Michael Reads the Bible

Jeremiah 21 – 25: Good Figs, Bad Figs, and the End of Judah

2011-11-20T19:08:00.000-08:00

In today’s Chapters, we move forward in historical context. At the ends of Kings and Chronicles we saw the crash of Judah under Nebuchadnezzar’s war machine and the subsequent exile of the Israelites – which, we later figured out, really meant “the Israelite elite and artisan classes" – in Babylon. In Ezra and Nehemiah, we saw that when the exiles returned, they seemed to bring a new and more restrictive set of social and religious norms with them to impose on the folks who got left behind.

So, in Jeremiah 21 we jump right into Judah’s endgame. Zedakiah, the very last king of that disintegrating city-state, sends a couple of priests to Jeremiah to ask him if he can talk God into intervening on the Israelites’ behalf, like he used to back in the day. God’s answer is inconsistent. First, there is a resounding no: I myself will fight against you with an outstretched hand and a mighty arm in anger and fury and great wrath. (5) The Israelites are told to surrender, or they will be killed. (9) And yet “moreover,” Jeremiah is supposed to tell the King that he has to do a better job of administering justice, or God will be angry. (11-14) Having the conditional warning come after the absolute statement rings oddly, as does the demand for changes of an administrative nature as Nebuchadnezzar’s thousands sweep down out of the east.

Jeremiah 22 is much the same, but in the reverse order. After an admonition to reform the justice system, Jeremiah (presumably speaking for God) goes into some detail about how Jerusalem is going to be sacked and how people will be talking about it in the past tense, once everybody goes into exile. In particular, he predicts grim fates for a couple of kings of Judah. One, Shallum son of Josiah, is a bit mysterious as he doesn’t appear in Kings or Chronicles, or at least in my notes thereon (although there is a much earlier king of Israel by that name who held the throne for one month before getting assassinated). The other, Johoiakim, comes two kings before Zedakiah in Chronicles, but things are pretty muddled at that point in the succession. It might not have been clear towards the end exactly who was boss.

False prophets are castigated at length in Jeremiah 23. They are dismissed as either reporting their dreams or simply making stuff up. Special attention is paid to the phrase “oracle of the Lord,” which is apparently a giveaway – there is no such thing as an “oracle of the Lord,” if I’m reading this right. (33-40) Although again, I’m not sure how the Israelite in the street is supposed to distinguish between Jeremiah and the fakers.

Oh, the chapter begins with a Biblical prophesy about someone from the royal family of David who will come back to rule over all of Israel: This is the name by which he will be called: The Lord Our Righteousness. (6) This might sound a little exciting to the Christian ear, but from the context we see that Jeremiah is talking about the restoration of Israel and Judah after the Babylonian exile. If that prophecy correctly points forward to someone, it’s Nehemiah or Ezra.

Figs!

Jeremiah 24 is a very interesting little metaphor. After everyone – or, as is actually spelled out here, after the officials, the craftsmen and the artisans were taken into exile, God shows Jeremiah two baskets of figs. One basket has yummy figs, the other rotten figs. The people who are going into exile, says God, are the good figs. Everyone who gets left behind, or who seeks shelter in Egypt, is one of the rotten figs. I will make them abhorrent and an offense to all the kingdoms of the earth, says God, a reproach and a byword, an object of ridicule and cursing, wherever I banish them. I will send the sword, famine and plague against them until they are destroyed from the land I gave to them and to their fathers. (9-10) So… if you were not in the ruling or artisan class, you were pretty much doomed. Clearly God – or at least Jeremiah – is of Nehemiah and Ezra’s party.

In Jeremiah 25, God gives Jeremiah a cup of wine of his wrath. Jeremiah is assigned to go to all the kings of all the kingdoms in the world, and tell them to drink the wine, after which they will be killed. If they say that they don’t want to drink it, he is to say that they have to. And, Jeremiah reports that he did so, which would seem to suggest that he is either speaking very figuratively, that there has been some sort of problem with the translation, or that he was stark raving bonkers. Of all the things that the Bible has asked me to believe so far, the notion that a priest from Judah went around cajoling all of the leaders of the known world to drink a lethal divine beverage is perhaps the oddest. I can’t imagine that we are expected to take it literally, but… there it is.

Jeremiah 18-20: Jeremiah Himself

2011-11-13T15:58:00.000-08:00

The figure of Jeremiah himself is prominent in these three Chapters. Jeremiah 18 begins with a specific message from God to the prophet, to the effect that he should go down to the potter’s shop and receive a message there. As Jeremiah watches the potter work clay, sometimes abandoning a false start and reshaping something different out of the same clay, he says that it is the same with God and his people: God made the Chosen People, and he can scrap them and start over at any time, if he decides to.

There is more curious tension in Jeremiah 18, of the kind I mentioned last week, between whether the doom predicted by the prophet is foreordained or avoidable. Is Jeremiah warning the Israelites, or just letting them know they are toast? God/Jeremiah usually speaks as if it is the latter, but the issue is confused in 18:7-8.

If at any time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed, and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned.

So, this sounds like it renders much of which we’ve been reading in Jeremiah somewhat more flexible. But then when God tells Jeremiah to go deliver his message, he adds But they will replay, ‘It’s no use. We will continue with our own plans, each of us will follow the stubbornness of his evil heart. (12) Which brings things back to sounding kind of preordained.

Jeremiah 18: 13-17 is God’s message of intended punishment for his neglect. Then, in Verses 18-23, Jeremiah complains of a whisper campaign against himself, and implores God to repay his community with famine and slaughter.

Chapter 19 also begins with a trip to the potter’s shop. This time, Jeremiah is told to buy a pot, which he will eventually break metaphorically during a, well, a Jeremiad I suppose, to make a point about God’s ability to shatter Jerusalem at will. It’s a rare moment when we are given a glimpse of a prophet in action.

There is a brief narrative line in Chapter 20, as the high priest hears about Jeremiah’s preaching and, apparently finding it objectionable, has him beaten up and put in the stocks overnight. When he is let out, Jeremiah tells the priest that he will be carried away to Babylon and die there, along with all his friends. Which may actually have been true, but you can kind of see why Jeremiah wasn’t winning any popularity contests.

In fact, he complains to God from 20:7 to the end of the Chaper, 20:18, about his lot as a prophet. He is mocked, insulted, and reproached all day long, he says, and regrets that he was ever born. He curses the day he was born, the man who told his father he had been born, and the fact that he was not stillborn. It is not easy being a prophet, apparently. Jeremiah is not a happy man.

Jeremiah 10 – 17: Those destined for death, to death.

2011-11-06T00:10:00.000-07:00

Well, it’s no great secret this far in that the God of the Old Testament is not, despite occasional references to mercy and compassion, a particularly merciful or compassionate entity. This week's reading does nothing to reverse this impression. In the tenth through seventeenth Chapters of Jeremiah, the way is cluttered with anger, threat, and revenge. God is great, and pissed.

Jeremiah 10: The first sixteen Verses of Chapter 10 have Jeremiah transmitting God’s mockery of physical idols made by craftsman. Verses 17 – 22 are a warning of imminent destruction. Verses 23 – 25 are a plea from Jeremiah that God does not punish him personally, but rather “pour out [his] wrath” on foreigners and backsliders.

Jeremiah 11: God announces, through Jeremiah, that his Covenant with the Israelites has been broken by the unfaithfulness of the people of Judah and Israel:

16 The LORD called you a thriving olive tree
with fruit beautiful in form.
But with the roar of a mighty storm
he will set it on fire,
and its branches will be broken.
17 The LORD Almighty, who planted you, has decreed disaster for you, because the people of both Israel and Judah have done evil and aroused my anger by burning incense to Baal.

In the remaining five Verses, Jeremiah talks about a plot to silence or kill him, and how God is going to punish the plotters.

Jeremiah 12: For eleven chapters, Jeremiah has been talking about the disasters that are going to befall all Israelites, how the cities and countryside will be laid waste and the people enslaved or slaughtered. In that context, the portion of Jeremiah 12 called “Jeremiah’s Complaint” is kind of odd.

1 You are always righteous, LORD,
when I bring a case before you.
Yet I would speak with you about your justice:
Why does the way of the wicked prosper?
Why do all the faithless live at ease?
2 You have planted them, and they have taken root;
they grow and bear fruit.
You are always on their lips
but far from their hearts.

Out of context, this is a very reasonable question: in the presence of a just God, why does evil prosper? Or, in the presence of a jealous God, why do the wayward prosper? It strikes an odd note here, however, because Jeremiah has been at pains to explain that these people are quite doomed and bringing everyone else with them. It seems to suggest a certain lack of conviction that he should be bringing the point up.

Speaking of odd notes: Is the nature of Jeremiah’s complaint concerned with justice for the mistreated, or reward for the faithful? No. Jeremiah is much more interested in punishment than reward:

3 Yet you know me, LORD;
you see me and test my thoughts about you.
Drag them off like sheep to be butchered!
Set them apart for the day of slaughter!

The remainder of the Chapter is a response from God, who elaborates the extent to which He is sickened with the Israelites, and the extent to which He intends to punish them. In an interesting coda (14-17) He suggests that among the nations that are going to be carving up the Israelites’ territory, he will more or less adopt any that convert to worshipping him.

Chapter 13: This Chapter begins with metaphors (involving a linen belt and a wineskin) to illustrate the familiar idea that God no longer feels obligated to protect the Israelites due to their faithlessness. The second half of the Chapter is more announcement of dire punishment coming, slavery and exile in particular.

Chapter 14: The heading “Drought, Famine, Sword” by and large sums up Jeremiah 14, but there are some interesting details. Jeremiah tells us that:

11 Then the LORD said to me, “Do not pray for the well-being of this people. 12 Although they fast, I will not listen to their cry; though they offer burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Instead, I will destroy them with the sword, famine and plague.”

Now, one hates to come out and say these things, but this passage is not consistent with the idea of a God of infinite mercy. Just at the definitional level, it isn’t. You can’t have both this passage and a God of infinite mercy. Unless some words are redefined or reinterpreted, the idea and the text are incompatible. This is disturbing stuff, and it is sometimes hard for me to understand why more people aren’t disturbed by it.

Anyway, Jeremiah responds by pointing out that there are false prophets running around saying that everything is fine, and that this confuses the people into misbehavior. God’s response is simply that those guys, unlike Jeremiah, are not authorized and are not delivering his message. How the Israelite on the street is supposed to tell the difference is not addressed.

Chapter 15: This chapter is a continuation of Chapter 14. Here’s a taste of the rhetoric which, again, is not really consistent with generally accepted definitions of “mercy”:

1 Then the LORD said to me: “Even if Moses and Samuel were to stand before me, my heart would not go out to this people. Send them away from my presence! Let them go! 2 And if they ask you, ‘Where shall we go?’ tell them, ‘This is what the LORD says:“‘Those destined for death, to death;
those for the sword, to the sword;
those for starvation, to starvation;
those for captivity, to captivity.’3 “I will send four kinds of destroyers against them,” declares the LORD, “the sword to kill and the dogs to drag away and the birds and the wild animals to devour and destroy. 4 I will make them abhorrent to all the kingdoms of the earth because of what Manasseh son of Hezekiah king of Judah did in Jerusalem.

Verses 11 – 21 are a little cryptic, but seem to be a conversation between God and Jeremiah, with God reassuring Jeremiah personally that because he has been virtuous, he will be spared.

Chapter 16: In a series of stansas, God says not to marry or have children, not to attend funerals, and not to attend feasts. There is no point in human relationships, since everybody is due for the big punishment that is coming. In Verses 14 – 15, there is a brief segue into a theme that was much more common back in the book of Isaiah: the notion that at some point in the future, after the era of punishment, some surviving Israelites will be brought back to the Promised Land and given another go. But then we go right back to the punishment theme, which continues into…

Chapter 17: As elsewhere in Jeremiah, it can be hard to keep track of who is speaking in this Chapter – whether “I” is Jeremiah, or God, or some hypothetical third party. But I think it is Jeremiah who again shows his unhandsome attitude toward the salvation of others in Verses 17 -18:

17 Do not be a terror to me;
you are my refuge in the day of disaster.
18 Let my persecutors be put to shame,
but keep me from shame;
let them be terrified,
but keep me from terror.
Bring on them the day of disaster;
destroy them with double destruction.

And then, at the end of today’s reading – although, keep in mind that the locations that I choose to wrap up for the day may not have any organizational relevance – there is a long passage (19-27) that seems to contradict almost everything else in today’s reading. It homes in on something that we haven’t heard about for an awfully long time, the importance of the Sabbath. If the Israelites will reform on this point, God says (says Jeremiah), they can be spared the coming destruction.

There is an illogic here, and I don’t see a ready way out of it. The Israelites are doomed and damned, mostly for their worship of false Gods, and there is no hope of a reprieve. It doesn’t matter that they were misled; the punishment is foreordained. Except, if they very carefully keep Sabbath, they will be spared. Again, the contradiction is right there at the fundamental level. I have been told many times that there are no contradictions in the Bible. This is said so often, and with such a level of confidence, that I didn’t really expect to see any, except perhaps here and there on a superficial level. At this point, though, consistency is no longer a reasonable assumption. Short of an escape clause along the lines of “The Prophets are fallible, and should not be expected to speak literal truth,” we have reached a point that the internal contradictions are too straightforward to get around.

And since I have begun admitting misgivings, I’ll throw out another one here: God prohibits the worship of false gods, and the breaking of this prohibition is always what angers him most. We have seen this innumerable times. But why? If God is universal and singular, and all other gods are just wood and clay, why get so worked up about a lack of faith? The options are obvious enough: get in touch and reestablish your preeminence, visibly reward the righteous, nip straying in the bud, or just laugh the whole thing off. Why is this particular phenomenon one that calls for periodic mass-punishment on such a grand scale? It’s not easy to tell whether it is OK to ask questions of the Old Testament God, but that would be mine if I had the chance.

Twelve Passages from the Book of Jeremiah

2011-11-03T01:30:00.000-07:00

Inspirational Christian images are very, very common. You have almost certainly seen them all your life, with or without noticing. They consist of a short biblical verse printed over a photograph that may be thematically linked to the quotation, or may just be a sunset, a rainbow, or some similar attractive scene.

In addition to their substantial brick-and-mortar presence, these images are also widely displayed, offered, and sold (!) here online. I run into them constantly when I am working on MRtB, and over time I have come to find them a little troubling. So I thought I would make a little game.

What follows are:

Six typical inspirational religious images based on quotes from the first half of Jeremiah, found randomly on the internet.

Six additional images, also based on quotes from the first half of Jeremiah, that I assembled myself (I used one a few posts back).

And the three questions, if you are playing the game, are: "Can you tell the difference? How? and What, if any, are the implications?"

1.

10.

11.

12.

Jeremiah 3 - 9: Reading Jeremiah in 2011

2011-10-26T14:13:00.000-07:00

Reader, it is as I feared: the Book of Jeremiah does not take very long to get into its groove, and that groove is much the same groove as had the Book of Isaiah. Which is to say, of course, that the Israelites have been very, very bad, and that therefore God is going to punish them plentifully.

There is a modest diversity in the nature of the Israelite badness. The top of the list continues to be the worshipping of false gods. Now, for many Books something has struck me as a little strange about this constant condemnation of religious waywardness, and I’ve finally figured out what it is. Let’s see if I can explain.

In a more usual sort of book for our time and place, by which I suppose I mean a novel or a history, an authorial hand would generally make sure that we saw the worshiping of false gods, or at least evidence of the worshiping of false gods, before moving us on to the consequences and reaction. Or, perhaps the order of these would be reversed, and the author might move from consequence to cause. But what a modern author does not ever do is show only consequence and reaction, without giving us any glimpses of a cause. So, as a reader trained inevitably to the story-telling modalities of my era, it creates some cognitive dissonance to read hundreds of pages about God punishing the Israelites for their constant worshipping of false gods, without ever hearing much about how many people were actually rushing off to the Azeroth poles, and when, and why.

This introduces a strange tension into the experience of Bible-reading. On one hand, it is easy enough to say “well, if God is always complaining about the Israelites’ waywardness, the Israelites must have always been wayward.” This doesn’t require mental gymnastics; we infer causes from consequences all the time. At the same time, however, we – and be “we” I mean we the novel-readers – have been teethed on a literature that invites or even demands that we made moral judgment of its characters. And if a novelist gave us a character that was always in an angry, punitive froth about something, but gave us no other evidence that this thing was happening, it would be understood as an invitation to understand the character as potentially unhinged, dangerous, disturbing. One knows that the Bible was not written with any such ideas in mind, nor was it intended to be read in this fashion, but because it is difficult to switch off a lifetime’s worth of context, the intellectual tension remains.

But I have digressed, as usual. In addition to the worship of false gods, Jeremiah accuses the Israelites of dishonesty, hypocrisy, sexual misbehavior, taking God for granted, and unkindness to the vulnerable. The punishments are equally varied, many involving a conquering army from the north but others involving environmental disasters, poisonous snakes, and so on. Unlikely words are occasionally put in the mouths of people who will suffer the punishments:

I hope you will forgive me this bit of genre parody.

8:14 Why are we sitting here?
Gather together!
Let us flee to the fortified cities and perish there!

And again and again, if we give Jeremiah credence, we are faced with the incredibly demanding discipline and baffling moral logic of God:

20 Now, you women, hear the word of the LORD;
open your ears to the words of his mouth.
Teach your daughters how to wail;
teach one another a lament.
21 Death has climbed in through our windows
and has entered our fortresses;
it has removed the children from the streets
and the young men from the public squares.

22 Say, “This is what the LORD declares:“‘Dead bodies will lie
like dung on the open field,
like cut grain behind the reaper,
with no one to gather them.’”

23 This is what the LORD says:“Let not the wise boast of their wisdom
or the strong boast of their strength
or the rich boast of their riches,
24 but let the one who boasts boast about this:
that they have the understanding to know me,
that I am the LORD, who exercises kindness,
justice and righteousness on earth,
for in these I delight,”
declares the LORD.

There is a certain grim beauty to it – as I mentioned last time, Jeremiah seems to me a poetic notch or two up from what we have seen before – but the words “justice,” “righteousness,” and “kindness” ring very oddly after an announcement that dead bodies will lie like dung on the open field. It’s very problematic. If when confronted by these passages one wants to take the Bible seriously, and yet not regard God as a vengeful horror, the only retreat is to “God’s ways are not man’s ways” and the notion that there is no frame of reference for a human to really conceive of an infinite and infinitely righteous God. Which then begs the question, why have I been asked so often, and in so many different ways, to read this book? Is there a virtue in trying to understand that which is incomprehensible? And if so, how will I know if I'm making progress?

Well.

Chapter Three is an extended metaphor of religious infidelity, and is an admirable and perhaps even witty piece of rhetoric. It has the memorable line Because Israel’s immorality mattered so little to [her sister Judah], she defiled the land and committed adultery with stone and wood. After that, the predictions of punishment become a bit more generalized. It becomes hard to tell, sometimes, who “I” is – Jeremiah, God speaking through Jeremiah, or some random sinner being quoted. After a while, the text frankly starts to seem a bit repetitious to me. Indeed, in at least one instance it really IS repetitious, literally. Check out this passage:

13 “From the least to the greatest,
all are greedy for gain;
prophets and priests alike,
all practice deceit.
14 They dress the wound of my people
as though it were not serious.
‘Peace, peace,’ they say,
when there is no peace.
15 Are they ashamed of their detestable conduct?
No, they have no shame at all;
they do not even know how to blush.
So they will fall among the fallen;
they will be brought down when I punish them,”
says the LORD.

That’s Jeremiah 6:13-15, but then it’s Jeremiah 8:10-12 too. See, I really am paying attention! I was also paying attention to Jeremiah 8:8, which reads:

8 “‘How can you say, “We are wise,
for we have the law of the LORD,”
when actually the lying pen of the scribes
has handled it falsely?

I very much doubt that Jeremiah conceived himself as a post-modernist paradoxically undermining the authority of Scripture even as he created Scripture, but he conjures much the same effect in this odd little Verse. To stretch the concept only a little, Jeremiah implies that you can’t trust the Bible, because it has been corrupted by human hands. You can only trust… Jeremiah, perhaps? Except, he’s in the Bible. It’s quite a conundrum.

See you next time!

Jeremiah 1-2: First New Book in a Year and a Half!

2011-10-17T19:26:00.000-07:00

OK, here we go. Jeremiah is the second-longest book of the Bible by a nose – Psalms is the longest – so we’ll hope that I can make brisker progress with it than I did with Isaiah, the fifth longest. After Jeremiah, I’ll catch breath with little Lamentations before heading on to Ezekiel, itself the third longest book in the Bible.

As an aside to anyone who has been following along, obviously all previous goals, projected finishing dates, and so on are completely off the table at this point. Maybe I can get a rhythm going again, is as much as I can promise at this point.

Jeremiah Begins

Jeremiah 1 actually starts with some contextualization, which is nice. It tells us that what follows from 1:4 on is going to be The words of Jeremiah son of Hilkiah, one of the priests at Anathoth in the territory of Benjamin. It also tells us when Jeremiah lived: from the thirteenth year of King Josiah of Judah through the reigns of Kings Johoiakim and Zedekiah.

Looking back to our notes from Kings and Chronicles, we see that this puts Jeremiah at the very end of independent Judah, which had managed to stay quasi-independent after the collapse of its larger sister kingdom, Israel. As Judah gets squeezed between the relative superpowers of Egypt and Assyria, there is a religious revival under King Josiah when, we were told, the laws of Moses were rediscovered in the temple, and reimplemented. After Josiah gets killed in an reckless-sounding attack on an Egyptian column, Judah slides rapidly towards its sack and pillage and the taking of the Israelites into exile. From this general background, I think we can anticipate a mood of pessimism.

The rest of the first chapter is a nice bit of narrative – the first we’ve really seen since way back in Job – with Jeremiah telling the story of how God came to him as a child and taught him to be a prophet. God speaks directly, in quoted passages, but also in imagistic puns – Jeremiah sees an almond tree, which means that God is watching, because “almond tree” and “watching” sound the same in Hebrew. (Obviously, I got that from the footnote.)

Parenthetically...

I had an emotional reaction to the first line of Jeremiah 1:5: Before I formed you in the womb I knew you… It's because I've seen this fragmentary quotation used on billboards, punctuated as a complete sentence and attributed “-God,” by the anti-abortion crowd. We are supposed to assume from the phrase that God, somewhere in the Bible, has made a definitive statement (directly addressed to us, no less) of when embryonic life should be protected under Federal statute. But here’s the full verse:

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
Before you were born I set you apart;
I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.

This is God telling Jeremiah about his own personal destiny. Now, if our devious billboard designer wanted to justify distorting the passage for political scree he or she could obviously say “But the context doesn’t matter, its says right there that God recognizes individuals in utero.” To which the equally obvious and equally tedious counterargument is, “it says right there that God recognized Jeremiah in utero and also that he is unique and different, implying that God doesn’t make this distinction for the rank and file. Both interpretations are perfectly obvious to the person who wants to make hay with them, and both are totally without merit. Neither God nor Jeremiah says anything here about the moment at which life should be designated as beginning under law. He’s saying, “Jeremiah, you are a special person with a special mission.”

Of course, it’s Jeremiah telling us that God told him this. It is, I think, reasonable to keep such a thing in mind when evaluating a prophet.

Jeremiah 2

Since Jeremiah is roughly contemporary with Isaiah, we would expect them to be singing from the same proverbial choirbook, and indeed it is so. Once the prophesy begins in Chapter 2, it focuses on the familiar theme that the Israelites’ decline into poverty and defeat is their punishment at the hands of God for their having strayed from religious orthodoxy.

The more I think about it – and one is forced to think about it a lot, in the Old Testament – the more it seems like this is a understandable mood for the late-Judah Israelites. Whether or not you believe that the premise of divine retribution is true, it must have felt true to the last holdouts in their little kingdom clustered around Jerusalem as they waited to see which of the neighboring powers were going to sack them. “We used to be regional contenders,” they must have thought, “and now we’ve been laid low. What went wrong?”

If you look for the answer to such a question in the theological realm, there are several answers available. “Their gods must be better than our gods” seems to have been a common response across many cultures in such a predicament, or even “Our god must have died” or “We haven’t been living right, so our god isn’t backing us up against their gods.” Since the Israelites don’t have full recourse to the idea of other gods – the Old Testament, despite its strong undercurrent of hegemonic polytheism, certainly has several definitive statements of absolute monotheism – none of these answers are available to them (or at least not to a religious leader like Jeremiah). Therefore if bad things are happening, it must be because God wants them to happen. If God wants bad things to happen, we must have done something to piss him off. What could that be? Religious unorthodoxy is a conspicuous candidate, particularly so perhaps if you are – like Jeremiah – a priest.

Whether Jeremiah will join Isaiah in the ecstatic promise of future glory years remains to be seen. He doesn’t in Chapter 2. But very much like Isaiah, he rails first against Israelites who have worshiped other gods, and secondarily against those who have emigrated to Egypt or the Euphrates Valley. He also, moreso than I think we’ve seen in previous books, points a finger at Israelites who are simply indifferent to religion.

Why do my people say, “We are free to roam;
We will come to you no more;?
32 Does a maiden forget her jewelry, a bride her wedding ornaments?
Yet my people have forgotten me, days without number.

This passage is a nice example of what, at least in the first few chapters, is a palpably different writing style in Jeremiah. So far, there have been none of the jagged mood swings that characterized Isaiah (and Psalms, for that matter). Instead of the repetitious rhythms of Isaiah, which felt sometimes like someone reading God’s plan for retribution off of PowerPoint slides, Jeremiah is so far much more fluid and integrated. It is adorned in metaphor like a bride in her wedding ornaments! Elsewhere in Chapter 2, the straying Israelites are compared to animals in heat, disgraced thieves, poorly cross-pollinated vines, and prostitutes. And this line has special literary relevance for modern English readers:

22Although you wash yourself with soda and use an abudance of soap, the stain of your guilt is still before me,” declares the Sovereign Lord.

Out out, damn spot!

See you in Chapter 3!

Isaiah 61-66: Ultimate Isaiah

2011-10-09T22:10:00.000-07:00

So, as I was saying, the Book of Isaiah is an unsettling document to the lay reader. By “to the lay reader” I of course mean “to me.” Still, the whiplash transitions throughout the Book between prophecies of paradisiacal futures to come and prophecies of relentless destruction of Israel, Israel’s enemies, or both, are pretty extreme. I’ve also noted that, for a major prophet, Isaiah doesn’t seem to have been much of a hand at predicting the future. Other disturbing details have cropped up in the Book as well; virgin birth seems to be more common than you’d expect, and at least some of Isaiah’s preaching is done, per God’s instruction, in the buff. The Bible is full of surprises.

Isaiah 61 is Isaiah at his gentlest. It speaks of the coming “Year of the Lord’s Favor,” a time of peace, prosperity, and plenty for everybody who has had a tough life up to now. It speaks of “the oil of gladness” and “double portions” and the rebuilding of ruined cities. But we are still in the brutal mindset of the Old Testament age, of course, and even in this idyllic vision there are undercurrents. Part of the blessing, for instance, is that people won’t have to work so hard because Aliens will shepherd your flocks; foreigners will work your fields and vineyards. The Israelites will feed on the wealth of nations, and in their riches you will boast. (5-6) To our minds this may seem a little cynical, but to Isaiah a natural part of plenty is being in the position to boss, rather than to be bossed.

Chapter 62 keeps up this positive theme, and stipulates that the name of Jerusalem will be changed to Hephzibah, and that its lands will be called Beulah rather than Zion. “Beulah” doesn’t really seem to have taken off; “Hephzibah” I’ve never even heard of.

Isaiah 63 is of two parts. Verses 1 – 6 are a short vignette of a figure – God, one supposes – who comes from “trodding the winepress” so that his clothes are soaked and red; what he has really been up to is the bloody business of trampling the nations.

Verses 7 through 19 are a prayer that starts by reciting “the kindnesses of the Lord” to the Israelites, but then interestingly modulates into a tone of complaint that God is perhaps not as kind as he used to be. “Why, O Lord,” the prayer asks, “do you make us wander from your ways and harden our hearts so we do not revere you?” (17) This is a very fair question, and addresses a puzzling Old Testament commonplace: God is so often said to cause people to defy him, and then to punish them mightily for defiance.

Isaiah 64 continues this prayer. (Here, again, the division of Isaiah seems very arbitrary. One so wishes to correct the editing so that 63:1-6 stands alone and 63:7-19 are not separate from 64, but I suppose that there would be brisk institutional resistance to any such rationalizing scheme.) In it “the people” (as portrayed by Isaiah?) continue to ask rather poignant questions of God. Why, when He has claimed an ability and responsibility to actively intervene on behalf of His people, do things always go badly? Why aren’t there miraculous interventions any more, like there used to be. Or, why does divine action seem to consist always in punishment, never in reward? If God is all-powerful, and the Israelites are his people, why is Zion a wasteland, Jerusalem a slum, and the Temple burned down?

Isaiah 65 is God’s answer, and in Verses 1 – 16 that answer is “incorrect ceremonial practice.” People that make sacrifices of the wrong kind, in the wrong places, who don’t keep kosher, and so on, are in for a world of hurt. This kind of misbehavior is as always blurred with religious infidelity, the outright worship of other gods instead of or in addition to God.

11 “But as for you who forsake the LORD
and forget my holy mountain,
who spread a table for Fortune
and fill bowls of mixed wine for Destiny,12 I will destine you for the sword,
and all of you will fall in the slaughter;
for I called but you did not answer,
I spoke but you did not listen.
You did evil in my sightand chose what displeases me.”

Then, is Verses 17-25, God says – or is made to say, by Isaiah – that He is going to start over with a new universe. He will make a new heavens, a new Earth, and a new, better, Jerusalem. There will be no sorrow and no sickness, and lifespans will be much increased. The existing heavens and Earth “will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind.” It’s a remarkable passage, and rather alarming in its casual promise of obliteration of our entire reality. On the face of it, is seems isolated from anything that has come before, and from anything I’ve ever heard of Jewish or Christian theology.

Isaiah 66 is the final chapter of the Book. It does not really wrap things up, so far as I can tell, but seems a fitting reprise to all of Isaiah in its puzzling muddledness. It contains within it celebration at the coming greatness of Jerusalem, but it’s right there alongside angry imagery like this:

15 See, the LORD is coming with fire,
and his chariots are like a whirlwind;
he will bring down his anger with fury,
and his rebuke with flames of fire.
16 For with fire and with his sword
the LORD will execute judgment on all people,
and many will be those slain by the LORD.

For whom does the bell toll?

“These are the ones I look on with favor:
those who are humble and contrite in spirit,
and who tremble at my word.
3 But whoever sacrifices a bull
is like one who kills a person,
and whoever offers a lamb
is like one who breaks a dog’s neck;
whoever makes a grain offering
is like one who presents pig’s blood,
and whoever burns memorial incense
is like one who worships an idol.
They have chosen their own ways,
and they delight in their abominations;
4 so I also will choose harsh treatment for them
and will bring on them what they dread.
For when I called, no one answered,
when I spoke, no one listened.
They did evil in my sight
and chose what displeases me.”

Well, this is frankly puzzling, because Isaiah and indeed the entire Old Testament to this point has been all about following instructions, and sacrificing bulls and lambs and making grain offerings is very much something you ARE supposed to do. In fact, a few verses later, there is a reference to the grain offerings that are going to happen when the Israelites triumph over all of the other kingdoms of the world.

Isaiah, ladies and gentlemen.

COMING SOON in Michael Reads the Bible: Jeremiah!

Isaiah 53-60: The Penultimate Isaiah Post!

2011-03-06T21:47:00.000-08:00

Sometimes the chapter divisions in the Bible really throw you for a loop. I closed last time at the end of Isaiah 52 by mentioning

three verses about a servant who will act wisely, who will be exalted, who will be physically disfigured, but who will be very influential to many nations and many important people.

Now, we're running out of Isaiah at this point, and I knew there was supposed to be stuff in this Book that is thought (by Christians, anyway) to predict the coming of Christ, and frankly those three Verses had seemed a little thin on the ground. But it turns out that Chapter 53, after a puzzling first verse, continues this description of a servant of God that is to come, and you can really see where people make the connection with Christ:

4 Surely he took up our infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to his own way;
and the LORD has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
7 He was oppressed and afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
and as a sheep before her shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.

It continues on in this vein, and you can really see here perhaps more than at any other point hitherto some content in the Old Testament that really feels ~Christian~ in nature. Or rather, I can. I shouldn't put words in your mouth. I imagine there are many people to whom it felt pretty Christian all along, and many others -- Jews, say -- to whom Isaiah 53 doesn't introduce any special new Christian resonance. And mind you, it's not a perfect fit, as there is nothing here about this servant being God, or the son of God, or both; he is merely identified as a servant. Moreover, he is identified as something of a despised outcast, rather than as a successful, charismatic religious leader, the way I picture Christ to have been. But then, I may be unduly influenced by my memories of Jesus Christ Superstar in that regard.

And Then...

...suddenly it's over, and the Book of Isaiah is off on another topic, because like almost everything since the Chronicles of the kings Isaiah isn't so much a cohesive body of material as a seemingly haphazard collection of short essays on a handful of recurring topics. In this case, Isaiah 54 returns to the theme of the imminent greatness of the Israelites, with lots of odd metaphors involving the many children of barren women, and the confident expansion of one's tent, and city walls with foundations of sapphires. Chapter 55 continues in an upbeat vein, with an invitation to everyone to come and, essentially, join God's Awesome spiritual party.

Chapter 55 is also remarkable for suggesting two memorable aspects of the nature of God. First, He doesn't think like us:

8 For my thoughts are not your thoughts.... 9 As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

cf. the common idea that God's creation of humanity in our image, in our likeness (from the first day of class, back in July 2006!) means that we do, in some sense, think alike, or at least have some sort of common cognitive frame of reference. Does God think kind of like me, only a whole lot smarter? Isaiah says no. Then there is also this interesting passage in which speech seems coupled with intention and action. Speech-act theorists, I suggest you sit up and take note! [rimshot]

10 As the rain and the snow
come down from heaven,
and do not return to it
without watering the earth
and making it bud and flourish,
so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater,
11 so is my word that goes out from my mouth:
It will not return to me empty,
but will accomplish what I desire
and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

Isaiah 56 is for the most part a discussion of how you don't have to be descended from the Jewish patriarchs to participate in the worship of God, nor to be a family man: foreigners and eunuchs too, if they follow the practices of the law, will enjoy God's favor. But then there is a transition at Isaiah 56:9 to an angry denunciation of an Israel populated by idol worshipers and adulterers. And there's no doubt about it; the constant abrupt shifts between descriptions of God's love for and promises of blessings for Israel and his wrath toward and brutal punishments of Israel are among the most prominent and also, frankly, the most disturbing elements of the Bible to this point, 555 pages in. But in this case, at least, the effect is magnified by the odd system of organization; if Isaiah 56:9-12 were numbered as the first four Verses of Isaiah 57 -- which it really is, textually -- at least the sudden shift of mood wouldn't seem quite as arbitrary.

Isaiah 58 is a warning against worshiping in form but without the proper spirit of devotion. Specifically, it warns of fulfilling the obligations of fasting, but without a spirit of sacrifice toward others, particularly the needy.

Isaiah 59 is in large part a catalog of how awful and unworthy people are of God's affection, and then a brief discussion of a "Redeemer" that will come to punish the wrongdoers. If this is the same "servant" we were talking about back in Chapter 53, he no longer sounds like Christ; this redeemer is a fearful military figure who will repay wrath to his enemies and retribution to his foes (18), a powerful force in the material world who will come like a pent-up flood. (19)

And finally, in Isaiah 60, we return to what I have been calling Isaiah's "Israel-triumphant mode," a time when Israel will very rapidly be made a mighty, powerful, and prosperous nation, with peace within its borders and enemies weak and shattered. As always, this vision seems a radical contrast from that of the Israel that was being so mightily punished for its wickedness just three chapters back. Then, too, the two chapters in-between have not necessarily had much to do with either vision. So, although it has not been as much of a line-to-line hodgepodge as Psalms or Proverbs were, Isaiah has certainly been more of an omnibus than a coherent line of narrative, or argument, or anything else. Maybe I'm just too linear in my own thinking to be receptive to Isaiah? This might be true.

NEXT: Ultimate Isaiah, or, Bring on the Jeremiads!

Isaiah 47-52: The Antepunultimate Isaiah Post!

2011-02-27T16:29:00.000-08:00

Isaiah 47: More prophesy from Isaiah, of course, this time an extended metaphor predicting the fall of Babylon. The mighty empire to the east is characterized as a young woman who dabbles in the supernatural, and Isaiah gives her what-for for 15 verses to let her know that, though she’s had a good run up to now, she’s due for big trouble ahead.

Two points of detail, though. At the beginning of the – shall we call it a rant? – the anthropomorphized Babylon is described as a “Virgin Daughter,” yet by the midpoint she is being threatened with widowhood and the death of her children. Well, I have learned not to look for consistency in Isaiah. More interesting, perhaps, is a footnote to the effect that the word “Babylonians” might actually refer to the Chaldeans. Apparently we’re not sure. But somebody was doomed, that’s for sure.

Isaiah 48: Isaiah the Prophet speaks on behalf of God about how stubborn the Israelites are for not listening to prophets, and about how his prophets are always right. God has refined the Israelites, he says, through affliction.

In the second part of the passage, there are odd things going on with the quotation marks, and I’m unsure what is the Book of Isaiah reporting on events, Isaiah talking, Isaiah reporting what God is saying, and what is God quoting things he said in the past. The upshot seems to be that God is going to destroy the Babylonians (or Chaldeans), and also that the Israelites should flee from the Babylonians. If this is confusing, there is also some tension between the notion that God has intentionally refined the Israelites through affliction in order to demonstrate his might and glory, as has just been announced in verse 10, and a long passage (verses 17-19) that the Israelites would have had an awesome deal, if they’d just followed instructions.

The chapter ends with a stand-alone verse, the awesome and familiar quote “There is no peace,” says the Lord, “for the wicked” (22).

Isaiah 49: A longish chapter in full-bore Israel-triumphant mode, prophesying that Israel will become a nation of enormous prosperity, an example and inspiration to other peoples, that you may bring my salvation to the ends of the earth. (7) The dominance of Israel shown here gets a little over-the-top, as the kings and queens of the Gentiles prostrate themselves before Israelites to lick the dust at their feet (23) and the enemies of Israel are forced to drink their own blood and drink their own wine. (26) Well, it’s the Bible! It’s a violent book!

Isaiah 50: This short chapter begins with a couple of odd metaphors about suffering. The gist is, if I’m reading this right, that God is capable of saving you from any mishap, but may choose not to do so if you are proud or sinful; ergo, if you are in trouble it’s your own damn fault. From Verses 4 to 9, Isaiah the Prophet talks about how awesome he is for continuing to pass on the messages that God gives him every morning, despite that people don’t always believe him and often make fun of him for it. In Verses 10 and 11, he closes with another metaphor to the effect that anybody who makes decisions based on anything except the will of God – as expressed by Isaiah the Prophet, naturally – will suffer eternal torment.

Isaiah 51: Another chapter in full Israel-triumphant mode, promising imminent and everlasting peace, prosperity, and political dominance for Israel. Never again, Isaiah says that God says, will the Israelites drink from the goblet of my wrath…. I will put it into the hands of your tormentors. (22-23) Again – because I think this is a really important point in evaluating Isaiah’s cred as a prophet -- The Lord will surely comfort Zion… he will make her deserts like Eden, her wastelands like the garden of the Lord. No more troubles for the Israelites, says Isaiah. Sometime in the late 700s B.C.

Isaiah 52: A puzzling chapter, in which Isaiah predicts the triumph of Israel, then suddenly encourages the people to Depart, depart, go out from there! (11), without really making clear why it’s important to leave or where everybody’s going.

The chapter closes with three verses about a servant who will act wisely, who will be exalted, who will be physically disfigured, but who will be very influential to many nations and many important people. I’m guessing that much will be made of this passage down the road.

NEXT -- the Penultimate Isaiah Post

Isaiah 42-46: O, Hai Blog

2011-02-13T17:35:00.000-08:00

Right, so where were we?

The book of Isaiah continues with the teachings of this great prophet of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. Unfortunately, he continues to impress this naïve reader as at best a ranting enthusiast, at worst a genuine lunatic. The effect is only heightened by dipping back in after an inexplicable half-year absence, right into the thick of things.

Isaiah 42

Verses 1-4 introduce the Servant of the Lord, a soft-spoken messianic figure, but verses 5-9 go off on a different tangent altogether, reminding the Israelites that they are supposed to be a good example for all of humankind, and reaffirming (as is so often reaffirmed) that idol worship is a big no-no. Verses 10-13 are a Psalm, encouraging various communities to raise their voices in songs of praise and joy, because God will assure their military success. Verses 14-17 represent God’s intention both to lavish destruction on the Earth and to lead people to enlightenment, as long as they don’t worship idols. Verses 18 to 25 assert that things go bad for Israel because it’s God’s punishment for sin. In short, in a higgledy-piggledy sort of way, Chapter 42 brings us right back in where we left off. Say what you like about Isaiah, he knew how to stay on-message.

Isaiah 43

Verses 1 through 21 are about God’s love for the Israelites, who are precious and honored in [His] sight. (4) Fear not, God is given to say, for I have redeemed you (1).

Verses 22 through 28 are about God’s anger at the Israelites, who do not properly conduct the rituals he laid out for them. Even He, who has infinite love for them, will therefore condemn them to destruction and humiliation.

Isaiah knew how to stay on-message, but he doesn’t seem to have had much of a feel for irony.

Isaiah 44

Verses 1 through 5 are a continuation of Chapter 43, and now the message is not to worry about the destruction and humiliation, because God intends to bless later generations; Verse 5 speaks vaguely again of a possible Messianic figure.

Verses 6 through 23 take aim at idols, and for the first time that I remember employs an interesting rational argument. (Generally, up to this point, there have been three takes on idols: (1) those other gods are nowhere NEAR as powerful as God; (2) obviously idols are fake, because God is the only God; and (3) it’s a bad idea to mess with idols, because God says not to.) Here, Isaiah goes into great detail about where an idol comes from, carved out of a block of wood or a stone. He points out that, from a wood carving, the chips will probably be used as kindling, and asks why the rest of the block of wood should be more special than the kindling part. It’s fairly clever, and drives home the message that worshiping human idols is just silly superstition.

The remainder of the Chapter is God reaffirming his greatness and power in all things. This, too, has been a very common theme throughout Isaiah.

Isaiah 45

This entire Chapter is Isaiah transmitting, if that’s the right word, a speech from God. It strikes several time on familiar key themes: God is very powerful, God made the Earth, there are no other Gods, idols are very bad. This Chapter is in what you might call the Israel-triumphant mode, with various nationalities foreseen as subject to the Israelites; the Israel-punished mode is pretty much absent for a good page and a half.

Individuals who carve idols or who shoot their mouth off to God are in trouble, though. Do you question me about my children, or give me orders about the work of my hands? (11) God asks. It’s a rhetorical question, but the drift is clearly that one ought not ask such things.

Does the clay say to the potter,
“What are you making?”
Does your work say,
“He has not hands”?

It’s a stern metaphor, and it is perhaps unfair to point out that although the answer is certainly no – clay is nothing if not humble – there is also no mandate for clay to follow a rigorous legal, religious, and ethical code lain down by its potter.

By the by, Both Chapters 45 and 44 make specific references to God using “Cyrus” as an instrument of his will, and in Chapter 46 God says that he will bring from a far-off land, a man to fulfill my purpose (46). This Cyrus fellow is, if I am not mistaken, an emperor of the Persians, who was at the time a very powerful actor in the human community. Isaiah’s explicit references to a known contemporary figure, whom he sees as a puppet carrying out the will of God in real time, certainly makes one look again to those passages which, ever so vaguely, seem to prophesy a messianic figure sometime in the future. Maybe those passages, too, were just referring to Cyrus.

Chapter 46

Primarily another anti-idol Chapter, Isaiah points out another problem with idol worship: what do idols actually DO, anyway? They just sit there! They can’t even talk back when you talk to them! So, here we have another and, I must say, really rather reasonable demonstration that idols are just so much empty superstition.

This Chapter remains in Israel-triumphant mode, and its final words are “I will grant salvation to Zion, my splendor to Israel.”

NEXT TIME: I will try not to let a half-year go by.

Isaiah 35-41: Biblical Reruns

2010-07-24T03:41:00.000-07:00

Chapter 35: This Chapter seems to carry on from Isaiah 34, which was largely about the destruction of Moab in a “day of vengeance” (8). But Isaiah is back on his Utopian theme here, describing an abundant landscape, a healing of the sick, lame, and blind, and the building of a holy highway, a safe and convenient road that only righteous people will be able to travel on.

Reruns!

Chapter 36: Up to this point, the Book of Isaiah has been rather loosely structured, one prophecy following another with very little context. Suddenly, in Chapter 36, a narrative breaks out! It’s the story of how the Assyrian king Sennacherib attacks Jerusalem and… hey, waitaminute! We’ve read this story before! Back in 2 Kings, when we were reading about King Hezekiah! In fact, Isaiah 36 is essentially identical to 2 Kings 18:17-37, with only a couple of words changed.

Chapter 37: Isaiah 37 is the same as 2 Kings 19. What we're talking about, incidentally, is the story of how an Assyrian commander offers the population of Jerusalem a choice between assimilation and extinction, but God intervenes by slaying 185,000 Assyrian soldiers in their sleep.

Chapter 38: The first three verses of Isaiah 38, about King Hezekiah’s illness and Isaiah’s prophecy first of his death, then of his recovery – which is typical Isaiah, prophesying both ways – are identical to the first three verses of 2 Kings 20. Then, Isaiah 38:4-8 is essentially a paraphrase (or vice versa, I suppose) or 2 Kings 20:3-11. Then we’re back into original material, with a long passage of thanks and humility said to have been written by Hezekiah after his illness.

Chapter 39: Isaiah 39 is the same as 2 Kings 20:12-19. It is a darkly funny story, really, in which the King of Babylon sends an envoy to Hezekiah, having heard he hadn’t been feeling well. Hezekiah, pleased by the attention, gives the envoys a tour of all the riches and treasures of his kingdom. Afterwards, Isaiah asks Hezekiah what he showed the representatives of the powerful, expansive neighboring empire, and Hezekiah, perhaps not the sharpest tool in the shed, says “There is nothing among my treasures I did not show them” (4). Then Isaiah makes a prophecy to the effect that – I paraphrase here – “We’re screwed. Babylon is going to conquer us and haul us and all our loot back to their capital.” This is a prophecy that turns out to be correct, but it would probably not have been a difficult prophecy for a savvy thinker of the time to have come up with, having heard or Hezekiah’s indiscretion.

New material!

Chapter 40: A Psalm-like meditation on the greatness of God and the insignificance of humans, nations, and the material world in comparison with Him.

Chapter 41: A sort of pep talk, delivered first-person in the voice of God, indicating that He will protect Israel and reduce all of its enemies to ashes. Also, a challenge to other gods and their priests and idols to try to show their worth and power by predicting the future.

Isaiah 25-34: More From Isaiah

2010-07-17T19:07:00.000-07:00

I know very little about the long, long process in which decisions were made about what material is in the Bible and what material is not in the Bible. But as I read, I am always thinking about what an odd, fragmentary, and disorganized collection of documents it is. The stereotypical evangelist who encourages people to regard the capital-B Bible as a small-b bible, a coherent and comprehensible guide to theology, metaphysics, and/or right behavior, would be in serious trouble if the flock actually tried to engage with the whole of this massive and massively opaque text. Well, either that, or I’m way behind the curve in terms of my reading aptitude.

Take the case of Isaiah. He is regarded, I gather, as one of the great prophets of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and he is given a huge amount of Biblical real estate -- about 5% of the Christian Bible, in fact. But now that we are well into his section, we see that it consists of little more than an elaborate precedent for the preacher of fire and brimstone. He has three basic messages: 1 – Israel is doomed, 2 – Israel (or the remnants of Israel) is going to have a utopian golden age, and 3 – all of the other nations of the Earth are doomed (although there are exceptions here, too). God will inflict endless punishments on Israel because his goodness, mercy, and might are not being worshiped in the proper fashion.

The prophet Isaiah is, in short, incoherent. He is also tedious and repetitive, which I suppose doesn’t disqualify him from a book of religious texts, but it’s hardly a recommendation. He seems at times a little crazy, especially when he says that God told him to run around naked. And, to cap it off, his prophecies are short-term affairs – he is explicitly interested in and making predictions about the current events of the day, “the day” being nearly 3000 years ago. So why is this guy in my Bible, which was printed in 1983? What am I supposed to get from him that will enhance my understanding of God or make me a better person? When State Senators from conservative states announce their literal belief of every word in the Bible, are they saying that they believe there is a meaningful literal truth, or even a meaningful abstracted truth, to be found in the swirling, rash thunderings of Jerusalem’s naked prophet? I am honestly baffled about this, and would be very interested to learn what it is people are seeing in here that I am not.

But enough of my frustration. Here’s the rundown:

Chapter 25: Isaiah praises God for his military power and mercy for the poor. He predicts a wonderful utopian age for all peoples – except for those of Moab, who will be trampled under him as straw is trampled down in the manure. (10)

Chapter 26: A song of praise that will be sung when the utopian age comes. It would not be out of place is Psalms. It includes this odd passage: But your dead will live; their bodies will rise. You who dwell in the dust, wake up and shout for joy. Your dew is like the dew of the morning; the earth will give birth to her dead. (19) Taken at face value, Isaiah seems to be prophesying zombies here.

Chapter 27: An especially difficult chapter. It begins with a prophecy of God killing a sea monster. Then there is an unattributed quotation – another song? – followed by what seems to be a prediction of Israelite world domination after God humbles all of the enemy nations. But it is not entirely clear.

Chapter 28: A prediction of God’s destruction of the people of Ephraim, who are all a bunch of drunks. Abuse of people who don’t respect prophets. A complicated agricultural metaphor, the point of which escapes me.

Chapter 29: Prediction of doom for Jerusalem. More abuse of people who don’t understand prophets. The assertion that once Jerusalem is good and humbled, the good Israelites who have proper respect for God and understanding of prophets will be very well off.

Chapter 30: Not unlike Chapter 29, with some interesting particular points. First of all, there is some added abuse for Israelites who “go down to Egypt.” Isaiah is living at a time when the Israelite kingdoms are being squeezed between Egypt and the Fertile Crescent empires, and no doubt emigration to Egypt seemed like a smart, safe choice to people with the resources or marketable skills to make it a viable choice. Isaiah and other Israelites staying behind would obviously resent the outward flow of wealth and talent.

Isaiah 30:9-14 is a memorable example of Isaiah’s complaints about how people don’t listen to prophets:

9 These are rebellious people, deceitful children,
children unwilling to listen to the LORD's instruction.

10 They say to the seers,
"See no more visions!"
and to the prophets,
"Give us no more visions of what is right!
Tell us pleasant things,
prophesy illusions.

11 Leave this way,
get off this path,
and stop confronting us
with the Holy One of Israel!"

12 Therefore, this is what the Holy One of Israel says:
"Because you have rejected this message,
relied on oppression
and depended on deceit,

13 this sin will become for you
like a high wall, cracked and bulging,
that collapses suddenly, in an instant.

14 It will break in pieces like pottery,
shattered so mercilessly
that among its pieces not a fragment will be found
for taking coals from a hearth
or scooping water out of a cistern."

That this can be read as a self-serving thing for Isaiah to say is perhaps too obvious to bear mentioning.

Finally, the chapter ends with a description of something that sounds kind of like the traditional notion of “Hell” – the first allusion to this concept I remember seeing here in the Good Book:

33 Topheth has long been prepared;
it has been made ready for the king.
Its fire pit has been made deep and wide,
with an abundance of fire and wood;
the breath of the LORD,
like a stream of burning sulfur,
sets it ablaze.

Of course, it’s typical to think of Hell – if this is indeed supposed to be Hell – as tended by “The Devil,” not by the breath of the Lord. Perhaps this will become clearer as we go.

Chapter 31: More invective against emigration:

1 Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help,
who rely on horses,
who trust in the multitude of their chariots
and in the great strength of their horsemen,
but do not look to the Holy One of Israel,
or seek help from the LORD.

Chapter 32: A long series of tautologies: the eyes of those who see will no longer be closed (3) and the fool speaks folly (6) and so on. A culturally-specific style of rhetoric, perhaps? Then, the women of Jerusalem are enjoined to begin mourning now for a devastation that will occur within the year, which is described in a long torrent of bleak imagery.

Chapter 33: Another Chapter that would be unobtrusive in Psalms. Praise of God’s power, predictions of woe for the unrighteous, promises of safety and prosperity for the righteous, and vague metaphors implying the eventual triumph of Jerusalem.

Chapter 34: An announcement that God is angry with all of the nations, followed by a specific prediction of doom for Edom. Eleven verses of imagery describing just how very desolate Edom is going to be, once God is done with it.

NEXT: More Isaiah!

Isaiah 17-24: Bad News for [Your Kingdom Here]!!

2010-06-26T17:04:00.000-07:00

Isaiah 17

Predictions -- an "oracle," actually, although that word seems oddly Greek-mythological to be popping up here -- of the doom of Damascus. Chockablock with vague details and metaphors.

Isaiah 18

Apparently, threats of agricultural failure to the people along the rivers of Cush,

which sends envoys by sea
in papyrus boats over the water.
Go, swift messengers,
to a people tall and smooth-skinned,
to a people feared far and wide,
an aggressive nation of strange speech,
whose land is divided by rivers. (2)

Isaiah 19

Predictions of civil war and external conquest of Egypt, in which all classes of society will suffer. In that day the Egyptians will be like women (10), which is to say fearful and cringing. Shortly after this, the Egyptians will convert to worship of God, and God will respond by striking them with a plague and then healing them (He works, I have been told, in mysterious ways). Egypt, Assyria, and Israel will all live in peace, all worshiping together.

Isaiah 20

In the shorter term future, Assyria will lay a beating on Egypt and Cush and lead their captives away with buttocks bared. This particular prophecy, incidentally, was made during a period when Isaiah, the great Old Testament prophet, was going around naked because God had told him to (2). Does this enhance his credibility? You make the call!

Isaiah 21

Mostly rambling and, frankly, not-especially-coherent prophecies of colorful bad doings in Babylon, Edom, and Arabia. It ends, however, with a highly specific prophecy that Kedar will be destroyed as a major power within one year. Hmm. I don't know whether that one came true or not. I'm pretty sure Kedar isn't a major power now.

Isaiah 22

Another prophecy packed with strange and vague analogies and details, but the upshot is that Jerusalem will be doomed because of a combination of poor leadership, outdated defenses, and of course the wrath of God. God, in this prophecy, is disappointed by the lack of a proper mood of despair in the populace, and has formulated the city's downfall accordingly.

12 The Lord, the LORD Almighty,
called you on that day
to weep and to wail,
to tear out your hair and put on sackcloth.
13 But see, there is joy and revelry,
slaughtering of cattle and killing of sheep,
eating of meat and drinking of wine!
"Let us eat and drink," you say,
"for tomorrow we die!"

Isaiah 23

God will crush the prosperous merchant town of Tyre to punish pride. After seventy years go by, though, she will return to her hire as prostitute (17) -- the general vibe in the Old Testament is never exactly pro-business -- except from then on all of the profits will be set aside for God and his followers.

Isaiah 24

OK, no doubt you are comfortably pitying those hapless MiddleEasterners of millenia back whom these prophecies all seem to menace. But don't get too comfortable.

1 See, the LORD is going to lay waste the earth
and devastate it;
he will ruin its face
and scatter its inhabitants-
2 it will be the same
for priest as for people,
for master as for servant,
for mistress as for maid,
for seller as for buyer,
for borrower as for lender,
for debtor as for creditor.
3 The earth will be completely laid waste
and totally plundered.
The LORD has spoken this word.

Details follow, but "completely laid waste" pretty much covers it.

17 Terror and pit and snare await you,
O people of the earth.
18 Whoever flees at the sound of terror
will fall into a pit;
whoever climbs out of the pit
will be caught in a snare.
The floodgates of the heavens are opened,
the foundations of the earth shake.

And as this happens,

23 The moon will be abashed, the sun ashamed;
for the LORD Almighty will reign
on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem,
and before its elders, gloriously.

Although who will be left to reign over and whether anyone will be around to appreciate all the glory is and open question.

Whether Isaiah was wearing any clothes while making this particular prophecy is not specified.

Next: I don't know, but I'm guessing that doom is involved.

Isaiah 11-16: There Goes the Neighborhood

2010-06-19T16:07:00.000-07:00

Isaiah 11-12 offer more of what is I guess the roots of the messianic tradition in Judaism and Christianity. It begins by saying, famously I think, that "a shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse," and describes a figure of great wisdom who shall usher in an era of peace and glory, striking the earth with the rod of his mouth and slaying the wicked with the breath of his lips (11:4). Under this guy's leadership, everyone will get along; the wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat (11:6), and the cow will feed with the bear. (11:7) All of the rivalries within the Israelite kingdoms will vanish, and everyone will live together in peace.

Well, everyone who's anyone, that is. While the Israelites are enjoying their love-fest,

14 They will swoop down on the slopes of Philistia to the west;
together they will plunder the people to the east.
They will lay hands on Edom and Moab,
and the Ammonites will be subject to them.

So it's not really a vision of universal peace so much as one of God trying for the umpteenth time to get his chosen people to get their ducks in a row and to lay off of the Azeroth worship. Isaiah 12 is basically a suggested song of thanks and praise, ready for use when the big day comes.

Bad News for the Neighbors

Throughout the first dozen chapters of Isaiah we've seen a real duality of predictions concerning Israel. In some cases, Isaiah is predicting some serious suffering for the Israelites, in other cases he's predicting an eventual, if possibly rather far off, happy ending.

Beginning with Chapter 13, Isaiah turns his attention from the Israelites themselves to their neighbors and enemies. In these cases, the predictions are pretty much always grim, grim, grim. The twenty-two verses of Chapter 13 itself spell out the future for Babylon, and man, it doesn't look good.

9 See, the day of the LORD is coming
—a cruel day, with wrath and fierce anger—
to make the land desolate
and destroy the sinners within it.

15 Whoever is captured will be thrust through;
all who are caught will fall by the sword.
16 Their infants will be dashed to pieces before their eyes;
their houses will be looted and their wives ravished.

19 Babylon, the jewel of kingdoms,
the glory of the Babylonians' pride,
will be overthrown by God
like Sodom and Gomorrah.
20 She will never be inhabited
or lived in through all generations;
no Arab will pitch his tent there,
no shepherd will rest his flocks there.
21 But desert creatures will lie there,
jackals will fill her houses;
there the owls will dwell,
and there the wild goats will leap about.
22 Hyenas will howl in her strongholds,
jackals in her luxurious palaces.
Her time is at hand,
and her days will not be prolonged.

All of this is to be regarded as a good thing. In Isaiah 14, Verses 4 through 23 are -- explicitly -- as a long and, it must be said, rather smug taunt to be hurled at the King of Babylon when all of the dire events list above transpire. No, really. Look it up if you don't believe me. (The Bible has all sorts of weird stuff in it. How could I ever have come up with something like that?)

The rest of Chapter 14 is a prophecy of doom for Assyria...

I will crush the Assyrian in my land;
on my mountains I will trample him down.
His yoke will be taken from my people,
and his burden removed from their shoulders. (25)

...followed by a prophecy of doom against the Phillistines...

Wail, O gate! Howl, O city!
Melt away, all you Philistines!
A cloud of smoke comes from the north,
and there is not a straggler in its ranks. (31)

And Isaiah 15 & 16 are prophecies of doom against Moab....

1 An oracle concerning Moab:
Ar in Moab is ruined,
destroyed in a night!
Kir in Moab is ruined,
destroyed in a night!
2 Dibon goes up to its temple,
to its high places to weep;
Moab wails over Nebo and Medeba.
Every head is shaved
and every beard cut off.
3 In the streets they wear sackcloth;
on the roofs and in the public squares
they all wail,
prostrate with weeping.

5 My heart cries out over Moab;
her fugitives flee as far as Zoar,
as far as Eglath Shelishiyah.
They go up the way to Luhith,
weeping as they go;
on the road to Horonaim
they lament their destruction.

...and I note, looking ahead, that other kingdoms are lined up for prophecies of doom as the reading continues.

Biblical Prophecies in Long-Term Perspective

It's tough not to read these ancient prophecies of the future of the Middle East and not think about contemporary events in the region. And as you can see from the magazines at your supermarket's check-out line, any can can mangle the prophecies and the events together in such a way that, say, Isaiah 13 must be about the 2002 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Well. I strongly recommend against getting too excited about this kind of interpretation. For one thing, the details don't line up with known historical events in anything but the most tenuous fashion, and that seems important when you are evaluating prophecy. Secondly, there is every appearance that Isaiah himself was expecting all that he predicted to happen pretty much right away -- indeed, he specifies that the fall of the Moabites will happen within three years of his vision (16:14), not 3000 years.

But let's say you want to grant Isaiah a great deal of poetic licence about the details of his prophecies, and suppose too that he simply didn't understand the depth of time involved in the visions that God sent him. In that case, the problem is just that in any place that is continuously inhabited for thousands of years, there will be some dark days and some golden years. Sure, Babylon fell. It has fallen lots of times, up to and including the suffering of today's Baghdad. Every very old city has fallen from time to time. Take "Babylon" out of the prophecy and replace it with "Paris" or "Rome" or "Japan" or "Cuba," and Isaiah's vision works just as well.

In other words, if your prophecies survive long enough, it's easy to be a successful prophet. I, Michael5000, predict that the city that you are currently living in will be struck by great sorrow and destruction sometime in the next 3000 years. And I'm right! I double-dog guarantee it. Sorry to be the bringer of bad news. (If it makes you feel any better, there will also be an era of peace and prosperity.)

NEXT: More prophecies of doom!

Isaiah 8-10: Prophecies of Punishments

2010-06-13T03:30:00.000-07:00

Isaiah's fiery sermonizing in these three chapters is very much akin to what we have seen so far in his Book: dire predictions of the doom that awaits Judah at the hands of the Assyrians.

At the beginning of Chapter 8, Isaiah goes to someone called "the prophetess" -- her identity is not further explained -- and she conceived and gave birth to a son. He announces that before the child learns to speak, Israel will be destroyed by the Assyrian Empire as punishment for its centuries of failure to toe the line. So, I was a little fast off the blocks last week with the idea that Isaiah 7:14-15 was a flawed prophecy of the coming of Christ; it turns out that this is a different virgin birth. Apparently they are a little more common than I realized.

Isaiah is a demanding preacher, asking of his listeners two things that are not easily reconciled: to turn to God as their protector and to be in awe of the might and wrath of God as he destroys their society.

13 The LORD Almighty is the one you are to regard as holy,
he is the one you are to fear,
he is the one you are to dread,
14 and he will be a sanctuary;
but for both houses of Israel he will be
a stone that causes men to stumble
and a rock that makes them fall.
And for the people of Jerusalem he will be
a trap and a snare.

Or again:

17 I will wait for the LORD,
who is hiding his face from the house of Jacob.
I will put my trust in him.

To put it simply: "God is going to inflict terrible punishments on you; turn to God for comfort and protection." It is a hard message.

Isaiah 9: A Happy Ending! Someday.

Isaiah 9 returns, at first, to a theme we saw earlier where a time of permanent peace and prosperity is promised for unspecified future times. Slaves will be freed and all of the military gear will be destroyed. Why? Here's why:

6 For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given,
and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Is this a prediction of the coming of Christ? Handel apparently thought so, and nailed one of the great choral settings of all time in the Messiah. Having been burned last week, though, I am a little suspicious about predictions involving infants. It's worth mentioning, as well, that the government was in fact never on the shoulders of the notariously antiauthoritarian Jesus Christ, so except for the self-fulfilling aspects the prophecy does not actually fit the facts. But I suppose I'm getting ahead of the story, here.

In any event, the prophecy of the child to come is only two verses of interlude, after which we return to God's fury at the Israelites:

12 his anger is not turned away,
his hand is still upraised.
13 But the people have not returned to him who struck them,
nor have they sought the LORD Almighty.

Therefore,

19 By the wrath of the LORD Almighty
the land will be scorched
and the people will be fuel for the fire;
no one will spare his brother.

Isaiah 10: Being Assyrian Won't Help

The Assyrians, say God, are the rod of my anger, and as we've discussed his plan is to use their military expansion to show the Israelites what's what. And indeed, they swoop in and crush Israel proper on more or less the timeline anticipated by Isaiah. Judah is a different matter, and staggers along in an increasingly decrepit state for several more generations before it is eventually destroyed.

Does this mean that the Assyrians have found favor in God's eyes? Why no, it does not.

12 When the Lord has finished all his work against Mount Zion and Jerusalem, he will say, "I will punish the king of Assyria for the willful pride of his heart and the haughty look in his eyes.

So God's intent, then, is to use the Assyrians and then dispose of them as well, destroying their army with disease and their sacred artwork with fire. When that happens, a tiny remnant of the Israelites will be able to escape from Assyrian slavery and return to their homeland. Isaiah 10:20-34 goes into great detail about the return of the Israelites from captivity, just as we have already seen in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah would happen a few generations after the fall of Judah. It is suggested, although not stated, that this return to the Promised Land is the utopian future promised by passages like the first verses of Isaiah 9. But that clearly can't be right, because you and I live after the end of the Babylonian exile and we are still waiting for our universal peace and prosperity. At least, I think we are.

NEXT: 56 more Chapters of Isaiah! But not all at once!

Isaiah 5 – 7: Prophecies and Problems

2010-06-06T06:00:00.000-07:00

Isaiah 5: Wine and Woe

Isaiah 5 begins with the “Song of the Vineyard,” which starts out nicely as a poem about how My loved one had a vineyard on a fertile hillside (1) and how he put a lot of work into the planting and the farm buildings and such. But the grapes turn out sour, so of course he destroys the farm and its buildings and renders it a wasteland where nothing can grow. This is not a variation on the “sour grapes” fable, but rather an analogy. Isaiah spells it out: the vineyard is Judah, and because the Israelites have turned out so badly, God is going to tear down his farm.

The remainder of the chapter is an extensive list of people to whom woe will come. These include:

Partiers -- Woe to those who rise early in the morning to run after their drinks, who stay up late at night till they are inflamed with wine (11)
Skeptics -- to those who who say “Let God hurry, let him hasten his work so we may see it….” (19)
Barflies and Bartenders -- Woe to those who are heroes at drinking wine and champions at mixing drinks… (22)
Perjurers -- who acquit the guilty for a bribe, but deny justice to the innocent.” (23)
Wiseasses -- Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight. (21)

I’m a little nervous about that last one.

There is also a strong note of hostility to the wealthy in Isaiah. The list of ne’er-do-wells begins, in fact, with

Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land.
The Lord Almighty has declared in my hearing: “Surely the great houses will become desolate,
the fine mansions left without occupants.” (9)

So if you had been inclined to dismiss Isaiah’s prophecies, keep in mind that not only did Judah in fact fall to foreign nations (as he predicts in 5:26-30), but he even seems to have anticipated the current crisis in the luxury housing market.

Isaiah 6: Whence Isaiah?

The Book of Isaiah didn't really have an introduction; it just began with Isaiah laying down some prophecy and woe. In Isaiah 6 we back up a little, and Isaiah tells us how he got his job. Apparently a few years back, he had a powerful vision of God and an entourage in the temple. During this experience, an angel – well, a “seraph” – put a hot coal in his mouth, and told him that this atoned for his sins. Then God charged him with the following mission:
9 He said, "Go and tell this people:
" 'Be ever hearing, but never understanding;
be ever seeing, but never perceiving.'
10 Make the heart of this people calloused;
make their ears dull
and close their eyes.
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
hear with their ears,
understand with their hearts,
and turn and be healed."
He is supposed to do this until Judah and Israel are destroyed, at which point a better Israel will emerge from the metaphorical or literal ashes of the first.

Now, I understand the idea here. God has a long-term plan that needs to be carried out, and things need to happen according to plan so that all will turn out for the best, or at least the way God wants it to turn out. The interesting thing, though, is that to judge from the preceding five chapters, Isaiah is doing the exact opposite of what God told him to do. He’s actually warning the people, trying to get them to mend their ways! He wants them to perceive and understand! So, I’m either missing the joke or God and Isaiah are not working from the same playbook. Indeed, Isaiah’s actions taken at face value suggest that he’s trying to protect Israel from God. That’s some serious hubris!

Isaiah 7: Two Prophesies About Israel

Isaiah has often predicted that Judah would eventually be swallowed up by its larger neighbors, which is in fact what happened. In Chapter 7, Judah is threatened by two an alliance of Aram and Ephraim, and the king – Ahaz, at this point – is pretty nervous about the situation. Isaiah goes to him and tells him that God says not to worry, Aram and Ephraim are small potatoes. It’s Egypt and Assyria that Judah needs to be concerned about; they will eventually crush Judah, but not quite yet. (It’s worth mentioning here that the growing power of Egypt and Assyria, and the likelihood of eventual annexation, must have pretty obvious to any local leader in the eastern Mediterranean in the time of Isaiah. Not to knock his gift for prophecy or anything.) He also predicts that the agricultural land of the Israelites will eventually become uncultivated wilderness. (This is in part true, and a far less obvious outcome at the time.)

Isaiah gets annoyed at Ahaz over what seems like a minor point of order, and in what seems like frustration issues another, stranger prophesy:
the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel. 15 He will eat curds and honey when he knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right. 16 But before the boy knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, the land of the two kings you dread will be laid waste.
Huh! That is very interesting in two ways to a guy from a Christian background. First, it is highly interesting that we seem to have stumbled rather randomly on an explicit prediction of the coming of Jesus Christ. Secondly, it’s not a very good prediction of the coming of Jesus Christ. The timing is way off. Jesus won’t arrive until far too late to be a sign to Ahaz, or for that matter until centuries after the Assyrians haul the Israelites into Babylonian exile.

So, does Isaiah’s prophecy establish a direct link between Old and New Testament? Or – if we are to be strict and literal – does Isaiah’s prophecy necessarily require for its fulfillment a virgin birth sometime in the decade or so directly preceding the fall of Judah and the Babylonian exile? Mysteries!

NEXT: More similar mysteries, it looks like.

Isaiah 2-4: Judgement, Utopia, and Haughty Women

2010-05-30T09:00:00.000-07:00

Isaiah in the Last Days

So! Isaiah 2 continues as a further transcript of the speeches of, who else? Isaiah! And in Verses 1 through 5, he makes good his reputation as a prophet by doing some good old-fashioned prophesying. Specifically, he speaks about the "last days," and it is a happy vision of the entire world turning to the Lord's temple in Jerusalem for binding arbitration of all disputes. These end times will apparently be pretty peaceful, and it is in Verse 4 that we get the famous quote they will beat their swords into plowshares. All the countries of the world will voluntarily demilitarize. It is a nice vision, but I feel obliged to bring up an inherent issue of "last days" prophecies -- they can not be disproven. No longer how continuously the prophecy goes wrong, as long as there's anyone around to read the prophecy, it's easy enough to say "well, obviously it just isn't the last days yet."

And hold on, anyway, because Verses 6 through 22 are much darker. They speak of how the Lord is truly pissed off about superstitions, divination, paganism, idols, and unorthodoxy in general, and has a day in store for all the proud and lofty (12) when the arrogance of man will be brought low and the pride of men humbled. (17) When that day comes, says Isaiah, it will be best to throw away all you have and go hide in a cave.

Now, there's no indication of a timetable here, and the bit about the day of punishment comes after the bit about world peace, but I guess since the peace comes in the "last days," the punishment must by definition come before. Which brings up another problem with prophecy: he can be hard to tell if it has been fulfilled or not. The Earthquake of Lisbon, for instance, basically fulfills everything that Isaiah describes in Chapter 2. So, can we assume that (a) he was right and (b) we are over that hurdle now? Tough to say.

Isaiah 3 and 4

Next, Isaiah makes grim prophecies about the future of Judah and Jerusalem: See now, the Lord... is about to take from Jerusalem and Judah both supply and support.... (3:1) He details all manner of nasty things that will happen to the city and its inhabitants, and of course history has proved him right on this score many times over, although perhaps not as quickly as the "about to" would have implied. He enumerates many specifics, and makes clear that the badness will happen because of God's anger: The Lord enters into judgment against the elders and the leaders of his people: "It is you who have ruined my vineyard; the plunder from the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people and grinding the faces of the poor?" declares the Lord, the Lord Almighty. (3:14-15) That the punishment is itself a crushing and grinding of the faces of the people is kind of inexplicable, but that's the Old Testament for you.

Now, Isaiah is not what you would be likely to call a feminist. Here he is complaining about outrageous female behavior among the Israelites:

The Lord says,
"The women of Zion are haughty,
walking along with outstretched necks,
flirting with their eyes,
tripping along with mincing steps,
with ornaments jingling on their ankles." (3:16)

For this bad behavior, they are going to be punished with sores and all sorts of other bad business. Here's the run-down:

24 Instead of fragrance there will be a stench;
instead of a sash, a rope;
instead of well-dressed hair, baldness;
instead of fine clothing, sackcloth;
instead of beauty, branding.
25 Your men will fall by the sword,
your warriors in battle.
26 The gates of Zion will lament and mourn;
destitute, she will sit on the ground.

4:1 In that day seven women
will take hold of one man
and say, "We will eat our own food
and provide our own clothes;
only let us be called by your name.
Take away our disgrace!"

And then -- rather suddenly it seems to me -- everything will be great. Isaiah 4 promises happiness, bounty, and peace for the survivors of the above troubles. There will be shelter from the heat of the day and from rainstorms, and the living will be good, just as soon as God has cleansed Jerusalem with a spirit of judgement and a spirit of fire and been able to wash away the filth of the women of Zion. (4:5) So! Something to look forward to, here in the prophecies of Isaiah!

NEXT: There are, I believe, 60 or 66 Chapters of Isaiah, and from the looks of things so far we're in for a real rollercoaster of doom and utopia. Onward!

Isaiah 1: Meet Isaiah!

2010-05-24T19:25:00.000-07:00

So, I got transferred to a new job a few months ago, and between that and other items relating to home improvement and a million other things of no interest I have seriously lost traction with the Bible. Which is a real shame, as I had a lot of momentum going at the end of last year.

Truth be told, I have read the first chunk of the Book of Isaiah three times in the last few months. This time, I'm going to actually write something down. Whether this will kick off a stunning reemergence of Michael Reads the Bible as the best Bible blog that no one has ever heard of remains to be seen. But it can't hurt to move the ball forward a chapter.

The Book kicks off immediately with a vision concerning Judah and Jerusalem experienced by Isaiah. It is a pessimistic but rather familiar vision, condemning the Israelites for their chronic waywardness and promising punishment a-plenty if they don't shape up. But it was a little hard for me to focus on this at first because, well, who is Isaiah, and why is he having visions? There's no introductory material, so I had to look back in my notes. I found that way back in 2 Chronicles 29-32 we read about Hezekiah, a king of Judah who rediscovered the Laws of Moses after what appeared to be a period of religious decline and reinstated real, by-the-Book Judaism. Well, Isaiah was the High Priest while all of this was going on. That gives us a context, and suddenly it makes sense that Isaiah would be having visions about the undesireability of religious backsliding.

Isaiah's complaints are many and mostly pretty vague: he rails against corruption, evil, evil deeds, poor treatment of widows and orphans, and forsaking of the Lord. But the most focused point of attack is against religious unorthodoxy:

"The multitude of your sacrifices -- what are they to me?" says the Lord.
"I have more than enough of burnt offerings,
of rams and the fat of fattened animals;
I have no pleasure
in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats." (1:11)

So wait a minute! Does this mean that God is telling Isaiah that he wants the Israelites (we've gone back in time to back before the Babylonian exile, so we're not talking about "Jews" anymore, but "Israelites" again -- well, I guess technically we're talking about "Judeans," but let's not get finicky.) to give up animal sacrifice? Because that would actually be a radical reversal from the Laws of Moses, which are in large part all about animal sacrifice. And the answer is no, God isn't angry about sacrifice in general, just that sacrifice is being done wrong.

Stop bringing meaningless offerings!
Your incense is detestable to me.
New Moons, Sabbaths and convocations -- I cannot bear your evil assemblies.
Your New Moon festivals and your appointed feasts
my soul hates. (1:13-14)

The Israelites have, it seems, gone all new age! They have a bunch of unsanctioned festivals and are ignoring the offical ones, they are sacrificing the wrong way at the wrong places and times, and they've made up a bunch of crazy new stuff that you won't find in Moses. You will be ashamed, thunders Isaiah, because of the sacred oaks in which you have delighted. (1:29) And if they don't straighten up and fly right, says Isaiah, God will punish them mightily.

Back in 2 Chronicles, was read that after Hezekiah restored the Temple they weren't able to celebrate Passover the first year because nobody remembered how. Nobody understood the laws of ritual purity and cleanliness that are so central to the Laws of Moses, and a whole new generation of priests needed to be trained. Isaiah's initial rant lines up perfectly with this state of affairs. Whether Isaiah the priest and Hezekiah the king shared a common religious inspiration or at least a common agenda, or whether one of them had the other over a political barrel of some sort, is impossible to say. But, it seems like the religious and political leadership were very much on-message in this period of Judea's history.

NEXT: Hopefully relatively soon, we'll advance deeper into the Book of Isaiah. It's a long one, but hopefully we'll get this blog back into a rhythm! And by the end of the Book, I hope to be able to spell "Isaiah" without having to stop and check every time.

The Song of Songs

2010-01-26T21:09:00.000-08:00

Well, I had been looking forward to the Song of Solomon -- or what my translation turns out to call the "Song of Songs" -- for obvious reasons. It is, after all, what a learned friend of mine recently referred to as "sexy time in the Bible." Yet, although it's never really my intent in this project to out-and-out critique the Bible -- it's not like I'm reviewing Avatar here -- I have to say that the Song of Songs is really something of a disappointment.

First of all, it is not nearly as sexy as its reputation. It's a poetic dialogue between the "Lover," the "Beloved," and a chorus of "Friends," and the presence of the Friends puts a fairly demure cap on any steaminess. There are a few vague gestures towards getting a little tipsy and getting out of town for the night, but the bulk of the dialogue consists of our lovers crafting various metaphors for each other or each other's body parts. Breasts are like twin baby gazelles, or towers, or clusters of fruit. Hair is like a flock of goats, or black as a raven, or like a royal tapestry, or like the fetters of a king. These are easy kinds of lists to make, and frankly a lot of the metaphors don't really transition well into the 21st Century:

Your temples behind your veil are like the halves of a pomegranate.
Your neck is like the tower of David, built with elegance;
On it hang a thousand shields, all of them shields of warriors. (4:3-4)

There are good bits too, for instance:

Strengthen me with raisins, refresh me with apples, for I am faint with love. (2:5)

But really, anybody can get bits of a love letter right if they approach it in the right spirit, and while these come-ons are of historic interest simply because they are so very old, they are hardly remarkable examples of the genre.

Secondly, why is this in my Bible? I mean, I've come to accept that the Bible is not (as billed) any kind of organized handbook of how to live a religious or virtuous or meaningful life. To this point, it has pretty much been a scrapbook of ancient Hebrew civilization. But even in this context, this mash note from Solomon to, well, whom? one of his more than a thousand wives? seems like a particularly egregious inclusion. It does not, I believe, mention God. It does not suggest any general principles for how one ought to conduct a meaningful relationship. The best excuse I can think of for its presence would be to institutionalize some notion that physical love is OK in God's book -- literally. But if that was the idea, it would have been nice to had it back in the Pentateuch with the shalts and the shalt nots.

Next Week: Isaiah!

Ecclesiastes 7-12: More Radical Departures

2010-01-11T21:02:00.000-08:00

The second half of Ecclesiastes is not unlike the first half, which is to say it continues laying out a philosophy of religion seemingly different than anything seen up to this point in the Bible. The Teacher continues to expound his surprising revelation that all earthly things, including wisdom and knowledge, are meaningless. His conclusion continues to be that one should, as they say, eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow ye may die. That saying, now that I mention it, might even be the King James translation of a passage from Ecclesiastes. I’ll have to look that up.

[UPDATE: According to the wiki, "The expression, 'Eat and drink, for tomorrow we die' derives from verses from the biblical books of Isaiah 22:13 and 1 Corinthians 15:32, both in a negative context illustrating a life without faith. So Ecclesiastes is apparently in conflict not just with earlier portions of the Bible, but with later portions as well.]

Twice in the back half of Ecclesiastes, there’s something new: lists of what I can only call “proverbs.” These are short, ostensibly wise declarations and admonitions from the guy who says that wisdom is meaningless. Chapter 7, and Chapters 10 and 11, are packed with these, and they are a bit of an odd lot. Some of them are unlikely to get much argument:

Extortion turns a wise man into a fool,
and a bribe corrupts the heart. (7:7)

Some do not carry the expected punch line:

A feast is made for laughter,
and wine makes life merry,
but money is the answer for everything. (10:19)

Some are kind of gnomic:

If the ax is dull
and its edge unsharpened,
more strength is needed
but skill will bring success.

If a snake bites before it is charmed,
there is no profit for the charmer. (10:10-11)

And some are not only downers, but seem somewhat in tension with the whole “eat, drink, and be merry” line:

...the day of death better than the day of birth.
It is better to go to a house of mourning
than to go to a house of feasting,
for death is the destiny of every man;
the living should take this to heart.

Sorrow is better than laughter,
because a sad face is good for the heart.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning,
but the heart of fools is in the house of pleasure. (7:1-4)

It is a little hard to pin the Teacher down to specifics. Wisdom, he has established abundantly, is meaningless. But now we’re faced with:

Wisdom, like an inheritance, is a good thing
and benefits those who see the sun.

Wisdom is a shelter
as money is a shelter,
but the advantage of knowledge is this:
that wisdom preserves the life of its possessor. (7:11-12)

And the emphasis of the Book seems to shift toward a philosophy of moderation in all things:

Do not be overrighteous,
neither be overwise—
why destroy yourself?

Do not be overwicked,
and do not be a fool—
why die before your time?

....There is not a righteous man on earth
who does what is right and never sins. (7:16-18; 20)

Counseling moderation is so safe and expected in our own cultural milieu as to be almost banal, but it’s really something of a radical departure here in the Old Testament, where God has generally demanded a very strict hard line of obedience and righteousness.

~~Why~~ Bad Things Happen to Good People

Here’s another radical departure: the Teacher (who identifies himself as the author of this Book, you remember) acknowledges that good things happen to bad people and vice versa:

There is something else meaningless that occurs on earth: righteous men who get what the wicked deserve, and wicked men who get what the righteous deserve. This too, I say, is meaningless. (8:14)

That’s pretty obvious, but it also in opposition to hundreds of pages of Old Testament text that claim the opposite – that God punishes the evil and rewards the righteous, right here on Earth. In this life. The only one we have. But mind you, in taking away the idea that God punishes and rewards in the earthly sphere, the Teacher does not gesture toward any idea of an afterlife. Quite the contrary:

For the living know that they will die,
but the dead know nothing;
they have no further reward,
and even the memory of them is forgotten.

Their love, their hate
and their jealousy have long since vanished;
never again will they have a part
in anything that happens under the sun. (9:5-6)

So what’s to be done about it? Carpe diem!

Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for it is now that God favors what you do. Always be clothed in white, and always anoint your head with oil. Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun— all your meaningless days. For this is your lot in life and in your toilsome labor under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the grave, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom. (9:7-10).

The Book ends, at Chapter 12, with an exhortation to both “remember your Creator” and to enjoy yourself during your youth, before you start to get old and sick and your friends and family do the same and everything gets all grim. It’s actually a fairly moving passage, if not exactly uplifting.

The Epilogue

It’s followed by a coda (12:9-14) to the effect that the Teacher was wise, and he said true things, and now people should consider all the best thinking done and lay off the books:

The words of the wise are like goads, their collected sayings like firmly embedded nails—given by one Shepherd. Be warned, my son, of anything in addition to them.
Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body. (11-12)

I don’t know how influential this specific passage was, but it certainly seems like the kind of idea that informed a lot of thinking in the Early and Middle Medieval period, not to mention the people in our own day who pretend to consider nothing true except the truth of the Bible.

The final words of Ecclesiastes are especially interesting.

Now all has been heard;
here is the conclusion of the matter:
Fear God and keep his commandments,
for this is the whole duty of man.

For God will bring every deed into judgment,
including every hidden thing,
whether it is good or evil. (13-14)

This “conclusion of the matter” doesn’t really have much to do with the central ideas and themes of Ecclesiastes. Indeed, since the Teacher has nullified any means of reward or punishment – the good often fail, remember, and the wicked often prosper, and then everyone dies alike – it is almost ironic now for the idea of divine judgment to be brought up. Are we to understand that it is our duty to fear God and keep his Commandments, and that we are to do this simply because it is our duty, knowing that doing so brings us no benefit and failing to do so brings us no harm? It’s not an impossible interpretation, but it is a pretty extreme departure from the rest of Old Testament theology, which is all based on covenant and contract.

It seems more likely to me, from this simple reading of the text, that the coda was added to Ecclesiastes at a later date by someone not entirely comfortable with the Book’s contents. There has been much here, after all, that strays from what I’ll call the Old Testament mainstream conception of God and right behavior. It is easy to imagine a conservative priest who was, for whatever reason, obligated despite his personal preferences to include Ecclesiastes in a collection of holy texts. Trying to make the best of the situation, he writes a short epilogue in which he tries to put some spin on the document that will render it less dangerous. It’s not about eat, drink, and be merry, he insists – I picture sweat on his brow – but about fearing God and keeping his commandments! And, in hopes of avoiding similar situations in the future, he attempts to declare the library of human wisdom closed to new additions. Except it must not have worked, because I’ve still got 419 pages to go.

Next Time: The Song of Songs! I’ve been led to believe it’s about sex!

This Week’s Reading: Ecclesiastes 7-12.

Ecclesiastes 1-6: Nothing Matters and What if it Did

2010-01-03T15:22:00.000-08:00

We're talking today about Ecclesiastes. That's not to be confused with Ecclesiasticus, which is considered a Book of the Bible by Catholics and Orthodox churches, but not by Protestants. Ecclesiasticus apparently has kind of ambiguous standing in Judaism. But we won't be looking at it here, for the simple reason that it ain't in the copy of the Bible I'm using. OK? Good.

Ecclesiastes

Ecclesiastes is credited to the Teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem, (1:1), which means it’s ostensibly by either Solomon or one of his brothers. If it’s by Solomon, it’s very unlike everything else we’ve seen or learned about him. If it’s by one of Solomon’s brothers, than there’s some sibling rivalry going on, because Ecclesiastes affirms that wisdom – Solomon’s big stock in trade, you remember – is “meaningless,” nothing more than “chasing after the wind.”

But then, Ecclesiastes describes just about everything as meaningless chasing after the wind. The opening chapter could have been written by an embittered Philosophy sophomore with seasonal affective disorder:

Meaningless! Meaningless! …Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless! (2)

All things are wearisome, more than one can say. (8)

Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago…. (10)

There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow. (11)

This inability to find significance in anything leads the Teacher on a path not unlike that of the Buddha’s when confronted by a similar sort of insight. He tries wallowing in pleasure and drunkenness, but that doesn’t prove very satisfying. He becomes an overachiever, undertaking great feats of architecture and agriculture, but is unable to convince himself that his undertakings have any real cosmic relevance. Then he embraces wisdom and learning, but when he realizes that idiots and scholars share the same ultimate fate – i.e., death – that, too, begins to seem pointless. So, after the long, long list of Psalms – songs of praise and experience – and of Proverbs – detailed lists of how one ought to behave in pretty much every situation – the Bible makes a radical change of tone and seems to declare that nothing much matters at all.

From this near-nihilism, the Teacher derives a single key concept: A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work. (2:24) The reasoning seems to be this: if you refuse to apply yourself, you’ll be impoverished and miserable, and obviously you don’t want that. But if you work really hard to accumulate wealth, power, privilege, and prestige, on the other hand, you are devoting your effort into things that are ultimately meaningless – they will fade with time, and you can’t take them with you.

The fool folds his hands and ruins himself.
Better one handful with tranquility than two handfuls with toil and chasing after the wind. (4:6)

Turn, Turn, Turn

I can’t say that Ecclesiastes is ignored – it’s full of oft-quoted quotes, it’s a go-to Book for weddings and funerals, and the first eight Verses of Chapter 3 comprise a classic rock song by the Byrds. Yet, there is an antimaterialism here that I definitely have never associated with Christianity or Judaism. Certainly the famous Protestant Work Ethic was never informed by Ecclesiastes 6:3:
A man may have a hundred children and live many years; yet no matter how long he lives, if he cannot enjoy his prosperity… I say that a stillborn child is better off than he.
Indeed, Chapter 5 lays into the meaninglessness of wealth with logic that would seem familiar to a Buddhist. People cause themselves no end of grief through their desire to accumulate, and to compete with people on the next rung of the social ladder. Who loves money never has money enough (10), the Teacher observes, and asks what benefits are [goods] to the owner except to feast his eyes on them? (11)

The sleep of a laborer is sweet, whether he eats little or much,
But the abundance of a rich man permits him no sleep. (12)

I have to say that, as an overeducated and not especially ambitious dude, I’m rather drawn to the live-in-the-moment, enjoy-your-time-‘cause-it’s-all-you’ve got tone of this Book. It is, for lack of a better word, a rather kicked-back philosophy of religion. But again, having said this, Ecclesiastes doesn't quite true up with some basic ideas of modern Christianity. Check this out:

Man’s fate is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; man has no advantage over the animal. Everything is meaningless. All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. Who knows if the spirit of man rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth? (19-21)

They read that at Christian funerals, don’t they? At least the bit about dust? Well, there’s the context for you: people are no different than animals – they live, and then they die, and they’re dead, and if there’s any such thing as an afterlife we certainly didn’t get the memo on it. The only thing to do about this state of affairs, says Ecclesiastes, is to live in the moment. This may not be especially comforting at a funeral, and it may or may not be good advice in general. What stands out to me, though, is that it is in radical opposition to everything I learned in Sunday school.

This Bible – it’s a weird book. I’m glad I’m taking the time to read it.

Next Time: The Second Half of Ecclesiastes

Today’s Text: Ecclesiastes 1-6.

Happy New Bible Year!

2010-01-02T10:00:00.000-08:00

The story thus far: After creating the world, God focused on a small tribe of people, the Israelites; much of the book of Genesis concerns the adventures of their early leaders. The next four books concern their activities and their laws under the great leader Moses. In Joshua and Judges, they conquer a modest parcel in the Eastern Mediterranean. The books of Samuel tell of the rise of King David, and the books of Kings and Chronicles tell, in separate narratives, of his many successors in two separate kingdoms until the eventual collapse of both states.

Last year, in Ezra and Nehemiah, we read of the return from Babylonian exile of some fairly radicalized Israelites, who impose a strict program of cultural renewal back in the homeland. We read a story about a Jewish queen in Babylon in Esther, and then hit three non-narrative books: Job, a long, abstruse, and not entirely coherent theological conversation; Psalms, a very long series of hymns with moods ranging from ecstatic joy to fierce paranoia; and Proverbs, a minimally structured set of pieces of wisdom -- a sort of biblical self-help text.

So it is here -- in the "Books of Wisdom," the collected non-narrative papers ascribed to David, Solomon, and other First Temple leaders -- that we resume our reading. Ecclesiastes is on deck.

But First....

Reader Elaine lobbied hard for a compare-and-contrast of Psalm 139 and Margaret Wise Brown's charming children's classic "The Runaway Bunny," so after having a copy of the latter out from the library all holiday season, I finally mustered the 45 seconds it takes to read. It's a short dialogue between a restless baby bunny and his mother; the younger rabbit makes up various magical ways he could escape parental control, and mom comes up with responses to the effect that she would always follow and keep tabs on him. The general mood is more nurturing than totalitarian, although with a different set of illustrations a mischievous culture jammer with parent issues could have some fun subverting the text.

Psalm 139 is a prayer from a human to God marveling about the size and scope and all-knowingness of the deity. It is indeed similar to "Bunny" in that the Psalmist lists possible modes of escape -- flying, burrowing, crossing the sea, hiding in the dark -- and confesses that God is going to see right through all of these ruses. There is also an explicit maternal link in Verse 13, which reads: For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb.

Are they the same story? Your answer to that will correspond to how closely you associate divine omniscience with maternal love. If you think those two things are broadly analogous, as many modern liberal Christians do, then the two narratives are all but identical. But I suspect that King David, to whom the Psalm is ascribed, would be horrified by the comparison. For the Old Testament writers, God is less about comfort and safety and more about pure, awe-inspiring power. There is plenty of talk about God's love in the Old Testament, but it is anything but unconditional. God's love, unlike Mother Bunny's, comes with strict rules, explicit contracts, and death sentences for entire populations.

At the end of "Bunny," the baby bunny realizes that he can't get away from mom -- or, perhaps, that she passes his test of her devotion -- and figures he might as well not bother running away. "Shucks," he says, invoking a mild oath that once, I've heard, was actually used in real life. Then his mom gives him a carrot. At the end of Psalm 139, David invites God's scrutiny and guidance -- but not without a quick burst of his characteristic angry paranoia. If only you would slay the wicked, O God! Away from me, you bloodthirsty men! (19) Personally, I find Ma Bunny's carrot a little more compelling than King David's stick, but then I think that David and I would find a lot about which we'd have to agree to disagree.

Next Time: The Bible is for the Byrds

Blog Sabbath 2009!

2009-11-08T22:30:00.000-08:00

And with the conclusion of the Book of Proverbs, it's time for the annual November - December MRtB Sabbath!

I read only six Books this year, but that included the massive and in some ways daunting Book of Psalms. In total, I've finished 20 of the Bible's 66 Books now, so I'm 30.3% of the way in. I read 256 chapters, though, which brings me up to 659 out of 1189, well over halfway through (55.4%). I'm at 55.7% of the way through in Verses, having completed a whopping 16401 out of 31102.

I stayed on task pretty well in 2009, despite the trouble that the Books of Job and Psalms gave me. I covered 5299 verses over the course of the year, down from 7124 last year but well over the 4687 in 2007 and 206 in 2006). I have 5829 verses to go to reach the New Testament, which would be a nice break point; it's an ambitious goal, but I will see if I can finish off the Old Testament in 2010. That would put the end of the whole project sometime in 2012. Mercy.

So, whatever readers there may be: Have lovely winter holidays of your choosing. I may well be back for a few pieces of unfinished business -- Elaine's request for me to read the book about the rabbit, for instance -- but we'll get back to actual Bible-readin' sometime around the new year. Ecclesiastes ho!!!

Proverbs 22-31: Wrapping Up Proverbs

2009-11-08T12:21:00.000-08:00

The specific material we have been looking at in the last few posts – the entire stretch from Proverbs 10 to halfway through Proverbs 22, in fact – falls under the heading “Proverbs of Solomon.” In today’s reading, there are several subdivisions, and the content starts to change up a bit from Proverbs 25 to the last chapter, Proverbs 31.

Proverbs 22 - 24 for Dummies

The first half of Proverbs 22 still comes under the “Proverbs of Solomon” label. The second half of Proverbs 22, all of 23, and the first half of 24 are labeled “Sayings of the Wise.” The second half of 24 is labeled “Further Sayings of the Wise.” There are some minor stylistic differences here from the material we’ve been going through, but it certainly covers the same terrain in terms of themes. It has the same basic teachings about what’s good and what’s bad. And here, as a public service, I present the summary list!

Good Things:

A good reputation
Prudence
Humility
Fear of God
Bringing up children well
Being rich
Generosity
Purity of Heart
Graciousness
Disciplining children
Being skilled
Restraint
Being wise (x6)
Listening to your parents
Having advisers
Rescuing people in trouble
Honesty
Doing the outside work first, and making sure your crops are planted before building your house.

This last, very specific piece of wisdom (24:27) reminds us that the Bible comes from a specific time and place, one where the outside work generates food to sustain life and housing is a luxury. Presumably, Eskimos and those of us living in food-abundant technological societies are given a pass on this one.

Bad Things

Being wicked
Being poor
Sowing wickedness
Unfaithfulness
Kissing an adulteress
Mocking (x2)
Oppressing the poor (x2)
Giving gifts to the rich
Crushing the needy in court
Being friends with a hot-tempered man
Backing the debts of others
Moving an ancient boundary stone (x2)
Gluttony (x2)
Being too excited about riches
Eating the food of a stingy man
Speaking to a fool
Encroaching on the fields of the fatherless
Withholding discipline from children
Envying sinners (x3)
Drinking too much (x2)
Cavorting with prostitutes
Plotting evil
Faltering
Pretending you didn’t know that other people were in trouble
Being a biased judge
Giving false testimony
Revenge
Burglary
Gloating
Rebelling against the king

So there you have it! All the does and don’ts, in a convenient list form!

Proverbs 25 – 29

This section is called “More Proverbs of Solomon,” but Chapters 25 and 26 in particular are quite a bit different than the previous Proverbs of Solomon. The first half of Chapter 25 consists of what I am calling “Proverbs of Court” – pieces of advice for kings and people going to a king’s court. The second half of 25, and almost all of 26, are mostly analogies. These vary from the obvious to the cryptic:

Like the one who seizes a dog by the ears
is a passer-by who meddles in a quarrel not his own. (26:17)

As a dog returns to its vomit,
so a fool repeats his folly. (26:11)

Like a lame man’s legs that hang limp
is a proverb in the mouth of a fool. (26:7)

Like one who takes away a garment on a cold day,
or like vinegar poured on soda,
is one who sings songs to a heavy heart. (25:20)

I spent quite a while trying to figure out whether 26:4-5 was a flagrant contradiction:

Do not answer a fool according to his folly,
Or you will be like him yourself.
Answer a fool according to his folly,
Or he will be wise in his own eyes.

Well, maybe. Or maybe the Bible is just expressing a paradox to the effect that “you just can’t win when you’re talking with a fool!” That’s some catch, that Catch 26:4-5.

Proverbs 27-29 return to the same style and themes of Proverbs 10-22. In fact, these Chapters often return to the exact same words, even whole Verses, of earlier Chapters. There are a fair number of reruns here in Proverbs.

Proverbs 30

This Chapter is called “Sayings of Agur,” Agur having been either an “oracle” or the son of a Man from Massa; the interpretation isn’t clear. I’m betting on “oracle,” though, as his sayings are pretty mystical. Which is to say, trippy:

Who has gone up to heaven and come down?
Who has gathered up the wind in the hollow of his hands?
Who has wrapped up the waters in his cloak?
Who has established all the ends of the earth?
What is his name, and the name of his son?
Tell me if you know! (4)

The leech has two daughters.
“Give! Give!” they cry. (15)

Much of the chapter consists of a peculiar kind of list, a type I’ve noticed one or two other examples of in earlier passages. In Agur’s Sayings, the form goes “There are four things that [are {x}], three things that [are {synonym of x}], and then a list of four items.

There are three things that are stately in their stride,
four that move with stately bearing:
a lion, mighty among beasts,
who retreats before nothing;
a strutting rooster, a he-goat,
and a king with his army around him. (29-31)

There are three things that are never satisfied,
four that never say, ‘Enough!’:
the grave, the barren womb,
land, which is never satisfied with water,
and fire, which never says, ‘Enough!” (15-16)

This is a pretty cool riddle form, but I’m not sure what they are really supposed to mean, why they are supposed to be significant. There’s only one that seems straightforward; I think that in 18-19 Agur is trying to make the ancient joke that woman are just too darn inscrutable. He chooses his words poorly, though, and would likely get laughed out of the bar if he were to repeat them today:

There are three things that are too amazing for me,
four that I do not understand:
the way of an eagle in the sky,
the way of a snake on a rock,
the way of a ship on the high seas,
and the way of a man with a maiden.

Really, how does a guy get to be oracle without understanding that last bit?

Proverbs 31

The final Chapter of Proverbs is split in two sections. The first are the Sayings of King Lemuel, or actually the sayings of King Lemuel’s mother. He reports that she warned him that he, as a king, should avoid women, wine, and beer, that he should be a fair judge, and that he should defend the rights of the poor and the needy.

Part two is the Epilogue: The Wife of Noble Character. In 21 Verses, this passage describes the Proverbial dream girl. She is, you may have heard, worth far more than rubies. (10) It is pretty specific about tasks appropriate to a pre-modern agricultural society, but the gist is that a good wife is hard-working, smart, trustworthy, generous, even-keeled, religious, and responsible. She doesn’t need to be charming or pretty, but those things aren’t important in the long run anyway.

Proverbs 19-21: Proverbs and the Poor, Proverbs in the Marketplace, and other good advice.

2009-11-05T21:18:00.000-08:00

Let's begin with my favorite Proverbs from #19, just because it's fun to imagine them cross-stitched, or carved on a plaque, hanging on a kitchen wall:

A foolish son is his father's ruin,
and a quarrelsome wife is like a constant dripping.
Houses and wealth are inherited from parents,
but a prudent wife is from the Lord. (13-14)

Proverbs and the Poor

The Proverbs continue to be a mixed batch here in Chapter 19, but five of the twenty-nine happen to deal with the poor. They are the following:

Better a poor man whose walk is blameless
than a fool whose lips are perverse. (1)

Wealth brings many friends,
but a poor man's friend deserts him. (4)

A poor man is shunned by all his relatives --
how much more do his friends avoid him!
Though he pursues them with pleading, they are nowhere to be found. (7)

It is not fitting for a fool to live in luxury --
how much worse for a slave to rule over princes! (10)

What a man desires is unfailing love;
better to be poor than a liar. (22)

OK, Verse 1 is straightforward enough, and Verse 22 is a bit disjointed but means basically the same thing. What is a little more surprising is Verses 4 and 7, with what appears to be a negative attitude about the poor. On one hand, the observation that it's easier for people who are well off to attract friends could be passed off as a neutral observation, a simple statement of the way things are. But this is a book of wisdom, as we have been repeatedly told, and the assumption is that all its verses have moral weight. Looked at in this light, Verses 4 and 7 acquire the sense of "It's obnoxious to be poor, so you have an obligation to avoid poverty." Harsh!

The class dynamics of 19:10 are a little puzzling too. I can remember a time back in Exodus that the Bible was all about slaves getting to rule over their masters, but it seems here like there has been a turn towards the Conservative. Well, these are the Proverbs of Solomon, after all, and Solomon is a king, and kings are not known for their calls for the poor to rise up and throw of their chains.

Proverbs in the Marketplace

Again, Proverbs 20 has the usual mix-and-match, but I'm picking out a handful that have to do with economic life.

There are a lot of Proverbs about laziness, including these:

A sluggard does not plow in season;
so at harvest time he looks but finds nothing. (4)

Do not love sleep or you will grow poor;
stay awake and you will have food to spare. (13)

Well, fair enough. A certain amount of get-up-and-go is required to prosper here in our modern age, but it's reasonable to assume this was all the more so when food supply was never far from anyone's mind.

Another thread of Proverbs concerns economic fair play:

Food gained by fraud tastes sweet to a man,
but he ends up with a mouth full of gravel. (17)

More explicit, and more common, are Proverbs about weights and measures. This seems a little comical to us today, but that's only because we generally HAVE standard, regulated weights and measures, and have lost sight of how difficult it is to conduct fair exchanges when you have to renegotiate the rules every time.

Differing weights and differing measures --
The Lord detests them both. (10)

The Lord detests differing weights,
and dishonest scales do not please him. (24)

Then there's this odd little gem:

"It's no good, it's no good!" says the buyer;
then off he goes and boasts about his purchase. (14)

Again, you could see this as a wry observation about human behavior. But as with 19:4 & 7, this comes in a list of moral injunctions, so we have to assume it has moral weight. My guess is that it is criticizing the buyer for his hypocrisy, but I'm not sure.

I'm even less sure about 20:16.

Take the garment of one who puts up security for a stranger;
hold it in pledge if he does it for a wayward woman.

Baffled. Anyone?

Mixed in with these commercial Proverbs, of course, are the continual reminders that, although the material world is important, there's something even importanter. Care to guess?

Gold there is, and rubies in abundance,
but lips that speak knowledge are a rare jewel. (15)

Tricked you! You thought it was going to be "wisdom!"

Proverbs 21

The grab-bag goes on. Themes that we've just looked at are repeated:

The sluggard's craving will be the death of him,
because his hands refuse to work. (25)

A fortune made by a lying tongue
is a fleeting vapor and a deadly snare. (6)

There's a different note sounded about the poor:

If a man shuts his ears to the cry of the poor,
he too will cry out and not be answered. (13)

And encouragement of thrift:

He who loves pleasure will become poor;
whoever loves wine and oil will never be rich. (17)

In the house of the wise are stores of choice food and oil,
but a foolish man devours all he has. (20)

But the very, very most interesting Proverb of Chapter 21 -- one of the most interesting sentences in the whole book to date, really -- is this:

To do what is right and just
is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice. (3)

WOAH WOAH WOAH WOAH WOAH!!! This is big news, as it appears to very casually undermine much of the Law of Moses. And it is strange to see this notion ascribed to Solomon, since we've already read through Kings and Chronicles that sacrifice was very important indeed for many, many generations after the death of Solomon. Indeed, if memory serves God was still judging kings and the fates of Israel and Judah according to the orthodoxy of their sacrifices, punishing them not just when altars were set up to other gods but when altars to God were set up not according to code.

So this is a rather explosive verse to find tucked in with the nagging-wife Proverbs, which may well be wise counsel to choose well in marriage but which must have always been a bit of comic relief:

Better to live on a corner of the roof
than share a house with a quarrelsome wife. (9)

Better to live in a desert
than with a quarrelsome and ill-tempered wife. (19)

Next time: Proverbs 22-31: the Sprint

Today's Text: Proverbs 19-21

Proverbs 17 - 18: The Weakness of Categories; The Power of Language

2009-11-01T18:21:00.000-08:00

Proverbs 17

My first thought for this go-round was that I'd extend my typology of Proverbs from last time and do a proverbial census. This is the kind of thing that, if all goes well, could lead to a pie chart, which would of course be awesome.

It started off well enough, with two new categories added to the ones from last time (dubious assertions, tautologies, judgments): assertions of faith and Proverbs of reward and revenge, the promises of better life for the virtuous and punishment for the evil, which I also talked about last time. But as I began the business of fitting each Proverb into one of the categories, I found my definitional edges starting to crumble.

Take 17:26, for instance:

It is not good to punish an innocent man,
or to flog officials for their integrity.

My first impulse was "judgment," a statement of principle. But then, you could also be a little cynical and call it a dubious assertion, for surely anyone who has read Machiavelli can imagine situations where it might be a good idea to punish some innocent men in order to preserve peace, prosperity, and public order. Or on the other hand, you could call it a tautology: the definition of "innocent" is more or less "those not deserving punishment."

Similarly with Verses 21 & 25:

To have a fool for a son brings grief;
there is no joy for the father of a fool.

A foolish son brings grief to his father
and bitterness to the one who bore him.

My first thought was "judgment"; they are an assessment that foolishness is bad. But then I thought, wait a minute, that's a pretty dubious assertion -- I know people whose children are kind of numbskulls, and they are happy enough in general and have reasonably good relationships with their kids too. Too, there's a whiff of tautology here in the obviousness of the statement, the idea that a parent wouldn't want they child to have bad qualities hardly being breaking news.

So, I gave up the categorizing.

Proverbs 18

In reading this Chapter, I noticed statements that seemed to imply a philosophy of knowledge. That's not to say that this chapter is "about" a philosophy of knowledge, mind you -- the individual Proverbs seem as much a grab-bag as ever. What set me off was probably 18:4

The words of a man's mouth are deep waters,
but the fountain of wisdom is a bubbling brook.

Now a statement like this leaves lots of room for interpretation, of course, but it also seems to suggest that it doesn't want to be interpreted too much. It seems to argue for the concept of "Keep It Simple, Stupid" or of Occam's Razor. This might be a comfort for someone trying to dredge some understanding out of Derrida or Kant. Calls to prefer "common sense" over that too-fussy book larnin', though, are dangerous; they tend to render people resistant understanding or appreciating the workings of complex systems, and most systems are complex systems.

The chapter has numerous admonitions that it is better to shut up and listen than to shoot your mouth off.

A fool finds no pleasure in understanding
but delights in airing his own opinions. (2)

A fool's lips bring him strife
and his mouth invites a beating
A fool's mouth is his undoing,
and his lips are a snare to his soul. (6-7)

He who answers before listening --
that is his folly and his shame. (13)

The idea that you should shut up when you don't know what you are talking about is of course a compelling one, especially to anyone reading the reader comments on the average newspaper article. But there is also a very conservative element at play here. Solomon the King is famously wise -- he's really made it the hallmark of his brand -- and here he is saying that people who aren't wise should just shut the hell up. It is awfully convenient for him and his hold on power.

Because certainly, the author of Proverbs 18 understood the power of language. Check out Verse 17:

The first to present his case seems right,
till another comes forward and questions him.

Or the odd Verse 8:

The words of a gossip are like choice morsels;
they go down to a man's inmost parts.

This is perhaps an unfortunate metaphor, as the first thing that jumps into most heads about "choice morsels" is that they are tasty and highly desireable. I think the intended concept, though, is that gossip will worm its way into a person's inner being and be destructive there, rather than nourishing. Another curious metaphor follows at Verse 21:

The tongue has the power of life and death,
and those who love it will eat its fruit.

Bizarre imagery aside, the idea seems fairly clear: language is powerful, and knowing how to use language confers power.

Next Time: Proverbs and the Poor, Proverbs in the Marketplace, and other good advice.

Today's Text: Proverbs 17 - 18.

Proverbs 7 - 16: 235 Propositions

2009-10-28T19:24:00.000-07:00

As we continue on into the Book of Proverbs, there is a break in style beginning with Proverbs 10. Chapters 7, 8, & 9, though, continue in the same vein as the material we were looking at last time. Chapter 7 is a warning against spending time with adultresses, and Chapter 8 is another paean to wisdom; Chapter 9 is a little folktale contrasting wisdom and folly.

Proverbs 7:6 - 22 is an uninterrupted narrative, which came as a real treat -- it had been a long time! It begins:

At the window of my house I looked out through the lattice.
I saw among the simple, I noticed among the young men, a youth who lacked judgment. (6 - 7)

This young guy has the misfortune to meet a woman whose husband is out of town. She kisses him with a brazen face and invites him home to check out her fine Egyptian linen sheets, which she has perfumed with myrrh, aloe, and cinnamon. After some smooth talking on her part,

All at once he followed her like an ox going to the slaughter,
like a deer stepping into a noose. (22)

Now, I don't want to be unduly cynical, but having such an relatively long, detailed, and sexy story suddenly pop up in the text made me think about the exploitation paperbacks of 50 years back, a briefly popular genre that allowed publishers to print prurient sexual material under a paper-thin disguise of social criticism. Is it possible that this tale -- the sad story of the poor unfortunate lad who gets tricked into a terrible terrible night of hot cinnamon-scented sex with the beautiful, assertive, seductive woman -- was an occasion for more chortling, smirks, and elbowing in the ribs than solemn contemplation? No way of knowing, I suppose.

Chapter 8's praise of wisdom extends to a kind of personification, with capital-W Wisdom speaking in first person:

The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works,
before his deeds of old...

I was the craftsman at his side. I was filled with delight day after day, rejoicing always in his presence,
rejoicing in his whole world and delighting in mankind. (22, 30-31)

It is unusual to see an abstract virtue assigned a voice in the Bible, and it recalls for me a speech you might expect to hear from a god or goddess of wisdom in a pantheon. If you are willing to read this passage metaphorically, it's not too hard to accept it as a literary device, a way of praising wisdom by pretending to personify it. A strict Biblical literalist runs into another trouble spot here, though, as Wisdom is elevated to a minor god and we find ourselves once again confronted by a whiff of polytheism.

The Book of List

The heading for Proverbs 10 is Proverbs of Solomon, and what follows is a list of aphorisms that lasts for at least the next six chapters. These do not seem to be organized in any particular order, and the chapter breaks seem fairly arbitrary as well. Every individual verse, unless I am mistaken, is in the form of a couplet, the two halves of which often express opposite forms of the same idea (e.g. The Lord abhors dishonest scales, but accurate weights are his delight. (11:1))

The Proverbs assert the same values that we saw praised in the Psalms. They are pro-wisdom, of course, and also pro-honesty, pro-obedience, pro-work, pro-patience, and pro-charity. They are also pro-righteousness, although I still get question marks in my head when I see righteousness, which could reasonably be defined as "that which is praiseworthy," described as worthy of praise. The Proverbs are, as you might expect, anti-wickedness. They are anti-pride and anti-sloth, against mocking, lying, and shooting one's mouth off. And like the Psalms, they frequently offer promises of long life, prosperity, and security to the righteous and threats of destruction to the wicked.

The fear of the Lord adds length to life,
but the years of the wicked are cut short. (10:27)

The blessing of the Lord brings wealth, and he adds no trouble to it. (10:22)

The righteous man is rescued from trouble, and it comes on the wicked instead. (11:8)

The Lord tears down the proud man's house but he keeps the widow's boundaries intact. (15:25)

Three Kinds of Proverbs

There are probably a lot of ways that you could categorize this long list of moral statements, but three categories leapt out at me as I read. This is not to say "there are three kinds of Proverbs"; my three types are potentially overlapping and not comprehensive. Nevertheless:

The Tautologies

Quite a few of the Proverbs, at least in the English translation we are reading, are so circular as to be nearly meaningless. A particularly vivid example is Proverb 11:13,

A gossip betrays a confidence,
but a trustworthy man keeps a secret.

It is certainly a wise statement in the sense of being true, since it essentially recites the definition of "gossip" and "trustworthy." It adds little beyond this, however. Similarly, 15:13 doesn't tell us much we didn't already know:

A happy heart makes the face cheerful,
but heartache crushes the spirit.

Or 12:17:

A truthful witness gives honest testimony,
but a false witness tells lies.

And when 16:27 tells us that A scoundrel plots evil, there is nothing to be done but nod in agreement. That's what a scoundrel does, all right!

Most of the Tautological Proverbs are not quite so blatant. Take 10:26:

As vinegar to the teeth and smoke to the eyes,
so is a sluggard to those who send him.

Well, yes. A sluggard is essentially someone who is annoyingly slow or lazy. So, to say that sluggards are annoying adds nothing that is not already inherent in the word "sluggard." People curse the man who hoards grain, begins 11:26 -- but then, unpopular anti-social behavior is already implied in the word "hoards." Again, the Proverb is stating a truth that is uncontestable, but only because it is circular.

The Dubious Truths

The Dubious Truths are confident assertions that, once you think about them, are vulnerable to obvious counterexamples.

Hatred stirs up dissension,
but love covers over all wrongs. (10:12)

For lack of guidance a nation falls,
but many advisers make victory sure. (11:14)

A kindhearted woman gains respect,
but ruthless men gain only wealth. (11:16)

These are probably better thought of not as hopelessly naive musings, but as statements of principle, of the way that things should be in a just society, all other things being equal.

Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge,
but he who hates correction is stupid. (12:1)

A man's riches may ransom his life,
but a poor man hears no threat. (13:8)

He who spares the rod hates his son,
but he who loves him is careful to discipline him. (13:24)

It would be unkind and unrealistic to think that Solomon, or his eventual amanuensis, really believed that all smart people love discipline, that the poor are safe from crime, and that indulgent parents hate their children. Once again, we must be looking at figures of speech, poetic ways of saying "It's good to discipline kids," "Being too rich can get you in trouble," and "It's a good idea to listen to constructive criticism."

Proverbs of Judgment

The Proverbs that are most user-friendly are the ones that simply state a principle. They make a judgment. Mind, this is not to criticize them. After all, wisdom is "good judgment" and the Proverbs are supposed to be all about the wisdom. So here, according to Solomon (or whomever), are some nuggets of pure wisdom:

Like a gold ring in a pig's snout
is a beautiful woman who shows no discretion. (11:22)

How much better to get wisdom than gold,
to choose understanding rather than silver! (16:16)

These are, however, surprisingly rare. To eyeball these six chapters, the majority of Proverbs seem to fall into the Dubious Truths category, with Tautologies leading Proverbs of Judgment among the minority categories.

Three Favorites

A heart at peace gives life to the body,
but envy rots the bones. (14:30)

Yeah!

Better a meal of vegetables where there is love
than a fatted calf with hatred. (15:17)

Well, I'm a quasi-vegetarian, and I like cows.

Grey hair is a crown of splendor;
it is attained by a righteous life. (16:31)

A very Calvinist sentiment, reflecting the idea that people who please God will live a long time while the bad guys are cut down in their prime. Whatever! It makes me think of my mom!

Next Time: I bet this list continues.

Today's Text: Proverbs 7 - 16.

Proverbs 1 - 6: Bring on the Wisdom!

2009-10-17T17:45:00.000-07:00

In the last entry, looking forward to the book of Proverbs and trying to imagine what I would find in it, I had the vague notion that it might be like Polonius' famous advice speech in Hamlet -- you know, "neither a borrower nor a lender be" and all of that. Well, to my considerable amazement... I was right. Proverbs really is a lot like Polonius' famous advice speech in Hamlet!! It is suggestions for right living, couched as a long speech from a father to his son, and even -- forgive me -- has some of the long-winded and too-obvious qualities of the Shakespeare speech.

Each chapter begins with a variation of "Listen to your old man, you little punk." Proverbs 4, for example:
Listen, my sons, to a father's instruction;
pay attention and gain understanding.
I give you sound learning,
so do not forsake my teaching. (1-2)

Proverbs is very big on "wisdom," and spends a lot of time talking about how awesome wisdom is. This is the aspect of the Book that seems a bit tedious; in these first six chapters at least, it often seems as though the writer is spending more time stating how great wisdom is than he is actually dispensing any wisdom.

Good Advices

Much of the wisdom, once it arrives, can be generalized into two ideas: Obey God, and Don't Be Evil. An example of the first idea appears, with the difficult-to-verify claim that belief in God is healthful, in Proverbs 3:

Do not be wise in your own eyes;
fear the Lord and shun evil.
This will bring health to your body
and nourishment to your bones. (7-8)

An example of the latter concept arrives early in Proverbs 1:

My son, if sinners entice you, do not give in to them
If they say, "Come along with us;
let's lie in wait for someone's blood,
let's waylay some harmless soul;
let's swallow them alive, like the grave,
and whole, like those who go down to the pit;
we will get all sorts of valuable things and fill our houses with plunder; throw in your lot with us, and we will share a common purse"--
my son, do not go along with them, do not set foot on their paths;
for their feet rush into sin,
they are swift to shed blood. (10-16)

This is certainly not bad advice at all, and indeed I hope any of you dads out there are discouraging your kids from joining bands of opportunistic killers. It's just that telling someone that they shouldn't hang out with opportunistic killers because they are violent and sinful seems like a bit of a restrained argument. (What I suspect might be really going on in passages like this, really, is that the "for" doesn't exactly mean "because," but something slightly different that is hard to render in English. This would go a long way toward explaining why the logic of the Old Testament so frequently seems off-kilter. But who knows; I know absolutely nothing about the linguistics involved.)

The most prominent piece of concrete guidance given in Proverbs 1-6 is that you should try to avoid hanging around with adulteresses. It's rather implied that you should avoid collaborating to create adulteresses too, although this is never directly stated. In a frank and earthy passage, the writer spells it out for his son:

May your fountain be blessed,
and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth.
A loving doe, a graceful deer --
may her breasts satisfy you always,
my you ever be captivated by her love.
Why be captivated, my son, by an adulteress?
Why embrace the bosom of another man's wife? (5:18-20)

In addition to further admonitions against adultresses and prostitutes, Proverbs 6 has the very famous warning against laziness:

Go to the ant, you sluggard;
consider its ways and be wise!
It has no commander,
no overseer or ruler,
yet it stores its provisions in summer
and gathers its food at harvest

How long will you lie there, you sluggard
When will you get up from your sleep?
A little sleep, a little slumber,
a little folding of the hands to rest--
and poverty will come on you like a bandit
and scarcity like an armed man. (6-11)

Six or Seven Things God Hates About You

And it also has a list that immediately caught my eye as resembling the kind of thing you might expect to find if the capital-B Bible was like a small-b bible, a straightforward handbook of rules and tips for proper conduct, practice, and belief. It is a list of the six things the Lord hates, seven that are detestible to him:
haughty eyes,
a lying tongue,
hands that shed innocent blood,
a heart that devises wicked schemes,
feet that are quick to rush into evil,
a false witness who pours out lies
and a man who stirs up dissention among brothers. (16-19)

Although the numbering is a little confusing -- which one is the one that the Lord finds detestible, but doesn't hate? -- this is an extremely interesting list. It is almost the opposite, if you think about it, of the Ten Commandments. The one consists of ten rules (most, admittedly, in the negative -- thou shalt NOT) you should follow; whereas the Proverbs 6 list implies six or seven things to avoid. It's interesting that the list isn't better known -- unless it is, and I've just somehow missed it all these years.

Marginalia!

Today's reading included something I haven't seen for many months: a marking in the margins of this Bible. Extremely long-time readers might recall that I am the first and only owner of the official project Bible, so this notation -- a simple bracket alongside Proverbs 3:21 - 22 -- was undoubtedly made by me. Why I found this passage significant, or when it was that I was poking around in Proverbs, though -- of this, I have no memory at all.

My son, preserve sound judgment and discernment,
do not let them out of your sight;
they will be life for you,
an ornament to grace your neck. (3:21-22)

NEXT WEEK: More Proverbs!

This Week's Text: Proverbs 1 - 6

Psalms 144 - 150: End of the Psalms

2009-10-10T08:04:00.000-07:00

The stretch from Psalm 144 to Psalm 150 -- the final Psalm! -- begins with Praise be to the Lord and ends with Praise the Lord, and in between there are numerous praises sung to the Lord. What is not praise is mostly affirmation: statements to or about God that indicate his magnificence, power, mercy, love, and justice. What is left over is petitions: requests for the destruction of enemies and foreigners, and for peace and prosperity.

There is nothing in these final seven Psalms about the sorrow and despair of one who feels failed by God, and relatively few complaints about the vindictive enemies and evil-doers who have it in for the Psalmist. Other than that, they are fairly representative of the whole set of 150. They cover familiar topics and employ the Psalmic style: an energetic, declaritive, loosely structured poetry with a fairly narrow range of themes and images. They are rich in ringing phrases and chockablock with abrupt shifts of topic and mood. Having been composed for singing or chanting one at a time, they make -- as I have often complained -- for a tedious, numbing experience when read through en masse.

Reading the Psalms as an Outsider

There are some styles of music that, as an occasional guitar noodler, I enjoy playing even though I don't especially enjoy listening to them. Heavy Metal, bluegrass, and a lot of folk music fall into this category. Others will differ, of course, but for me these are musics that are best experienced as a performer, not as a listener. And to stretch a point, maybe this is somewhat true of the Psalms as well. To a worshiper -- to someone in the actual act of "Praising the Lord" -- the Psalms may be a rich library of texts, and therefore of practices, that enrich and add structure to that experience. To their original writers and to someone using them in the context of religious practice today, the affirmations and petitions of the Psalms may be perceived as ringing with the most sacred holy truths.

To an outsider to this experience, however, there is an arid and lifeless quality to the Psalms. In their singleminded assertions, stripped of anything like argument or narrative flow, it is hard to find anything like inspiration. They have been, to be sure, different from anything else we've encountered so far in the Bible, certainly unlike the epic historical accounts and the lists of stern Mosaic Law. The poetic Book of Job, although I found it equally inpenetrable as Psalms, was at least steeped in theological ideas, whereas Psalms itself consists merely of thousands of essentially unconnected religious statements. There is not enough development of ideas in Psalms for anything but the loosest theological concepts to be apparent, and even these are often at odds with each other: God is merciful, and vengeful; God is all-loving, and has abandoned me; God reigns over all kingdoms, and will protect me from the foreigners.

I knew when I picked the Bible up that it would not be a wholely unified document, but I did not realize just how much of a... scrapbook it would turn out to be. The range of materials is quite a bit broader than I realized. I don't recall exactly what I expected from the Psalms, but I don't think I expected them to be no more (and no less, I suppose) than the hymnal tucked in among the histories and prophets. Yet that's pretty much what they are.

Progress Report!

Reading Psalms, the longest book of the Bible, took 21 posts spread over 5 months and 6 days. Having completed Psalms, I've got through 19 of the 66 Books of the Bible: 28.8%.

Well, that's all fine and good, but I've also completed 628 of the Chapters of the Bible, or 52.8%! Or 16401 of the Verses, 52.7%! I'M MORE THAN HALFWAY THROUGH, PEOPLE!

NEXT TIME: Here come Proverbs! Which I expect to be... somewhat like Psalms, except pithier? And more addressed to everyday life, rather than religious practice? I guess I imagine Proverbs as being like Polonius' long advice-giving speech in Hamlet. I bet I'm wrong. But here's an advantage Proverbs is sure to have over Psalms: it's only 31 Chapters long!

We'll tuck into it next time!

This Week's Reading: Psalms 144 - 150

Psalm 135-143: Psenultimate Psalms!

2009-09-30T20:16:00.000-07:00

Psalm 135: A "Praise the Lord" Psalm, using that phrase three times along with a "Praise the name of the Lord," a "sing praise to his name," and a "Praise be to the Lord." The Psalm includes brief peregrinations on the power of God, his historic assistance to the Israelites, and the inadequacy and unreality of other gods.

Psalm 136: What must be a call-and-response kind of Psalm, consisting of 26 short phrases, each immediately answered with the words "His love endures forever." Psalm 136:17-22 is essentially Psalm 135:10-12 with the response phrase inserted six times.

Psalm 137: Wow! Check out Psalm 137:1!

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.

OK, that is TOTALLY ripping off an old reggae song.

Verses 5-6 are also familiar: If I forget you, O Jerusalme, may my right hand forget its skill. May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if if do not remember you....

It ends on a bit of a bummer, though, both viscerally and philosophically:

O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction,
happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us --
he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks. (8-9)

Psalm 138: This song, ascribed to David, begins:

I will praise you, O Lord, with all my heart;
before the "gods" I will sing your praise. (1)

This passage raises an interesting question: do our ancient Hebrew or Greek sources really have an equivalent for ironic quotation marks? I certainly don't think we've seen such leading punctuation employed employed up to this point in the Bible, although we have often seen references to the other gods besides God. Is there something in the source materials that lead the NIV translators to indicate that by saying "gods," David didn't really mean to suggest that he believed in other gods? Is it a surmise based on David's abundantly demonstrated piety? Or are they -- strange as this might sound -- trying to protect David from the taint of polytheism? Because the latter is actually kind of what it looks like.

After this interesting beginning, the 138th is a fairly straightforward Psalm of praise.

Psalm 139: The 139th, on the other hand, is an interesting, distinctive, and nuanced Psalm about being thoroughly known by a creator:

You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. (2-3)

There is a lovely passage here that has a bit of a Shakespearean ring to it:

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. (13-14)

Oh, what a piece of work is man!

Psalm 139 veers away from its main thrust only for four of its twenty-four verses, for one of the fairly alarming rants so common in the Psalms ascribed to David (as this one is). The mood swing is swift: When I awake, I am still with you. If only you would slay the wicked, O God! (18-19)

Psalm 140 is a more extended version of the angry rant that snuck into #139, with inspirational, uplifting thoughts like:

Let the heads of those who surround me be covered with the trouble their lips have caused.
Let burning coals fall upon them; may they be thrown into the fire, into miry pits, never to rise. (9-10)

Psalm 141: Begins as a prayer not to be drawn into evil deeds, but then morphs into the now-familiar if less interesting contrast of self versus the "evildoers": their rulers will be thrown down from the cliffs (6) and so on.

Psalm 142: Much like Psalm 141, it is largely a prayer of humility and supplication before God, interwoven with requests for God to destroy sinister, vaguely-defined enemies.

Psalm 143: And much like Psalm 142, it is largely a prayer of humility and supplication before God, interwoven with requests for God to destroy sinister, vaguely-defined enemies.

NEXT TIME: The End of the Psalms!!!

Today's Text: Psalms 135-143.

Psalms 130-134: The End of the Ascents

2009-09-27T21:31:00.000-07:00

These five Psalms are the last of the “songs of ascents,” Psalms 120-134, which are supposed to be a cycle of songs sung on the pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem. Except for Psalm 132, they are all quite short.

Psalm 130: Throughout the Old Testament, there has been a decided emphasis on salvation through obedience. One is supposed to obey the Law to the letter, and in exchange for this God will not bring you sufferings or just snuff you out altogether. But here in Psalm 130, we have another of the occasional glimpses of a different sort of theology, in this case a theology of forgiveness.

If you, O Lord, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand?
But with you there is forgiveness, therefore you are feared. (3-4)

Fearing someone for their power of forgiveness seems off-kilter at first blush, but consider the context: EVERYONE is guilty, and their only hope is forgiveness, so of course the decision-maker is someone to inspire a certain amount of trembling. (This strikes me, incidentally, as a very Christian sort of passage.)

And here’s a lovely passage, I think:

My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning,
more than watchmen wait for the morning. (6)

Psalm 131: A very short song of abject humility, echoes the “watchman waiting for morning” line with a metaphor which doesn’t ring quite as well to the modern ear:

But I have stilled and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother,
like a weaned child is my soul within me. (2)

Really, I’m not even sure what that means.

Psalm 132: A longer Psalm in three parts. First, it recalls David’s oath to build a suitable temple for the Ark of the Covenant. Second, it expresses the need and desire of the people to go and worship at the “dwelling place.” And third, it recounts God’s promises to David to provide leadership, prosperity, and success to Israel. As usual in the Old Testament, the contractual nature of religious practice is much in evidence, with the implication that “here we are, God, doing our part by coming to worship in the proscribed manner; don’t let us down with your part of the bargain.”

Psalm 133: The first line of this short Psalm conveys the meaning of the whole: How good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity! (1) If you continue past that very quotable first line, though, you get a great example of how ringing sound bites from Psalms often seem pretty curious when they are not cropped out of their surrounding text:

How good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity!
It is like precious oil poured on the head, running down on the beard,
Running down on Aaron’s beard, down upon the collar of his robes. (1-2)

Anyone here especially like oil running down into their beard? No?

Psalm 134: Three short lines, the condensed version of which is: “Praise the Lord! Left up your hands and praise the Lord! May the Lord bless you!” This is religious practice at its most fundamental level. Even when this simplified, however, there is still an element of the contractual in the picture: Praise, that you may be blessed. You do your bit for God, and God will do his bit for you.

Next Time: The Penultimate Psalms!

This Week's Text: Psalms 130-134

Psalms 120 - 129

2009-09-14T12:58:00.000-07:00

All of the songs of the 120s are labelled "songs of ascents." I'm not sure what that means. They are all quite short, though, at four to nine verses long. All ten of them together are considerably shorter than Psalm 119.

120: The Psalmist complains of lying lips and deceitful tongues (2), and tells such liars that God will punish them with a warrior's sharp arrows, with burning coals of the broom tree. (4) Then, he laments living among those who hate peace. (6)

121: I recognize Psalm 121 immediately from, of all places, the soundtrack of the 1980s movie "The Falcon and the Snowman." Funny.

It is an eight-verse poem of reassurance in second person that reads almost as a lullaby, affirming to the readers or listeners that God will watch over them and preserve them from harm. And although I have often expressed scepticism over whether the Bible should really be promising physical protection to believers, in this context I find the sentiment rather touching. This might be my new favorite Psalm.

122: A jumbled and upbeat Psalm about how nice it is to pray and worship communally, especially in Jerusalem.

123: A short Psalm of devotion and submission to God, asking mercy for those who have endured the contempt of "the proud" and "the arrogant."

124: States forcefully that Israel would have been doomed in its conflicts with its neighbors, if not for the direct assistance from God.

125: Compares people who believe in God with unshakeable mountains.

126: A song of joy and happiness, stating that the Lord has done great things for us (3), especially in returning the exiles from captivity.

127: The first two verses of this Psalm state that all labor is futile unless it is in accordance with God's will. The remaining three verses are in praise of sons, who are a blessing from God; it's best to have a lot of them and to have them young.

128: A promise of prosperity to believers, with this great line: Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your sons will be like olive shoots around your table. (3)

129: A somewhat disjointed Psalm that seems to be about how the peoples who were against Israel have now fallen on hard times.

Well, I still don't know what a "song of ascents" is. This set of Psalms seems unusually upbeat and brief; maybe that has something to do with it. Or, maybe it just has to do with the musical setting?

...ah-ha. Says here that they probably are the songs traditionally sung while climbing up to Jerusalem. Also that they are short and upbeat, so I guess I was on the right track.

Psalm 119: The Longest Psalm

2009-09-10T17:52:00.000-07:00

I singled out Psalm 119 for a couple of reasons. First of all, it's freakin' long. One hundred seventy-six Verses long, in fact, which (sez here) makes it not only the longest Psalm but also the longest book in the Bible.

Secondly, it is divided into 22 sections, each of which is labelled with a Hebrew letter. On the page, this makes it look pretty cool and potentially experimental and interesting. On reading it, unfortunately, I was a bit underwhelmed and unable to see what the point of all the alphabetic divisions was. Then, however, I consulted an authoritative commentary on holy scripture and all other things -- it's called "Wikipedia" -- and was glad I did. Check this out:

This psalm is one of about a dozen alphabetic acrostic poems in the Bible. Its 176 verses are divided into twenty-two stanzas of eight lines each, and in Hebrew forms an acrostic, with each stanza starting with successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Further, within each stanza, each line begins with that same letter.

In other words, the eight verses of the "Aleph" section all start with the letter Aleph, the eight verses of the "Beth" section all... well, you get the picture. Cooool.

This aspect of the Psalm doesn't survive in the translation, however, so in reading I naturally focused on the simple meaning of the text. And the meaning is fairly straightforward, and consistent throughout the Chapter. I'll give you a sample line from each section, and you can see if you can find any sort of overarching theme. Ready? Here we go.

Aleph: You have laid down precepts that are to be fully obeyed. (4)
Beth: I rejoice in following your statues as one rejoices in great riches. (14)
Gimel: My soul is consumed with longing for your laws at all times. (20)
Daleth: I have chosen the way of truth; I have set my heart on your laws. (30)
He: Teach me, O Lord, to follow your decrees; then I will keep them to the end. (33)
Waw: ...for I delight in your commands because I love them. (47)
Zayin: I remember your ancient laws, O Lord, and I find comfort in them. (52)
Heth: I will hasten and not delay to obey your commands. (60)
Teth: The law from your mouth is more precious to me than thousands of pieces of silver and gold. (72)
Yodh: I know, O Lord, that your laws are righteous.... (75)
Kaph: Preserve my life according to your love, and I will obey the statutes of your mouth. (88)
Lamedh: Your laws endure to this day, for all things serve you. (91)
Mem: Oh, how I love your law! I meditate on it all day long. (97)
Nun: My heart is set on keeping your decrees to the very end. (112)
Samekh: My flesh trembles in fear of you; I stand in awe of your laws. (120)
Ayin: Deal with your servant according to your love and teach me your decrees. (124)
Pe: I open my mouth and pant, longing for your commands. (131)
Tsadhe: The statutes you have laid down are righteous; they are fully trustworthy. (138)
Qoph: Long ago I learned from your statutes that you established them to last forever. (152)
Resh: Look upon my suffering and deliver me, for I have not forgotten your law. (153)
Sin/Shin: I obey your precepts and your statutes, for all my ways are known to you. (168)
Taw: May my tongue sing of your word, for all your commands are righteous. (172)

EXTRA CREDIT: Rewrite an English translation of Psalm 119 so that, in each eight-verse section, each verse begins with the same letter. For full credit, get all twenty-two sections in alphabetical order. You may skip any four letters you wish.

AMAZING SIDENOTE: As I finished today's reading, I was all like "wow, it looks like I'm getting to the halfway point in this book!" Well. There are 923 pages in my Bible. Today, I read most of page 462. ~You~ do the math!

Psalms 111 - 118

2009-09-08T11:07:00.000-07:00

Eight More Psalms!

111 A short "Praise the Lord" Psalm -- it opens with that phrase -- touching on the greatness and majesty of God, his propensity for giving his followers sustainance and the ability to conquer other peoples, and his justice and uprightness.

112 A Psalm about how great and successful life is going to be for a righteous man who believes in God, with a short coda about how miserable things will go for wicked people.

113 The third Psalm in a row beginning with "Praise the Lord," this is a short passage that does just that. God is praised particularly as one who lifts up the poor and makes barren women fertile.

114 A short and somewhat cryptic celebration of God's miracles during the Exodus.

115 Ooh! Psalm 115 is suddenly RICH in theological content! For starters, it introduces the brand-new idea that there is a specific non-earthly dwelling place of God: Why do the nations say, "Where is their God?" Our God is in heaven; he does whatever pleases him. (2-3) Then, it explicitly takes on polytheism. In verses 4-8 it says that the idols of the surrounding peoples have mouths, but cannot speak, and so on through eyes, ears, noses, hands, and feet, which can not walk, and then it darkly hints that those who worship the idols will end up the same way.

Yet even while it makes these big gestures towards standard Christian theology as I learned it in Sunday school, it retains the general Old Testament line against life after death: The highest heavens belong to the Lord, but the earth he has given to man. It is not the dead who praise the Lord, those who go down to silence; it is we who extol the Lord, both now and forevermore. (16-18)

116 A fairly ecstactic prayer of fealty to God, in thanks for having "turned his ear" to the Psalmist and delivered him from all of his problems.

117 Is tiny. Here it is in its entirety:

1 Praise the Lord, all you nations;
extol him, all you peoples.
2 For great is his love toward us,
and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever.
Praise the Lord.

(It says here in the footnote that the bit translated as "Praise the Lord" is, in Hebrew, Hallelu Yah. I'll be.)

118 A long prayer proclaiming the physical protection afforded by God, and encouraging everyone to celebrate and praise God.

Psalm 119: Is long and looks kind of... unusual. So we'll stop here for now.

Psalms 101 - 110: Let's Speed This Up

2009-09-04T18:36:00.000-07:00

Ten More Psalms!

101 A first-person vow to God that the Psalmist will behave well.

102 One of the most negative Psalms yet, a lament of sickness, destitution, and humiliation. The Psalmist compares his misery with the greatness of God, more or less blaming God for his downfall but seemingly without rancor.

103 Literally a "Praise the Lord" sort of hymn; the phrase crops up five times in the Psalm. It is a catalog of God's virtues. The most memorable phrase, though, is a brief break to describe humanity by way of contrast: 15 As for man, his days are like grass, he flourishes like a flower of the field; 16 the wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more. Kind of a downer.

104 A long Psalm of praise, ascribing all natural phenemona to God. Light, winds, earth, rivers, plants, wine, the moon, animals, the sea, whales, everything: God made it all, and it's all good. There's only one negative note, as the last verse calls for sinners and the wicked to be swept from the earth.

105 A long song of Thanksgiving, recounting the history of the Israelites from Genesis and Exodus.

106 More or less a sequel to Psalm 105, Psalm 106 continues the summary of history from the Exodus through to at least the wandering in the desert.

107 The first of a new set of Psalms, "Book V." This is a Psalm of wild contradictions, exhorting everyone to give thanks for God's "unfailing love" and celebrating the good things he provides for his worshipers, but at the same time also celebrating the miseries, captivity, and deprivation that those who "rebelled against the words of God" are subject to. Love can apparently be both unfailing and extremely conditional.

108 A military Psalm, calling on God to support the armies of David and ensure their victory.

109 We haven't seen any of the paranoid Psalms for a while, but this one starts out in good form with complaints against wicked, deceitful enemies full of hatred. From there, it transforms into a scorching curse, wishing all manners of misfortunate and woe on the people who wished the Psalmist ill, as well as their friends and family.

110 And Psalm 110 is just kind of... weird. It's definitely about the power of God, but... well, it's short, I'll just give it to you whole.

1 The LORD says to my Lord:
"Sit at my right hand
until I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet."
2 The LORD will extend your mighty scepter from Zion;
you will rule in the midst of your enemies.

3 Your troops will be willing
on your day of battle.
Arrayed in holy majesty,
from the womb of the dawn
you will receive the dew of your youth.

4 The LORD has sworn
and will not change his mind:
"You are a priest forever,
in the order of Melchizedek."

5 The Lord is at your right hand;
he will crush kings on the day of his wrath.

6 He will judge the nations, heaping up the dead
and crushing the rulers of the whole earth.

7 He will drink from a brook beside the way;
therefore he will lift up his head.

Psalms 90-100

2009-08-31T18:45:00.000-07:00

Wait, What?

I still have a Bible project? And I'm still in the Psalms? Sigh....

The good news is, I've finally made it to Psalm 100! ...and the bad news is, there's 150 Psalms. Well, onward! The strategem today is just to identify the main point of each Psalm -- this batch consists for the most part of thematically unified chapters -- and give you a short soundbite that captures the mood. Ready? Let's go!

Psalm 90

This is another Psalm on a topic that is always surprising to me, how much the world as created by God kind of sucks. The tone isn't complaint, but resigned acceptance of the limitations of human life, and the harshness of God:

7 We are consumed by your anger
and terrified by your indignation.

...and then you die, as lain out in this famous passage:

9 All our days pass away under your wrath;
we finish our years with a moan.
10 The length of our days is seventy years—
or eighty, if we have the strength;
yet their span is but trouble and sorrow,
for they quickly pass, and we fly away.

There is just this one upbeat, uplifting passage to break the gloom, toward the end of the Psalm:

14 Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love,
that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days.

Otherwise, this is a hard-bitten, that's-just-the-way-it-is sort of Psalm. Psalm noir, as it were.

Psalm 91

A far more optimistic Psalm than its immediate predecessor, #91 is on the popular theme of how God will protect and shield his worshippers.

9 If you make the Most High your dwelling—
even the LORD, who is my refuge-
10 then no harm will befall you,
no disaster will come near your tent.
11 For he will command his angels concerning you
to guard you in all your ways;
12 they will lift you up in their hands,
so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.

These assurances always seem a little problematic in a prayer or a religious song. After all, does God really provide complete physical protection for all his believers? Well, ask any saint.

Psalm 92

This one is a straightforward song of celebration, an upbeat celebration of greatness of God and the greatness of worshipping God.

5 How great are your works, O LORD,
how profound your thoughts!

The second half continues in the same mood, but reintroduces the theme of material benefit for believers:

12 The righteous will flourish like a palm tree,
they will grow like a cedar of Lebanon

Psalm 93

A short piece, five verses long with a loopy, repetitive quality, you can just imagine this one as a a slow number in a minor key. It is on the theme of the mightiness of God.

4 Mightier than the thunder of the great waters,
mightier than the breakers of the sea—
the LORD on high is mighty.

Psalm 94

The 94th Psalm is, by contrast, a long and rather blunt recitation on the theme of God's vengeance. It complains of the actions of the evildoers, and predicts their punishment by God, rooting God on in the process:

1 O LORD, the God who avenges,
O God who avenges, shine forth.
2 Rise up, O Judge of the earth;
pay back to the proud what they deserve.

Psalm 95

The 95th starts out as a call to worship God and ends with a sort of monologue by God to the Israelites. It is hard to tell exactly where one morphs into the other, but I think it's somewhere in here:

7 for he is our God
and we are the people of his pasture,
the flock under his care.
Today, if you hear his voice,
8 do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah,
as you did that day at Massah in the desert,
9 where your fathers tested and tried me,
though they had seen what I did.

At and before verse 7, God is "he"; at and after verse 9, God seems to be "I."

Psalm 96

A fairly ecstatic song of praise, with a bit of a prosylatizing edge to it:

3 Declare his glory among the nations,
his marvelous deeds among all peoples.
4 For great is the LORD and most worthy of praise;
he is to be feared above all gods.

You don't often see calls in the Old Testament for believers to spread their faith, but this seems to be a bit of an exception.

Psalm 97

Another straightforward song of praise.

5 The mountains melt like wax before the LORD,
before the Lord of all the earth.
6 The heavens proclaim his righteousness,
and all the peoples see his glory.

Psalm 98

This is one of a great many Psalms that starts along the lines of Sing to the Lord a new song, which is kind of ironic seeing as how they are all now old, old, old songs. Of course, every song is a new song when it's being written, but the phrase happens often enough so that one wonders if it has any particular meaning in this context.

This is, in any event, another song of religious celebration, specifically religious celebration through music.

4 Shout for joy to the LORD, all the earth,
burst into jubilant song with music;
5 make music to the LORD with the harp,
with the harp and the sound of singing,
6 with trumpets and the blast of the ram's horn—
shout for joy before the LORD, the King.

Psalm 99

A song of praise and thanksgiving -- we seem to have uncovered a rich vein of them here -- this time with references to earlier Old Testament history.

5 Exalt the LORD our God
and worship at his footstool;
he is holy.
6 Moses and Aaron were among his priests,
Samuel was among those who called on his name;
they called on the LORD
and he answered them.

Psalm 100

And Psalm 100, finally, an uncomplicated thanksgiving Psalm that simply exhorts the reader to get happy and praise God:

4 Enter his gates with thanksgiving
and his courts with praise;
give thanks to him and praise his name.

And with that, we're 2/3 through the Psalms.

Psalms 83-89: Eighties Songs

2009-08-02T15:11:00.001-07:00

Psalm 83

This is a solid example of a Psalm about enemies and about smiting enemies. The first eight verses talk about and list the foes that have it in for God's people, and the last ten verse exhort God to punish them and punish them good.

...pursue them with your tempest and terrify them with your storm.
Cover their faces with shame so that men will seek your name, O Lord.
May they ever be ashamed and dismayed; may they perish in disgrace. (15-17)

The idea that God should lay into enemies of his followers with especial harshness in order to make a big impression is a very common one in the Bible; we've seen it at least since the Plagues of Egypt, which Exodus says were orchestrated by God in order for a chance to showcase his power. It is always a disappointing thing to read about a God whom you hope will be less about vengeance, hate, and destruction and more about mercy, goodwill, and loving thy
enemy.

Now Psalm 83 is a Psalm, a song of praise, and there is no indication in the text that it aspires to predicting the future. Indeed, it is pretty self-evidentally a plea to God for support in a local crisis of the moment. This has however not stopped Biblical prophecy nutters from getting all excited about the enemy nations listed in Verses 6-8. A web search reveals several discussions of "prophecy in Psalm 83," illustrated with maps like this:

Well, the Bible is abundant with cryptic detail, and if you want to use it as a magic fortune-telling book there is enough material to keep you chasing your own tail indefinitely. It is an abuse of both the text and of your own intellect, but I suppose it keeps you off the street.

Psalm 84

This Psalm is about the "dwelling place" of God, which immediately resonates with ideas of heaven. But I don't think the house of God here is anything but the Temple in Jerusalem. Blessed are those who dwell in your house; they are ever praising you, reads Verse 4, and it's hard to take that as anything but a metaphorical way of talking about the community of believers. But I think it's quite literal, and is referring to the priesthood which actually lived and worked in the temple and indeed was always praising Him. The clue is in the next three lines, which talks about pilgrims comes through the Baca Valley to "appear... before God in Zion"; this is almost certainly referring to the annual pilgrimages that believers were supposed to make in order to make their most important sacrifices at the one temple.

Psalm 85

The Psalms since Psalm 73 have tended to be much more individual coherent and unified than the "Psalms of David" that preceded them, and this one is another example. It is again on a common theme: the idea that God punishes a lack of faithfulness by withdrawing his favor and his favors from his people. Apparently written during a dark time, it asks for forgiveness as of an angry spouse:

will you be angry with us forever?
Will you prolong your anger through all generations?
Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you? (5-6)

As before, we see an element here of bargaining with God -- if he overdoes his withdrawal of favors, than people will lose interest in him and it will cost him the worship he has become accustomed to. However, later in the Psalm it's implied that righteousness is supposed to come first.

The Lord will indeed give what is good, and our land will yield its harvest.
Righteousness goes before him and prepares the way for his steps. (13)

In other words, you aren't supposed to wait and see what God offers, and then worship accordingly; you are supposed to start worshipping, and if you do that will please God and he will provide for you.

Psalm 86

Now THIS is kind of interesting: Psalm 86 is so ecstatic in it's praise of God, and has such a ring of paranoia in its sudden invocation of mysterious enemies -- The arrogant are attacking me, O God; a band of ruthless men seeks my life (14) -- that I thought "uh oh, this really breaks down the division I've noticed between the Psalms of David and the post-David Psalms." But then I noticed up at the top that Psalm 86 is, indeed, a "Psalm of David." Spiritually blissed out, paranoid, brazenly asking for divine favors like some guys bum cigarettes -- that's David for ya all right. The Chapters of Psalms said to have been written by David may or may not have actually been written by the possibly fictitious king, but they certainly seem to have been written by someone with a distinctive set of concerns.

Psalm 87

A short Psalm about how much God loves Jerusalem: the Lord loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwellings of Jacob. There's a list of surrounding countries that will submit to Jerusalem, and lots of famous people are going to be born there. After Solomon, this song would obviously appeal more to the Judeans (who controlled Jerusalem and its local region) than the remaining Kingdom of Israel (who controlled everything else).

Psalm 88

The theme of despair is all over the Book of Psalms, and it runs through all 18 verses of this chapter. The singer addresses God, reminding God that he prays continually for help and comfort but receives only sickness, trouble, and humiliation. Why, O Lord, he asks, in a fairly common Psalms lament, do you reject me and hide your face from me? (14) Often times, these kinds of passages end on a positive note, with an indication that God has come through in the end or with a solumn determination to redouble one's faith, but not this time. You have taken my companions and loved ones from me; the darkness is my closest friend. (18)

In Verses 10 through 12, the Psalmist reasons with God in an interesting way. In a heavily paraphrased form, the argument goes "It won't do you any good to let me die young; dead people can't praise you or tell people how great you are." This shows that the Israelites thought of God as needing, or at least wanting, their praise and acclaim for reasons of His own; again we see the idea that to a certain extent, they can bargain with Him because He NEEDS them. It is also further evidence for the notion that the Israelites did not believe in a significant life after death.

People who make inspirational images are way too selective in the scripture they choose to illustrate. Wouldn't this image be so much more challenging, bracing, and thought-provoking with the text You have taken my companions and loved ones from me; the darkness is my closest friend?

Psalm 89

A very long Psalm, number 89 begins with 18 Verses of praise addressed to God, telling him how powerful, awe-inspiring, and righteous he is. After that, there is a recounting of God's covenenant with David that lasts another 19 Verses.

Then, a surprising detour: the next eight lines talk about how God then borke his covenant with David, and how without God's protection the kingdom has been subject to humiliation, plunder, and the scorn of its enemies. A final seven Verses plead with God to resume his support and love, to make things better for his people. Essentially, it is a plea for mercy, although there is a subtle reprise of the idea that God is being silly to let his people experience so much trouble, since they can't be praising him if they are always getting killed off.

Whoops, that's the end of "BOOK III" of the Book of Psalms.

NEXT TIME: The first half of "BOOK IV" of the Book of Psalms.

This Week's Text: Psalms 83-89

Psalms 73-82: Psalms by Numbers II

2009-07-19T12:41:00.000-07:00

I broke off last time because Psalm 73 marks the transition from the Psalms of David to the Psalms of Asaph, whoever he is. I wasn't expecting this to be a terribly significant shift, though. Truth be told, I've been pretty skeptical about the idea that the "Psalms of David" were really written by King David -- people who study such things are apparently not even unanimously convinced that such a person really ever existed, after all, let alone that we can say much about his life and works.

That as may be, however, there is a definite stylistic shift between Psalm 72 and Psalm 73, marked enough so as to suggest -- through the many complications of translation, form, and history -- a different authorial voice. As a Psalmist, "Asaph" is more even-tempered and narrative. The sudden shifts of mood and topic are gone, and Psalms follow a single line of thought more or less from beginning to end. These Psalms are less personal and less emotional, more about the history and experience of the Israelites as a people. They have fewer resonant, ringing phrases -- I'm guessing that they are far less popular as sound-bite Psalms -- but are much easier to read in their entirety.

They still touch on many of the same themes as the previous 72 Psalms, however, so I was by and large able to evaluate them according to the categories I was using last week. Three chapters didn't quite fit the pattern, though, so the following number-crunching is for Psalms 73-77, 79, and 80.

Characterizations of God as Powerful

Asaph preaches the power and might of God. In 25% of the verses enumerated, Asaph is in some way referring to the past, present, or potential ability of God to shape the world and its events. Psalm 76, for instance, is about God's ability to make peace through the use of might: Surely your wrath against men brings you praise, and the survivors of your wrath are restrained. (10)

Two of the Psalms that didn't work with my categories are also largely about the power of God as well. Psalm 78 has an 8-verse preamble followed by a 64-verse summary of Israelite history from Moses to David -- two hundred and two pages of text, from Exodus to 2 Samuel, laid out in a single chapter! This summary, moreover, stresses God's power to bless the Israelites when they are properly obedient, and to lay them low when they stray.

Then, Psalm 82 stresses God's authority and power among the ""gods."" Got that? The ""gods."" That is, it talks about God's authority over the gods as if he were the CEO of a polytheism, but the word "gods" is in quotation marks. The text doesn't make clear if it is actually referring to other deities -- as I have often said, polytheism always seems to be lurking at the edges of Old Testament theology -- or whether it is making fun of puffed-up human bigshots:

"I said, 'You are "gods"; you are all sons of the Most High.'
But you will die like mere men; you will fall like every other ruler." (6-7)

Psalms of Despair

This new set of Psalms is no less willing than the first 72 to complain of the absence of God. The theme of despair, which represents 20% of the text, is most evident in Psalm 74, where Asaph asks questions like "Why have you rejected us forever, O God?" (1) and says things like "We are given no miraculous signs; no prophets are left, and none of us knows how long this will be." (9) This continual refrain has been the most surprising element of the Psalms to me, but its presence has also been kind of reassuring. To me, doubt seems a necessary element of faith in a divine, inscrutable supernatural being, and I am always surprised and rather confused by people who claim to have never doubted, or feared that God might be other than they imagine or indeed altogether absent. That the Psalmists wrestled with this most obvious of religious problems lends them a credibility that escapes the blindly faithful.

The Wicked

Description of the Wicked was the third most common theme in this set, with 16% of the text. Most of this came in Psalm 73, which lists most of the typical problems with the wicked -- tautological characteristics like iniquity, evil conceits, malice, and oppression, and vague characteristics like violence, arrogance, and the propensity to lie. It begins, though, with a startlingly different take on the wicked than we've seen previously:

For I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
They have no struggles; their bodies are healthy and strong
They are free from the burdens common to man; they are not plagued by human ills. (3-5)

This flies straight in the face of what has been the party line throughout earlier Psalms, that the Wicked are due for a comeuppance in this world. It is quite a while -- not until verse 17 -- that Asaph makes clear that you shouldn't go out and sign up for the Wicked team. The Wicked do well in the short term, he suggests, but despite their prosperity, or indeed because of it, they are in trouble in the long term: Surely you place them on slippery ground; you cast them down to ruin. How suddenly are they destroyed, completely swept away by terrors! (18-19) This stands out as the first suggestion I've seen in the Bible that wealth could be a morally problematic or hazardous thing, as opposed to a simple blessing or even a sign of God's favor.

Let's Make a Deal!

Another theme that runs through the Psalms, although it would be hard to enumerate, it that of deal-making between God and humans. This element shouldn't be surprisingly, I suppose in a religion that is based on a Covenant, but it is still sometimes rather jarring and -- to my arguably prissy middle-class sentiments -- sometimes seems a bit distasteful in a sacred context. Psalm 81 talks about the deal from God's point of view, and quotes God as saying essentially "if you would obey the laws and lay off of other gods, I'd make things really easy for you; when you go do your own thing, though, you are totally on your own.

But then elsewhere, as in Psalm 80, the Psalms present God with a laundry list of complaints and requests, sometimes with the implication that worship is going to require a bit of a quid pro quo. If God restores the prominence of the Israelites and makes them successful among the surrounding kingdoms, Psalm 80 suggests, then we will not turn away from you; revive us, and we will call on your name. (18) It all suggests a rather practical relationship, a sort of alliance, between deity and worshiper, with less in the way of unconditional love than a modern observer might expect. Did they have unconditional love in the iron age? Hard to say. The Psalms are, we are often forced to remember, from a culturally very distant world.

Psalms 65-72: Psalms by Numbers

2009-07-10T21:09:00.000-07:00

Last week, I was kind of flirting with classifying the Psalms into different types -- I mentioned "Sanctuary Psalms," for instance, and "Celebratory Psalms." The problem with that idea is that, as I have mentioned numerous times, most Psalms don't cleave to a single topic. Like a lot of songs, they are filled with sudden mood swings and changes of topic.

In looking at today's set of Psalms, I decided to try to ennumerate out some of the key themes and see what proportion of the text they occupy. We've seen a lot of fretting about enemies in the Psalms, for instance, and calls for God to punish these enemies. This theme SEEMS super-prominent, but that's partially just because it's so jarring; I guessed that in terms of raw volume, it would be somewhat less impressive, and that seems to be more or less true.

Caveats:

If fifty people read the Psalms and enumerated out the main themes, you would very possibly have fifty different versions of what constitutes "the main themes." Nothing special about MY version.
Even if you thought my themes were the definitive set, we would probably argue from time to time about which category an individual verse belongs to. Categorizing stuff is always a messy exercise.
Doing this at the verse level obfuscates that there are some Psalms that are relatively thematic, some that split into two or three coherent themes, and some that ramble around all over the place. (In this set, #s 67, 65, and 68 are prime examples). The first three Psalms in this set are all reletively celebratory in nature, and so the set as a whole is probably more celebratory than your "average" ten Psalms, whichever those ones are.
Occasionally, there are verses that go right over my head. See below.

I meant to just tally up the next ten Psalms, 65-74, but predictably there were complications. One complication is Psalm 72, which is unlike anything I've seen previously; it's all about how great the king is and how things are going to be wonderful because of him. It is bracketed with a request for God to bless the king, but as (it says) a work by Solomon, it seems not a little self-serving. It is also a breakpoint, the end of the "prayers of David." The next several Psalms are all "of Asaph." Who? I don't remember an Asaph, but then I've read an AWFUL lot of names in this book.

So, anyway, the numbers here are just for the seven Psalms 65-71. The plan is, I'll come back next time and see if I can use the same breakdown for Psalms 73-82. K? K. With no further ado:

Celebratory Psalms

In this category, I place anything that amounts to pure praise: ecstatic professions of faith or devotion, as well as statements of intent to praise, give sacrifice, and so on. These kinds of verses are sometimes addressed to God in second person and sometimes about God in third person; I didn't distinguish these in my counting.

Examples:

65:1 Praise awaits you, O God, in Zion; to you our vows will be fulfilled.

66:17-20 I cried out to him with my mouth; his praise was on my tongue.
If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened;
but God has surely listened and heard my voice in prayer.
Praise be to God, who has not rejected my prayer or withheld his love from me!

In this sample, these made up a whopping 37% of the Psalmic real estate by verse.

Psalms of Sanctuary

The second most prevalent category of Psalm was the appeal to God for physical shelter and protection.

71:2-4 Rescue me and deliver me in your righteousness; turn your ear to me and save me.
Be my rock of refuge, to which I can always go; give the command to save me, for you are my rock and my fortress.
Deliver me, O my God, from the hand of the wicked, from the grasp of evil and cruel men.

These verses made up 14% of the sample.

Psalms of Despair

You can not escape the depressive streak that runs through the Psalms, as so often they address God with a catalog of profound miseries.

69: 1-3 Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck.
I sink in the miry depths, where there is no foothold. I have come into the deep waters; the floods engulf me.
I am worn out calling for help; my throat is parched. My eyes fail, looking for my God.

At 10%, these were the third most common kind of verse in this batch.

Other Categories

The other categories I've come up with so far are

the related Complaints Against Enemies and Calls to Smite Enemies. At 4% and 7% of the same, you would say that they constitute 11% in an "Enemies" category and outweigh "Despair." Although there is some overlap between "Enemies" and "Despair," too. THIS IS JUST A LEARNING EXERCISE. IT ISN'T SCIENCE!!!
Characterizations of God as Powerful (10%)
Characterizations of God as a Bringer of Abundance (7%)
References to Past Trials and Punishments Endured by the Israelites (2%)
Discussion of The Wicked (1%) and The Righteous (1%)
Mystical Visions (3%)
Self-Accusation (1%)
?!???!!! (4%)

I'll talk more about some of these categories next time if they still seem to be meaningful. But if you are wondering what "?!???!!!" is all about, that would be those verses that I'm unable to make much sense out of. The main stumbling block this time was Psalm 68: 11-16, which goes like this:

11 The Lord announced the word, and great was the company of those who proclaimed it:
12 "Kings and armies flee in haste; in the camps men divide the plunder.
13 Even while you sleep among the campfires, the wings of my dove are sheathed with silver, its feathers with shining gold."
14 When the Almighty scattered the kings in the land, it was like snow fallen on Zalmon.
15 The mountains of Bashan are majestic mountains; rugged are the mountains of Bashan.
16 Why gaze in envy, O rugged mountains, at the mountain where God chooses to reign, where the LORD himself will dwell forever?

It probably belongs under "mystical visions," but it's so quirky that I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. Which of course makes me rather fond of it.

NEXT TIME: Psalms 73-82 -- the Breakdown.

This Week's Text: Psalms 65-72

Psalms 55 - 64: The "Second Batch of Colorado Psalms"

2009-07-04T08:57:00.000-07:00

Psalm 55

We begin a second set of Colorado Psalms – using the Revised Standard Version I have here at hand in the Centennial State – with Psalm 55, a fine example of a Psalm that doesn’t make any kind of conventional narrative sense. It starts off as a fairly typical riff on the “enemies” theme, asking God for protection from “the enemy” and “the wicked.” The Psalmist says he wishes he had “wings like a dove” so that he could fly away into the wilderness, and just get away from his troubles; then, that not being an option, he asks God to just destroy his opponents for him instead.

Then, there is a rapid mood swing, and instead of addressing God the Psalm addresses some former buddy of the Psalmist:

It is not an enemy who taunts me – then I could bear it;
It is not an adversary who deals insolently with me—then I could hide from him.
But it is you, my equal, my companion, my familiar friend,
We used to hold sweet converse together;
Within God’s house we walked in fellowship. (12-14)

This is an abrupt and confusing shift not only because we don’t know what the hell he is talking about – it’s possible that this is all about the Saul/David rivalries, but it sure isn’t spelled out – but because the Chapter up to now has clearly been talking about a large group of enemies, not just one guy.

Speaking of rapid mood swings, the text continues immediately into:

Let death come upon them;
let them go down to Sheol alive;
let them go away in terror into their graves. (15)

We have whiplashed back into addressing God and talking about a host of enemies. And after this single bizarrely vindictive verse, our mood changes again:

But I call upon God;
and the Lord will save me. (16)

See what you miss when you get just a few lines of Psalms in quotation? Everything seems so much more inspirational and level-headed after a good cherry-picking. And behold! We are only 2/3 of the way into Psalm 55. It continues through seven more verses of self-pity, confident affirmation of God’s protection, more accusations against the “companion,” a call to trust in God’s support, and a confident statement to God of trust that he will humiliate and kill the bad guys. It’s a twisty road, Psalm 55.

Psalm 56

Psalm 56 is far more straightforward, and follows what seems to be a fairly common pattern: seven Verses describing the downtrodden state of the Psalmist, followed by six Verses of ecstatic affirmation of faith in God. It is to be sung to the tune of “The Dove on Far-off Terebinths,” which is cool, and here in the NRV contains the startling claim that Thou hast kept count of my tossings. (8) I must remember to cross reference this with another translation.

Psalm 57

Here again we have an easily understood song. It has abrupt changes of mood and content, but they are in the regular rhythm of chorus and refrains. A few Verses describing the Psalmists suffering and despair are followed by a few Verses celebrating the intervention and power of God, and this pattern is repeated three or four times. It is sung to the tune of “Do Not Destroy,” which must have been a big hit as it is also the music for Psalm 58.

Psalm 58

Despite its tune, this is a text about destroying. The first five verses are about how very bad bad people are, and how some people are just born bad. It also, in this translation, mentions the amorality of other gods aside from God, which is the first really noteworthy example of Old Testament polytheism we’ve seen in awhile; a footnote, however, gives an alternate translation of “mighty lords.”

The next four Verses call on God to punish the bad guys in creative ways: having their teeth broken and torn out, vanishing like evaporating water, being trampled like grass, dissolving into slime like a snail, etc. There is, here as elsewhere, no suggestion that “the righteous” should care much about the fate of “the wicked.” Indeed,

The righteous will rejoice when he sees the vengeance;
He will bathe his feet in the blood of the wicked. (10)

This is followed immediately by:

Men will say, “Surely there is a reward for the righteous;
surely there is a God who judges on earth.” (11)

Hypothesis: I am guessing that Psalm 55:11 is fairly popular in quotation, but almost invariably de-linked from the context of the proceeding verse. I am guessing that Psalm 55:10 is invoked not at all, save in the most marginal and extreme of churches.

Results: Quick internet search reveals little to confirm or disprove the hypothesis.

Psalm 59

A mildly disturbing Psalm in its naked xenophobia, characterizing “all the nations” as snarling, lying, plotting packs of dogs, and calling on God to punish them, but to draw it out a bit so their suffering provides a good object lesson.

Psalm 60

Another downbeat, military Psalm, the 60th begins with a complaint of the troubles God has inflicted on people, and then shifts into a ambiguous series of passages that seem to both gloat of the military victories that will be achieved with the help of God and to accuse God of having abandoned the military effort.

Psalm 61

A straightforward example of what I am starting to think of as the “Sanctuary Psalms” – those that request and/or celebrate the physical protection that God provides to the faithful.

Psalm 62

Perhaps there is a category of the “Jumble Psalms.” Number 62 has two Verses of devotion; two of ranting about enemies (one in second person, one in third); four mystical Verses on the “sanctuary” theme; two Verses admonishing against the desire for worldly things; and two Verses that are hard just to get your head around, let alone to categorize:

Once God has spoken;
Twice have I heard this:
That power belongs to God;
And that to thee, O Lord, belongs steadfast love.
For thou dost requite a man according to his work. (11-12)

Psalm 63

Mostly what you might call one of the “Celebratory Psalms,” this one is an ecstatic professing of faith and devotion. It moves through a comparison of God to water in the dessert, something thirsted for which sustains life – a powerful metaphor in the Middle East, then as now – to a comparison of God to a rich and sumptuous feast. Here as in so many Psalms, though, the mystical vision of a just, loving, affirmative God is complicated by an intrusion of fear and vengeance:

But those who seek to destroy my life
shall go down into the depths of the earth;
they shall be given over to the power of the sword,
they shall be prey for jackals. (9-10)

Psalm 64

Psalm 64 is a plot point in the book I read last night! Jar City is an enjoyable and engrossing detective novel by the Icelandic writer Arnaldur Indridason. He uses this Psalm, a complaint against the malice and aggression of an unnamed enemy, to good effect. I have been thinking of these as the “Psalms of Paranoia” but that seems a bit loaded; “Psalms of Despair” isn’t quite right either. “Psalms of Complaint Against the Malice and Aggression of an Unnamed Enemy” is just too cumbersome. I’ll have to think on this.

Psalms 48-54: The "Colorado Psalms"

2009-06-29T15:14:00.000-07:00

Michael Reads the Bible comes to you this week from sunny Colorado! The official Michael Reads the Bible Bible – which is an “NIV,” a New International Version translation – got left behind in Oregon, because how hard is it to find a Bible when you’re traveling? As it happens, though, the only Bible at hand at the moment is a RSV, a Revised Standard Version. That doesn’t bug me any, but I think I’ll hold off from my attempt at quantitative analysis until we’re back on the home court. So to speak. In the meantime, we’ll cover Psalms 48-54, more or less on the fly.

Psalm 48

It’s a song about Mt. Zion, encouraging the faithful to consider God’s presence there and to praise God there.

Psalm 49

This is a longish Psalm, 20 verses, on a single theme: you can’t take it with you. More specifically, it encourages you not to worry if your neighbors are smarter or richer or happier than you, because everybody ends up dead in the end anyway. Cheerful stuff! Paradoxically, however, this is also one of those Psalms that seems to flirt with the idea of life after death:

God will ransom my soul from the power of Sheol, for he will receive me. (15)

Psalm 50

Psalm 50 is about judgment, the separation of the righteous from the wicked. Its imagery of God is rather severe:

Our God comes, he does not keep silence,
Before him is a devouring fire,
Round about him a mighty tempest. (3)

In Verses 8-15, God is said to speak well of those who honor Him with sacrifices, and promises to deliver them in times of trouble. In Verses 16-20, though, he castigates the wicked. Here, again, we learn a little of what this group “the wicked” that we hear so much about in the Psalms are like: they hate discipline, ignore the Laws of Moses, and befriend thieves and adulterers. They also lie a lot – wickedness and lying are often equated in Psalms – and in particular they are prone to lying about their own brothers.

It is interesting that righteousness here is defined only as adherence to sacrifice laws and, presumably, in the negative – in other words, righteous people should embrace discipline, obey the laws of Moses, stay away from thieves, and tell the truth. So there, perhaps, is some news we can use.

Psalm 51

It’s a Psalm of contrition. The author speaks at great length about his sins, begs for forgiveness, absolution, and cleansing, and promises to go out and tell other sinners about God as well. Two interesting points here – One, there is a hint of the “original sin” concept, which as I understand it holds that since babies are made through the filthy filthy horrible sin of sex, we are all tainted from the get-go:

Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. (5)

Probably, this is not an especially popular Bible verse these days, unless you go to a particularly hard-core church. But what do I know?

Second, Psalm 51 carries on a theme that I didn’t really mention in Psalm 50, the idea that the physical act of sacrifice is less important than conducting one’s relationship with God with the right attitude:

The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise. (17)

These passages do not say that sacrifice is irrelevant. Sacrifices are still supposed to be offered; however, they are spoken of less as fundamental to religious conduct and more as the cherry on top, so to speak, of one’s religious practice. Even this, though, is a pretty big departure from the laws of sacrifice as laid out back in the books of Moses, which had a ton to say about the mechanics of sacrifice, and nothing much at all about attitude.

Psalm 52

The author, identified as David, chews out an evil powerful man (it’s implied that he might be thinking specifically of poor King Saul). God, he says, will destroy and kill an evil person, and all of the righteous people will get to make fun of him as he gets his comeuppance. But none of these bad things, the author says, will happen to HIM – I am like a green olive tree in the house of God. It is, I’m afraid, a bit of a smug Psalm.

Psalm 53

Psalm 53:1 has another famous line: The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” Beyond foolishness, this Chapter has a lot else to say about atheists; they are corrupt, doing abominable iniquity; there is none that does good. (1) …They are all alike depraved; there is none that does good, no, not one. (3)

This equation of atheism with evil has always created a bit of a Biblical credibility gap for me. It simply does not jibe with my personal experience, in which I seem to have seen the devout do both good and evil, the atheistic do both good and evil, and the many who are in between do both good and evil, with the degree of morality and religiosity being in no way related.

Psalm 53, predictably enough, sees it differently, and forecasts dire punishments for the ungodly/evil. They will be in great terror and their bones will be scattered.

Psalm 54

It’s not unusual for the verses of a song to represent different moments in time, and this may be what we have here in Psalm 54. In Verses 1-3, the author is afraid of enemies, and cries out to God for help. In Verses 4 and 5, he confidently predicts God’s vanquishing of his enemies. In Verses 6 and 7, he thanks God for deliverance and promises to make sacrifice. Apparently, God did indeed save the day between Verse 5 and Verse 6, and we are now looking back on the event.

NEXT!

In the comments for the last entry, Chuckdaddy asked if Psalm 47 was the last of the bunch. Ha! Ha! No. There are 150 Psalms. We are barely 1/3 of the way through them. Then comes Proverbs. So yeah, we’re a long way still from picking back up any kind of narrative thread. But if you think that these posts are a little repetitive, think how I feel, OK?

Oh – best wishes from Colorado!

Psalms 43 - 47: Five More Psalms!

2009-06-21T13:06:00.000-07:00

Psalm 43

This is another one in which David complains of an absent God -- "why have you rejected me?" -- but resolves to be faithful and hopeful regardless. In retrospect, I wish I had kept track of the content of the Psalms since the beginning. The "why have you forsaken me" theme is really quite pervasive. I think this is interesting, because I don't believe I've ever heard or seen it cited in the various settings where we see or hear Psalms cited.

Psalm 44

Take Psalm 44, for instance! The first eight verses are a confident soldier's prayer, three verses extolling God's role in victories of the past, and five saying things along the lines of my sword does not bring me victory; but you give us victory over our enemies. (6-7) This is followed, though, by 18 verses of dispair and abandonment: You gave us up to be devoured like sheep.... You sold your people for a pittance, gaining nothing from the sale. (11-12) It goes on to specify that All this happen to us, though we had not forgotten you or be false to your convenant. (17)

...For your sake we face death all day long; it continues, we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered. (22) After a few lines of pleading for God to awake and not to reject his people forever, the Psalm ends with an affirmation of faith that seems almost ironic in context: Rise up and help us; redeem us because of your unfailing love. (26)

Again, you don't hear much about this in church, and I am finding a conspicuous shortage of inspirational images based on this particular Psalm. This makes perfect sense, of course, since most churches and religious people are more interested in messages of joy, hope, and redemption, and less excited about contemplating abandonment, despair, and divine capriciousness. But that's one of the ways that the Bible is so deeply problematic -- it does not, at least as far as I've read to date, offer an exclusively positive message about the relationship between God and His humans. The most that could be said is that God is often kind to those people that he has selected for his special regard, and although we see occasional references to His enormous compassion and mercy, little of this is actually seen in the acts attributed to Him. Psalm 44, then, is not especially out of place here in the Old Testament. It's just out of sync with the modern Christian conception of God.

Psalm 45

Psalm 45 is a wedding song fit, literally, for a king, praising his deeds, wishing him success in future endeavors, and offering some of the complements to him and his bride. It notes at one point that the person to whom the song is addressed love[s] righteousness and hate[s] wickedness; therefore God, your God, has set you above your companions by anointing you with the oil of joy. (7) Wait, don't most people hate wickedness? And love righteousness? Whatever "righteousness" is? Well, that's Psalmic logic for you.

Best thing about Psalm 45? It's supposed to be sung to the tune of "Lilies." You can't make this stuff up.

Psalm 46

This one is a three-parter. The first three verses affirm that God is an "ever-present help" and that with his assistance one fear nothing, not even the proverbial mountains falling into the sea. Except we're in Psalms, not Proverbs. How come we say things are "proverbial" but never "psalmic"?

The second part is something of a mystical vision, which I find lovely and trippy enough that I'm just going to repeat it without comment:

4 There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy place where the Most High dwells.

5 God is within her, she will not fall;
God will help her at break of day.

6 Nations are in uproar, kingdoms fall;
he lifts his voice, the earth melts.

7 The LORD Almighty is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress.

The third part speaks of God's ability to end war: he makes wars cease to the end of the earth. (9) I will guess that religious of an anti-war persuasion will have appropriated this snippit with some enthusiasm, but this is really not lion-lying-down-with-lamb stuff. In context, it's talking about ending war the hard way, with violence and fire.

Psalm 47

Nine verses of pure religious celebration, the concept of "praising the Lord" in a compact and ecstatic form. The first two verses seem tailor-made for those hippyish Christian youth groups that were popular in the 1970s:

1 Clap your hands, all you nations;
shout to God with cries of joy.

2 How awesome is the LORD Most High,
the great King over all the earth!

As is true of most songs of simple celebration, the content is not exactly what you would call deep thinkin':

6 Sing praises to God, sing praises;
sing praises to our King, sing praises.

7 For God is the King of all the earth;
sing to him a psalm of praise.

Here's an idea! Let's stop on an upbeat note for a change!

NEXT TIME: I've got the idea of trying a little quantitative analysis of Psalmic themes! I bet you're on the edge of your seat!

Psalm 42 Illustrated

2009-06-14T16:00:00.000-07:00

I've complained before that the Psalms seem more coherent and more significant in sound-bite form that they are in their totality. It is significant, I think, that we almost never hear a Psalm in its entirety. Readings at public events or worship services tend to pick out three or for consecutive verses that are relatively unified in content, so we are rarely confronted with the radical subject changes, mood shifts, and/or allusions to malicious enemies that likely lie before and after.

Another place you are likely to run into Psalms is in religious inspirational images. These are a commonplace; now that you are thinking about them you will likely start noticing them taped to your coworkers' monitors, in little frames in your relatives' homes, in the waiting rooms of businesses owned by religious entrepreneurs, and so on. Or, if you are a churchgoer, you can probably count a half-dozen of 'em between the foyer and the pastor's office. They're ubiquitous.

The inherent problem with using Psalms in religious art is, I think, quite similar to the inherent problem with television news programs. The problem with television news programs is that important things that affect people's lives (policy, laws, diplomatic efforts, economics, social trends, technological change, scientific development) aren't very photogenic, and things that are exciting to watch (police chases, fires, crowds, weather, baby ducks) aren't really important. The very nature of the medium pretty much guarantees that television news will be trivial, as is in fact the case.

In the case of Psalms, what happens is that passages that can be matched with attractive photography get immediate preference in the inspiration business. Let's take a look at the first three verses of Psalm 42.

1 For the director of music. A maskil of the Sons of Korah.
As the deer pants for streams of water,
so my soul pants for you, O God.
2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When can I go and meet with God?

3 My tears have been my food day and night,
while men say to me all day long,
"Where is your God?"

We have three verses here that, read together, are a lament of the perceived absence of God. This is a regular theme in the Psalms, something that initially surprised me but which I have become used to at this juncture. Verse one compares the longing for God to the thirst of a deer (probably a more potent image in the deserts of the Middle East than here in verdent Oregon). Verse two states the point directly, and verse three contains an interesting image of tears as food and complains of the mockery of unbelievers. And we are not, of course, given any guidance as to any one of these verses being more significant or important than the others.

So: Would you care to guess which of the three verses is more likely to show up in inspirational art?

The opportunity to match a Psalm with an attractive image of a deer wins the day, of course. I was in fact unable to find a single image of Psalm 42:3 as an inspirational image. It would be easy enough to create an appropriate photograph -- a desolate man weeping while passers-by mock him -- yet no one seems to have gone to the trouble.

Well, duh. Obviously, people who are going to decorate with scriptural quotations want to do it in a pleasant and tasteful way. It's more than understandable, it's perfectly obvious -- at yet, it significantly distorts which Psalms we are paying attention to. The nature of the medium highlights Psalms about, say, bunnies, flowers, and sunrises and buries those about wounds, grief, and being attacked by beasts.

But it goes deeper than that, too. Looking at the images above, you see that they all cite verse 1 or verses 1 and 2. Only one goes on to verse 3, and it does so in extremely fine print. This effectively changes the meaning of the passage, changing it from a complaint of God's absence into an affirmation of zeal for God. So the inspiring wisdom of these images is perhaps all fine and good, but it is not really the wisdom of Psalm 42. In its entirety, Psalm 42 is about resolving to remain faithful to God even though he may completely abandon you and there's nothing you can do about it. Putting verses 1 and 2 with a picture of a deer creates an image that is about being totally into God, and liking that deer are pretty. There's a difference.

----

Here's a gallery of the other Psalm 42 images I found in my carefully unscientific search. And the full text of Psalm 42, if you need that.

No Fear: Psalm 41

2009-05-28T16:18:00.000-07:00

For Post #100, something a little different. Yesterday in the Life & Times, I made fun of the No Fear: Shakespeare books, a "study aid" that badly paraphrases the more popular Shakespeare plays into colloquial English. So today, I thought I would try this out on the next Psalm to happen along. Which happens to be Psalm 41:

1 Blessed is he who has regard for the weak;
the LORD delivers him in times of trouble.
2 The LORD will protect him and preserve his life;
he will bless him in the land
and not surrender him to the desire of his foes.

3 The LORD will sustain him on his sickbed
and restore him from his bed of illness.

4 I said, "O LORD, have mercy on me;
heal me, for I have sinned against you."

5 My enemies say of me in malice,
"When will he die and his name perish?"

6 Whenever one comes to see me,
he speaks falsely, while his heart gathers slander;
then he goes out and spreads it abroad.

7 All my enemies whisper together against me;
they imagine the worst for me, saying,

8 "A vile disease has beset him;
he will never get up from the place where he lies."

9 Even my close friend, whom I trusted,
he who shared my bread,
has lifted up his heel against me.

10 But you, O LORD, have mercy on me;
raise me up, that I may repay them.

11 I know that you are pleased with me,
for my enemy does not triumph over me.

12 In my integrity you uphold me
and set me in your presence forever.

13 Praise be to the LORD, the God of Israel,
from everlasting to everlasting.
Amen and Amen.

Here's my version:

People who are nice to the unfortunate will always have good fortune themselves. God will take care of them when they have problems, and will look after them and make sure they don't get killed. He will make sure they don't get hurt by either natural forces or their human enemies. If they get sick, God will make sure they pull through.

"God, have mercy on me," I said. "I am sick, and even though I realize that I've sinned, I still ask you to make me well again." My enemies think it's great that I'm sick, and they hope I'll die. They come and see me, but only so they can go out and tell their friends how bad I look. They have fun imagining how bad off I am. Since I've been sick, even my best friend has been trying to turn the situation to his own advantage.

But you, God, are merciful with me. I hope you will make me strong again so I can take revenge. I know you must be happy with me, or I wouldn't have lasted as long as I already have. Because I'm faithful, you take care of me and are always looking after me. Praise the Lord!

Assessment: This was a moderately interesting exercise to complete, but probably not a very interesting one to read about.

Next: Psalm 42 Illustrated

Psalms 32-40: The Beat Goes On

2009-05-25T19:27:00.000-07:00

Oh, how I weary of the Psalms!
Their vagueness and their repetition, they lead me unto sleep.
Each verse alone rings out with the sound of wisdom,
Yet the verses in their masses neither inspire nor inform.

In my torpor I cried out, saying
"I know that song lyrics are not made to be read as other texts!"
And yet, this is the way the Psalms have been passed down to me.
This is the Bible, here for me to read.

So give me strength, to endure the same metaphors endlessly,
The endless petitions of David, blatantly self-serving,
Vindictive toward all who do not think at he does,
Disingenuous in all questions of good and evil.

I cry out in fear that all my posts are now the same!
Yet how can it not be so, when the Psalms are all the same?

OK, that was silly and not especially well done, but reading the Psalms really is starting to get to be a little like driving across the desert. There are landmarks here and there, and any given view has a sort of austere beauty to it, but the essentially unchanging scenery quickly becomes mind-numbing.

Now, I chose that comparison carefully, knowing that some people love the desert and love driving across the desert, and couldn't imagine anything more beautiful than a desert landscape. And good for them! And for anyone who finds the Psalms endlessly beautiful and inspirational, good for them too. But we clearly have different tastes.

Psalm 34

In today's slate of Psalms, the 34th was the one that caught my eye the most. I was struck, as I often am when I encounter it, with the notion of fearing God:

8 Taste and see that the LORD is good;
blessed is the man who takes refuge in him
9 Fear the LORD, you his saints, for those who fear him lack nothing.

This is the kind of exhortation that is everywhere in the Psalms, but as you focus on it you realize that it makes a uniquely complex demand on the emotions of the worshipper. Generally, you take refuge FROM the things you fear, not IN the things you fear. Here and elsewhere, we are told to trust in God, to regard him as an earthly salvation, but also to live in fear of him. My first impulse is to disregard this as an emotional impossibility, but that would be naive of me. It is actually a common complex of emotions that one might feel for a boss or a commander, and which most people feel to some extent for their parents.

I have oserved from time to time in this blog that the capital-B Bible is not really a small-b bible. If you were to buy a book called, I don't know, "The Gardener's Bible," you would expect a how to book that would present all the information you need in order to be a good gardener in a coherent, instructive fashion. Whereas THE Bible, although flecked here and there with religious rules (some considered important, some obsolete) and with potentially instructive stories, can't at this point really be said to lay down much of a game plan for either how to conduct a moral life or how to conduct one's relationship with God. So, I was excited in Psalm 34:11-14 to see a brief catechism taking shape:

11 Come, my children, listen to me;
I will teach you the fear of the LORD.
12 Whoever of you loves life
and desires to see many good days,
13 keep your tongue from evil
and your lips from speaking lies.
14 Turn from evil and do good;
seek peace and pursue it.

So. Don't lie, reject this vaguely-defined thing called "evil," and seek peace, and you will live a long time. Really? Does David -- a fine one to recommend seeking peace, incidentally -- think we were born yesterday? It's disappointing how often the ringing wisdom of the Psalms crumbles into mere rhetoric when you attend to it. So much of the Psalms treats the banal and obvious (don't lie! avoid evil!), or the meaninglessly vague (turn from evil and do good!), and the nakedly false promises. I've resisted saying this, but I will now: the Psalms are often simply and unambiguously false. Check it out:

19 A righteous man may have many troubles,
but the LORD delivers him from them all;
20 he protects all his bones,
not one of them will be broken.

Now, it's tempting to me to accept this as absolutely true, because I've never broken a bone. But I don't think this really makes a good acid test for righteousness, do you? Do you think God makes sure that no righteous person ever breaks a bone? Do you, in fact, think that any sensible person has ever really believed such a thing? Of course not! So my question is, what's David putting it in his song for! And more to the point, why is it in the Bible! The presence of stuff like this really makes it hard to make the Bible as a whole seriously.

Psalm 35

David's exhortation to seek peace in Psalm 34 is actually relatively rare in the Psalms, at least relative to more military language. The 35th Psalm is an example of the many songs that employ military themes and metaphors. The third verse is a great encapsulation of David's martial faith; it feels like a radically mixed message to a peacenik like myself, but might resonate nicely with a religious soldier.

3 Brandish spear and javelin against those who pursue me.
Say to my soul, "I am your salvation."

The military Psalms typically condemns "enemies" in ways that strike me as morally childish. An obvious example of this is in verses 7 and 8:

7 Since they hid their net for me without cause
and without cause dug a pit for me,
8 may ruin overtake them by surprise --
may the net they hid entangle them,
may they fall into the pit, to their ruin.
9 Then my soul will rejoice in the LORD
and delight in his salvation.

This is not a seeking after peace, nor even a basic attempt to recognize the humanity of others and wish them well. It is more the grim world view you find when you study marine biology: the desire to kill instead of to die. And perhaps that is sometimes the choice a person or a people was faced with, back in the iron age, but it's not a worldview that requires a religion to support it, nor a core concept that you want in your system of belief if you hope to have a sustainable civilization.

Psalm 37

Love 'em or hate 'em, the Psalms seem destined to be used as soundbites. Even when read in a religious service, you seldom hear more than three or four verses run together, and of course their use (often accompanied by or superimposed onto photographs of nature scenes) as short inspirational messages. To read through the Psalms, I find, is to continually bounce off of soundbites that sometimes seem very positive, sometimes very negative.

Here in the 37th, for instance, I find myself profoundly annoyed by the shamelessly pandering false promise of verse 4:

Delight yourself in the LORD
and he will give you the desires of your heart.

and the spookily vindictive image of the Almighty in verse 13:

the Lord laughs at the wicked,
for he knows their day is coming.

But in between, there's a soundbite that seems like a fine piece of wisdom:

7 Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him;
do not fret when men succeed in their ways,
when they carry out their wicked schemes.
8 Refrain from anger and turn from wrath;
do not fret -- it leads only to evil.

This is a sound council of patience, endurance, and tolerance, and looks great out of context. In context, unfortunately, its message is that you should have patience because God will soon arrive on the scene like some kind of divine Batman to vanquish evildoers and restore the meek. That obviously doesn't work, though. If it did, we wouldn't have had to invent Batman.

Psalms 38 & 39

These two chapters are interesting in that they are very negative in tone, beseeching an absent God to return and redeem the situation. They describe a speaker in depressed desolation, less rejoicing in God than desperate for God.

39:12 Hear my prayer, O LORD
listen to my cry for help; be not deaf to my weeping.
For I dwell with you as an alien, a stranger, as all my fathers were.
13 Look away from me, that I may rejoice again
before I depart and am no more.

This is a more or less recognizable state of mind for most people, and songs like these add a level of emotional wholeness to David's song cycle. It must be said, however, that the tenor of Psalms 38 & 39 is a long way from, and puts the lie to, the happy nonsense of "delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart."

Psalm 40

...is an old U2 song! Kind of!

1 I waited patiently for the LORD
he turned to me and heard my cry.
2 He lifted me out of the slimy pit,
out fo the mud and mire;
he set my feet on a rock
and gave me a firm place to stand.
3 He put a new song in my mouth,
a hymn of praise to our God.
Many will see and fear
and put their trust in the LORD.

See ya soon.

NEXT TIME: No Fear Psalm 41

Psalm 31: Looking Hard at Just One Psalm

2009-05-03T21:26:00.000-07:00

I expected to continue my sprinting pace through the next ten Psalms, but it occurred to me that it might be a different experience of I instead slowed down and spent a little more time with one particular Psalm. So I did, and the Psalm I happened to be on was Psalm 31.

What I ended up noticing more at this scale of reading is the language of the text. In what follows, I am going to pick at the language a little bit, but before I do that I also want to suggest that analysing of the language of the Psalms is to a certain extent a futile exercise. It is like trying to judge the merit of Shakespeare's writing; since Shakespeare has had such a profound influence on our conceptions of what constitutes excellence in writing, and even on the evolution of the English language in general, he is to a certain extent untouchable. You can like Shakespeare or not like Shakespeare, but whether Shakespeare is any good or not is pretty much irrelevant.*

In the same sort of way, the Psalms carry a cumulative weight from their centuries of use, and from their use in specific contexts throughout all of our own lifetimes, that makes detached analysis something of a non sequitor. They ring with a certain authority simply because they are scripture, because they are Psalms, and we have almost all heard them spoken with reverence and solemnity at formal and religious occasions since we were children. It almost doesn't matter what the actual words are; the Psalms pack a rhetorical punch because they are Psalms.**

So now that I've argued that you can't really analyize this text, let's get rolling.

Here's the Text:

Psalm 31
For the director of music. A psalm of David.

1 In you, O LORD, I have taken refuge;
let me never be put to shame;
deliver me in your righteousness.
2 Turn your ear to me,
come quickly to my rescue;
be my rock of refuge,
a strong fortress to save me.
3 Since you are my rock and my fortress,
for the sake of your name lead and guide me.
4 Free me from the trap that is set for me,
for you are my refuge.
5 Into your hands I commit my spirit;
redeem me, O LORD, the God of truth.
6 I hate those who cling to worthless idols;
I trust in the LORD.
7 I will be glad and rejoice in your love,
for you saw my affliction
and knew the anguish of my soul.
8 You have not handed me over to the enemy
but have set my feet in a spacious place.
9 Be merciful to me, O LORD, for I am in distress;
my eyes grow weak with sorrow,
my soul and my body with grief.
10 My life is consumed by anguish
and my years by groaning;
my strength fails because of my affliction, [a]
and my bones grow weak.
11 Because of all my enemies,
I am the utter contempt of my neighbors;
I am a dread to my friends—
those who see me on the street flee from me.
12 I am forgotten by them as though I were dead;
I have become like broken pottery.
13 For I hear the slander of many;
there is terror on every side;
they conspire against me
and plot to take my life.
14 But I trust in you, O LORD;
I say, "You are my God."
15 My times are in your hands;
deliver me from my enemies
and from those who pursue me.
16 Let your face shine on your servant;
save me in your unfailing love.
17 Let me not be put to shame, O LORD,
for I have cried out to you;
but let the wicked be put to shame
and lie silent in the grave. [b]
18 Let their lying lips be silenced,
for with pride and contempt
they speak arrogantly against the righteous.
19 How great is your goodness,
which you have stored up for those who fear you,
which you bestow in the sight of men
on those who take refuge in you.
20 In the shelter of your presence you hide them
from the intrigues of men;
in your dwelling you keep them safe
from accusing tongues.
21 Praise be to the LORD,
for he showed his wonderful love to me
when I was in a besieged city.
22 In my alarm I said,
"I am cut off from your sight!"
Yet you heard my cry for mercy
when I called to you for help.
23 Love the LORD, all his saints!
The LORD preserves the faithful,
but the proud he pays back in full.
24 Be strong and take heart,
all you who hope in the LORD.

Footnotes:
Psalm 31:10 Or guilt
Psalm 31:17 Hebrew Sheol

Understanding the Words

Even at the level of individual words, I'm struck by how many phrases ring out to me with initial visceral authority, but elude me when I try to consider their meaning. We can start with the first verse: deliver me in your righteousness. I kind of know what that means, but I kind of don't. The word "righteousness" alone is pretty hard for me to wrap my head around; I've only really seen it in religious texts or in imitation of religious texts, so a lot of its "meaning" is just to signify religiousness. The same can be said of the word "deliver" in its sense of "rescue"; it comes so laden with connotation that it could really be said to mean "rescue, in a religious sense."***

Again, in verse 3: "For the sake of your name lead and guide me." Sounds powerful! But what does "for the sake of your name" mean? Does it mean "in order to enhance your reputation?" And should a mere human be giving God that kind of advice, if so?

Verse 4 illustrates a puzzling use of the word "for" that I have noticed throughout Psalms. "Free me from the trap that is set for me, for you are my refuge" is a fine-sounding phrase that is also a mixed metaphor. Furthermore, its internal logic is unconventional. To be a refuge is not to be a freer from traps, let alone to necessitate freeing from traps. Whether this is a problem with translation or just vagueness in the original is obviously way beyond my understanding.

Verse 5 is another one to make those of us raised on the New Testament stand up and salute; "Into your hands I commit my spirit" is, if I remember correctly, the last of the last words of Christ, who was therefore presumably quoting them.

The Moods of David

The Psalms are songs, and songs of course are free to encompass many moods within them. So, it is maybe not surprising that the Psalms are full of sudden mood swings. In Psalm 31, check out the transition from verses 7 and 8 to verses 9 and 10. Immediately, the mood goes from rejoicing in good fortune to near-dispair. At an even smaller scale, you could make a case that there is a remarkable shift of tone at the semicolon back in verse 6.

The despair gets pretty dark in verses 11 - 13, with the same whiff of paranoia I mentioned back when we were looking at the very first set of Psalms. These sorts of passages might be the Psalmy version of the Blues, but they go beyond the human universals here. I've "been so far down I swear I was lookin' up at down," but I've never felt "the utter contempt of my neighbors" and noted people in the street fleeing from me, at least not since junior high.

Taut Prose

When the mood modulates back into the positive, we encounter several statements that are somewhat self-fulfilling. Look at verse 14: I say, 'You are my God.' This would be a startling thing to say to anybody or anything BUT God, but if you assume a monotheistic outlook, it doesn't carry a lot of meaning when said TO God. (I have argued before that the Old Testament often seems to imply a taken-for-granted polytheism, although that seemed to diminish again once we got to King Saul or thereabout. But, it doesn't seem like a ridiculous interpretation to say that David is choosing his God from among Gods.)

Often, David seems to cry out to God to reward good people and, especially, to punish bad people, with a presupposition that the people of the world are divided by personalities of a cartoonish simplicity. Let the wicked be put to shame, he asks, and that's hard to argue with. But who are "the wicked"? Have you ever met a wicked person? He describes them: they have lying lips, pride, and contempt, and they speak arrogantly against the righteous. Well, those all make sense! That's what you'd expect from a wicked person! Except, doesn't everybody lie? Wouldn't you expect the righteous, if you found any, to be proud of their righteousness, and to speak arrogantly of their contempt for the wicked? Much as David himself is doing here? So, much as the Psalm's language rings out beautifully, all it is really doing is asserting that bad people are bad, which seems like a pretty simplistic view of human nature to anyone past the age of 12.

The Question of "Praise"

In verses 19 and 20, the Psalmist speaks rhetorically to God, describing God's own goodness and greatness to him. There are two ways, not necessarily exclusive, that this could be intended. Obviously, the exclamation of God's greatness may be intended for the education of us, the human readers and listeners who experience the Psalm. The other possibility is that David is literally "praising God," which is to say telling him how great he is. Praise be to the LORD, he will say in verse 21, and I have to admit that this common idea -- "praise the Lord" -- has always puzzled me. One praises the accomplishments of children, of friends, and perhaps of heros and leaders; but it would seem to me that God would be utterly and profoundly not in need of human kudos. More, would humanity even be able to grasp enough of the essence of an infinite God so as to render any kind of judgement, even a radically positive judgement? Human understanding being what it is, of what posible use could our pat on the back be to God? But perhaps I digress.

It is interesting, though, the extent to which the Psalms slip back and forth between the second person (addressing God) and the third person (talking about God). This frequent modulation has run throughout most of the first 31 Psalms, I think. For an example, look at verses 21 and 22 here. They form a very compact and satisfying short-short story. Verse 21, in third person, establishes that the story is about divine intervention and establishes the setting. In second-person Verse 22, the hero is physically endangered and experience a crisis of faith; but in the end he is saved by God's mercy. Is the shift between second and third person, here and elsewhere, meaningful at all? I have no idea. None at all.

Next Week: Psalms!

* Which is not likely to stop me from starting the next big michael5000 project on the drawing board, Michael5000 Reads Shakespeare.

** If the text of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" was read reverently from the pulpit every Sunday, cited at weddings and funerals, and quoted in religious wall hangings in the home of the pious, would it ring with an inherent authority and majesty? According to my line of argument here, it would, and I suspect that is right. Kids would go to college and have their minds blown when they realized that, dude, if you really look at the words of "Mary had a little lamb," they don't really say anything!!!

*** I am having a hard time getting the phrase "the dude delivered a righteous pizza" out of my head now.

Psalms 21-30: Psalt3r

2009-04-24T20:59:00.000-07:00

Ten more Psalms! Why, I have been asked, am I going through them ten at a time? Well, one of the project ground rules is that I have to write a post at least every ten chapters. There have been a lot of books where I averaged four or five chapters per post, but the Psalms, by their nature as songs of praise, lack much in the way of a narrative flow. And yet, for reasons I'll explain below, they are not an easy read for me.

Themes Revisited

Glimmers of Afterlife

As we've seen in the two previous sets, there are more Psalms in this group that seem to flirt with the idea of an afterlife. Psalm 21:4 & 6, for instance, would be a perfectly appropriate reading for a Christian funeral:

4 He asked you for life, and you gave it to him—
length of days, for ever and ever.
6 Surely you have granted him eternal blessings
and made him glad with the joy of your presence.

It sounds like an affirmation of the idea of Heaven, right? Except, the first seven verses of Psalm 21 are autobiographical, King David explicitly talking about himself in the first person. He is grateful that God has, at the time of this writing, granted him a long life and many blessings, and he speaks about them with the same giddy hyperbole that informs so much of Psalms.

A few verses later, he reveals what will happen to the "enemies" of God:

9 At the time of your appearing
you will make them like a fiery furnace.
In his wrath the LORD will swallow them up,
and his fire will consume them.

It sounds like hell, right? But it isn't. David (or his ghostwriters, if you're a skeptic on this point) is talking about fiery death for God's foes in this world. The next verse makes it clear:

10 You will destroy their descendants from the earth,
their posterity from mankind.

Also, just as you are starting to wonder whether the Psalms might imply eternal life after all, you occasionally bump into passages that reaffirm the concept I've called "total death." In Psalm 30, David cries out for God's help in a crisis and offers an argument why he should be spared to live another day:

9 "What gain is there in my destruction,
in my going down into the pit?
Will the dust praise you?
Will it proclaim your faithfulness?

Death, here, is firmly conceptualized as the end of the line. David does not expect to go to a close communion with God after death. He thinks the relationship will be ended, because he himself will no longer exist.

Speaking of Phrases that Resonate in Christianity

How does the opening of Psalm 22 strike you: My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? Now, Psalm 22 in its entirety is another one that begins with a lamentation of the distance or absence of God. There's a lot of lamentation -- 18 verses worth -- before the text modulates back into an affirmation of faith. Along the way, the chapter bristles with phrases that resonate in interesting ways with the imagery of Christianity. In addition to the famous question that would be later asked by Christ during his execution, there are lines like you brought me out of the womb (9) and even a band of evil men has encircled me, they have pierced my hands and my feet. (16) But remember: we're talking about David here. The birth of Christ is still centuries in the future.

Two great details from Psalm 22, by the way. One is just a passage conveying sorrow in an especially lovely way:

14 I am poured out like water,
and all my bones are out of joint.
My heart has turned to wax;
it has melted away within me.

The other is a direction to the music director. Psalm 22, it says, is to be sung to the tune of "The Doe of the Morning." Awesome.

Psalms, Psalms, Psalms!

And so they go. Psalm 23 is a very famous one, the one that starts The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want (actually, in this translation, I shall not be in want). It celebrates God as the provider of first bounty, then peace, than moral law, than might, before concluding:

6 Surely goodness and love will follow me
all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the LORD
forever.

Once again, the Christian ear is tuned to hear a promise of eternal life here, whereas the two halves of the sentence were very likely originally intended to mean the exact same thing.

Psalm 29 is a celebration of the might and power of God, and includes the quirky phrase He makes Lebanon skip like a calf. (6) Psalm 26 is a celebration, by David, of his own allegedly morally upright life: Vindicate me, O LORD, for I have led a blameless life.... (1) (As we saw earlier, the Biblical record of David's life shows it to be chockablock with blame. But I guess if you are the king, you can talk about your blameless life and everyone has to keep a straight face.)

For a lot of the Psalms, though, it is hard to say succinctly what they are "about." Many of them have no particular central focus. The Psalms are not intended to inform, after all, but to celebrate, and so it's not surprising that they consist in large part of loosely connected statements in praise of God. There may well be a deep logic that governs the flow of one statement to the next, but for a first-time reader at this remove of culture, time, and translation, they might as well be random. I suspect that if several Psalms were taken apart verse by verse, shuffled, and reassembled, and put next to the originals, it would take some time to tell which were the real ones.

As an experiment, I picked a Psalm (#25) and made a kind of conceptual map of it, looking at the sentence-level meaning of each line. It is a goofy thing, but working it out made me a little more comfortable in thinking that, for all of their resonance, there is a certain arbitrary feel to the Psalms that makes them a bit hard to penetrate.

1 Affirmation of devotion to God
2 Affirmation of trust in God
Request of favor from God
3 Prediction of reward for believers
Prediction of punishment for the evil
4 Request to God for guidance
5 Request to God for guidance
Affirmation of devotion to God
Affirmation of trust in God
6 Request for God to recall and continue his past kindnesses
7 Request for God to disregard personal sins
Request for God’s favor
Affirmation of God’s goodness
8 Assertion of God’s goodness
Conclusion that God’s goodness is instructional to sinners
9 Assertion that God is a teacher
10 Assertion: God cares for those who obey his laws
11 Request for God to disregard personal sins
12 Rhetorical question
Assertion that God is a teacher to his followers
13 Assertion that God’s followers and their will be prosperous
14 Assertion that God communicates with his followers
15 Affirmation of devotion to God
Acknowledgement of God’s unique power
16 Request for God’s favor
Complaint of personal unhappiness
17 Complaint of personal unhappiness
Request for God’s help
18 Request for God’s help
19 Complaint of numerous, aggressive enemies
20 Request for God’s protection
Request for God’s protection
Affirmation of trust in God
21 Wish that God behavior will be beneficial
Affirmation of trust in God
22 Request of God’s favor for all of Israel

Sometimes I wonder if the Psalms are too rich to read ten at time, and ought to be savored one by one. Sometimes, I admit, I wonder if they are just a collection of sanctimonious old sound bites, made to seem significant only through their use and repetition. They are, so far, difficult going. And there are 13 more sets! Heavens.

NEXT: Ten more Psalms!

Psalms 11-20: "Psalms II: Davidic Bugaloo"

2009-04-19T18:16:00.000-07:00

Overall, Psalms 11-20 are not radically different from Psalms 1-10. Instead of looking at overall themes this time around, I'll break 'em down for a closer look.

Psalms 11-12

These two really drive home a world view in which there are two kinds of people: good people that God likes, and bad people that he doesn't. In 15 verses, there are four references to "the wicked" against two to "the righteous" and one apiece to "the upright in heart," "upright men," and "the faithful." We learn some of the characteristics of the bad folks: they "love violence," lie to their neighbors, flatter, speak with decision, boast, oppress the weak, honor what is vile, and make the needy groan. God is against these things, but rather loves justice.

These kind of Psalms trouble me for two reasons. One is that they don't jibe with my (admittedly limited) experience of human nature. In my daily rounds, I seem to see a lot of goodish people and a few baddish people and, as far as I can tell, plenty of in-between people. More importantly, the message of these prayers can be condensed to "it's a mean old world, but God is a just sheriff." The obvious question -- I'm hardly the first to pose it -- is: If God's role is to be the sheriff, than why is it still a mean old world?

Psalm 13

Six verses long, #13 has three complementary section. The first two verses cry out at the perceived absence of God: How long will you hide your face from me? (1) The second two verses make the claim that, if God persists in absence, the speaker will die. The final two verses are a happy ending to this short crisis of faith, and consist of a profession of belief, celebration, and praise.

Psalm 14

Seven verses long, #14 begins by ripping into people for falling into corruption and not believing in God. ...there is no one who does good, the text complains, not even one. (3) From this emotional low point, the song builds back up to a triumphal pitch about how the poor and the righteous will triumph over the wicked and the "evildoers." It is a good poetic structure -- the negative state of things is laid out, and then the impending triumph of good explained -- but the sudden reappearance of righteous people is a little confusing, since we were just told that there wasn't even one.

Psalm 15

Psalm 15 is a list of good behaviors: speaking truth, doing what is righteous, avoiding slander, keeping oaths, eschewing bribes, and refusing to charge interest on a loan. People who do all of these things will, we are told, be rewarded. And here, again, we can see right away why the rhetoric of these pre-Christian writings can be so persuasive to Christians. The Psalm begins:

Lord, who may dwell in your sanctuary?
Who may live on your holy hill? (1)

I would wager that nine out of ten Christians asked in the street what these questions meant would reply that of course they refer to Heaven. Good people go to Heaven. But from what we've seen previously, that's very unlikely. If #15 is, as it is labelled, "a Psalm of David," the most logical interpretation is that it is defining appropriate behavior for people who live on the literal holy hill: Jerusalem.

Psalm 16

Here again, David uses language that seems puzzlingly Christian if you, like my, come at it with a Christian background.

...you will not abandon me to the grave, nor will you let your Holy One see decay.

You have made known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand. (11)

This passage really does seem to flirt with a promise of a blissful afterlife. But as a sort of thought experiment, I tried to read it as if I didn't already "know" about Heaven. And, when looked at this way, the passage remains coherent. In fact, it is consistent to the language all over the Psalms describing God as a protector against earthly enemies. God will not, in this reading, let David die or decay at present, before his time. David expects to be filled with joy in God's presence in this life, with eternal pleasures -- ie., pleasures until he dies -- at God's right hand.

To look at the passage in this way requires a certain leap of imagination for me. Yet it is the only way of reading it that does not contradict David's blunt denial of the possibility of life after death only a few chapters earlier.

Psalm 17

Another two part Psalm, labelled "A prayer of David." In the first five verses, David vigorously asserts his own righteousness and adherence to God's will. In the final ten, he then calls out to God for protection from his enemies. Verses 8 through 13 form a splendid rhetorical crescendo, with each verse ratcheting up the level of crisis and conflict:

8 Keep me as the apple of your eye;
hide me in the shadow of your wings
9 from the wicked who assail me,
from my mortal enemies who surround me.
10 They close up their callous hearts,
and their mouths speak with arrogance.
11 They have tracked me down, they now surround me,
with eyes alert, to throw me to the ground.
12 They are like a lion hungry for prey,
like a great lion crouching in cover.
13 Rise up, O LORD, confront them, bring them down;
rescue me from the wicked by your sword.

Psalm 18

An extremely long chapter at 50 verses, the bulk of this Psalm is devoted to praise OF God (He trains my hands for battle (34)) and praise TO God (You give me your shield of battle (35)), intermixed together and put forth with a wide variety of military, natural, and legal imagery.

Near the beginning of the chapter is a narrative passage that is a kind of short story of God's personal intervention in David's affairs. Read literally, it recounts a vague but powerfully-rendered physical manifestation of God to get David out of a jam.

4 The cords of death entangled me;
the torrents of destruction overwhelmed me.
5 The cords of the grave [b] coiled around me;
the snares of death confronted me.
6 In my distress I called to the LORD;
I cried to my God for help.
From his temple he heard my voice;
my cry came before him, into his ears.
7 The earth trembled and quaked,
and the foundations of the mountains shook;
they trembled because he was angry.
8 Smoke rose from his nostrils;
consuming fire came from his mouth,
burning coals blazed out of it.
9 He parted the heavens and came down;
dark clouds were under his feet.
10 He mounted the cherubim and flew;
he soared on the wings of the wind.
11 He made darkness his covering, his canopy around him—
the dark rain clouds of the sky.
12 Out of the brightness of his presence clouds advanced,
with hailstones and bolts of lightning.
13 The LORD thundered from heaven;
the voice of the Most High resounded. [c]
14 He shot his arrows and scattered the enemies ,
great bolts of lightning and routed them.
15 The valleys of the sea were exposed
and the foundations of the earth laid bare
at your rebuke, O LORD,
at the blast of breath from your nostrils.
16 He reached down from on high and took hold of me;
he drew me out of deep waters.
17 He rescued me from my powerful enemy,
from my foes, who were too strong for me.
18 They confronted me in the day of my disaster,
but the LORD was my support.
19 He brought me out into a spacious place;
he rescued me because he delighted in me.

These verses seem completely contrary to the common modern notion that God is everywhere and nowhere; certainly, it is surprising to see God depicted as literally riding a cherub into battle. The language reminds me of the great Rennaisance religious paintings, where God is portrayed as a massive man, huge, muscular, and radiant but unmistakably human in form.

Psalm 19

If the Trancendentalists had a favorite passage in Psalms, it might well be the first six verses of #19. The heavens declare the glory of God; it begins, the skies proclaim the work of his hands. (1) It continues in this vein, advancing the general idea that you can tell that God is great just by looking at how terrific the natural world is. The second half of the chapter changes course, and speaks to the greatness of God's law (The ordinances of the LORD are sure and altogether righteous. (9)).

Psalm 20

The twentieth Psalm reads as a sort of greeting card, a well-wishing from one person to another. May the LORD answer you when you are in distress, it begins, and continues on to predict future victory and celebration for the person addressed.

Are We Going to Go Through Every Single Psalm Like This?

No.

Next Time: Ten More Psalms!

Psalms 1-10: Setting Sail on the Sea of Psalms

2009-04-03T16:15:00.000-07:00

The Psalms are, as far as I can tell, the hymnbook of Second Temple Judaism. That's probably a brutal oversimplification, but I gather that they are a set of lyrics that developed over several centuries between, say, 800 and 200 BC. At least some of them, maybe all of them, are ascribed to King David. They are written in poetic form, although in English translation -- or at least in THIS translation -- they have no apparent rhyme or meter. (There may have been some attempt at alliteration, but I can't tell for sure.)

Another thing about the Psalms: there are 150 of them. That's a lot! Psalms is easily the longest book in the Bible, whupping Isaiah in number of chapters (150 vs. 66) and Genesis in number of verses (2461 v. 1533). That means I'll be living with Psalms for at least the next ten posts. I've got plenty to talk about today; hopefully the next nine posts won't just say "more of the same."

God as Shield

One theme that jumps out from these first ten Psalms is their conception of God as a protector and ally in conflict. "Enemies" or "foes" are mentioned or at least implied in almost all of them. Indeed, a quick survey could make David sound a little paranoid:

O LORD, how many are my foes!
How many rise up against me! (3,1)

Lead me, O LORD, in your righteousness
because of my enemies.... (5,8)

My eyes grow weak with sorrow;
they fail because of all my foes. (6,7)

O LORD, see how my enemies persecute me! (9,13)

Well, David had a lot of enemies. In addition to the usual allotment due him as a head of state, he would have to add wronged husbands, victims of his career as a bandit warlord, and almost anybody involved in the debacle of Absalom's rebellion. Yet David is nothing if not pious, and he trusts in God's protection against his many opponents. Indeed, many lines from his Psalms seem to be a kind of calling in of a metaphysical air strike:

Deliver me, O my God!
Strike all my enemies on the jaw;
break the teeth of the wicked. (3,7)

Arise, O LORD, in your anger;
rise up against the rage of my enemies. (7,6)

Break the arm of the wicked and evil man;
call him to account for his wickedness.... (10,15)

Elsewhere, he confidently states the way of things:

My shield is God Most High,
who saves the upright in heart. (7,10)

My enemies turn back;
they stumble and perish before you.
For you have upheld my right and my cause;
you have sat on your throne, judging righteously.
You have rebuked the nations and destroyed the wicked;
you have blotted out their name for ever and ever.
Endless ruin has overtaken the enemy,
you have uprooted their cities;
even the memory of them has perished. (9,3-6)

Clearly, the Psalms are about a God who takes an active hand in the earthly struggles of his chosen people.

Suffering and Divine Judgment

To place these ten Psalms against the blur of ideas that was argued over in the Book of Job, they assume that God is rewarding obedience and punishing evil here, in this world. David alternatively celebrates that this is so (You destroy all those who tell lies (5,6); God is a righteous judge, a God who expresses his wrath every day. (7,11)) and acts as God's cheering section in the rewarding and especially the punishing process (Declare them guilty, O God! Let their intrigues be their downfall. Banish them for their many sins, for they have rebelled against you. (5,10)).

Interestingly, David does not ever seem to stop and wonder if his own sufferings might be punishment for his own misbehavior. When he destroys his enemies, it is because they are being punished for their wickedness. When his enemies afflict him, though, it is because they are wicked. It is an immaculate theory of how the world works, in that it covers all possible exigencies. The only problem is its utterly inconsistent and arbitrary nature.

One thing is for sure, though -- David doesn't expect to be rewarded for virtue after his death in this world:

Turn, O LORD, and deliver me;
save me because of your unfailing love.
No one remembers you when he is dead.
Who praises you from the grave? (6:4-5)

The lack of any concept of an afterlife has been a conspicuous absence in the first third of the Bible, but here we have an explicit statement denying the possibility of life after death. “You need to help me now,” David tells God, “in order to maximize my grateful worship while I’m still alive and able to worship you.” Death terminates the relationship with God, which can only mean that it is what you might call “real death” or “total death” – no afterlife allowed.

Psalms for Christians

The Book of Psalms, along with the Book of Proverbs, is probably the most popular part of the Old Testament for Christians. Indeed, there are many cheap Bibles that are really just the New Testament plus those two books. Psalms are all over the place, read at almost any service, wedding, or funeral that you might show up for in the, uh, Christian community. This raises an interesting question: Why are Christians so gung-ho for a Jewish hymnal that predates all of the central events of their religion?

Well, part of the answer is probably just the comfort afforded by talking in first person to a God who is going to protect you and smite your oppressors. I mean, come on:

...you are a shield around me, O LORD;
you bestow glory on me and lift up my head.
To the LORD I cry aloud,
and he answers me from his holy hill.
I lie down and sleep;
I wake again, because the LORD sustains me.
I will not fear the tens of thousands
drawn up against me on every side. (3,3-6)

When you read that out loud, you don't think of it as a prayer attributed to David, king of the ancient Hebrews. You think of it as a personal affirmation and, whether you strictly believe it or not, it is still a soothing sort of thing to profess.

There is also some more specific language in these Psalms, though, that might carry special resonance for Christians. Check out this passage:

[The Lord] rebukes them in his anger
and terrifies them in his wrath, saying,
"I have installed my King
on Zion, my holy hill."
I will proclaim the decree of the LORD:
He said to me, "You are my Son;
today I have become your Father." (2,5-7)

In Christianity, the language of Father and Son is intimately tied to the relationship between God and Christ, so this passage lends itself very easily to being misinterpreted, or at least interpreted out of context. David is referring himself literally as the King of Zion and figuratively as a person enjoying a close relationship with God. A Christian listener, steeped in the rhetoric of the New Testament, would have a hard time reading this passage without thinking of Christ declaring himself the figurative King of Zion and the literal son of God.

A third and more subtle way that the Psalms appeal to Christianity involves the logical problem with David's theory of divine judgment. To help me make this point, let's look Psalm 1 in its entirety.

1 Blessed is the man
who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked
or stand in the way of sinners
or sit in the seat of mockers.
2 But his delight is in the law of the LORD,
and on his law he meditates day and night.
3 He is like a tree planted by streams of water,
which yields its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither.
Whatever he does prospers.
4 Not so the wicked!
They are like chaff
that the wind blows away.
5 Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous.
6 For the LORD watches over the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish.

Now, since there's no evidence that David believes in life after death, he means all of this to apply quite literally to this world. Good people will prosper in this life; the wicked will be punished in this life. The problem with this way of thinking, though, is that it is radically repudiated by reality. No one with a glancing knowledge of history or current events could believe it in anything other than a highly abstracted sort of way.

Add a belief in the afterlife, though – stipulate, as Christians do, a heaven and a hell – and the passage becomes entirely plausible. Everything that David asserts becomes possible when the rewards and the punishments happen offstage, someplace where we can't see them. It becomes irrelevant that war criminals die in old age, wealthy and comfortable, or that children are killed by diphtheria and malnutrition; their punishments and rewards will come afterwards, in the great hereafter. To read Psalms this way is a taking out of context, a radically alternative reading inconsistent with the original meaning of the text. But it is rereading that is both resonant and consistent within the context of Christian belief.

Detail of the Week

From the footnotes: "Psalms 9 and 10 may have been originally a single acrostic poem, the stanzas of which begin with the successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet." How cool is that?

Job 38-43: The Problem of Suffering, and Other Problems

2009-03-28T22:47:00.000-07:00

So the Book of Job has been this long, long theological discussion about whether suffering is necessarily divine punishment, or if it might be either divine punishment or divine warning, or if it might just be something that happens randomly. Job and four of his friends have hashed this question out at great length without really getting anywhere, and when we left off last time I was excited to see that we would now get God's own words on this important question.

God on the Problem of Suffering

God's response, however, is not one either to satisfy those who would seek a relationship of dialogue with the Divine, nor even one that casts any light on the issue. Essentially, it's four chapters of sarcastic questions belittling Job for having thought to speculate on the nature of God.

Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! (38:4-5)

It goes on in this vein for four chapters. God describes the various things that he can do and Job can't, and points out that Job is nowhere NEAR as powerful and well-informed as he is. So, God's message on the question of suffering seems to be: "Shut up and stop asking questions."

The Narrative Conclusion

In Job 42, the storyline picks up where it left off in Job 2. Job apologizes all over himself for his presumption. Then, god tells Job's buddies that they have spoken of him incorrectly, and gives them instructions for making a sacrifice of atonement. To this extent, God seems to indirectly refute the notion that all suffering is divine retribution for sin.

Except, Job said that too at one point (although, see below), and God doesn't assign him any sacrifices. Indeed, God seems to be pouring on the rewards. Job is healed, his family comes around to visit, and in short order he has twice as much livestock as he did before. In the fullness of time, he has another seven sons and another three daughters, and -- this is stressed -- his second set of daughters is even prettier than the first ones were! So, Job's a lucky guy! I guess! And he lives to be really old.

Further Study

So I looked up Job in Peloubet's Bible Dictionary, copyright 1925, which Mrs.5000 purchased for me last weekend at an estate sale. (Mrs.5000 is freaking awesome.) According to PBD, Job "stands as the greatest poem in the world's great literatures." Hmm. Also, that "it is almost universally agreed that the basis of the Book of Job was an historical fact; that Job was a real man who underwent such severe trials and disasters that they made a lasting impression upon his age...." Hmm. "Every good man's life in the end is a success. With God's children there are no life-tragedies. There are dramas and lyric songs and epics, but no tragedies." Hmm.

So, I turned to the more modern Oxford Companion to the Bible. Here, we learn that Job "is not only a work of intellectual vigor; it is also a literary masterpiece that belongs with the classics of world literature." More usefully, the OCB summarizes some critical scholarship on Job. I am, apparently, not the first to notice that much of what Job says is actually an argument against what otherwise seems to be his main point. Most Job scholars apparently feel that the Book only makes sense with the speeches shuffled somewhat, so that chunks of Job's speeches are reassigned to various of his three buddies. I hope I am not too curmudgeonly to feel that a record of a discussion in which there is literally no way to keep the various lines of argument distinct from each other has some fundamental problems with its cred as a "work of intellectual vigor."

It is frankly silly to call it a "literary masterpiece." Although, who knows, it might sound amazing in Hebrew. In English translation, though, it is opaque, repetitive, confused, and dull. It is extremely interesting as a record of the thought of people who lived long ago, and no doubt that interest only increases for someone with real specialist expertise in Biblical scholarship. To the extent that the intent of the poem was "literary" as we understand the word, however -- something that seems awfully unlikely -- the most that can be said is that it is really, really, really old.

I am not just blandly naysaying the OCB here. Really, I think that it is important to call out anyone who declares a text this unapproachable and turgid to be overbrimming with literary merit. For when someone is told this, and then runs up against the brick wall of a text manifestly lacking in any kind of literary value as the term is commonly understood, their inclination may well be to dismiss the text -- the Bible, in this case -- as something unapproachable by any means. Or, they may just assume that they are not smart enough to appreciate great literary works, and as a result reject the possibilities of literature in general. In this way are lives made less rich.

If you approach the Book of Job expecting a literary masterpiece, I absolutely, positively guarantee you that you will be utterly disappointed. If you approach it expecting a real muddle of a theological discussion, you will probably be able to glean some ideas from among its chaos. I hope, having had this warning, you fare better than me. Please report back!

Job 32 - 37: Elihu Puts His Two Shekels In

2009-03-22T11:49:00.000-07:00

Job and his three pals have been arguing for 30 chapters, and after last week's reading they were pretty much argued out. Nobody has convinced anybody, so there's an awkward pause in the conversation. This gives a young guy who has been sitting nearby a chance to speak.

His name is Elihu, and he's been keeping quiet out of deference to his elders. Now it all comes spilling out, five chapters worth, although the first chapter is really just a long apology for jumping into the conversation. He is frustrated that Job's three friends haven't been able to refute his arguments, and hopes he can do better than them.

He starts off in Job 33 with a new line of argument. Job has complained throughout the book that God is remote and uncommunicative, but Elihu argues that God is speaking all the time, just not directly.

For God does speak -- now one way, now another
though man may not perceive it.
In a dream, in a vision of the night,
when deep sleep falls on men as they slumber in their beds,
he may speak in their ears
and terrify them with warning,
and keep him from pride,
to preserve his soul from the pit,
his life from perishing by the sword.
Or a man may be chastened on a bed of pain
with constant distress in his bones,
so that his very being finds food repulsive
and his soul loathes the choicest meal. (33:15-20)

What this boils down to, as far as I can see -- and again, in the twisty poetry of Job, I often can't see much -- is first, that God speaks to us in dreams and visions. Personally, I find this unlikely, since my dreams are usually pretty dull affairs on the order of "I was in this house where I used to live, but people I didn't know at the time were there too!" But whatever. And after that, we're right back into the argument of "God gives people worldly blessings and punishments according to their behavior, which is the same idea that the three pals have been beating to death all through the chapter and which Job, except for a brief bit in Chapter 21, hasn't done a very good job of arguing against.

Towards the end of his speech, Elihu makes the further argument that the very natural order is in a sense the voice of God. Well, maybe not the natural order so much as weather: lightning, storms, thunder, clouds, winds, Elihu says, all speak for the power and majesty of God. Wanting to speak to such a power, as Job does, he thinks foolish:

37:19 "Tell us what we should say to him;
we cannot draw up our case because of our darkness.
20 Should he be told that I want to speak?
Would any man ask to be swallowed up?
21 Now no one can look at the sun,
bright as it is in the skies
after the wind has swept them clean.
22 Out of the north he comes in golden splendor;
God comes in awesome majesty.
23 The Almighty is beyond our reach and exalted in power;
in his justice and great righteousness, he does not oppress.
That last clause is kind of problematic, though, in that it doesn't follow from what came before. "Really powerful" does not mean, or even really imply, "righteous," as anyone living at any period of history would have to know. This may be an example of why I find is so hard to tell what is going on in the arguments of Job -- they don't seem to be conducting their discussion within the same general framework of logic that a modern dude like me is used to. It's a poem, too, so who knows how important the theological discussion is supposed to be relative to it creating a pleasant effect in the original. Sometimes I have wondered if the whole chapter is not just so much ancient hot air, but then I know that many books have been written about the theology of Job, so there must be SOMETHING in here that is eluding me.

Just to check if there was something obvious I was missing, I checked with the Wiki, which is never wrong. Elihu, it says:

contradicts the fundamental opinions expressed by the 'friendly accusers' in the central body of the text, that it is impossible that the righteous should suffer, all pain being a punishment for some sin. Elihu states that suffering may be decreed for the righteous as a protection against greater sin, for moral betterment and warning, and to elicit greater trust and dependence on a merciful, compassionate God in the midst of adversity.

...and yeah, that sounds about right.

After Elihu's speech, who should enter the conversation but God himself, with a speech that takes up most of the rest of the Book. That seems like it will be worth treating on its own, so we'll break here for now.

Next: "We'll hear it straight from the horse's mouth" sounds pretty sacriligious, but I'm having a hard time coming up with any other way of saying it.

Job 22-31: They Keep Arguing

2009-03-15T17:36:00.000-07:00

So when we lost saw Job, he had just made a rather powerful observation. His friends, you'll remember, have been giving him what-for because his misfortunes are, to their eyes, clear evidence that he is being punished by God for something. They want him to 'fess up, so that he can be forgiven by God and put an end to his run of bad luck.

After asserting his innocence all this time, Job argued in Chapter 21 that this whole theory of divine retribution is undermined by an obvious observation: a lot of time, the wicked do really well in this life. If God was really handing out rewards for good and bad behavior, you would expect to see fewer happy evildoers.

I was curious to see how this would affect the subsequent argument, and am disappointed to find that.... it doesn't. They just continue as before. Eliphaz makes responds by directly accusing Job of some hidden wickedness -- he must have done something wrong to merit his punishment, after all -- with no response to what the man has just said.

As for Job, he just continues to complain that he has no way of making his case directly to God. His problem is not the loss of his family, fortune, and health, he claims; it is the remoteness of God from his creation. You can imagine many of his statements having been underlined in the Bibles of many an Existentialist in the 1950s and 1960s:

...if I go to the east, he is not there;
if I go to the west, I do not find him.
When he is at work in the north, I do not see him;
when he turns to the south, I catch no glimpse of him. (23:8-9)

...how faint the whisper we hear of him!
Who then can understand the thunder of his power? (26:14)

In Chapter 24, he seems to brush again on the problem of unpunished evil in a long passage about pain and suffering in the world, which starts with something like a procedural complaint:

Why does the Almighty not set times for judgment?
Why must those who know him look in vain for such days? (24:1)

But then, in the second half of Job 27, he seems to be making exactly the same arguments his friends have been making against him. He describes at some length how the evil will be punished by God -- in this life! This baffles me. If this was just a record of a long, rambling conversation, we wouldn't necessarily expect the participants to cling to a consistent point of view all the way through. But this is the Bible, and presumably there is supposed to be some kind of theological lesson at the heart of this conversation. Up until now, I thought the point was that divine reward and punishment should not be expected to happen in our reality, or in "real time" as it were. But now Job has argued both sides of the issue, and I'm confused.

Could it be that the book of Job just isn't intellectually consistent? And if so, is that an intentional ambiguity that's supposed to mean something, or is it just, perhaps, a flawed or confused piece of writing? The later seems unlikely, as you'd expect someone to have noticed incoherence sometime in the Bible-assembling process. Maybe all will become clear later.

As an aside, Job's friend Eliphaz asks a very interesting set of questions at the outset of today's reading, questions that cut to the heart of the relationship between God and humanity.

Can a man be of benefit to God?
Can even a wise man benefit him?
What pleasure would it give the Almighty if you were righteous?
What would he gain if your ways were blameless? (22: 2-3)

Here, again, is the prevailing theme of Job: that God is so remote, so different, so unlike us that any attempt at understanding him -- or perhaps even of pleasing him through rightous and obedient behavior -- is doomed to futility. Interesting and provocative, but Eliphaz does not seem to grasp the implications of what he has said, and the idea is not developed any further.

Next: I continue to wade through Job.

Job 12-21: With Friends Like Jobs'....

2009-03-06T11:50:00.000-08:00

So last time, we got the basic story of Job in one and a half chapters, and then saw Job argue about his situation with three of his friends for the next nine and a half chapters. The next ten chapters continue this conversation, as Job's buddies -- Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar -- continue to hector him, and he continues to rail back at them. It's all dialog, this "interior poem" of the Book of Job, and I imagine most of it being shouted accusingly between our hero and his erstwhile pals.

The buddies continue to reiterate, and re-reiterate, and re-re-reiterate, their basic argument: that God punishes the unjust and evil, and therefore Job's punishment must be based on some wrongdoing. They want him to come clean, make atonement, and humble himself before God; if he honestly does this, they think, his punishment will be lifted.

For most of this section, Job continues to counter is the same way he did in the earlier chapters. He protests his innocence, and argues that the actions and motivations of God are inscrutable. In so doing, he gets in some good digs at his friends (and perhaps at all of us):

Men at ease have contempt for misfortune
as the fate of those whose feet are slipping. (12:5)

Despite his insistence of the unknowableness of God's motives, however, Job is persistent in asserting that God is unfair in not communicating with him. I desire to speak to the Almighty and to argue my case with God, he asserts (13:3), frequently crying out for the same. Indeed, he seems less bothered by his misfortune -- his loss of property and standing, the death of his family, his personal afflictions -- than by God's refusal to explain any of this to him.

Only grant me these two things, O God,
and then I will not hide from you:
Withdraw your hand far from me,
and stop frightening me with your terrors.
Then Summon me and I will answer,
or let me speak, and you reply.
How many wrongs and sins have I committed?
Show me my offense and my sin.
Why do you hide you face and consider me your enemy?
Will you torment a windblown leaf? (13:20-25)

It's interesting that, despite an almost total submission to the acts of God, that Job is all but scolding God for not communicating and explaining his actions.

Though I cry, "I've been wronged!" I get no response; though I call for help, there is no justice. (19:7)

But Who's Right?

This is not easy reading -- I continue to wrestle with it -- but its existence as an open discussion about the nature of God and God's role in the world is highly interesting. We haven't really seen anything like this before in the Bible. The closest we've been was in the books of Moses, when God was laying out the long list of laws to govern human behavior, but this is a very different sort of discussion. For one thing, it is highly ambiguous. It seems like we are supposed to think that Job is right, or at least righter than his three friends, but this is never really spelled out.

And, from everything stated in the Bible up to this point, it is hard to fault the friends. Throughout the histories, God is forever rewarding or punishing people (or whole nations) by making good things or bad things happen to them here on Earth. Writers of all the previous books of the Bible have had no problem with ascribing people's fortunes and misfortunes, even their deeds and misdeeds, to God's rendering judgment on their behaviors. By that reasonable standard, the friends are right.

Except, we know from the way the story is set up that Job is an innocent. We know that God has allowed his tremendous misfortune not as a punishment, but merely as an experiment. This certainly gives weight to Job's assertion that the ways of God are inscrutable. Whether Job is in the right in his demands for an explanation for his sufferings is an open question. I can't tell whether this is considered unseemly arrogance, or whether he is perfectly free to demand all he wants, secure in the knowledge that God has not the slightest obligation to pay his demands any attention.

Job 21: Let's Look at the Evidence

Finally, Job gets empirical with his friends. He points out something that, as much back in the day as now, must have been pretty obvious: the theory of divine retribution from evil is all fine and good, but anybody who has been around the block a few times knows it doesn't work. If things work the way you say, he points out:

7 Why do the wicked live on,
growing old and increasing in power?
8 They see their children established around them,
their offspring before their eyes.
9 Their homes are safe and free from fear;
the rod of God is not upon them.
10 Their bulls never fail to breed;
their cows calve and do not miscarry.
11 They send forth their children as a flock;
their little ones dance about.
12 They sing to the music of tambourine and harp;
they make merry to the sound of the flute.
13 They spend their years in prosperity
and go down to the grave in peace.
A little later, he implies his friends are being naive yokels for thinking like they do:

28 You say, 'Where now is the great man's house,
the tents where wicked men lived?'
29 Have you never questioned those who travel?
Have you paid no regard to their accounts-
30 that the evil man is spared from the day of calamity,
that he is delivered from the day of wrath?

Now I don't know about you, but this seems like a slam dunk of an argument to me. We'll find out what Eliphaz and his posse have to say in response next time on Michael Reads the Bible!

Next Time: What Eliphaz and his posse have to say in response!

p.s. Ever wondered about the phrase "by the skin of my teeth"? Well! In Job 19:20, Job notes that he has escaped with only the skin of my teeth, and a footnote indicates that this means his gums. In other words, he has survived, but with all of his teeth having been knocked out or having fallen out of his head.

Job 1-11: God & Satan, Job & His Pals

2009-02-23T20:27:00.000-08:00

So, the Book of Job. You know the story. It seems like it would be about six or seven chapters worth of narrative, right? But no. The Book of Job weighs in at a whopping FORTY-TWO chapters, the most we’ve seen since any book since, well, Genesis (which has fifty). The bulk of the story as you and I know it, moreover, happens in the first chapter and a half. Which means there is a lot of Job left unaccounted for. We better get started.

The Story as You and I Know It

So there's this guy named Job, and he is both very religious and very fortunate. He has seven adult sons and three adult daughters, all of whom get along well, and he's fabulously wealthy. His lifestock holdings are in four digits. Secure and happy in every particular, he nevertheless remembers always to make the ritual sacrifices -- not just for himself, but also some extra for his children, in case they forget.

Now one day God and Satan are talking and ---

WHOA!!! Wait a minute!?! What's this about "Satan"?!?

Here we are on page 374, and the Bible is suddenly giving us what is perhaps a new character, perhaps a radical shift in theology. All through the story of creation and the history of the Israelites, there was never any mention of this Satan character. Suddenly, in the middle of what is looking to be another folktale along the lines of Ruth or Esther, up he pops.

The footnote here in the NIV indicates that the word Satan means "accuser." According to a little minimal research I allowed myself on the subject, Jewish tradition regards Satan as a servant that God might use to do the dirty work, like a bouncer or a district attorney. Could be way off on that one. In the Christian tradition, Satan is of course "the devil," the incarnation of evil. Some Christians, in fact, veer way towards the old theology of Zoroastrianism, in which the world is contested between two dieties of more or less equal power, good and evil. Old-school conservative sects that emphasize Hell and the power of Satan are really 9/10 of the way there. Is there anything in the Bible to support this line of thinking?

Well, perhaps not yet. Let's resume the story in progress.

The Story in Progress

Right, so one day God and Satan are talking, and God brings up the subject of Job and how righteous he is. "Of course he's righteous," replies Satan (I paraphrase). "It's easy for him to be. You've given him an incredibly good life. Take that away from him and he's probably no more righteous than anyone else."

So God proposes to test this theory. Very well, then, everything he has is in your hands, but on the man himself do not lay a finger. (1:12) A few days later, four of Job's servants run up. Each is the only person to survive a catastrophe: his beasts and agricultural laborers have been stolen or killed, the fire of God has fallen from the sky to kill his sheep and shepherds, the camels have been stolen and their drivers put to the sword, and a mighty wind knocked over the house where all of his children had gathered for a meal, killing them all.

Now all of this, I think it's safe to say, would be hard for anyone to hear, but Job remains resolute in his religion. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away," he says. "May the name of the Lord be praised." (1:21)

God and Satan talk about this later. God thinks he's really made a point about how righteous Job is, but Satan says that sparing the man any physical distress made all the difference. OK, says God, do whatever you want to him. But don't kill him. So Satan afflicted Job with painful sores from the soles of his feet to the top of his head. (2:7) Job continues to hold to his faith. His wife said to him, "Are you still holding on to your integrity? Curse God and die!" He replied, "You are talking like a foolish woman. Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?"

The Long, Long Conversation

So, that's pretty much the story, right? But that's only a chapter and a half! So why is Job forty-two chapters long? Well, at least as far as I've read so far, it's because he is now going to discuss his situation with passers-by. At length. What happens from 2:11 through at least Chapter 11 is that three of Job's buddies come by and argue with him. They speak in a series of speeches that appear to be in verse form; indeed, Job 3 - 42 appears to be an epic theological poem. Personally, I find this rather heavy going. I have been impressed to date that the Bible, although not always a gripping read, has never been especially difficult to read. This poem of Job, though, tries my attention span.

I will summarize brutally, and to the best of my understanding. Job's buddies, anticipating John Calvin by a few millenia, are convinced that God would only punish the unjust. They chastise Job for not coming clean; if he only admitted his wrongdoing and performed some kind of atonement, they tell him, God would cease to punish him. Job counters that he is blameless, that he really has done nothing wrong. He resolutely resists cursing God, but he repeatedly calls on God for an explaination of why so much misfortune has befallen him.

Now these speaches are long and florid, as I say, and there is very little contextualizing, so it is hard to say what exactly we are supposed to make of them. Are we supposed to agree with Job, or with his buddies? I'm guessing the answer is neither. The buddies are, I think, supposed to be seen as in error when they claim that God will reward righteousness with favor. God, we are supposed to gather, will do whatever he wants -- up to and including ruining a man's life for the sake of a divine parlor bet -- and we are not to presume to guess whom he favors or considers righteous. Job, I think, is supposed to be seen as somewhat less wrong. He is right to accept whatever God throws at him. However, he persists in error by demanding an explanation. No explanations, the story seems to indicate, will be forthcoming, and Job would do even better to accept his fate and keep his yap shut.

I'm only a quarter of the way in, so this interpretation remains open to drastic revision. Plus, as I said, I don't feel like I'm "getting" Job as well as I have the more straightforward material. So take my thoughts, here as always, with a grain of salt. I will say, though, that this section of Job contains a passage I have long known, and which is one of my favorite things to grumble to myself when I'm having a crappy day:

hardship does not spring from the soil,
nor does trouble sprout from the ground.
Yet man is born to trouble
as surely as sparks fly upward. (5:6-7)

NEXT: Job and his friends chat some more!

The Book of Esther

2009-02-17T20:13:00.000-08:00

After Ezra and Nehemiah, the twin chronicles of the Jews’ return to Judea from Babylonian exile, comes Esther, a story about events during the captivity. I say “story,” because it feels more like a tale than the various forms of historical account that we have read in the Bible up to this point. Certainly, it has the narrative arc of a fairy tale, and many of the usual tropes: a beautiful queen, treachery punished, and happiness ever after. I’ll give you the condensed version.

How Esther Became Queen

It all starts with a big party. Xerxes the Great throws a half-year extravaganza to show off the magnitude and splendor of his empire, which stretches from Ethiopia to India. After this proto-World’s Fair, there’s a seven-day afterparty for everybody who lives in the capital, complete with an open bar. The text goes into particular detail about the open bar. Then, as ever, a fine thing.

At the end of the party, the king calls for his queen to appear before the nobles, so he can show off how beautiful she is. She says no. This causes much consternation, and the nobles are afraid that when word gets out that the king’s wife disobey him, wives everywhere will stop obeying their husbands. It’ll be chaos! CHAOS!!!

So, it’s decided that the queen will lose her standing, and Xerxes will pick a new queen from among the most beautiful virgins in all the empire. Esther, a lovely Jewish orphan girl who was raised by her uncle Mordecai, enters the contest. Since this is the Book of Esther, not the Book of Mary Lou, you will not be surprised that after much rigmarole she is selected to be the next queen of the Persian Empire.

Enter the Villain

Now that he’s a royal hanger-on, Mordecai takes to loitering about in the palace courtyard. One day he overhears two guards making a conspiracy to assassinate Xerxes. He tells Esther, who tells the king, who escapes the plot and executes the conspirators. Things are going well for the Queen and her uncle.

The trouble starts when Xerxes promotes a guy named Haman to be his second-in-command. Everybody is supposed to bow down to Haman, but because Mordecai is Jewish (and so only supposed to bow down to God, I think the reasoning is here) he won’t. Whenever Haman comes through the courtyard, there’s everybody bowing down except Mordecai. It stands out. It rankles Haman, who develops such a loathing for Mordecai that he tricks Xerxes into letting him proclaim a pogrom against all of the Jews in the reign. A day is chosen by lot when all of the Jews will be rounded up, plundered, and killed, and Haman sends out a proclamation to this effect throughout the empire.

This naturally causes considerable consternation in the Jewish community, and Mordecai implores Esther to try to use her influence on Xerxes. It turns out, though, that this is very tricky. No one, not even the Queen, is allowed to approach Xerxes without him calling for them. If you enter his presence without being asked, you will be put to death – unless he decides on the spot that it’s OK, in which case he will point a special golden scepter at you. You touch the tip of the scepter, and everything’s OK. Freudians, start your engines!

The Villain’s Comeuppance!

Esther works up the nerve to disturb Xerxes, and luckily he is so fond of her that he points his special scepter at her and, after she has touched it, promises to give her whatever she wants. She says that she will prepare a banquet for Xerxes and Haman the following evening, and make her request then.

At the banquet, Esther reveals Haman’s plans and pleads for her life and the lives of all the other Jews in the Empire. Xerxes, who is only just now learning about the pogroms, is livid that he has been tricked, and goes out in the garden to cool off. Haman stays behind to try to beg Esther for mercy, but when Xerxes comes back inside it looks to him like Haman is putting the moves on her. Haman’s goose is pretty much cooked at this point, and shortly afterwards he can be seen dangling from the same high gallows that he had been recently hoping to hang Mordecai from.

So Xerxes calls off the pogroms, the Jews are saved, Esther is happy, and Mordecai is promoted to be Xerxes’ new chief of staff. And this is where we would fade out in the modern after-school special version of the tale.

More Comeuppance!

In the rough and tumble world of the Old Testament, though, there is an important additional aspect to this particular happy ending. The letter that Xerxes sends out doesn’t cancel the pogrom, because the King’s word once proclaimed – or forged, apparently – can not be rescinded. Instead, Xerxes grants all Jews in the empire permission to defend themselves against the pogroms, and

To destroy, kill and annihilate any formed force of any nationality of province that might attack them and their women and children; and to plunder the property of their enemies. (8:11)

With the imperial administration now clearly rooting for the Jews, many converts begin discovering the attractions of Judaism.

The big day comes, and the Jews kill 500 people in the capital, including Hamam’s ten sons. Xerxes, in celebration, asks Esther if she has any additional wishes, and she says yes please: Can we string up the corpses of Hamam’s sons, and can the slaughter continue tomorrow, too? Spunky girl, the queen, and Xerxes indulgently grants her wishes. Three hundred anti-Semites are dispatched in the capital the next day; the two-day body count in the provinces is 75,000. Much feasting and celebration ensues. The end.

Historical Note

The modern Jewish celebration of Purim, I read here in the Wiki, is a commemoration of these events. It is traditionally viewed, reasonably enough, as a celebration of national self-preservation, and a reading of the Book of Esther is a key part of the Purim service.

The Book of Nehemiah

2009-02-10T19:51:00.000-08:00

The Book of Nehemiah has a lot in common with the Book of Ezra. Like Ezra, it is a first-person account of the return of the “Jews” – Nehemiah, too, uses the new word – from Babylon to Jerusalem. It recounts some of the same events, and indeed contains some of the same lists of how many of which people went where, and when. The same lists, that is, with only enough deviation to disturb the mood of a strict literalist. How many descendents of Arah returned from Babylon to Jerusalem, for instance? Ezra (2:5) says 775; Nehemiah (7:10) says 652. Can’t be both!

Nehemiah, the man, starts off as a cupbearer to (one of the) King Artixerxes(es) in Babylon. One day, noticing that his servant looks glum, the king asks him, well, why the long face? Nehemiah says that he is sad because his ancestral city lies in ruins. Artixerxes asks what Nehemiah would like him to do about it. Nehemiah says send me to the city in Judah where my fathers are buried so that I can rebuild it. (2:5)

Counter to what you might expect, Artixerxes says “sure thing!” He throws in a substantial allocation of timber from the royal forests, and letters to the local governors, who can not be expected to be enthused about this project. One assumes that ol’ Arti might have had some ulterior motives having to do with regional geopolitics, but who knows? Maybe he just really liked pleasing his servants. Or maybe, as the text implies, he was being manipulated by God in all this.

Class Relations in Early Second Temple Jerusalem: The Rough Guide

The first half of the text is largely an account of the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s walls, recounted in great detail. Ezra appears prominently in the second half of the text, as the priest who leads a great religious revival in the rebuilt city. Again, the accounts of events in the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah line up pretty well. Here, as in Ezra, what is presented as the glorious rebirth of the Israelite kingdom leaves a distinct impression of a ruling elite, back from Babylon, imposing a strict and unwelcome authority on an underclass of locals whose grandparents escaped the captivity.

When the walls are first completed, for instance, there is a big rally in the city. Ezra reads from the Laws of Moses, and a posse of Levites either clarify or interpret – it’s not clear – the text to the assembled people. Then you get this interesting passage:

Then Nehemiah the governor, Ezra the priest and scribe, and the Levites who were instructing the people said to them all, “This day is sacred to the Lord your God. Do not mourn or weep.” For all the people had been weeping as they listened to the words of the Law.

Nehemiah said, “Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks, and send some to those who have nothing prepared. This day is sacred to our Lord. Do not grieve, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”

The Levites calmed all the people, saying “Be still, for this is a sacred day. Do not grieve.”

Then all the people went away to eat and drink, to send portions of food and to celebrate with great joy, because they now understood the words that had been made known to them. (8:9-12)

Well, maybe. But when a large group of people is weeping and agitated when laws are being read to them, it’s a reasonable inference that these laws are being forced upon them, and they are mourning their humiliation and loss of freedom. Somehow the offer of snacks and drinks seems fairly cynical in this light, and the sudden “celebration with great joy” perhaps an overstatement? But who knows. I wasn’t there.

Nor was I there when all of the people decided to join their brothers the nobles, and bind themselves with a curse and an oath to follow the Law of God given through Moses. (10:29) It’s interesting and revealing that the people of Judah suddenly have “nobles” – they never did before – and even more interesting that they would unanimously adopt the rigorous laws of Moses, with its strict limitations on personal and economic freedom and its steep taxation of crops and flocks for the benefit of the priesthood.

Nehemiah, like Ezra, wants to take some credit for the ethnic cleansing of Judah. In the final chapter of his book, the narrative takes the form of a prayer, in which he reminds God of various virtuous acts he has carried out. These include a very strict reimposition of the Sabbath, expulsion from Israel of all who were of foreign descent, and the physical punishment or exile of those whose close relatives married outsiders.

Remember me with favor, O my God, the Book ends, and one has to wonder. On the one hand, this is a man who clearly made critical contributions to the ability of one of history’s most influential small cultures to endure. And, doubtless it is sheer anachronism to judge his more draconian measures against the human rights ideals of the current day. But at the same time, I don’t think that every citizen of Judah felt that the governorship of Nehemiah was an occasion to “celebrate with great joy.” And I feel some measure of sorrow for the losses of those nameless Israelites, all those centuries ago.

Ezra: The Return of the Israelites

2009-01-24T13:21:00.000-08:00

OK, Listen Up People! The 2009 session of MichaelReadsTheBible is now in session, and there's a lot of Bible left to read. So let's get eyes to Scripture, People! Hu-ah!

Ezra

We'll jump in feet first today by covering the entire Book of Ezra. That's not too tough a task, because Ezra is short, heavy on lists of names, and really has only one key message.

That key message: The Jews come back to Jerusalem.

You'll remember that Jerusalem had fallen at the end of 2 Chronicles, and the Israelites had been taken off to forced resettlement in and around Babylon. Between then and the events of Ezra, roughly 70 years go by. Now, at the beginning of the book, God moves the Persian Emporer Cyrus to allow the exiles to move back to Jerusalem, taking some of the Temple treasures back with them. He gives them permission to rebuild the city and the temple, as well.

Except, it's not quite that easy. After a few years, and after Cyrus dies, local leaders around Jerusalem send a letter to the new emporer saying "Hey! You're letting these troublemakers rebuild their fortress-city! Check the archives, and you'll see what a pain they were before they were conquered." The archives are checked, and the rebuilding project is defunded.

A few more years go by, another emporer is on the throne, and there is another exchange of letters. "Hey," the governer says, siding with the Israelites. "This project was authorized by Cyrus! Cyrus THE GREAT!! Check the archives!" The archives are again checked, the order is confirmed, and the Temple is allowed to be completed.

It is very confusing to keep the chronology of Ezra straight, however, because events are all situated in years of the reigns of the Persian emporers Xerxes, Artaxerxes, and Darius, and the Persian dynasty of the 6th Century B.C. is (as one finds with a quick peek at the Wiki) has multiple kings by all these names. I believe that Biblical historians have worked through all of this to their satisfaction, so if you are curious, I recommend you consult your local Biblical historian. I'll let it slide.

A Little Ethnic Cleansing

It appears that the exiles return in at least two separate waves, and if I read the text correctly there is quite a bit of tension between the groups who were in Babylon and the Israelites who remained in the countryside after the fall of Jerusalem. The returnees are more insular and religious, having had the shared experience of living as exiles in Babylon, while the locals have been doing what locals do in a multicultural environment, intermarrying and sharing cultural ideas back and forth with the neighbors.

At the end of the book, Ezra -- the leader of one of the waves of returnees -- prevails on the Israelites to enforce an expulsion of all "foreign" wives and and any children by these wives. The text presents this as an excellent idea, carried out with minimal opposition and by popular acclaim. It doesn't take much imagination to realize that this had to have been a brutally devastating wielding of power by the social conservatives. The fate of the wives and children is not mentioned.

Ezra "resolved the identity threat which arose by the intermarriage between Jews and foreigners," is says here on the Wiki, and for this is "highly respected in the Jewish tradition." So as usual my way looking at things is a bit non-traditional, I suppose.

Interesting Bits

This is, to my memory, the first time in the Bible that we have seen the word "Jews." It was the Israelites that were taken away to Babylon, but it is the Jews that return. There's no indication that this represents any change; it's just a new term introduced without explaination.
Ezra 8 and 9 are written in first person, by Ezra. Other books of the Bible have traditionally recognized authors -- Moses for the Books of Moses, for instance -- but I believe this is the first time we have an account that is directly written by participant in the action.
Finally, one of the human details that occasionally reward a close reading of the Bible. The people have been forcefully assembled in the central square of Jerusalem, knowing that they will be told that all "foreign" women and children will have to be expelled. ...all the people were sitting in the square before the house of God, we're told, greatly distressed by the occasion and because of the rain. (10:9) And wouldn't it just be like that? Not only do you have to endure bullying by social extremists, but to cap it off it has to rain on the outdoor meeting? It must have been a really, really awful day.

NEXT WEEK: Whatever book comes after Ezra!

2 Chronicles 33-36: The Fall of Judah, Again

2008-11-23T20:03:00.000-08:00

Manasseh

In 2 Kings 21:1-18, we learn that Manasseh about as bad as it gets in terms of religious orthodoxy. It doesn't look like there is any diety that he didn't worship, and he builds altars to just about anybody with a cult right inside the Temple. Manasseh leads the people of Judah so far astray, we are told, that they become worse than the peoples that God had wiped out to make space for the Israelites.

We are given the same story in 2 Chronicles 33:1-20, but the story continues on in an interesting arc. In the Chronicles account, God punishes the lapsed Israelites by having them defeated by the Assyrians, and Manasseh is led on an unpleasant trip to Babylon in shackles and with a hook in his nose. Perhaps not surprisingly, this experience makes him feel pretty repentent, and in his distress he sought the favor of the Lord his God and humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers. God is sympathetic, and somehow he brought him back to Jerusalem and to his kingdom. A reformed Manasseh becomes a more effective king, and has all the altars he had built early in his reign torn down again.

Amon

A young man who serves only two years before he is assassinated, Amon gets the last four verses of 2 Kings 21 and the last six of 2 Chronicles 33.

Josiah

Josiah is the king of Judah during whose reign Moses' Book of the Law is found in the Temple. The account in Chronicles 34-35 is pretty much the same as that in 2 Kings 22-23. Realizing that the Israelites have strayed far from the Law of Moses, Josiah does his best to restore religious practice.

In the Kings version, God appreciates Josiah's efforts but subsequently allows Judah to be destroyed anyway because he's still so angry about Manasseh. This doesn't work in Chronicles, where Manasseh has managed to rehabilitate himself. In this version, God informs Josiah -- through a female prophet named Huldah -- that he will destroy Judah out of a more general anger for the generations of religious neglect. Since God promises not to start until Josiah is dead, the people must be especially horrified to see him attack, for no good reason I can divine, an Egyptian army on its way to war with someone else. He is killed by archers, and it's all over but the shouting for the last independant Israelite kingdom.

The Shouting

Johoahaz, Johoiakim, Johoiachin, and Zedekiah are covered in 2 Kings 23:31 - 24:7 and 2 Chronicles 36:1-14. None of them is able to do anything but preside over the erosion of Judah by the rising powers of Egypt and Assyria. Both books end with an account of the fall of Jerusalem, the corruption and destruction of the population of Judah, and the enslavement of everyone who remained in Babylon.

Both books, however, end on a positive note. 2 Kings ended with the release of Jehoiachin, the penultimate king of Judah, and his humane treatment under King Evil-Merodach of Assyria. Here in 2 Chronicles, if I'm reading it right, an Assyrian king apparently undergoes a religious conversion after the Israelites have been in exile for seventy years. Here's how it ends:

22 In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, in order to fulfill the word of the LORD spoken by Jeremiah, the LORD moved the heart of Cyrus king of Persia to make a proclamation throughout his realm and to put it in writing:

23 "This is what Cyrus king of Persia says: " 'The LORD, the God of heaven, has
given me all the kingdoms of the earth and he has appointed me to build a temple for him at Jerusalem in Judah. Anyone of his people among you—may the LORD his God be with him, and let him go up.' "

Well, THAT certainly seems like a lucky break for the Israelites. Perhaps we'll read all about it next time.

But first!

It's time for the annual MRtB Winter Sabbatical. In fact, it's a little past time, but I wanted to finish up Chronicles before taking the break. I'll start up again sometime in January with the Book of Ezra. It's kind of exciting to me that I'm getting into some of those really short chapters of the Old Testament that I've always wondered about. What's in those chapters, anyway? Guess we'll find out!

Got Stats?

I've finished 14 of the Bible's 66 books now, which puts me 21.2% of the way in. In chapters, though, I've finished 403 of 1189, a little more than a third of the way through (33.9%). My favorite measure is verses, though; having completed a whopping 12017 verses, I'm 38.6% of the way through the 31102 verse Bible.

I stayed on task pretty well in 2008, covering 7124 verses (compared to 4687 in 2007 and 206 in 2006). At the current pace, I would wrap up in Summer 2011, at which point I guess I'll have to find a new hobby.

Thanks to anybody who's reading. See ya sometime in January!