by Micah’s house, take his ephod and his household gods and convince his personal priest to come with them.  Micah and his neighbors go out and yell at the Danites about taking all of his stuff, but they tell him to go back home before they get angry and kill him.

            The Danites conquered the land and made a city  there named Dan (named after their ancestor, Dan).  They used Micah’s idols the whole time they were there.

            So, is this story about Micah being punished for having such a materialistic faith?  Is it about the dangers of investing too much in physical idols when they might be lost?  Is it just a sad story about a nice guy who got all his silver stolen by the Danites or a happy story about God providing blessings and silver for the righteous tribe of Dan?  I have no idea.  This one’s a little too foreign for me to make sense of I guess.

            That’s okay though, it doesn’t all have to resonate perfectly.  There’s so much different stuff in here that I’m pretty comfortable chalking one up to our cultural differences every once in a while.

            That seems to be happening a lot in this book though.

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 56 Numbers 35-36

            God commands the creation of cities for the Levites to live in.  There are to be forty eight towns all together and six of them will be towns of refuge.  If you kill someone accidently and are afraid of that person’s family taking revenge on you, you can move to a city of refuge and you’re safe from vengeance as long as you stay there.  Once the high priest dies, you’re safe forever and you can leave.  It’s important that this is only true if it’s an accidental death though.  This section differentiates very strongly between accidently killing someone and intentionally murdering them.  This is not the first time in Numbers that the idea of accidental versus intentional sin is discussed.  It seems like a bit of a theme in this book.  God did not hand down the sacrificial laws so that you could buy your way out of punishments; he created this system as a means of recovering from accidental rule-breaking so that God can still stand to be around you.

            God Himself told Moses that He couldn’t travel with the Israelites because they were too wicked, too disobedient for Him to be around, so I wonder how it is that God had such an amicable relationship with Abraham or his sons.  I mean, I know they didn’t have this same covenant so Abraham wasn’t actually breaking commandments back then, but God is saying that He can’t stand to be around someone who doesn’t wash their cloths right or who burns incense to Him the wrong way.  Did God’s preferences change in the intervening couple hundred years?  Is God’s disgust based on the Israelites’ disobedience, so like it’s only abhorrent to God, not because it’s something He doesn’t like per se, but just because He told them not to do it?  This book raises as many questions as it does answers sometimes.

            I mean the Bible, not the book of Numbers.  Numbers is actually pretty straightforward.

            Most of the time.

            The very last chapter outlines some logistical problems that have come up from those sisters from before inheriting their father’s land in chapter 27.  Some guys from the (half)tribe of Manasseh come to Moses and the heads of the Israelite families and point out that if those women, who were from their tribe, went off and married men from other tribes, then their husbands would absorb their holdings.  That means that land that was allocated for the tribe of Manasseh could be acquired by someone from Judah or Dan or whatever.  This transfer of land, under the law, would persist even through a year of Jubilee when all bought land is returned to the original owner.  That’s a real problem because the boundaries of the tribal lands are kind of holy, and this loophole could muddy those borders a lot over a few generations.  Moses and the elders patched it up with a ad hoc little piece of legislation decreeing that any women who inherit land in such a way have to marry within their own tribes.  Bang, done, next.

Day 31 Leviticus 1-4

            Leviticus is the book of the Levites.  Moses was a Levite.  Aaron was his brother so he must have been a Levite too.  It’s starting to look like the Levites are going to be the priest tribe, which still doesn’t make sense to me after that line from Exodus about all Israelites being a nation of priests in Exodus 19:6.

            Just to recap, Levi’s blessing from Jacob back in Genesis is not that great.  Jacob talks about how he and his brother are violent and fierce and he curses their anger and tells them they will be spread across the land of Israel.  They were the two who killed all those Shechemites and I think Jacob was still carrying that with him.  I guess that’s in keeping with the Levite’s jumping up and slaughtering 3000 other Israelites when Moses told them to.  And with Moses killing that guard in the beginning of Exodus.  Wow, Levites are some stone-cold killers.  I wonder if they really had that reputation back then.  It seems like the 12 tribes were all pretty clicky.  I’ll bet each one had it’s own reputation, like how we think that Canadians are very polite and Texans are all in the NRA.  I wonder if it made anyone a little nervous that the murderingest tribe was the one being given the mantle of priesthood.

            Leviticus starts off with four different kinds of offerings that may be presented before the Lord: burnt offerings, grain offerings, fellowship offerings and sin offerings.  I can’t discern from the text itself what each kind of offering is for, except the sin offering which is the way to apologize to God for accidently breaking a commandment.  It seems reasonable that the fellowship offering has to do with fellowship, but even that is sort of vague.  Fellowship at most of the churches I’ve attended is a code word for ‘potluck’ so it’s difficult to pin down exactly what the passage means.  My Bible handbook and some online research says that the burnt offering and the sin offering were to nullify sin although it sounds like the burnt offering was kind of more general while the sin offering was targeted to negate a specific sin.  The grain offering and the fellowship offering, which looks like it’s often called the peace offering, weren’t necessarily connected to sin, the grain offering was mostly about giving thanks to God and the fellowship offering was about entering fellowship with God, which was symbolic of a new beginning or rebirth.  It sounds like you might make a fellowship offering if you had a scrape with death or if you just decided to turn over a new leaf and change something about you relationship with God. 

            This is the most useful single source I found on it.  It’s still pretty complicated, but it’s got charts so that’s always helpful.

            The priests often get something from sacrifices.  In burnt sacrifices the whole animal is burnt, but in the others only a portion is burnt and then the rest is given to the sons of Aaron.  Similar sacrifices were common in many religions in the ancient world.  What makes these different though is that there isn’t really anything magical happening.  In other faiths, sacrifices were meant to make your God do something like bring rain or kill you enemies, or else they were to feed a God who needed sacrifices to stay strong.  Israelite sacrifices don’t really benefit God at all, they seem to be almost completely for the sake of the sacrificer.  The system isn’t there because God needs it, it’s there because we need a physical experience that we can touch and participate in to help us remember not to break the Law.

            I think of it kind of like the way rules work with little kids.  Your toddler doesn’t understand that eating a bowl full of sugar cookies is going to make it sick, so it has to learn that sometimes the reason you can’t do things is because mommy said so.  Once we start getting into some of the specific rules I’ll talk more about that, but one of the first things God is doing is setting up a system so we can remind ourselves to stay on the right path.  If you do something really nasty like God laid down in the last few commandments, then you will likely get stoned or at least run out of town, but this is to help us keep the minor infractions a priority as well.

  The Israelites are getting rules about washing their tables before eating and not touching dead bodies that seem very logical to us with our fancy understanding of germ theory, but for the time being, they’re just going to have to learn to do certain things and avoid certain things because God said so.  It’s kind of funny that after Jesus came we, western society, just kind of declared ourselves completely above the law and summarily ignored everything God said in the Old Testiment.  I understand that Jesus legitimately did change the way we read books like Leviticus, but then during the dark ages the average life expectance took a nose dive from which it is still recovering and hundreds of years later Ignatz Samelweis was laughed out of the field of medicine for proposing, and later proving, that people die less in hospitals if doctors would wash their hands after doing something gross.  Just like the Bible says not to do.  The mortality rate at Sammelweis’s hospital was a fraction of every other hospital around.

            Maybe funny isn’t exactly the right word.

            Chapter one mentions systematically three times “It is a burnt sacrifice, an offering made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the lord.”  That’s right, that’s a King James Version quote, we’re going to class this place up a little bit today.

            Repeating the same thing three times was a popular literary device in Moses’s era.  It comes up a few times in these early books whenever God does something extra-important, like create man:

            God created man in his own image/

            in the image of God he created him/

            male and female he created them. (Gen 1:27)

           

Or call Abraham:

            I will make you a great nation and I will bless you/

            I will make your name great and you will be a blessing/

            I will bless those who bless you and whoever curses you I will curse (Gen12:2-3)

            So I guess the sacrifices must be important.