The Book of Job

Job is an upright man. He feared the Lord. The narrator gives us this information and we cannot doubt it.

But The Satan (which means something like 'prosecutor' in Hebrew), he isn't so sure. He says to God that maybe Job is only upright because of how he's been rewarded. The only test of his faith is to take it all away. And so God does.

God takes away Job's cattle and wealth. God kills all of Job's children. God gives Job some kinda leprosy. And Job maintains his goodness.

Three of Job's friends show up and they don't even recognize Job, the poor guy has been through so much stuff. Job tells them what's happened, and they all try to figure out what sin he's committed. Maybe he did something without realizing it... Job says no. Maybe it wasn't something he did but something he did not do.... Job says no.

Job demands justice. He knows he has done no wrong. God shows up to defend himself. The only real words he says directly to Job are basically "I'm only gonna say this once, so you'd better listen."

God explains that he made hawks and falcons and snakes and alligators and hippos. Then he scolds Job's friends for misrepresenting Him, and cures Job and gives him even more wealth and children than he had before. And Job lives longer than anyone has since Moses.

Back to the Bible, briefly

I've been reading the bible, but I've also been making real legitimate efforts to understand what I'm reading, how it all came to be. So I thought real quick I'd make a post about the different sources I've found online.

http://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-145

Dr Christine Hayes teaches this Intro to the Hebrew Bible course, and you can audit it for free. From anywhere that you have an internet connection. She does a pretty solid job explaining the various sources, and provides clarification on translations when she thinks that it's necessary.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/course/hebrew-scriptures-in-judaism/id512201207?ign-mpt=uo%3D8

Another free class. You can sit down and listen at your leisure. This time it's from Harvard instead of Yale.

You can actually find a HUGE list of classes on the topic of religion on iTunes. I haven't listened to any other than this one, but the topics seem fascinating.

And I have to give a shout-out to www.reddit.com/r/askhistorians and www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical


And in case you are wondering, I'm reading the "Fully Revised Fourth Edition New Oxford Annotated Bible New Revised Standard Version With the Apocrypha College Edition, An Ecumenical Study Bible"

Regarding the Plagues and the search for the land of Milk and Honey.

This is arguably just a minor detail, but something else I'm intrigued by is that as God metes out the plagues on Egypt he repeatedly steels the Pharaoh's reserve.

He doesn't go down and talk to Pharaoh, but does this through his Godly ways. It isn't exactly clear how he does this, but he doesn't seem to be having a chat, it seems to be a much more supernatural thing. Pharaoh would have actually caved after just a few plagues, but God keeps him stiff.

The motivation behind this seems to be that Pharaoh would have in all reality changed his mind once the Israelites left. Maybe not immediately, but eventually he would decide to go get them back. So he forces Pharaoh to learn in the hardest way possible, so that it sticks.

He even does it right at the end. He allows Pharaoh to give the go ahead and dismiss the Israelites, then goes on to change Pharaoh's mind and give chase through the sea of reeds. But then he protects the Jewish people and closes the sea on the Egyptians.

Side note here: In movies and things the bit where they walk through the sea of reeds is a mad dash. In the Bible this event takes at least a few days.

...

Then the Jewish people have to get to the land of milk and honey. This takes a very long time. I'm not sure how old Moses is when they leave Egypt, but it takes right up to his death at 120 years old. And during that time these people repeatedly screw it up.

The most well known bit seems to be that when Moses goes up to receive the commandments from God, they make a golden calf to worship. They thank the golden calf for getting them out of Egypt, even. But then God shows up and they come back to him.

Then of course there's the deal where they aren't themselves permitted to enter the land, but only their children may, and so they have to wander the desert for 40 years.

This actually happens repeatedly in various ways. They won't go to war because of the enemy's superior numbers, so God punishes them. And when they try to go to war without his go-ahead they are punished, too.

At one point some of the Israelites who are not descendants of Levi decide that they want to be priests, and they follow all of the directions, but God doesn't like it and sends a plague that kills 14,700 people (I think that's the number).

I can't think of the other times this happened, but I'm pretty sure there are a couple more. 

God calls the descendants of Jacob a "stubborn people," but I have to wonder. Maybe he did the same thing to them. Maybe he decided that the lesson to stay loyal to him, that he would protect them, wouldn't really stick unless he put them through quite an ordeal. It's not said explicitly. It's not even suggested, really. They just seem... honestly kind of dense to not catch on to how things work.

But that's my hypothesis about the Pentateuch. I'll let you know when more cool stories come up.

On the Tower of Babel

So I mentioned a couple of posts back about the Tower of Babel, I wanted to kind of ramble and explicate my thoughts on that to you guys. I'll be doing this with the parts of the bible I find particularly interesting. If you'd like to, then you can find the story about the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11:1-9. It's really quite short.

The Tower of Babel (though never called that exactly) was built by some folks who wanted to either sneak into Heaven (though it doesn't say this; it says "the heavens", not the plural form and the small h), or to get in on some godlike powers. Depends on who you ask.

The exact reason they built this tower isn't so important to me, really. What's more important is the cause-and-effect of the parable. The humans want something that they shouldn't have, and that would upset the (for lack of a better phrase I'm going to call it) natural order of things (would God/gods be considered natural? Purely hypothetical.) And in response they are punished in an interesting way, by splitting them into separate peoples by giving them separate languages.

This story is amazing. It's a two-birds/one-stone kinda parable. One of those birds is hubristic. The other is etiological (I just learned that word and had to use it). Which is to say, it's both a warning and an explanation of a phenomena. And it's only nine verses long.

It's a warning against trying to be like God/gods (God says 'let us,' make of that what you will), and at the same time an explanation of a phenomenon (that's what the word etiological means). The phenomenon in this case being multiple languages.

The Pentateuch

I'm also going to keep you updated on the Bible. So ignore this post, Eric Collier.

I've finished the first five books. And so far the Bible is a wild ride. I have a fancy pants scholar's bible from Oxford. Fourth edition NRSV, with the apocrypha, something like that.

There were several stories that I knew of and that I knew were in the bible, but that I had no idea where they really were in the timeline. Like the Tower of Babel, for instance. It's in Genesis. Babel is/was a place where they built the tower. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah, also in Genesis. I had no idea that Lot and Abraham were related at all.

I was terribly confused about the differences between the story of Lot in Sodom and Gomorrah and the story of Abraham and Isaac. The basic gist is that God comes up to Abraham and says that the sin and inequity and etc of Sodom and Gomorrah are calling out to him and he's real upset about it and says he's going to smash the cities. Abraham talks God down, and says that woah woah woah, there's gotta be some innocent people in there, so you can't kill all of them, right? and God kind of takes a deep breathe and says he'll spare the city for a bit if Abraham can find fifty people and then Abraham haggles with him for a few verses and God finally says that okay, if Abe can find at least ten people (I think ten, maybe five?) in those two cities then He will walk away.

So God has a temper and Abraham is the voice of reason.

But then not very much later in the book God says to Abraham: You gotta kill Isaac. Abraham doesn't say word one in the way of protest. Just nods and accepts it. Especially screwy when Isaac is Abraham's only son and God promised to give Abraham and heir (if certain conditions were met, which they very much were).

God seems to be the more consistent of the two between these two incidents; He's got a temper, he wants everything to be his way, he's testing people all the time to make sure they are up to par.

But Abraham seems like two completely different people. I don't get it.