The King James Version

Sumerians Look On In Confusion As Christian God Creates World

2009-12-16T00:32:00.001Z

In advance of next year's resumption of this very worthwhile project, we will be posting the odd little thing.

This is from the woundrous Onion...

Members of the earth's earliest known civilization, the Sumerians, looked on in shock and confusion some 6,000 years ago as God, the Lord Almighty, created Heaven and Earth.

According to recently excavated clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform script, thousands of Sumerians—the first humans to establish systems of writing, agriculture, and government—were working on their sophisticated irrigation systems when the Father of All Creation reached down from the ether and blew the divine spirit of life into their thriving civilization.

"I do not understand," reads an ancient line of pictographs depicting the sun, the moon, water, and a Sumerian who appears to be scratching his head. "A booming voice is saying, 'Let there be light,' but there is already light. It is saying, 'Let the earth bring forth grass,' but I am already standing on grass."

"Everything is here already," the pictograph continues. "We do not need more stars."

Religion and the environment/back to the KJV

2009-11-17T10:05:00.006Z

It's been a while, I know. A very long while. It's been a busy year - heading back to Palestine, completing not one but two books - the Leila Khaled biography I've had in the pipeline for ages, and an unplanned edited volume of the writings from Gaza of my amazing friend Sharyn. So dealing with the beautiful but sometimes slightly impenetrable language of the King James Version, and hefting the bloomin' great thing around as well, kind of slipped onto a very back burner...
But post-books and with a little time to think, I'm certainly planning to resurrect this project, although I can't speak for Husband. But he did just post the following on the Manchester Climate Fortnightly blog, and a thought it made a good start to some of the issues I'll be thinking about:

Monday, 16 November 2009
And ye shall know the truth, and it shall set you free...

MCFly attended the Faith Network of Manchester conference about Faith and the Environment, at the wonderful MERCi building in Ancoats. It was one of those evenings where everyone (between 35 and 45 people, slightly older than average 'climate' meetings tend to be) had a good time, but that you leave with nagging doubts about its effectiveness. Good grub, good chat, but not as incisive or interactive as it might have been...

After housekeeping and a brief intro to the history of MERCi (sustainable in many ways) we had four speakers.
On Buddhism, Clive Pyot spoke about his own community and the precepts he tries to follow. For more on Buddhism and the environment, see here. If it was true back in ol' Gautama's day that all existence is suffering, what's it gonna be like when the Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet">positive feedback loops kick in, eh?

On Christianity Rev John Hughes spoke about people's definitions of Christianity (he favours “God is, as Jesus is, therefore there is hope”) and Operation Noah and ecofeminism

The representative of Islam, Zahid Hussein, spoke of the Ecomosque project, and Rabbi Warren Elf finished off the session with a brief take on Judaism and the guidance to be found in the Torah.

Because of significant time over-runs, there was no time for questions and discussion in the big group- everyone legged it for the food, which was vegetarian and delicious (huzzah to the cook!)

There was an invitation and expectation that we should all “schmooze”, but this was not done coercively (name badges, enforced mingling etc) so people seemed to largely stick with those they already knew.) After a nice long break, we climbed back to the top of the building. Initially we were told that, as per the plan, we were going to get into groups to tackle very specific questions and come up with one-sentence pledges that would be stitched into a big pledge. Then followed some extended introductions, and since time was then very short, the initial plan was curtailed, and we were invited to be in big groups (of about 10 people) to discuss things generally and fill in a pledge leaf for a pledge tree. In MCFly's experience these groups tend to be dominated by one or three people, with the others drifting off mentally if not physically, so we cast ourselves out of the land of Nod.

MCFly's unsolicited advice- The evening might have been more intriguing and thought-provoking if the speakers had been invited to wrestle with one or more of the following-

* 1) My faith's doctrine and how it does or doesn't equate with “sustainability.” What are the tensions, what have the tensions been historically?
* 2) The existing PRACTICE of my faith and how it does/doesn't equate with sustainability (i.e. is there a gap between my doctrine and my faith's practice around environment, and if so why.)
* 3) What are the OBSTACLES that stand in the way if I try to make my doctrine/practice more in line with sustainability?

After all, for each religion there are problems;

Christians have the dilemma between the two bits of Genesis in which God says “hey, this creation is yours to subdue, fill yer boots” [domination] or else He/She says “look, I'm giving you this to look after” [stewardship]. Further, some evangelical Christians (and yes, I know some- and like them) – are very unconcerned about Climate Change because God Has A Plan. This segues nicely into Buddhism- there are some interpretations that allow people to “meh, it's all just one big cycle o' suffering, so what's the point trying to hold stuff together- everything changes”. I'm not saying it's a right interpretation, but it is prevalent.

Islam- well, take a look at the Haj- is flying to Mecca more than once (or even once...) compatible with sustainability? It's one big can of worms- ass soon as you start dissing people's interpretations of what it means to be a good adherent to their faith, it's gonna get messy. (Please not, most of the world's Muslims seem to live in countries with pretty low per capita carbon emissions. Before Westerners start lecturing, we might need to sort out the plank in our own eyes).

Judaism- I am not so clear on the tensions within it on environmental issues, but you could- without conflating Judaism and Israel- take a look at Israel's environmental record (nothing to write home about), and the reasons for the weakness of its environmental movement.

The point is, these problems (and others) exist. If they didn't, we wouldn't be in this mess. It seems a pity to hold an event that focusses solely on the good things that are going on. There has to be SOME time devoted to the problems, and how they might be overcome. If not, we simply violently agree with each other and are none-the-wiser for dealing with the real problems, because they haven't been named. As a Quaker might say, we've not born witness.

Given that the total time spent on the four speakers was closer to an hour than 40 minutes, despite the invocation on the agenda “max 10 mins each” it might have been better to have a fifth speaker- a secular humanist, or an animist or a pagan as well, and kept everyone strictly to their time (with a card held up to give them a two minute warning, or some such).

MCFly's two pence. In vulgar anthropological terms, religion is part of terror management, and also a way of maintaining social solidarity and rules of engagement within (and less commonly between) tribes. To that extent, religions mostly seem to follow the Golden Rule, which Christians will explain as “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Kant's categorial imperative yadder yadder. (And a nice little side line in telling you to behave in this life cos you get your reward in the next. But we digress...)

Well, if you're gonna retrofit the Golden Rule for “the Environment”, you simply need to say that “others” means not just other hairless two-legged apes stumbling about now but ALSO other species AND other humans and species that haven't yet been born.

Voila. We'll send you an invoice.

Random important quote

"Activism is my rent for living on this planet." Alice Walker

Further Reading

The stuff about Buddhism in Only Planet (pages 111-113)
The Ecology of Eden by Evan Eisenberg (long, but really really amazingly good. If you skim the 'Earth Jazz' tosh, that is)
Dancing towards Armageddon by http://www.arcworld.org/

Things MCFly thinks they should read, if someone invents an extra 12 hours in the day:

The Great Transformation, by Karen Armstrong

Leviticus 23 to 24: Feast your eyes on this

2009-02-10T14:21:00.002Z

Chapter 23

Blah blah Keep the Sabbath.

Blah blah lots of bread/lambs etc ya gotta sacrifice before you stuff your cakeholes

Blah blah how to calculate days of atonement, feast of tabernacles etc

And boy, is God the Union Steward enforcing the work to rule tactic:

Verse 30 “And whatsoever soul it be that doeth any work in that same day, the same soul will I destroy from among his people.”

This is cute:

Verse 40 “And ye shall take you on the first day the boughs of goodly trees, branches of palm trees, and the boughs of thick trees, and willows of the brook; and ye shall rejoice before the LORD your God seven days.”

And then there seems to be one of those Guinness Book of Records attempts- how many people can you fit in a phone box. In my experience, Time Lords always win that one...

Verse 42: “Ye shall dwell in booths seven days; all that are Israelites born shall dwell in booths”

Chapter 24

Light pollution and the 24 hour society is nothing new...

Verse 1-2 “And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, Command the children of Israel, that they bring unto thee pure oil olive beaten for the light, to cause the lamps to burn continually.”

Cakes equals covenants, it seems

Verse 4-8 “He shall order the lamps upon the pure candlestick before the LORD continually. And thou shalt take fine flour, and bake twelve cakes thereof: two tenth deals shall be in one cake. And thou shalt set them in two rows, six on a row, upon the pure table before the LORD. And thou shalt put pure frankincense upon each row, that it may be on the bread for a memorial, even an offering made by fire unto the LORD. Every sabbath he shall set it in order before the LORD continually, being taken from the children of Israel by an everlasting covenant.”

And who gets to eat it? Who the heck do you think, hmm?

Verse 9 “And it shall be Aaron's and his sons'; and they shall eat it in the holy place: for it is most holy unto him of the offerings of the LORD made by fire by a perpetual statute.”

And the “son of an Israelitish woman, whose father was an Egyptian” gets in a fight, curses the Lord and they make an Example of him:

Verse 14 “Bring forth him that hath cursed without the camp; and let all that heard him lay their hands upon his head, and let all the congregation stone him.”

Remember Shirley Jackson's story “The Lottery”?

Anyhow, there's more of the stuff that Leviticus is justly famous for-

Verse 20 “Breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth: as he hath caused a blemish in a man, so shall it be done to him again.”

Before they return to the main plot (artful, these suspense raising diversions...)

Verse 23 “And Moses spake to the children of Israel, that they should bring forth him that had cursed out of the camp, and stone him with stones. And the children of Israel did as the LORD commanded Moses.”

Leviticus 20 to 22: Insert snarky title here.

2009-02-10T07:21:00.002Z

Chapter 20

Here's what God's gonna do if anyone is Israel (inc. 'strangers') 'giveth his seed (worships, methinks) Molech:

Verse 3 “And I will set my face against that man, and will cut him off from among his people; because he hath given of his seed unto Molech, to defile my sanctuary, and to profane my holy name.”

In fact, you gotta kill him (Commandments be damned I say) or else you and your family will get caught up in God's secondary action (I thought those were illegal?)

Verse 4-5 “And if the people of the land do any ways hide their eyes from the man, when he giveth of his seed unto Molech, and kill him not. Then I will set my face against that man, and against his family, and will cut him off, and all that go a whoring after him, to commit whoredom with Molech, from among their people."

If this stuff ever caught on, Amnesty would melt under the workload

Verse 9 “For every one that curseth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death: he hath cursed his father or his mother; his blood shall be upon him.”

Verse 10 “And the man that committeth adultery with another man's wife, even he that committeth adultery with his neighbour's wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.”

Yep, and a repeat of no homosexuality, no adultery, no bestiality etc etc

And no shagging during that Time of the Month

Verse 18 “And if a man shall lie with a woman having her sickness, and shall uncover her nakedness; he hath discovered her fountain, and she hath uncovered the fountain of her blood: and both of them shall be cut off from among their people.”

Keep All these rules and it'll turn out peaceful and socially just, oh yes-

Verse 24 "But I have said unto you, Ye shall inherit their land, and I will give it unto you to possess it, a land that floweth with milk and honey: I am the LORD your God, which have separated you from other people.”

Chapter 21

Priests sisters don't seem able to marry, though maybe I'm getting this wrong.

Verse 3 “And for his sister a virgin, that is nigh unto him, which hath had no husband; for her may he be defiled.”

And some sartorial 'advice'

Verse 5 “They shall not make baldness upon their head, neither shall they shave off the corner of their beard, nor make any cuttings in their flesh.”

Watch out daughters!

Verse 9 “And the daughter of any priest, if she profane herself by playing the whore, she profaneth her father: she shall be burnt with fire.”

And despite the LORD's previous (Ch 19,14), He takes a dim view of anyone less than Aryanly perfect coming into his temple.

Verse 18-21 “For whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not approach: a blind man, or a lame, or he that hath a flat nose, or any thing superfluous, Or a man that is brokenfooted, or brokenhanded, Or crookbackt, or a dwarf, or that hath a blemish in his eye, or be scurvy, or scabbed, or hath his stones broken. No man that hath a blemish of the seed of Aaron the priest shall come nigh to offer the offerings of the LORD made by fire: he hath a blemish; he shall not come nigh to offer the bread of his God.”

They get to worship ('eat the bread') but are not welcome at the altar.

And Moses passes all this along.

Chapter 22

More bonkers rules- or rather, repeats of one's I've already done my cod-funny sneering at.

But catch this language.

Verse 21 “And whosoever offereth a sacrifice of peace offerings unto the LORD to accomplish his vow, or a freewill offering in beeves or sheep, it shall be perfect to be accepted; there shall be no blemish therein. Blind, or broken, or maimed, or having a wen, or scurvy, or scabbed, ye shall not offer these unto the LORD, nor make an offering by fire of them upon the altar unto the LORD.”

Beeves? Plural of beef.

Wen? n. (wĕn)

[AS. wenn; akin to D. wen, LG. wenne.]
(Med.) An indolent, encysted tumor of the skin; especially, a sebaceous cyst.

More of the same, rules-wise.

And. Don't. Call. God. Names.

Verse 32-3 “Neither shall ye profane my holy name; but I will be hallowed among the children of Israel: I am the LORD which hallow you, That brought you out of the land of Egypt, to be your God: I am the LORD.”

Leviticus 18 to 19: At last, loopy Leviticus launches!

2009-02-10T00:12:00.005Z

Chapter 18

God tells Moses to remind everyone how much He has done for them and all he wants in exchange is unthinking unswerving obedience.

Verse 6-7 “None of you shall approach to any that is near of kin to him, to uncover their nakedness: I am the LORD. The nakedness of thy father, or the nakedness of thy mother, shalt thou not uncover: she is thy mother; thou shalt not uncover her nakedness.”

Got that, anyone caring for their parents? Let them sit in their shit until the carers arrive... No carers because social services is out of money? Well, your parent is out of luck. Wouldn't want to risk old Lordy's wrath, would we?

Whole long list of people you cannot see naked.

Er, huh?

Verse 21 “And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God: I am the LORD.”

Ah, here it is, the verse that the homophobes Milk for all it's worth:

Verse 22 (drumroll please) “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.”

Must have been happening a fair bit though, for them to make a rule about it. Ditto for the bestiality outlawed in the next verses.

And if you don't keep all these rules...

Verse 25 “And the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants.”

Chapter 19

More orders: No other gods. Peace offerings.

Oh, and here's a bit as important as Ch 18, verse 22

Verse 9-10 “And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not wholly reap the corners of thy field, neither shalt thou gather the gleanings of thy harvest. And thou shalt not glean thy vineyard, neither shalt thou gather every grape of thy vineyard; thou shalt leave them for the poor and stranger: I am the LORD your God.”

Disability Discrimination Act avant la lettre

Verse 14 “Thou shalt not curse the deaf, nor put a stumbling block before the blind, but shalt fear thy God: I am the LORD.”

No gossiping, dammit

Verse 16 “Thou shalt not go up and down as a talebearer among thy people: neither shalt thou stand against the blood of thy neighbour: I am the LORD.”

Remember, you gotta keep ALL these statutes.

Verse 19 “Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee.”

Death penalty for adultery, so (as my mother says) 'be careful where you dip your wick'

Verse 20 “And whosoever lieth carnally with a woman, that is a bondmaid, betrothed to an husband, and not at all redeemed, nor freedom given her; she shall be scourged; they shall not be put to death, because she was not free.”

No tats

Verse 28 “Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the LORD.”

No pimping yo daughter

Verse 29 “Do not prostitute thy daughter, to cause her to be a whore; lest the land fall to whoredom, and the land become full of wickedness.”

Don't tarry with tarot, and don't go potty about Potter

Verse 31

“Regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards, to be defiled by them: I am the LORD your God.”

Be nice to strangers

Verse 34 “But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.”

EU standard measures!

Verse 36 “Just balances, just weights, a just ephah, and a just hin, shall ye have: I am the LORD your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt.”

Leviticus 14 to 17: Pure and simply boring

2009-02-09T23:47:00.002Z

Leviticus 14

Leper goes to priest, who has to

verse 5-6 “And the priest shall command that one of the birds be killed in an earthen vessel over running water. As for the living bird, he shall take it, and the cedar wood, and the scarlet, and the hyssop, and shall dip them and the living bird in the blood of the bird that was killed over the running water”

Crikey, try getting that prescription filled at your local chemist!

And the priest has to do some lamb killing and burning and tips of right ear and toe of newt eye of frog and all that guff.

And there's a sliding scale if the afflicted be poor:

Verse 21 "And if he be poor, and cannot get so much; then he shall take one lamb for a trespass offering to be waved, to make an atonement for him, and one tenth deal of fine flour mingled with oil for a meat offering, and a log of oil"

And there goes God again, promising real estate

Verse 34 "When ye be come into the land of Canaan, which I give to you for a possession, and I put the plague of leprosy in a house of the land of your possession"

(followed by rules about cleansing and purifying and so forth)

Chapter 15

God tells Moses to tell the Israelites that running sores are unclean. This whole chunk of Leviticus is turning into a running joke, and it's making me sore.

More purity stuff-

Verse 4-7 “Every bed, whereon he lieth that hath the issue, is unclean: and every thing, whereon he sitteth, shall be unclean. And whosoever toucheth his bed shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the even. And he that sitteth on any thing whereon he sat that hath the issue shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the even. And he that toucheth the flesh of him that hath the issue shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the even.”

Now, a lot of this stuff makes sense, and was useful in the days before a germ theory of contagion. But I ask you

Verse 14 “And on the eighth day he shall take to him two turtledoves, or two young pigeons, and come before the LORD unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, and give them unto the priest”

I mean, it's like something out of the Old Testame... oh, yeah, um. never mind.

Ah, and here is the Lewinsky doctrine-

Verse 16-17 “And if any man's seed of copulation go out from him, then he shall wash all his flesh in water, and be unclean until the even. And every garment, and every skin, whereon is the seed of copulation, shall be washed with water, and be unclean until the even.”

And this next bit is sure to be a red rag to the feminists-

Verse 18-19 “And if a woman have an issue, and her issue in her flesh be blood, she shall be put apart seven days: and whosoever toucheth her shall be unclean until the even. And every thing that she lieth upon in her separation shall be unclean: every thing also that she sitteth upon shall be unclean.”

Oh FFS. It's. Menstrual. Blood. Deal. With. It.

Verse 29-30 “And on the eighth day she shall take unto her two turtles, or two young pigeons, and bring them unto the priest, to the door of the tabernacle of the congregation. And the priest shall offer the one for a sin offering, and the other for a burnt offering; and the priest shall make an atonement for her before the LORD for the issue of her uncleanness.”

Chapter 16

Now, we come back to Aaron's dead kids. God gives Moses a bunch of instructions to pass on. Including

Verse 7-10 “And he shall take the two goats, and present them before the LORD at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation. And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the LORD, and the other lot for the scapegoat. And Aaron shall bring the goat upon which the LORD's lot fell, and offer him for a sin offering. But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the LORD, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.”

So, no bad thing to be an (e)scapegoat.

Gotta kill a bullock and sprinkle its blood around.

And it goes on. Yea did I create a rod for mine own back when I said I would read this in/for a year.

There must be some way to atone for this sin against common sense?

Verse 33-4 “And he shall make an atonement for the holy sanctuary, and he shall make an atonement for the tabernacle of the congregation, and for the altar, and he shall make an atonement for the priests, and for all the people of the congregation. And this shall be an everlasting statute unto you, to make an atonement for the children of Israel for all their sins once a year. And he did as the LORD commanded Moses.”

Chapter 17

Ah, now the priests are channelling God, demanding their 'cut'. Remember that scene in The Godfather Two about 'dipping your beak'...

Verse 3-4 “What man soever there be of the house of Israel, that killeth an ox, or lamb, or goat, in the camp, or that killeth it out of the camp. And bringeth it not unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, to offer an offering unto the LORD before the tabernacle of the LORD; blood shall be imputed unto that man; he hath shed blood; and that man shall be cut off from among his people”

And No Other Gods. Alright?? How many times do I have to tell you, eh?

Verse 7 “And they shall no more offer their sacrifices unto devils, after whom they have gone a whoring. This shall be a statute for ever unto them throughout their generations.”

No blood drinking either.

Verse 14 “For it is the life of all flesh; the blood of it is for the life thereof: therefore I said unto the children of Israel, Ye shall eat the blood of no manner of flesh: for the life of all flesh is the blood thereof: whosoever eateth it shall be cut off.”

Leviticus 11 to 13: I got you under my skin...

2009-02-05T20:04:00.007Z

Leviticus 11

God tells Moses what is edible and what ain't.

Verse 20-2: "All fowls that creep, going upon all four, shall be an abomination unto you. Yet these may ye eat of every flying creeping thing that goeth upon all four, which have legs above their feet, to leap withal upon the earth; Even these of them ye may eat; the locust after his kind, and the bald locust after his kind, and the beetle after his kind, and the grasshopper after his kind."

And ooh,germs, germs everywhere! OCD GOD?

Verse 32: "And upon whatsoever any of them, when they are dead, doth fall, it shall be unclean; whether it be any vessel of wood, or raiment, or skin, or sack, whatsoever vessel it be, wherein any work is done, it must be put into water, and it shall be unclean until the even; so it shall be cleansed."

Purity and Danger and all that Mary Douglas stuff...

Leviticus 12

Women are unclean for seven days after giving birth to a boy. After his circumcision-

What's that useless piece of skin at the end of a penis called?
A man...

she's unclean for another 33 days, and shall touch no halloed thing, nor come into the sanctuary.

Since females are obviously inherently yuckier and ickier, after giving birth to a “maid child”, a woman is unclean two weeks, and then a further 66 days.

In either case, burnt offerings are due the prie... sorry, the LORD

Leviticus 13

God does dermatology outpatients clinics...

Verse 2-4 “When a man shall have in the skin of his flesh a rising, a scab, or a bright spot, and it be in the skin of his flesh like the plague of leprosy; then he shall be brought unto Aaron the priest, or unto one of his sons the priests: And the priest shall look on the plague in the skin of the flesh: and when the hair in the plague is turned white, and the plague in sight be deeper than the skin of his flesh, it is a plague of leprosy: and the priest shall look on him, and pronounce him unclean. If the bright spot be white in the skin of his flesh, and in sight be not deeper than the skin, and the hair thereof be not turned white; then the priest shall shut up him that hath the plague seven days.”

Basically, if the priest thinks you've got leprosy,

Verse 21-25 "But if the priest look on it, and, behold, there be no white hairs therein, and if it be not lower than the skin, but be somewhat dark; then the priest shall shut him up seven days: And if it spread much abroad in the skin, then the priest shall pronounce him unclean: it is a plague. But if the bright spot stay in his place, and spread not, it is a burning boil; and the priest shall pronounce him clean. Or if there be any flesh, in the skin whereof there is a hot burning, and the quick flesh that burneth have a white bright spot, somewhat reddish, or white; Then the priest shall look upon it: and, behold, if the hair in the bright spot be turned white, and it be in sight deeper than the skin; it is a leprosy broken out of the burning: wherefore the priest shall pronounce him unclean: it is the plague of leprosy."

- and these versus remind me of an extremely crude diagnostic algorithm- then you'll be treated like an, er, leper.

Verse 45-6 “And the leper in whom the plague is, his clothes shall be rent, and his head bare, and he shall put a covering upon his upper lip, and shall cry, Unclean, unclean. All the days wherein the plague shall be in him he shall be defiled; he is unclean: he shall dwell alone; without the camp shall his habitation be.”

But given how clothes are expensive and all, and a proper dry cleaner isn't to be had for a good 3400 years or so, then decontamination is important...

Verse 56-9 “And if the priest look, and, behold, the plague be somewhat dark after the washing of it; then he shall rend it out of the garment, or out of the skin, or out of the warp, or out of the woof: And if it appear still in the garment, either in the warp, or in the woof, or in any thing of skin; it is a spreading plague: thou shalt burn that wherein the plague is with fire. And the garment, either warp, or woof, or whatsoever thing of skin it be, which thou shalt wash, if the plague be departed from them, then it shall be washed the second time, and shall be clean. This is the law of the plague of leprosy in a garment of woollen or linen, either in the warp, or woof, or any thing of skins, to pronounce it clean, or to pronounce it unclean.”

And look, I've gone all this way without making ONE joke about failing driving tests/comments to prostitutes etc etc. You've got to hand it to me...

Leviticus 7 to 10: The calm before the storm

2009-02-05T07:16:00.005Z

Leviticus 7

More rules about trespass and sin offerings and who gets the leftovers...

Verse 6 "Every male among the priests shall eat thereof: it shall be eaten in the holy place: it is most holy."

So there were female priests? But they weren't in the protein-grubbing gang...

Burn, sprinkle blood, tabernacles. Yawn.

Verse 26 "Moreover ye shall eat no manner of blood, whether it be of fowl or of beast, in any of your dwellings."

Leviticus 8

God gives Moses some get-up instructions for Aaron. Gotta keep up appearances.

Verse 6-7 "And Moses brought Aaron and his sons, and washed them with water. And he put upon him the coat and girded him, with the girdle, and clothed him with the robe, and put the ephod upon him, and he girded him with the curious girdle of the ephod, and bound it unto him therewith. And he put the breastplate upon him: also he put in the breastplaste the Urim and the Thummim."

And they kill a bullock. Annoint, purity, yadder yadder yadder.

Verse 31 "And Moses said unto Aaron and to his sons. Boil the flesh at the door of the tabernacle of the congregationL and there eat it with the bread that is in the basket of consecrations, as I commanded, saying, Aaron and his sons shall eat it."

Leviticus 9

And Aaron sacrfices a bullock, goat and lamb, which the LORD torches

Verse 24 "And thre came a fire out form before th LORD, and consumed upon the altar the burnt offering and the fat which when all the people saw, they shouted and fell on their faces."

Leviticus 10

Aaron's kids get torched by the LORD, and Moses consoles Aaron by saying 'that's how it goes, mate.'

Verse 1-3 "And Nadab and Abihu, he sons of Aaron, took either of them his censer and put fire therein and put incense thereon, and put incense thereon, and offered strange fire before the LORD, which he commanded them not. And there went out fire from the LORD, and devoured them, and they died before the LORD. Then Moses said unto Aaron, This is tit that the LORD spake, saying I will be sanctified in them that come nigh me, and before all the people I will be glorified. And Aaron held his peace."

And the LORD gives some complicated rules for Moses' cronies to follow, which they muddle, and Moses chews out Aaron's kids. Aaron takes up their cause and Moses so 'oh, that's alright then'.

Ah, next chapter gets going with the strange rules Leviticus is known for...

Exodus 32-40: more bloodshed, more gold

2009-02-02T22:30:00.002Z

OK, I'm even further behind now. Blame the evil three legged cat (I'm sure there must be something in this fat book about casting weird little yowly three-legged things like that out into the wilderness). He killed Marc's computer monitor by throwing up down the back of it, so we're now sharing a computer and on rationed blogging time.
Anyway.
Chapters 32 and 33 recount the tale of the making of the Golden Calf. As if to confirm all the stuff I've been talking about regarding the importance of ritual, the Israelites take a very short time indeed to start freaking out about the fact that Moses has vanished up to the top of Mount Sinai to commune with God, and demand that Aaron makes them something else to worship instead.
Collecting jewellery off them, Aaron takes very little persuading to make a statue of a bull calf, which immediately becomes the new God.
God, who has been showing himself to be a rather insecure and demanding character since at least the beginning of Exodus, and of course on occasions like ordering Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, gets understandably stroppy about this:

“Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them”
(Chapter 32 verse 10)

Moses manages to talk him down a bit, and back down at the bottom of the mountain seems to be happy to go along with some spectacular buck-passing by Aaron (I thought we had major legal precedents established that 'he told me to' was no excuse?):

“And Aaron said, let not the anger of my lord wax hot: thou knowest the people, that they are set on mischief.
For they said unto me, Make us gods, which shall go before us: for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him.”
(Chapter 32 verses 22-23)

Despite this, Aaron gets comprehensively forgiven and reinstated into his God-assigned role as the head of a lineage of priests, while in a typically Biblical bit of understated callousness 3,000 people apparently get butchered for this bit of cow-worship, but this only warrants one very short verse and no real explanation as to why. Bit like the massacre of the people of Shechem or various other non-Israelite groups, who, like the girl in the B movie whose function is just to scream and look terrified, just exist to get minced to show off Israelite power:

“And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses: and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.”
(Chapter 32 verse 28)

Yep, that's it.
Having generously forgiven the leadership of this rather hierarchical set-up, God now reinforces his position by ordering the destruction of any other gods who might be knocking around, and yet again all those commandments about rituals get repeated, just in case anyone had forgotten them.
Chapters 35-38 mainly recap in the actual performance the instructions delivered by God to Moses for the making of the Ark of the Covenant, involving lots of gold, silver, brass, shittim wood and purple, red and blue cloth. The level of detail entailed extends to listing the number of tenon joints needed to hold some of the boards together:

“One board had two tenons, equally distant from one another: thus did he make for all the boards of the tabernacle.
...
And forty sockets of silver he made under the twenty boards; two sockets under one board for his two tenons, and two sockets under another board for his two tenons.”
(Chapter 36 verses 22 and 24)

Collecting all the materials for this – all apparently accumulated from the existing wealth of the Israelite people (even though they've been enslaved in Egypt for several generations?), so at least it's recycled. I remember from archaeology classes at uni that one of the types of evidence considered to indicate that a society was hierarchical is the carrying out of large-scale construction projects (Stonehenge, for example), the presence of crafts specialisations (because people doing specialised crafts obviously need someone else to be growing/producing the goods to feed them, since they don't have time to do it themselves, so you need some kind of social system that supports this differentiation) and burials or other accumulations of wealth such as gold jewellery or ritual objects.
Giving little credence to hippy notions of co-operation, it is assumed that the presence of hierarchies and leaderships is necessary to get enough people together at the same time and for long enough to actually build anything of any significant size or value – and although this Ark isn't particularly huge in itself, it does involve major accumulation of wealth and of labour, with all the society's women apparently engaged in weaving the hangings, and its skilled craftsmen (rejoicing in the wonderful names Bezaleel and Aholiab) devoting their time to this effort.

We also get quite a bit about the priests' ephods, which is apparently a word of which there is controversy about the meaning of, but may be some kind of loincloth, or possibly a kind of ritual apron. In this case, they seem to be accompanied with 'curious girdles,' which also sound great but lack specifics as to why they are curious... this for me is one of the joys of the Old Testament and especially the King James Version, that we come up against some bizarre and in some cases totally incomprehensible words and phrases, their exact meanings lost in the mists of time, but their general resonance remaining.
And so the Book of Exodus ends, with the completion of this great creative and ritual work, a social bonding experience between the Israelites who donate their valuables and time to create a symbol of their belief and their identity as a people. And, armed with a growing conviction that they are God's one chosen people, and with a substantial list of laws as to the proper conduct of society, they're ready to head off to the land of Canaan:

“For the cloud of the LORD was upon the tabernacle by day, and fire was on it by night, in the sight of all the house of Israel, throughout all their journeys.”
(Chapter 40 verse 38)

Leviticus 5 to 6: The protein-grubbing priest class...

2009-02-02T20:10:00.003Z

Leviticus 5

And now comes some of the arcane ritual cleansing/purification stuff that Leviticus is (in)famous for.

Verse 2 “Of if a soul touch any unclean thing, whether it be a carcase of an unclean beast, or a carcase of unclean cattle, or the carcase of unclean creeping things, and if it be hidden from him, he also shall be unclean, and guilty.”

So, guilty until proven innocent, and proving yourself innocent isn't easy.

But you can atone for your sins, which is quite Indulgent of the Lord. There's even a sliding scale, and not just for touching the sleeping snake...

Verse 7 “And if he be not able to bring a lamb, then he shall bring for his trespass, which he hath committed, two turtledoves, or two young pigeons, unto the LORD: one for a sing offering, and the other for a burnt offering.”

And the priest will sprinkle and sort out absolution.

Verse 11 “But if be not able to bring two turtledoves, or two young pigeons, then he that sinned shall bring for his offering the tenth part of an ephah of fine flour for a sin offering he shall put no oil upon it, neither shall he put any frankincense thereon: for it is a sin offering.”

Got that?

The priest did-

Verse 13 “... and the remnant shall be the priest's, as a meat offering.”

And there's more sin extortion. It's a nice little protection racket, is this...

Chapter 6

And the LORD has more rules about lying and so on.

And instructions to Aaron about how to dress up for the burnt offering show. And how to get the altar just so...

Verse 13 “The fire shall ever be burning upon the altar: it shall never go out.”

Won't somebody think of the carbon emissions??

Ah, here we go...

Verse 14 "And this is the law of the meat offering: the sons of Aaron shall offer it before the LORD, before the altar. And he shall take of it his handful, of the flour of the meat offering, and of the oil thereof, and all the frankincense which is upon the meat offering, and shall burn it upon the altar for a sweet savour even the memorial of it, unto the LORD.”

And if any is left over, it's given to the widows and orphans, right?

You. Haven't. Been. Paying. Attention. Have you? Hmm? Have you? Admit it.

Verse 16 “And the remainder thereof shall Aaron and his sons eat: with unleavened bread shall it be eaten in the holy place: in the court of the tabernacle of the congregation they shall eat it.”

As Marge Piercy had one of her characters say in the extraordinary novel “Vida”- “Keep naming the enemies. Put faces on where the money goes.” Or in this case, the protein...

Oh, and funny how the LORD locks in this...

Verse 18 “And the males among the children of Aaron shall eat of it. It shall be a statute for ever in your generations concerning the offerings of the LORD made by fire...”

You'd never know it was the priest class writing and regurgitating this shit would you? Nothing self -serving in it at all...

Chapter closes out with more recipes. Jamie Fernly-Ramsay has nothing on this guy.

Oh, and no bloody in the bloody tabernacle, owright?:

Verse 30 “And no sin offering, whereof any of the blood is brought into the tabernacle of the congregation to reconcile withal in the holy place, shall be eaten: it shall be burnt in the fire.”

Leviticus 1 to 4: Sexing the Pigeon

2009-02-01T00:43:00.002Z

Leviticus1

And the LORD gives Moses some fairly exact(ing) instructions for how (burnt) offerings are to be made to him. Bullocks and sheep must be blemishless males.

The gender-restriction more relaxed for turtledoves and pigeons, possibly cos it's not quite so easy to tell...

Verse 17 “And he shall cleave it with the wings thereof, but shall not divide it asunder: and the priest shall burn it upon the altar, upon the wood that is upon the fire: it is a burnt sacrifice, an offering made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the LORD.”

Leviticus 2: Priests snaffle God's leftovers, taxing protein...

And goes on to explain how to get their meat out, and that Aaron and his sons get the left-overs.

(Crafty protein source, as Marvin Harris would point out. Protein. Important stuff, amino disrespect to the notion of offering meat to Bearded Skymen, nosiree...)

Leviticus 3

Verse 2 “And he shall lay his hand upon the head of his offering, and kill it at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation: and Aaron's sons the priests shall sprinkle the blood upon the altar round about.”

Won't someone think of the health and safety implications??

Oh, and how to sacrifice this and that. It really gets my goat.

And here's the kosher kicker:

Verse 17 “It shall be a perpetual statue for your generations throughout all your dwellings, that ye eat neither fat nor blood.”

Leviticus 4

Repetitive instructions on how to kill bullocks to attone for individual and collective sins from positions of ignorance.

And there seems to be a sliding scale for rulers who sin and common folk.

Not much fun being a lamb, I'd say.

Verse 35 “And he shall take away all the fat thereof, as the fat of the lamb is taken away from the sacrifice of the peace offerings: and the priest shall burn there upon the altar, according to the offerings made by fire unto the LORD: and the priest shall make an atonement for his sin that he hath committed, and it shall be forgiven him.”

As befits an oral tradition, there's a lot of repetition in these four books. We skim it so YOU don't have to...

Exodus 24-31: some very, very detailed instructions

2009-01-31T10:56:00.004Z

I've slightly had my comeuppance here. OK, so I decided to talk about the importance of ritual in my last post. But this section is really going for it – although I suppose if you're setting out details of religious rites that are meant to last for thousands of years it could take a while.
But God has obviously put some very serious thought into exactly how he wants worshipping.
So, after a ceremony to celebrate the fact that the Israelites have been given the Ten Commandments (involving, as usual, some gory sacrifices), Moses heads up to the top of Mount Sinai, and doesn't come down for 40 days.
As far as can be told from chapters 25-31, that 40 days is spent being given intensively detailed instructions on what God wants the Ark of the Covenant to look like. Marc obviously finds the instructions rather OTT and the lists pretty boring, but I quite like some of them.
The descriptions of what the Ark should look like is quite enjoyable to read, with excitingly lush materials:

“And blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine linen, and goats' hair,
And rams' skins dyed red, and badgers' skins, and shittim wood,
Oil for the light, spices for anointing oil, and for sweet incense,
Onyx stones, and stones to be set in the ephod, and in the breastplate”
(Chapter 25 verses 4-7)

It's a bit like reading fat glossy women's magazines, full of celebrities wearing designer labels and wearing fabulous shoes – you wouldn't necessarily want to do it yourself, but it's kind of fun.
The Ark is also to include something called a Mercy Seat, which explains the origins of the Nick Cave song (also covered by Johnny Cash) which I had vaguely wondered about before. It apparently translates better as a seat of grace, which fits with it being where God shall appear.

One question that occurs to me is exactly where all this gold and other expensive trappings are meant to come from, from a people apparently still wandering around in a desert and who only a few chapters back were busy kicking up a fuss over the prospect of dying of thirst.
Not only do we have extensive amounts of gold and gems on the design spec, with chapter 25's long lists of bowls, candlesticks, vessels and other bits of metalware which have to be made with pure gold, but also lots of precious jewels:

“And thou shalt set in it settings of stones, even four rows of stons: the first row shall be a sardius, a topaz, and a carbuncle: this shall be the first row.
And the second row shall be an emerald, a sapphire, and a diamond.
And the third row a ligure, and agate, and an amethyst.
And the fourth row a beryl, and an onyx, and a jasper: they shall be set in gold in their inclosings.”
(chapter 28 verses 17-20)

Many of the cloths have specifically to be purple, which as far as I can remember from my ancient history means that it has to be dyed with extracts from the murex shell, which was fabulously expensive and very much sought after, with major trade routes and conflicts linked to various empires' desire to get their hands on good supplies of it. And we're not just talking the priests' robes here, but also curtains for the temple courtyard which are meant to be 20 cubits in length – which I think is about 30 feet, or 10 metres.
Aaron, Moses' brother, is designated the father of a line of priests, since this is to be a hereditary post – and a rather cushy billet too. As well as getting to wear all that purple, the priest class seems to do rather well out of the massive amount of blood sacrifices ordered, which include large quantities of bullocks, rams and lambs – surely a huge challenge for this desert nomadic people?

“And thou shalt offer every day a bullock for a sin offering for atonement: and thou shalt cleanse the altar, when thou hast made an atonement for it, and thou shalt anoint it, to sanctify it.
Seven days thou shalt make an atonement for the altar, and sanctify it; and it shall be an altar most holy: whatsoever toucheth the altar shall be holy.
Now this is that which thou shalt offer upon the altar; two lambs of the first year day by day continually.
The one lamb thou shalt offer in the morning; and the other lamb thou shalt offer at even:
And with one lamb a tenth deal of flour mingled with the fourth part of an hin of beaten oil; and the fourth part of an hin of wine for a drink offering.”

(Chapter 29 verses 36-40)
But, it needs noting, the priests get to eat a bit of this stuff – that which isn't completely incinerated as burnt offerings – which implies that they're going to have a better diet than a lot of their people.
And, as with events such as the massacre of Shechem and the Tower of Babel, the actual handing over the the stone tablets gets just a brief mention at the end of these very long and details demands for how ritual must be carried out:

“And he gave unto Moses, when he had made an end of communing with him upon mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God.”
(Chapter 31 verse 18)

Exodus 38 to 40: Taber-knackered

2009-01-31T00:08:00.002Z

Exodus 38

Cripes, I hope this Bezaleel guy got an hourly contract rather than piece rates, cos this job is going on well over time and budget. And I hope he got it in writing...

Verse 1 “And he made the altar of burnt offering of shittim wood: five cubits was the length thereof, and five cubits the breadth thereof: it was foursquare: and three cubits the height thereof”

And he keeps making, verse after verse after verse.

It's almost hypnotic.

Then there's some quantity surveying/cost accounting (verses 24-5)

Exodus 39

And it goes on. And on. Onan onan on. Wankers.

Verse 10 “And they set in it four rows of stones: the first row was sardius, a topaz and a carbuncle: this was the first row.”

And then they get onto the clothes, and make big fashion statements.

Verse 26-7 “A bell and a pomegranate, a bell and a pomegranate, round about the hem of the robe to minister in, as the LORD commanded Moses. And they made coats fo fine linen of woven work for Aaron, and for his sons.”

And finally along comes the quality control guy.

Verse 43 “And Moses did look upon all the work, and behold, they had done it as the LORD had commanded,even so had they done it: and Moses blessed them."

Exodus 40

The LORD gives Moses some presentational and H&S tips on the tabernacle's opening. Moses does as he is told, and the temple becomes the green light/red light for the onward journey:

Verse 35-8 “And Moses was not able to enter into the tent of the congregation, because the cloud abode thereon, and the glory of the LORD filled the tabernacle. And when the cloud was taken up from over the tabernacle, the children of Israel went onwards in all their journeys: But if the cloud were not taken up, then they journeyed not till the day that it was taken up. For the cloud of the LORD was upon the tabernacle by day, and fire was on it by night, in the sight of all the house of Israel, throughout all their journeys.”

Ah, so they're on the road again...

And that's that for Exodus, thank the LORD.

Exodus 17-23: rules and regulations

2009-01-30T22:38:00.011Z

Still wandering in the wilderness in the south of the Sinai peninsula, the Israelites apparently haven't yet learnt the graceful art of gratitude, but continue to get snitty with Moses at every opportunity:

17/2 "Wherefore the people did chide with Moses, and said, Give us water that we may drink. And Moses said unto them, Why chide ye with me? Wherefore do ye tempt the LORD?
17/3 And the people thirsted there for water; and the people murmured against Moses, and said, Wherefore is this that thou hast brought us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our cattle with thirst."

Although having said this, the continued concerns about water are a strong reminder of how important a supply of H2O is, and how lightly we now take it in societies where it is still plentiful, and prefigures the significance it has in the conflicts of the modern Middle East and, increasingly, in Africa and Central Asia.

But in this case, Moses resolves the situation by smiting a rock on Mount Horeb, which flows with water – Mt Horeb apparently being another name for Mt Sinai, where there are little green gardens amongst the desert rocks.
The Israelites also find themselves doing battle with the Amalek, a tribe which appears on a number of occasions in the Bible and was the cause in various bits of Jewish theology of discussions over the justification of a war of total extermination – indeed genocide – against another people:

17/13 "And Joshua discomforted Amalek and his people with the edge of his sword.
17/14 "And the LORD said unto Moses, Write this for a memorial in a book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua: for I will utterly put out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven."

On a lighter note (though they would hate me for saying this, probably), the Amalek are also identified with the Nephilim, a reference which only sad old goths like me will get excited about.
In Chapter 18, Moses is reunited with his wife and, apparently more importantly, his father-in-law Jethro, to whom he enthuses about God's “goodness” in delivering the Israelites out of Egypt, which given the horrors God seems to have put them through for the sake of repeatedly winding up Pharaoh seems a bit overstating it.
But Jethro does have one use, in teaching Moses the graceful art of delegation and avoiding burnout:

18/22 "And let them judge the people at all seasons: and it shall be, that every great matter they shall bring unto thee, but every small matter they shall judge : so shall it be easier for thyself, and they shall bear the burden with thee."

I can think of many environmental activists and social entrepreneurs who obviously need to pay closer attention to their Bibles...
Chapter 19 sees God being demanding again, listing the various forms of devotion and worship he's expecting. But he also lays on some fairly spectacular scenes in the runup to the Ten Commandments

19/18 "And mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the LORD descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly."

Given that we're in a fairly major volcanic zone, this is the kind of thing that can probably be explained adequately through natural phenomena, but to a few thousand people who live in tents and are vulnerable to dying from cold, heat, thirst and starvation, you can see why it might have quite a psychological impact.
Chapter 20 is basically the Ten Commandments themselves. These largely make pretty good sense in terms of maintaining a stable society, especially in the unstable and difficult situation of roaming around a big desert, where people need to be able to rely on one another and conflicts over each other's truthfulness, light-fingeredness, cattle, oxen, asses, offpsring or spouses could be seriously disruptive.
The comment about:

20/5 "I the LORD thy God a jealous God"

might however be stating the obvious, given many of the pronouncements of the previous dozen chapters.
The ensuing verses dealing with the correct way to perform rituals also emphasise the importance of belief and rites to a people who, by nature of their rather antagonistic tendencies to anyone whose land they turn up in and their wandering nature, need a very strong internal social cohesion. Plenty of anthropology sees ritual (not necessarily the belief behind it) as a form of 'social glue,' bonding people together, and at this point in the Israelites' history this all makes pretty clear sense. The best-known example of this theory is probably Victor Turner's studies of ritual amongst the Ndembu of what was then Northern Rhodesia. See this paper by Mathieu Deflem for a broad discussion of the topic. Chapter 23 also returns to this obsession with ritual, setting out days of rest and feast days.

Chapters 21 to 23 are primarily taken up with a more detailed setting-out of many more rules and laws of Israelite life. A lot of these can be somewhat disturbing in their inequity and sometimes cruelty, but also need to be seen as a product of their time – the problem then arising is when fundamentalist religious believers take them as graven in stone and try to enforce them on other people in a contemporary setting.
So, we have justifications for slavery, with laws which allow for lighter punishments for killing one's slave than for killing a free man (chapter 21 verse 20). Slaveowners can separate husbands and wives or parents and children, and female slaves appear to be subject to sexual use as well as being forced to perform other types of labour. Male ownership of women is also enshrined in rules such as that which states that if a person attacks a pregnant woman and causes her to miscarry, the compensation goes not to her but to her husband – the owner not only of the woman but of her child, born or unborn (chapter 21 verse 22).
The bits about executing cows who kill people is a bit weird, though:

21/28 "If an ox gore a man or woman, that they die: then the ox shall be surely stoned, and his flesh shall not be eaten,"

although the practice seems not to have entirely died out in the USA until the 20th century. I'm going to refrain from making stereotypical anti-American comments about that, since I've got a feeling the French might have been doing it to farmyard animals too. But I may be thinking of medieval stuff about executing pigs for being witches...
Many of the rules are also a good illustration of the main concerns of an agrarian society, setting out the punishments and compensations involved if people damage crops, set fires or endanger other people's livestock (chapter 22 verses 5 and 6). There are explicit instructions to let fields lie fallow and rotate crops (chapter 23 verses 10 and 11). Widows and orphans also get special protection, which seems fair enough (22/22).
More scariness pops up though, with some famous lines:

22/18 "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,"

juxtaposed with more weirdness; I mean, I find the idea of bestiality as grim as the next person, but execution does seem a slight over-reaction. But then I'm not a raped sheep:

22/19 "Whosoever lieth with a best shall surely be put to death."

And eating roadkill is, apparently, out, which may disappoint a few strange people who take resource conservation to considerable lengths:

22/31 "...neither shall ye eat any flesh that is torn of beasts in the field; ye shall cast it to the dogs."

And the injunction against 'raising a false report' (23/1) surely means that thousands of tabloid hacks are truly stuffed. But is this a bad thing?

The closing of chapter 23 is, however, another rather chilling outline of the kind of justifications that are used by some Zionists for the right of the modern state of Israel and those even more extreme, violent and disturbing settlers to use any means, up to and including mass murder, to clear the lands of modern Palestine and Israel, possibly extending into Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan, of any person who is not Jewish:

23/31 "And I will set thy bounds from the Red sea even unto the sea of the Philistines, and from the desert unto the river: for I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand; and thou shalt drive them out before thee.
23/32 Thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor with their gods.
23/33 They shall not dwell in thy land, lest they make thee sin against me."

Exodus 35 to 37: Te Deum or tedium?

2009-01-30T21:58:00.003Z

Exodus 35

Moses calls a meeting and passes on the Lord's commands...

... sabbath

... kindle no fires on t'sabbath

And Moses creates one of those present lists you do when you're getting hitched, only this time it's for the Lord's temple.

Onyx, linen, shrewbread, candlesticks etc.

And Moses' audience Getteth With The Programme.

Verse 21 “And they came, everyone whose heart stirred him up, and everyone whom his spirit made willing, and they brought the LORD's offering to the work of the tabernacle of the congregation and for all his service and for the holy garments.”

and badgers' skins, silver, bracelets, sugar and spice and snails and puppy dogs tails

It's a regular potlatch, except without the redistribution.

And Moses shouts out some particularly skilled craftsmen (and women)

Verse 35 “Them he hat filled with wisdom of heart, to work all manner of work, of the engraver, and of the cunning workman, and of the embroiderer, in blue, and in purple, in scarlet, and in fine linen, and of the weaver, even of them that do any work, and of those that devise cunning work.”

Exodus 36

But Moses' subcontractors/wisemen tell him that there's now More than Enuff Stough

Verse 6-7 “And Moses gave commandment, and they caused it to be proclaimed throughout the camp, saying, Let neither man nor woman make any more work for the offering of the sanctuary. So the people were restrained from bringing. For the stuff they had was sufficient for all the work to make it, and too much.”

And then there's this long description of taches and loops and curtains. Having the decorators in is bloody painful.

Yep, more boards, tenons, shittim wood. More gaudy gaudiness. More cherubims.

It's as boring as the begatting, frankly.

Verse 38 “And the five pillars of it with their hooks: and he overlaid their chapiters and their fillets with gold: but their five sockets were of brass.”

Exodus 37

And he's still at it.

Verse 1-2 “And Bezaleel made the ark of shittim wood: two cubits and a half was the length of it, and a cubit and a half of breadth of it, and a cubit and a half the height of it. And he overlaid it with pure gold within and without, and made a crown of gold to it round about.”

And it goes on and on in this vein. Give me a family tree full of Muppims and Amaleks and Beelzebuubs any day of the week (including the sabbath) instead of this.

Te Deum? No, tedium....

Exodus 33 to 34: Farting around in the desert

2009-01-29T22:48:00.002Z

Exodus 33

God tells Moses that he will wipe out the Canaanites and Amorites and Hittites etc, so his lot can have the land of milk and honey.

Moses takes the tabernacle out of the camp

Verse 8 “And it came to pass when Moses went out unto the tabernacle, that all the people rose up, and stood every man at his tent door, and looked after Moses until he was gone into the tabernacle.”

Drum roll please...

Verse 11 “And the LORD spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend. And he turned again into the camp, but his servant Joshua, the son of Nun, a young man, departed not out of the tabernacle.”

Yeah, I think later on in the Bible we are told that no man has ever seen God's face. I'll keep you posted.

Oh, here we go, that didn't take long.

After Moses gets the LORD back on-side again,

Verse 20 “And he said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.”

And God comes up with a cunning plan.

Verse 21-3 “And the LORD said, Behold, there is a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock: And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by: And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen.”

So, I wonder which part of his body God will be talking out of?

Exodus 34

God replaces the tablets Moses broke.

And here's a familiar bit:

Verse 7 “Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children unto the third and to the fourth generation.”

Er, isn't that collective punishment? Someone call the Hague...

God gives instructions and covenant on ethnic cleansing. (Verses 12 to 16)

Lots of repetition, more promises

Verse 24 “For I will cast out the nations before thee, and enlarge thy borders...”

Moses spent 40 days and nights with God this time, and when he comes back to Aaron etc, his complexion is kind of out of whack.

Verse 35 “And the children of Israel saw the face of Moses, that the skin of Moses' face shone and Moses but the vail upon his face again, until went in to speak with him.”

Exodus 30 to 32: Calf Pain and DVT (Deity Vengeance Thuggery)

2009-01-29T22:33:00.004Z

Exodus 30

More shittim wood. This LORD and his priests have a real altar ego.

Verse 3 “And thou shalt overlay it with pure gold, the top thereof, and the sides thereof, round about, and the horns thereof: and thou shalt make unto it a crown of gold round about.”

Yeah, more Ark architecture. Building it sounds more complicated than the proverbial Ikea flat pack...

But then God gets on the blower to Moses

Verse 12 “When thou takest the sum of he children of Israel after their number, then shall they give every man a ransom for his soul unto the LORD, when thou numberest them: that there be no plague among them, when thou numberest them.”

Well, it makes sense, us bloggers think.

Oh, everyone has to pony up half a shekel. And that's a real regressive tax:

Verse 15 “The rich shall not give more, and the poor shall not give less than half a shekel, when they give an offering unto the LORD, to make an atonement for your souls.”

Look, this is just a shakedown by the priests. Wise up!!

God tells Moses to get into the oil business, for anointment/atonement purposes

Verse 26 “And thou shalt anoint the tabernacle of the congregation therewith, and the ark of the testimony. And the table and all his vessels, and the candelstick and his vessels, and the altar of incense.”

And God wants patent protection on the brand, against counterfeiters...

Verse 33 “Whosoever compoundeth any like it, or whosoever putteth any of it upon a stranger, shall even be cut off from his people.”

I bet they don't stock the following at Tesco's-

Verse 34 “And the LORD said unto Moses, Take unto thee sweet spices, stacte, and onycha, and galbanum; these sweet spices with pure frankincense: of each shall there be a like weight:” And though shalt make it a perfume, a confection after the art of the apothecary, tempered together, pure and holy:”

Exodus 31

The LORD boasts a bit about all the sub-contractors he's created/employed to get this latest covenant in on time and budget. And then says the following, which will be of interest to anyone ever arguing with a Christian about how all rules in the Bible need to be followed...

Verse 14-5 “Ye shall keep the sabbath therefore: for it is holy unto you: everyone that defileth it shall surely be put to death: for whosoever doeth any work therein, that soul shall be cut off from among his people. Six days may work be done: but in the seventh is the sabbath of rest, whosoever doeth any work in the sabbath day, he shall be put to death.”

Work on Sunday. Buy anything on Sunday. And you don't see Monday. Clear on that?

And you know what they say about verbal contracts not being worth the tablets of stone they're written on?

Verse 18 “And he gave unto Moses, when he had made an end of communing with him upon mount Sinai, two tablets of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God.”

Exodus 32

But these Hebrews, they're so fickle...

Verse 1 “And when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down out of the mount, the people gathered themselves together unto Aaron, and said unto him. Up, make us gods, which shall go before us: for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him.”

“Wot”? You what? What means wot? I dinna ken.

Aaron gets the gold together

Verse 4 “And he received them at their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.”

God tells Moses his gang has corrupted itself: 'Thou shalt not have a cow, man'

God says 'behold, it is a stiffnecked people'. Which is kind of funny. Has he diagnosed (or caused?) an epidemic of ankylosing spondylosis?

God is threatening more smiting, and Moses has to talk him off the ledge.

Moses gives some good reasons, with good results

Verse 14 “And the LORD repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people.”

So Moses comes down with the two tablets and sees 'em having a hoe down around the calf

Verse 19-20 “And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses' anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount. And he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and strawed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it.”

Moses blames Aaron, who blames the people.

Verse 26 “Then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said “Who is on the LORD's side? Let him come unto me. And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves unto him.”

And... erm, am I misreading this??? God goes nuts again.

Verse 27 “And he (Moses) said unto them, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate through the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour.”

And guess what. No-one bothers to cite Exodus 20: 13 “Thou shalt not kill.”

Verse 28 “And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses: and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.”

Holy Fucking Shit. They didn't teach me THAT in Divinity class at Edinburgh House Prep School.

God didn't stop them, God didn't tell Moses to knock it off.

Moses has been leading them astray, and tells them the following day that they've sinned and he's off up to make an atonement. It's a good think rank hypocrisy isn't against the commandments, isn't it Mosey mate...

So Moses tells God (who you'd think knew this already, being omniscient and all, but apparently not).

Verse 31 “Oh, this people have sinned a great sin.... [3000 corpses? Nah] ... and have made them gods of gold.”

And the Lord tells Moses to lead the people away and there will be trouble. Again, not cos of the massacre, but the golden frigging calf.

Unbelievable.

Exodus 13-16: Red Sea and white fluffy food

2009-01-29T21:43:00.004Z

Having fled slavery in Egypt, the Israelites receive various new orders from God, generally via Moses. Many of those in chapter 13 seem to confirm the patriarchal nature of this religious regime, demanding initially that the firstborn - "whatsoever openeth the womb" - is the property of the LORD, but then moving on to the explicit assertion that it's the male firstborn that is actually of interest.
Not that being of the LORD is necessarily a good thing, unless you're human, as for other species it seems to entail getting sacrificed:

13/15 "And it came to pass, when Pharaoh would hardly let us go, that the LORD slew all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both the firstborn of man, and the firstborn of beast: therefore I sacrifice to the LORD all that openeth the matrix, being males; but all the firstborn of my children I redeem."

For once, in the this book, being female seems like a better option.
Despite the grim fates it prescribes for an awful lot of male creature, some of the language in this chapter is fantastically powerful and resonant – positively Biblical, in fact:

13/21 "And the LORD went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; and to go by day and night:
13/22 He took not away the pillar of the cloud by day, nor the pillar of fire by night, from before the people."

But despite any lyrical tendencies that may be showing themselves, the LORD is still doing the whole dangerous capricious thing, hardening Pharaoh's heart again (in chapter 14 verses 4, 8 and 17), apparently with the continued aim of being able punish the Egyptians for actions which God himself has engendered by the reaction that he inspires in Pharaoh.
Given that this chapter features another great Biblical iconic event, the parting of the Red Sea, this is fairly significant, as it involves the entire Egyptian army, complete with the poor horses who like all those poor animals that died in the Plagues have done nothing to anyone, getting swept away by the wrathful waters after the Israelites have passed.
Like many great events of the Bible, there have been many archaeologists and, to be blunt about it, pseudo-scholars running around trying to find geological and archaeological evidence for real events which might account for the legends. The actual creation of the Red Sea, a northern part of the African Rift Valley which ends with the Dead Sea, isn't really a candidate, since it was a process which happened – whether suddenly or gradually is disputed – tens of millions of years ago. Film director James Cameron, whose other peer-reviewed scientific studies include Titanic and Terminator, managed to tweak Biblical estimates that the exodus probably took place around 1300BCE and push it back a few hundred years to coincide with the huge volcanic eruption on the island of Santorini, which probably destroyed the Minoan civilisation on Crete and is often associated with the creation of the legend of Atlantis. This is based on some re-readings of Egyptian carvings to decide that the eruption caused the plagues:

"The Exodus producers believe the waters were turned red by chemicals released by underwater tremors. Something similar happened to the lakes in Cameroon in 1986. If the waters were poisoned, amphibians would hop ashore, producing the biblical plague of frogs. When the frogs died, insects would have bred on their bodies leading to plagues of locusts, fleas and lice.
They in turn would have spread disease to humans, the plague of boils, and animals, the plague of dying livestock. They would also have threatened crops, forcing the Egyptians to store grain which might have then turned mouldy. Contaminated food might account for the plague of deaths among first-born Egyptian males. Weather conditions spawned by the eruption might also have caused the plagues of hailstorms and darkness."
(The Sunday Times, 6th August 2006)

and then the same set of volcanic disturbances resulted in the parting of the waters of the Red Sea.
Whatever.
Most of Chapter 15 of Exodus reads like a hymn of praise the God for this salvation, lyrical and rhythmic and following the kind of verse forms typical of such songs, with repetition of the achievements for which praise is being given, and listing of other victories and strengths:

15/15“Then the dukes of Edom shall be amazed; the mighty men of Moab, trembling shall take hold upon them; all the inhabitants of Canaan shall melt away.”

This gratitude, however, does not last long. Somewhat disempowered by several generations in slavery, the Israelites fairly rapidly start wailing and complaining about the lack of food and water, and generally being ungrateful and showing very little initiative.

15/24 "And the people began to murmur against Moses, saying, What shall we drink?"

This carries on in chapter 16, until finally God resolves the situation by sending manna from heaven, a kind of fluffy white frost which quickly disappears when the sun comes up and “bred worms, and stank” if people tried to gather it up to keep overnight. It does sound wonderful:

16/31 "And the house of Israel called the name thereof Manna: and it was like coriander seed, white; and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey."

However, the Israelites do apparently have to live on it for the forty (count 'em) years it takes for them to get through Sinai to Canaan (which seems a little excessive, it's not THAT far, and hell they managed to invade the whole thing in less than a week during the Six Day War).
And now I'm going to finish off with a cartoon which doesn't specifically relate to this post but I is vaguely associated with the whole theme of this blog, and which I thought was quite amusing.

Exodus 28 to 29: Priests as the New Boss...

2009-01-28T22:19:00.003Z

Exodus 28

Aaron is being kitted out for second-in-command

Verse 4-5 “And these are the garments which they shall make; a breastplace, and an ephod, and a robe, and a broidered coat, a mitre, and a girdle: and they shall make holy garments for Aaron thy brother, and his sons, that he may minister unto me in the priest's office. And they shall take gold, and blue, and purple, and scarlet and fine linen.”

Good God, gaudy goods.

Get grotesquely garishly glamrockly gaudier... gaah!

Verse 33 “And beneath upon the hem of it thou shalt make pomegranates of blue, and of purple, and of scarlet, round about the hem thereof; and bells of gold between them round about:”

See what I mean?

Ah,

Verse 38 “And it shall be upon Aaron's forehead, that Aaron may bear the iniquity of he holy things, which the children of Israel shall hallow in all their holy gifts; and it shall be always upon his forehead, that they may be accepted before the LORD.”

Verse 42 is kind of poetic

“And thou shalt make them linen breeches to cover their nakedness: from the loins even unto the thighs shall they reach:”

Exodus 29

Ah, here comes the rationale for all this . Here comes the money shot-

Verse 1 “And this is the thing thou shalt do unto them to hallow them, to minister unto me in the priest's office: Take one young bullock, and two rams without blemish.”

And the priest class is going to sit on its arse... and scoff unleavened bread, cakes, wafers etc

Verse 22 “And thou shalt take of the ram the fat and the rump, and the fat that covereth the inwards, and the caul above the liver, and the two kidneys, and the fat that is upon them, and the right shoulder: for it is a ram of consecration.”

Oh, and Aaron's gladrags will stay in the family...

Verse 29 “And the holy garments of Aaron shall be his sons' after him, to be anointed therein, and to be consecrated in them.”

ah, after all the recipe instructions for rams and so forth, we get to the nub of the issue.

Verse 32-3 “And Aaron and his sons shall eat the flesh of the ram, and the bread that is in the basket, by the door of the tabernacle of the congregation. And they shall eat those things wherewith the atonement was made, to consecrate and to sanctify them: but a stranger shall not eat thereof, because they are holy.”

The priest class, entrenching itself...

Yeah, more health and safety hygiene instructions for sanctification of altars etc.

Verse 44 “And I will sanctify the tabernacle of the congregation, and the altar: I will sanctify also both Aaron and his sons, to minister to me in the priest's office.”

'We're God's henchmen. Do what we tell you.'

Sigh.

Exodus 24 to 27: An Ark that Fugly should stay lost

2009-01-27T22:42:00.003Z

Exodus 24

So God calls a (tele)-conference, but only Moses can enter the corner office.

Verse 12 “And the LORD said unto Moses, Come up to me into the mount, and be there: and I will give thee tables of stone, and a law and commandments which I have written: that thou mayest teach them.”

And it's a pretty long conference, I hope Moses negotiated a decent per diem with his HR department.

Verse 16-18 “And the glory of the LORD abode upon mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it six days: and the seventh day he called unto Moses out of the midst of the cloud. And the sight of the glory of the LORD was like devouring fire on the top of the mount in the eyes of the children of Israel. And Moses went into the midst of the cloud, and gat him up into the mount: and Moses was in the mount forty days and forty nights.”

Chapter 25

And God has some fashion requests of his homies.

Verse 4 “And blue and purple and scarlet and fine linen, and goats' hair, And rams' skins dyed red and badgers' skins and shittim wood.”

Shittim wood? This one I'm gonna have to google... Ah, it's a case o' ya typical urban ignorance on my part... Bet wifey knew without googling..

Oh, and now we get design instructions for a certain Ark of the Covenant, from about verse 9 to 20. Sounds kind of tacky, to be honest.

Verse 20 “And the cherubims shall stretch forth their wings on high, covering the mercy seat with their wings, and their faces shall look one to another: toward the mercy seat the faces of the cherubims shall be.”

Something that kitsch DESERVES to be swallowed up in a sandstorm that lasts a year, if you ask me. Which you didn't.

And more kitsch. Is this a menorah?

Verse 37 “And thou shalt make the seven lamps thereof: and they shall light the lamps thereof, that they may give light over against it.”

Chapter 26

Nope, no taste. Real nouveau dieu stuff. Gaudy even.

Goat hair curtains? Oh puhlease.

Verse 11 “And thou shalt make fifty taches of brass, and put the taches into the loops, and couple the tent together that it may be one.”

The wife doesn't like taches, btw.

Chapter 27

God keeps micromanaging the worship. He certainly isn't the Do Your Own Thing God of Vatican 2, or Liberation Theology or any of that malarkey. This GOD has OCD.

e.g.

Verse 12-4 “And for the breadth of the court on the west side shall be hangings of fifty cubits: their pillars ten, and their sockets ten. And the breadth of the court on the east side eastward shall be fifty cubits. The hangings on one side of the gate shall be fifteen cubits: their pillars three, and their sockets three...”

And so on...

Exodus 21 to 23: The Leviticus Dry Run

2009-01-27T22:31:00.003Z

Exodus 21

OK, lots of fruit-loopy laws now, some of which doubtless made sense at the time.

Here are some faves, but they have to be read to be, er, believed.

Verse 17 “And he that curseth his father, or his mother, shall surely be put to death.”

Which motherfucker thought that one up? Doh!!

Verse 24 “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot. Pancreas for pancreas.”

OK, I made the last bit up.

Exodus 22

Verse 16 “And if a man entice a maid that is not betrothed, and lie with here, he shall surely endow her to be his wife. If her father utterly refuse to give her unto him, he shall pay money according to the dowry of virgins.”

Oh, burn baby burn

Verse 17 “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

Oh, and if you're feeling sheepish.

Verse 19 “Whosoever lieth with a beast shall surely be put to death.”

Man, that'd really get my goat. It would be unbearable.

Here's one for the times

Verse 21 “Thou shalt neither vex a stranger. Nor oppress him: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

And God hammers it home by repeating it Ch 23 verse 9

Chapter 23

Ah, here's Christmas and birthdays screwed then:

Verse 8 “And thou shalt take no gift: for the gift blindeth the wise and perverteth the words of the righteous.”

And we get a little biodiversity advice...

Verse 10-11 “And six years thou shalt sow thy land, and shalt gather the fruits thereof: But he seventh year thou shalt let it rest and lie still that the poor of thy people may eat: and what they leave the beasts of the field shall eat. In like manner thou shalt deal with thy vineyard, and with thy oliveyard.”

And verse 13 “no other gods” schtick again. Slightly low self-esteem there, Bearded Sky Man? Or maybe whoever wrote this down figured out that being the only link to the only God was a powerful position? Just saying...

Oh, and God's gonna send an Angel

Verse 22 “But if thou shalt indeed obey his voice, and do all that I speak; then I will be an enemy unto thine enemies, and an adversary unto thine adversaries.”

Smiting and hornets etc are promised, but not too bluntly...

Verse 29 “I will not drive them out from before thee in one year; lest the land become desolate, and the beast of the field multiply against thee.”

So don't have too many cows, man...

Verse 31 “And I will set thy bounds from the Red sea even unto the sea of the Philistines, and from the desert unto the river: for I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand: and thou shalt drive them out before thee. Thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor their gods. They shall not dwell in thy land., lest they make the sin against me: for if thou serve their gods, it will surely be a snare unto thee.”

Bearded Sky Man, two state it clearly, you really aren't helping here mate...

Exodus 18 to 20: take two tablets and call me in the morning...

2009-01-27T22:22:00.003Z

Jethro, Moses' father-in-law rocks up.

Verse 7 “And Moses went out to meet his father in law, and did obeisance, and kissed him: and they asked each other of their welfare; and they came into the tent.”

Jethro looks at Moses' workload

Verse 17-8 “... The thing that thou doest is not good. Thou wilt surely wear away, both thou, and this people that is with thee: for this thing is too heavy for thee: thou art not able to perform it thyself alone.”

Jethro tulls, sorry, tells Moses how to delegate.

Verse 21 “Moreover thous shalt provide out of all the people able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness: and place such over them, to be rulers of thousands, and rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens.”

Moses does as he is told.

Exodus 19

God tells Moses the new deal

Verse 7 "And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests and an holy nation. These are to the words which thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel.”

And says People Get Ready (wash clothes, no shagging for three days) Or rather, no bukkake-

Verse 15 “And he said unto the people, Be ready against the third day: come not at your wives.”

And things get hot.

Verse 18 “And mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the LORD descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly.”

Sigh. Dry ice machines are SO 1980s...

God tells Moses that he and Aaron are on the guestlist, but the riff-raff cannae come up t'mountain.

Exodus 20

These verses seem vaguely familiar. Oh, yeah, it's the Ten Frigging Commandments.

Verse 18 “And all the people saw the thunderings and the lightnings [very very frightenings], and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountains smoking: and when the people saw it, they removed, and stood far off.”

God gets tetchy with the other gods thing, and specifies

Verse 25 “And if thou wilt make me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stone: for it thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast polluted it.”

So, all those cathedrals I've gotten chronic unremitting Cathedral-fatigue from? Level them all, let God sort them out...

Exodus 7-12: the plagues of Egypt and Passover

2009-01-26T23:49:00.008Z

So, over the course of five chapters we have a fairly spectacular series of plagues, all designed to make Pharoah let the Israelites leave Egypt.
In order, we have the bloody, stinking water (which sounds like some kind of 'red tide' algal bloom to me); frogs which die everywhere; lice (ugh); flies (eeuuuwh); murrain, which kills all the cattle and sheep; boils all over everyone, including the 'magicians'; thunder, hail and fire (sounds like a dodgy 70s pop band); the notorious locusts, and finally the death of the firstborn sons.

I have two main problems with these.
Firstly, what did the poor frogs, cows and sheep, and for that matter the firstborn sons, some of whom were presumably just we'uns at the time of being bumped off, do to anyone? This all seems highly unfair. I mean, obviously there is some strategic point to offing Pharoah's son to get him to make policy changes, but:

“even unto the firstborn of the maidservant that is behind the mill; and all the firstborn of beasts”

(the ones that have survived the murrain, presumably). What influence are they supposed to have? How are they supposed to help the Hebrews be allowed to leave? This is all getting very bloodthirsty...
Secondly, it's all a massive set-up. All these plagues are allegedly ways to getting Pharoah to let the poor enslaved Israelites go, but after every one we get a statement like:

“But the LORD hardened Pharoah's heart, so that he would not let the children of Israel go” (Ch10 v20)

and:

“But the LORD hardened Pharaoh's heart, and he would not let them go” (Ch10 v27)

So, apparently Pharoah is supposed to let the Israelites go, but the LORD keeps stopping him. What sort of psycho game is he playing here? I'm just confused now.
But having pretty much nuked the entire livestock , farmland and water supply of Egypt (them Yankees with their Agent Orange got nuttin' on the LORD in a bad mood), the LORD then stops hardening Pharoah's heart enough that the Israelites finally get to leave.
To follow this up, we get the instructions for the Jewish feast of Passover (the night the houses of the Israelites were Passed Over by the Angel of Death seeking the firstborn), or Pesach, with the meal of lamb, bitter herbs and unleavened bread. It's a beautiful and dignified meal – I was privileged to be invited to a seder (Pesach meal) at a leftie kibbutz in the Arava desert 13 years ago, and was very moved at how, even though I was at a table full of usually rowdy teenaged students, everyone remained quiet and solemn for many of the readings which punctuated the servings of food.

I'm not entirely sure I should have been there, though, looking at the official instruction booklet we have here:

“12/43 And the LORD said unto Moses and Aaron, This is the ordinance of the passover: There shall no stranger eat thereof:
12/44 But every man's servant that is bought for money, when thou hast circumcised him, then he shall eat thereof.
12/45 A foreigner and an hired servant shall not eat thereof.”

My experience that year amongst young Jewish people who had made aliyah – emigrated to Israel – was also an interesting lesson in the way that ritual can be more important for 'outsiders' and people who need to reinforce community and define themselves, than for those who feel more secure in their identity and community.
These young people – at the time in, I guess their early 20s – had made the choice as British Jews to move to Israel, partly perhaps because of job opportunities (or, quite frankly, to escape the bloody British weather), but substantially, as I understood it, because they felt deeply attached to the notion of a Jewish homeland in Israel and as being part of that project. Most of them, because of the friend I was travelling with, came from left-wing Zionist Jewish youth movements such as RSY Netzer and Habonim.
So, my friend (a non-kosher-keeping Jewish girl) and I, in Jerusalem during Passover, went into one of the many wonderful bakeries in the Arab quarter of the Old City, in search of bread that wasn't matzo. We'd had several days on kibbutz of unleavened matzo being made into all sorts of inventive forms of carbohydrate, and all of them were pretty tasteless and horrible. Basic matzo itself is kind of like cream crackers and actually ok, but it was the efforts to replicate leavened things like pasta and sandwiches using matzo meal that had been tough going.
Friend and I sneaked our illicit leavened bread home, where we planned to respectfully eat it away from people who were keeping proper kosher for Pesach. Not in this flat though. All of those aliyah-making twentysomethings (none of whom would have happily gone in the dark, narrow, spice-and-mint-scented streets of the Arab quarter) fell upon the proper bread like starved things, and the bagfull lasted about ten minutes. And, if keeping Pesach is primarily an expression of identity, a way of defining and celebrating Jewishness in a Britain which has over the centuries been deeply hateful, violent and prejudiced towards them, then why is it still necessary to pursue it once you're home and dry? (Even if it is on contested land...)
And, at the risk of sounding like one of those Daily Mail readers who laments the passing of some bizarre mythical 1950s England full of scrubbed-clean blonde people who skipped around being neighbourly to each other, there is something very sad about the fact that modern society seems to have lost most of its rites and rituals, that we rarely celebrate things together with any sense of poetry and solemnity, that festivals like Christmas seem to largely be an excuse for over-indulgence or an opportunity for desperate and over-worked people to cram some R&R into their lives. We seem to have lost the notion of a ritual meal as a time to share with other people and to step back, getting some perspective on both the past and future. I think it's a sad loss.

Thanks to National Geographic and Discourse.net for the pix

Exodus 16-17: Mind your mannas!

2009-01-24T01:48:00.004Z

Exodus 16

The ungrateful and now free wretches are still whining.

Verse 3 “And the children of Israel said unto them, Would to God we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt when we sat by the flesh pots, and when we did eat bread to the full, for ye have brought us forth into this wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”

Really, this isn't to the manna born, is it?

The LORD promises their daily bread, and foreshadows a stunt his kid will pull off later.

Verse 5 “And it shall come to pass, that on the sixth day they shall prepare that which they bring in: and it shall be twice as much as they gather daily.”

Moses and Aaron tell their followers that a murmur against them is a murmur against the LORD. How unlike earthly leaders to try to wrap themselves up in Supernatural Authority.

So they get “manna” in the morning with orders to eat it by its best before date (today).

But some try to save for a rainy day.

Verse 20 “Notwithstanding they hearkened not unto Moses: but some of them left of it until the morning, and it bred worms, and stank: and Moses was wroth with them.”

See, lack of a cold chain can elevate your food spoilage rates well-easily.

Anyhow, they follow Moses' orders for the requisite six days.

Verse 25 “And Moses said, Eat that to day, for to day is a sabbath unto the Lord: to day ye shall not find it in the field. Six days ye shall gather it: but on the seventh day, which is the sabbath, in it there shall be none.”

But there seems to have been a communications snafu, for God is narked with Moses for breaching t'sabbath.

Quite obsessed with food and food rituals this lot. Unsurprising really.

Verse 35 “And the children of Israel did eat manna forty years, until they came to a land inhabited,: the did eat manna, until they came unto the borders of the land of Canaan.”

Oh, and btw

Verse 36 “Now an omer is the tenth part of an ephah.”

Just to clear up any confusion...

Exodus 17

More unhappy and thirsty refugees, leaving (the widerness of) Sin behind them. They kvetch to Moses, who kvetches to God.

Verse 4 “... What shall I do unto this people? They be almost ready to stone me.”

God tells Moses to get a grip on his rod, and get the elders together and

Verse 6 “Behold, I will stand before thee there upon the rock in Horeb: and thou shalt smite the rock, and there shall come water out of it, that the people may drink. And Moses did so in the sight of the elders of Israel.”

Now a military curiosity.

Moses gets a lieutenant, Joshua (him of the trumpet, I think) to lead men in a skirmish with some clown called Amalek.

Moses and co will be up a mountain

Verse 11 “And it came to pass, when Moses held up his hand, that Israel prevailed: and when he let down his hand, Amalek prevailed.”

But obviously the upper traps and levator scapulae and so forth aren't what they used to be in the old man...

Verse 12 “But Moses hands were heavy: and they took a stone, and put it under him, and he sat thereon: and Aaron and Hur stayed up his hands, the one on the one side, and the other on the other side: and his hands were steady until the going down of the sun.”

Me, if I were Amalek, I'd be complaining to the umpire. But I think Amalek is too dead for that, because

Verse 13 “And Joshua discomfitted Amalek and his people with the edge of the sword.”

And the LORD gets Moses to write it all down cos otherwise people forget, eh? Like one of those fancy flashing pen things in Men in Black

Verse 14 “... for I will utterly put out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.”

Exodus 12-15: The Red Sea reddens

2009-01-24T01:17:00.002Z

Exodus 12

The LORD gets Moses to get the Hebrews to do the lamb to the slaughter thing and

Verse 9 “Eat not of it raw, nor sodden at all with water, but roast with fire, his head with his legs, and with the purtenance thereof”

For the LORD is going to get all Biblical

Verse 12 “For I will pass throught he land fo Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt , both man and beast: and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgement.”

There are gods of Egypt? I thought there Could Be Only One? Is this a market consolidation exercise then? Has anyone told the Competition Commission??

Anyhow, the Hebrews are to daub their lintels:

Verse 13 “And the blood shall be to you for a token upon the houses where ye are: and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and the plague shall not be upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt.”

And sure enough, God has a pretty handy friend-foe target acquisition thing going on. Doubtless BAE Systems, purveyors of airborne smiting, would like a look-see, and America's allies would be keen for Pentagon to take it on. As the old anecdote goes: during the Italian campaign, when the German bombers flew over the British ducked, when the British planes flew over the Germans ducked, and when the American planes flew over, everyone ducked...

So Moses tells his homies what's gonna go down, they do as they're told for once, and God gets down to some heavy-duty smiting.

Verse 29 “And it came to pass that at midnight, the LORD smote all the first born in the land of Egypt, from the first-born of Pharaoh that sat on his thrown unto the first born of the captive that was in the dungeon: and all the first born of cattle.”

Pharaoh is understandably less than gruntled, and tells Moses to get outa town

Verse 32-3 “And take your flocks and your herds, as ye have said, and be gone: and bless me also. And the Egyptians were urgent upon the people, that they might send them out of the land in haste: for they said, We be all dead men.”

So after 430 years of post-Joseph sojourning in Egypt, 600,000 leg it.

And God tells Moses and Aaron that this should be remembered.

Verse 48 “And when a stranger shall sojourn with thee, and will keep the passover to the LORD, let all his males be circumcised, and then let him come near and keep it: and he shall be one that is born in the land: for no uncircumcised person shall eat thereof.”

Remind me not to stay over with any of my Jewish friends round Passover...

Exodus 13

More rules about bread, with “a land of milk and honey” as a carrot. The further price is

Verse 12 “That thou shalt set apart unto the LORD all that openeth the matrix, and every firstling that cometh of a beast which thou hast: the males shall be the LORD's.”

which is where the whole “giving up your firstborn” thing comes from I guess.

So the LORD (presumably through Moses)

Verse 17 “... led them not through the way of the land of the Philistines, although that was near: for God said, Lest peradventure the people repent when they see war, and they return to Egypt.”

Not so squeamish these days, it seems...

Verse 18 “But God led the people about through the way of the wilderness of the Red sea: and the children of Israel went up harnessed out of the land of Egypt.”

So they end up near Etham, in the edge of the wilderness, with a dirty great big pillar of a cloud in the day time and a pillar of fire at night.

Beats a satnav, I guess.

Exodus 14

So LORD tells Moses to get his people camped in a spot where Pharaoh will chase 'em. He duly does, and he duly does.

Verse 7 “And he took six hundred chosen chariots and all the chariots of Egypt, and captains over everyone one of them.”

The fleeing Hebrews are bricking it (still without straw, one suspects)

Verse 11-12 “And they said unto Moses, Because there were no graves in Egypt, has thou taken us away to die in the wilderness? Wherefore hast thou dealt thus with us, to carry us forth out of Egypt? Is not this the word that we did tell thee in Egypt, saying, Let us alone, that we may serve the Egyptians? For it had been better for us to serve the Egyptians, than that we should die in the wilderness.”

Nice to know that ancient revolutionaries (which is what Moses clearly is) had the same battles with reformists who'd rather cling to the scraps from the master's table than to Be Free.

Moses says that God is on their Side.

So God puts on a show moving his pillars of cloud and fire.

Verse 21 “And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea: and the LORD caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided.”

The Hebrews leg it along the dry land, the Egyptians follow and, oh, look, you've all seen the movie, yes? "You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!" No, that's a different movie...

Moses unparts the waters

Verse 28-9 “And the waters returned and covered the chariots and the horsemen, and all the host of Pharaoh that came into the sea after them: there remained no so much as one of them.” But the children of Israel walked upon dry land in the midst of the sea: and the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left.”

Exodus 15

Clearly

Verse 3 “The LORD is a man of war: the LORD is his name.”

None of this namby-pamby love thine enemy tosh. “Drown them all, let God sort them out.”

Verse 11 “Who is like unto the, O LORD, among the gods? Who is like thee, glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders?”

Among the gods eh? What happened to the rest of them then?

Verse 14 “The people shall hear,and be afraid: sorrow shall take hold on the inhabitants of Palestina.”

Well, you got that much right...

Oh, there's a victory dance, led by a woman...

Verse 20-1 “And Miriam, the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand: and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances.”

Are we inhuman, or are we dancer?

Anyway, it's the desert, and they're short of water, and folks murmur against Moses. The LORD shows Moses a tree which, when cast into the salty waters they have, desalinates them.

God promises disease-free living in exchange for unending worship. Can't say neuroticer than that, can you?

And they come to Elim, with its twelve wells of water...

Exodus 1-6: The Market Theory of Deities

2009-01-23T23:09:00.008Z

So, after the massive dramas of Genesis, I'm finally on to Exodus.
I don't think I was quite prepared for exactly how much stuff Genesis was going to cover - I mean, one of the reasons I decided to do this project of reading the Bible and blogging about it was to see for myself all those references that turn up in literature and popular sayings and song lyrics and umpteen other cultural spheres. It feels like half of the references I might have had mind have already been covered, from Adam and Eve to Lot's wife to Joseph and his coat of many colours...
So, now we skip a few generations in the land of Egypt, and start with a rundown of the tribes of Israel. I guess if we're dealing with a text that comes from an oral history tradition, every so often you need to remind people who the main characters are, in case they're a bit forgetful or nodded off last time the storyteller came round.

But due to that lapse of several generations the Egyptians have forgotten that Joseph came up with those cunning ways of getting them alive through a famine (or maybe they remember very well how he got all their land and livestock off them and handed them to Pharoah). So the Hebrews have been enslaved (in the true hard-labour sense it seems, not that cushy viceroy-type slavery that Joseph fell into), but there are still enough of them to scare the Egyptians sufficiently that Pharoah orders the midwives to kill off male children (which I suppose makes sense on a military level, but not really on a population control level.)
As part of this attempt to control the Hebrew numbers, a 'daughter of Levi' puts her strapping baby boy in a basket in the river, where he gets found by an Egyptian princess and brought up. Having killed an Egyptian for killing a Hebrew he flees to the land of Midian, which apparently takes him up to the head of the Red Sea and the north of the Sinai Peninsula, or even into modern southern Jordan. Here he describes himself as a:

"stranger in a strange land,"

one of those fantastically resonant Bible quotes that echoes down the ages in book titles and, apparently, the name of an episode of Lost. Just to really lower the tone.
In Chapter 3, God speaks to Moses out of a burning bush. This is another of those Bible tales where myriad theories about mistranslations and misunderstandings of place names come into play, so we could actually be talking about events as divergent as a chatty bramble patch or a voice from Mount Sinai.
Here I get to digress a bit, because Mount Sinai is one of the my favourite places in the world. It is outstandingly beautiful and atmospheric, with the vastly thick walls of the ancient monastery of St Catharine's marking the start of the trek to the summit - best done at night, to avoid the desert sun and to watch the dawn over the desert. The local Bedouin control the tourist trade in the area, which means that at least some of the money spent on the mountain stays with them rather than being siphoned off into the coffers of multinational tourist corporations. Many of these Bedouin are themselves terrifically handsome in their characteristic periwinkle-blue kuffiyahs, and their camels (a surprisingly comfortable way to get up the mountain for the mobility-challenged) seem to be pretty well cared for and healthy compared with some of the sorry specimens in other parts of the Middle East.
Anyway, tourist blurb over, and I expect I'll get to repeat it all when we get to those tablets of stone...
But God decides to promise Moses that he will be returning to:

"a land flowing with milk and honey,"

whilst also listing the other peoples -

"the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzities, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites"

who are going to get kicked out so that the Children of Israel can have the land. No precedents being either followed or established there then.

God, however, is being very clear about his intentions for Moses and his people, as demonstrated by the use of lots of CAPITALS;
(ch3 v14) "And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you," and then also in Chapter 6, where God's name Jehovah is also IN BIG CAPITALS.
After some miracles involving sticks and snakes and leprosy to prove that he is indeed, God, God decides to try and kill Moses, who is only saved by his Midianite wife throwing their infant son's foreskin onto the ground before the LORD. I'm now totally lost as to quite what it is with the whole foreskin thing. At least Isaac's life got swapped for an entire sheep...

With all these shenanigans in the land of the Midianites, the poor old Israelites are still stuck in Egypt as slaves, although they still seem to be putting their faith in God, even if he has apparently forgotten about them for several generations. Their situation gets even worse after Moses returns with God's various instructions, because the suggestion that the Israelites be allowed to leave off slavin' for 3 days to go and worship in the wilderness is met with the order that instead of a holiday, they will have to find their own raw materials for the bricks they have to manufacture, but still make the same quantity of bricks in the end. So by the end of Chapter 6, we have lots of promises from God, and lots of demands of worship, but very little action from Him and a whole lot more work for the Hebrews.

Now, this has led me to my Market Theory of Deity, as mentioned in the title of this post. I reckon that when you have a polytheistic system with lots of Gods competing for sacrifices, faith and other affirmation from human worshippers, they have much more incentive to be nice. OK, so there is a fear element - storms, famine etc - but there is also going to be an extent to which Gods will also get more worship if they deal out a certain amount of niceness. In a a monotheistic monopoly situation, however, God gets to behave pretty much as he likes, leaving his Chosen People in slavery, forgetting about them, and then demanding major amounts of love, honour and probably sheep and goats while we're at it. Not so different from certain large utility companies (without the blood sacrifice, though some gas bills don't seem so far off it.)

All photos in this post taken by Sarah Irving on and around Mount Sinai, August 2008

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

Exodus 10-11: Suckerpunches on the way to Passover

2009-01-22T00:43:00.002Z

Exodus 10

God isn't even bothering to dissemble

Verse 1 “And the LORD said unto Moses, Go in unto Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart, and the heart of his servants that I might shew these my signs before him:”

Moses and Aaron warn Pharaoh it'll be the Day of the Locust if he isn't careful.

Verse 7 “And Pharaoh's servants said unto him. How long shall this man be a snare unto us? Let the men go, that they may serve the LORD their God: knowest thou not yet that Egypt is destroyed.”

So Pharaoh haggles with Moses about who can go. Moses says

Verse 9 “...our young and with our old, with our sons and with our daughters, with our flocks and with our herds we will go: for we must hold a feast unto the LORD."

Er, that sounds like pretty much everyone!

Locusts. Lots. Of. Locusts.

Verse 15 “For they covered the face of the whole earth so that the land was darkened: and they did eat every herb of the land, and all the fruit of the trees which the hail had left: and there remained not any green thing in the trees, or in the herbs of the field, through all the land of Egypt.”

Hmm, sounds like western civilisation after one of its periodic (well, perpetual really) land grabs...

Pharaoh relents, again.

The locusts get blown away. But God the nutter ain't done with his fun.

Verse 20 “But the LORD hardened Pharaoh's heart, so that he would not let the children of Israel go.”

Moses flaps his arms

Verse 22-3 “And Moses stretched forth has hand toward heaven and there was a thick darkness in all the land of Egypt three days. They saw not one another, neither rose any from his place for three days but all the children of Israel had light in their dwellings.”

Another Moses-Pharaoh negotiation breaks down thanks to the LORD hardening Pharaoh's heart.

All that hardening, his arteries must be well clogged... CABG time...

Verse 28-9 “And Pharaoh said unto him, Get thee from me, take heed to thyself, see my face no more:for in that day thou seest my face thou shalt die. And Moses said, Thou has t spoken well, I will see thy face again no more.”

Exodus 11

God I'm bored. Thank God so's God.

Verse 1 “And the LORD said unto Moses. Yet will I bring one plague more upon Pharaoh and upon Egypt,: afterwards he will let you go hence: when he shall let you go, he shall surely thrust you out hence altogether.”

Moses doesn't even say 'FFS, Bearded Sky Man, cut to the chase already!'

God tells Moses to tell the women folk to borrow jewels of silver and gold from their (Egyptian?) neighbours.

And here's the kicker.

Verse 5-7 “And all the first born in the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sitteth upon his throne, even unto the firstborn of the maidservant that is behind the mill: and all the first born of beasts. And there shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt, such as there was none like it, nor shall be like it any more. But against any of the children of Israel shall not a dog move his tongue, against man or beast: that ye may know how that the LORD doth put a difference between the Egyptians and Israel.”

Er, isn't this exactly what Herod does, and gets a (justifiably) bad press for, about 600 pages from now? You can see where he got the idea. It's the double standard in Biblical Scholarship and Commentary I don't like. One law for Roman administrators, another for neurotic Bearded Sky Men. Herman and Chomsky should do a propaganda model study. Medialens should do an alert...

Verse 9-10 “And the LORD said unto Moses, Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you: that my wonders may be multiplied in the land of Egypt. And Moses and Aaron did all these wonders before Pharaoh, and the LORD hardened Pharaoh's heart so that he would not let the children of Israel go out of his land.”

Exodus 7-9: Bearded Sky Man still a Needy Nutter

2009-01-21T23:58:00.003Z

Exodus 7

God tells Moses and Aaron to keep at it but

Verse 4-5 “And I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt. But Pharaoh will not hearken unto you that I may lay my hand upon Egypt,and bring forth mine armies, and my people the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great judgments.”

Right, here's the deal. Throughout the coming chapters God unleashes plague after plague, Moses keeps going back to Pharaoh, whose “magicians” can mimic most of the plagues.
But why on Earth is God going through this palaver? It's like he's bought a plague-o-matic kit on eBay and doesn't want the Hebrews out of Egypt till he's had a good chance to test out the entire kit. He comes across as an impossibly needy low self-esteem bully for whom NO AMOUNT of worshipping by his followers is enough. Saddo.

Moses and Aaron do the rod-into-serpent trick for Pharaoh. But his wise men and sorcerers do the same.

Verse 12 “For they cast down every man his rod, and they became serpents: but Aaron's rod, swallowed up their rods.”

Yeah, I saw a movie with a similar theme once.

So God upgrades to stinky water stunt.

Verse 18 “And the fish that is in the river shall die, and the river shall stink: and the Egyptians shall lothe to drink of the water of the river.”

Following orders...

Verse 20 “And Moses and Aaron did so, as the LORD commanded, and he lifted up the rod, and smote the waters that were in the river, in the sight of Pharaoh, and in the sight of his servants: and all the waters that were in the river were turned to blood.”

'Pah', says Pharaoh.

Verse 24 “And all the Egyptians digged round about the river for water to drink: for they could not drink of the water of the river.”

Yeah, just like huge swathes of the planet's population 4000 years later. Progress eh, donchajustloveit...

Exodus 8

Then comes the frog plague. But Pharaoh is underwhelmed because

Verse 7 “And the magicians did so with their enchantments, and brought up frogs upon the land of Egypt.”

Still and all, Pharaoh would like the 'phibs to cease and desist, and promises Moses the proles can have time off for religious observance in exchange.

Moses offs the frogs (well, he asks God to),

Verse 14 “And they gathered them together upon heaps: and the land stank.”

But Pharaoh reneges. ALWAYS. GET. IT. IN. WRITING.

So along come the lice, which the magicians can't mimic. And then a swarm of flies.

Verse 25-6 “And Pharaoh called for Moses and for Aaron, and said Go ye, sacrifice to your God in the land. And Moses said It is not meet so to do: for we shall sacrifice the abomination of the Egyptians to the LORD our God: low, shall we sacrifice the abomination of the Egyptians before their eyes, and will they not stone us. We will go three days' journey into the wilderness and sacrifice to the LORD our God, as he shall command us.”

Pharaoh says 'OK, but not too far away'. Moses makes the flies fly.

Silly joke: Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

But, you guessed it.

Verse 32 “And Pharaoh hardened his heart at this time also, neither would he let the people go.”

Exodus 9

So the LORD says to Moses to tell Pharaoh if he keeps playing silly buggers [pots and kettles, bearded sky man, pots and kettles...]

Verse 3 “Behold, the hand of the LORD is upon thy cattle which is in the field, upon the horses, upon the asses, upon the camels, upon the oxen, and upon the sheep: there shall be a very grievous murrain.”

Murrain-

Any of various highly infectious diseases of cattle, as anthrax.
Obsolete. A pestilence or dire disease.

Sounds like biowar to me.

Verse 6 "And the LORD did that thing on the morrow, and all the cattle of Egypt died, but of the cattle of the children of Israel died not one.”

Pharaoh doesn't budge. This is becoming comic by repetition/escalation.

Verse 8 “And the LORD said unto Moses and unto Aaron, Take to you handfuls of ashes of the furnace, and let Moses sprinkle it toward the heaven in the sight of Pharaoh.”

Verse 10 “And it shall becomesmall dust in all the land of Egypt, and shall be a boil breaking forth with blains upon man, and upon beast, throughout all the land of Egypt.”

And here comes needy God again...

Verse 16 “And in very deed for this cause have I raised thee up, for to shew in thee my power: and that my name may be declared throughout all the earth.”

And God says his next trick will be the mother of all hail storms.

Verse 20 “He that feared the word of the LORD among the servants of Pharaoh made his servants and his cattle flee into the houses.”

Moses flaps his arms and,

Verse 24 “So there was hail, and fire mingled with the hail, very grievous, such as there was none like it in all the land of Egypt since it became a nation. And the hail smote throughout all the land of Egypt all that was in the field, both man and beast: and the hail smote every herb of the field, and brake every tree of the field.”

I love the smell of napalm in the morning!!

And Pharaoh cries uncle. But Moses is wising up at last and says

Verse 30 “But as for thee and thy servants, I know that ye will not yet fear the LORD God.”

and sure enough:

Verse 34 “And when Pharaoh saw that the rain and the hail and the thunders were ceased, he sinned yet more, and hardened his heart, he and his servants. And the heart of Pharaoh was hardened, neither would he let the children of Israel go: as the LORD had spoken to Moses."

Exodus 3-6: Speechophobia, Zebra Crossings and Industrial Relations

2009-01-21T23:18:00.004Z

Exodus 3

So Moses is shepherding

Verse 2 “And the angel of the LORD appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.”

Hmm, I hope the LORD is offsetting his apparemissions...

And God says “Yo, Moses”

Verse 7 “And the LORD said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people which by reason of their taskmasters: for I know their sorrows: And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey: unto the place of the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites.”

Well, that certainly sounds like a land without people for a people without land...

So God says 'go to Pharaoh and tell him to let you and yours go.'

Moses demures and also says 'what shall I say unto them [the Hebrews]'

Verse 14 “And God said unto MOSES, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.”

Is this like iambic pentameter?

But God sees problems with his own plan

Verse 19 “And I am sure that the king of Egypt will not let you go, no, not by a mighty hand. And I will stretch out my hand, and smite Egypt with all my wonders which I will do in the midst thereof: and after that he will let you go.”

So get your women to “borrow” jewels of silver and gold, as a kind of 'pre-looting'

Exodus 4

Moses says 'they aint' gonna believe me, LORD.' And God says 'check out the magic rod that turns into a serpent when ya throw it in the dirt.'

Moses does it and “Moses fled before it.”

And God says 'pick the damn snake up you numbskull'

And it turns back into a rod.

[Erm, isn't this PROOF, which denies FAITH, and without faith god is nothing and man then goes on to prove black is white and gets killed at the next zebra crossing?]

And God has a leprous hand/not leprous hand stunt for Moses too.
And a blood/water stunt.

And Moses says 'I got public speaking anxiety LORD, I get so tongue-tied. Can't you get someone else for the gig?'

Verse 14 “And the anger of the LORD was kindled against Moses, and he said Is not Aaron the Levite thy brother? I know that he can speak well. And also behold, he cometh forth to meet thee: and when he seeth thee, he will be glad in his heart.”

Moses gets leave of absence from Jethro his boss to head back to Egypt.

Verse 21 “And the LORD said unto Moses When thou goest to return into Egypt, see that thou do all those wonders before Pharaoh, which I have put in thine hand: but I will harden his heart, that he shall not let the people go.”

Now, that line is worth re-reading. God is going to take away Pharaoh's free will, thus surely rendering Pharaoh blameless for the shit that hits the fan. So who, really, is to blame for all the deaths to come? That'd be the neurotic Bearded Sky Man, I reckon.

Moses' wife Zipporah seems unhappy, and circumcises her son and said “Surely thou a bloody husband thou art to me.”

Silly joke: Couple at a Relate counselling session, and it's not going well. In desperation the counsellor asks the man. “Well, you two aren't communicating much. Do you talk to your wife while you are making love?” And the man shrugs and says “Sure, my mobile's charged.”

Verse 27 “And the LORD said to Aaron, Go into the wilderness to meet Moses. And he went and met him in the mount of God, and kissed him.”

But probably not with tongue.

Verse 29-31 “And Moses and Aaron went and gathered together all the elders of the children of Israel. And Aaron spake all the words which the LORD had spoken unto Moses, and di the signs in the sight of the people. And the people believed: and when they heard that the LORD had visited the children of Israel and that he had looked upon their affliction, then they bowed their heads and worshipped.”

Suckers.

Exodus 5

Aaron and Moses meet Pharaoh, who laughs at them and orders a karoshi.

Verse 6-7 “And Pharaoh commanded the same day the taskmasters of the people and their officers, saying Ye shall no more give the people straw to make brick as heretofore: let them go and gather straw for themselves. And the tale of the bricks, which they did make heretofore, ye shall lay upon them: ye shall not diminish ought thereof: for they be idle: therefore they cry, saying, Let us go and sacrifice to our God.”

This is good old-fashioned management, punishing workers who have temerity to ask for better conditions, to stop them getting ideas above their station. Make them hit higher productivity targets while cutting their wages etc etc. Death by speed up!!

And it's a bad time to be a union steward...

Verse 14 “And the officers of the children of Israel, which Pharaoh's task masters et over them, were beaten, and demanded Wherefore have ye not fulfilled your task in making brick both yesterday and to day, as heretofore.”

And the union bureaucracy blames Moses and Aaron for taking a mildly bad situation and making it worse.

And Moses says to God 'whassup?'

Verse 23 “For since I came to Pharoah to speak in thy name he hath done evil to this people: neither hast thou delivered thy people at all.”

[Moses doesn't get God has a Plan]

Exodus 6

God goes on a riff about how cool he is and all the things he'll do. Frankly a bit embarrassing...

Verse 9 “And Moses spake so unto the children of Israel: but they hearkened not unto Moses for anguish of spirit, and for cruel bondage.”

And God orders Moses and Aaron back to Pharaoh, and there's another family tree for a few verses.

Verse 30 “And Moses said before the LORD, Behold, I am of uncircumcised lips, and how shall Pharaoh hearken unto me?

Good question, given what's coming...

Genesis 46-50: the Twelve Tribes of Israel and more family trouble brewing?

2009-01-21T17:55:00.005Z

So, with Joseph having duly loaded up his brothers with food to see them through a journey in famine-stricken territory, Jacob decides that he wants to see the son he thought was dead.
The entire family decamps to Egypt, which gives an opportunity to list all of Jacob's sons and grandsons, which include the wonderfully named Huppim and Muppim, two of the many sons of Benjamin. They all settle in a land called Goshen, the whereabouts of which seem to be a bit hazy but is somewhere in the Nile Delta.
The famine, however, continues, and with his distinctly profit-oriented mind Joseph manages to get the desperate population of Egypt to swap first their cattle and horses and then all their land for bread, effectively reducing them all to sharecroppers:

"The Joseph said unto the people, Behold, I have bought you this day and your land for Pharaoh: lo, here is seed for you, and ye shall sow the land.
And it shall come to pass in the increase, that ye shall give the fifth part unto Pharaoh, and four parts shall be your own, for seed of the field, and for your food, and for them of your households, and for food for your little ones."
(Ch 47 v23-24)

Meanwhile, the dying Jacob calls Joseph to his bed and gives his blessing to Joseph's younger son Ephraim, instead of to the older Manasseh. You'd think, after the trouble that this kind of thing caused with first Ishmael and Isaac and then Esau and Jacob himself that people in this family would leave off giving complicated blessings, but apparently not.
Jacob also calls all of his other sons to him and decides to enumerate their failings and virtues, including Reuben's 'instability' (for sleeping with one of his father's concubines) abd Simeon and Levi's 'cruelty' (at last these two are getting some come-uppance for going around stabbing people left right and centre.) Judah, Zebelun and Issachar are apparently all ok, while the rest of the sons - Dan, Gad, Naphthali and Benjamin - all get rather ambivalent reviews, including:

"Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse heels, so that his rider shall fall backward."
(Ch 49 v17)

and:

"Benjamin shall ravin as a wolf: in the morning he shall devour the prey, and at night he shall divide the spoil."
(Ch 49 v27)

And so are listed the Twelve Tribes of Israel, setting a framework for many of the political and religious developments of the rest of the Old Testament.
Like Abraham, Isaac and Jacob's own first wife Leah, Jacob himself is buried at the tomb in Hebron built on land bought by Abraham. This is also described as being near Mamre, an intriguing site which is mentioned at a number of points in Genesis and seems connected with Sarah and Rebekah. The archaeological record suggests that it was an ancient cult site from bronze age times, prior to the eras associated with Biblical figures insofar as Old Testament characters can be identified with pre/historic periods, and which continued as a religious shrine under Jewish, Roman, Muslim and Crusader Christian rule. Christian pilgrims seem to have managed to destroy the last remains of the ancient

tree which was associated with the site. There is a nice little discussion of whether the trees actually associated with the site were oaks or terebinths here. Terebinths, by the way, may sound grand but are also the source material for turpentine, which is less swanky sounding.
As so, with a grand act of final forgiveness of his conniving brothers by Joseph, the Book of Genesis ends.

Exodus 1-2: Baby killing, man killing, God forgetting?

2009-01-19T23:48:00.004Z

Exodus 1

Starts with roll call of the “twelve tribes”

Verse 7 “And the children of Israel were fruitful and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and waxed exceedingly mightly; and the land was filled with them.”

There may be trouble ahead... And sure enough, there's a new boss, not the same as the old boss.

The new king who didn't know Joseph says “these guests are like fish, they've gone off after three days.”

Verse 10 “Come on,let us deal wisely with them: lest they multiply, and it come to pass, that, when there falleth out any war, they join also unto our enemies, and fight against us."

Ah yes, unreliable, agents of a foreign power yadder yadder yadder.

The Hebrews get “taskmasters to afflict them with their burdens” but like Hydra “the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew.”

So feeling harried and Herod, Pharaoh tell the midwives to bump of the boys.

Verse 16 “...if it be a son, then ye shall kill him; but if it be a daughter, then she shall live.”

Huh??!! That is arse-backwards. One male can inseminate lots of women, whereas lots of males chasing a limited number of females is a recipe for internal tension. Women are the bottleneck in population demographics. Duh! Or maybe its a psyop to demoralise the Hebrews?

The God-fearing midwives disobey, and at their next performance appraisal tell Pharaoh the Hebrew mothers spit them out before the midwives get there.

So Pharaoh gets all Nilistic.

Verse 22 “And Pharaoh charged all his people, saying Every son that is born ye shall cast into the river and every daughter ye shall save alive.”

I think I see where this is going. I may mosey on through one more chapter before retiring...

Exodus 2

Verse 1 “And there went a man of the house of Levi, and took to wife a daughter of Levi.”

[FFS, haven't you clowns heard of exogamy??]

Verse 2 “And the woman conceived, and bare a son: and when she was him that he was goodly child, she hid him three months."

But the jig is up and she puts him near where Pharaoh's daughters will find him near the river's edge.

Kid (Moses, natch) gets raised, and telescoping forward a bit...

Verse 11 “And it came to pass in those days, when Moses was grown, that he went out unto his brehtren, and looked upon their burdens and he spied an Egyptian smiting an Hebrew, one of his brethren. And he looked this way and that way, and when he saw there was no man, he slew the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.”

Attaboy- none of this turn the other cheek malarkey. And with a good understanding of the 11^th commandment “Thou Shalt Not Get Caught.”

Moses gets in another fight, the wee hothead and his opponent says “You're not the boss of me”

Verse 14 “And he said, Who made thee a prince and judge over us? Intendest thou to kill me, as thou killedst the Egyptian? And Moses feared and said Surely this thing is known.”

Yep. Pharaoh wants his guts for garters so he legs it to Midian. He helps out at a well and is rewarded with some shepherd's daughter Ziporah. And Moses decides to start citing Robert Heinlein novels

Verse 22 “... for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.”

Verse 23 “And it came to pass in process of time, that the king of Egypt died, and the children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage, and they cried., and their cry came up unto God by reason of the bondage.”

And I am restraining myself from sub/dom gags....

Verse 24 “And God heard their groaning and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob.”

WTF? God forgets? GTD, God, GTD...

Verse 25 “And God looked upon the chldren of Israel, and God had respect unto them.”

Genesis 48-50: All good things must end. This too.

2009-01-19T23:03:00.003Z

Chapters 48

Joseph gets word the old man is dying and rocks up with his two sons Mnasseh and Ephraim.

Jacob/Israel says he's hearing voices again

Verse 4 “And said unto me, Behold, I will make thee fruitful, and multiply thee. And I will make of thee a multitude of people and will give this land to thy seed after thee for an everlasting possession.”

And he's blind so can only touch the kids faces, but puts the wrong hand on the wrong kid's head (should be right for older, left for younger) and does the blessing and dishing out.

Verse 17 “And when Joseph saw that his father laid his right hand upon the head of Ephraim it displeased him: and he held up his father's hand to remove it from Ephraim's head unto Mannasseh's head”

No dice of course, from Jacob, who knows a thing or two about dodgy successions, having pinched his brother Esau's rights.

Verse 19 “And his father refused, and said, I know it, my son, K know it: he also shall become a people,and he also shall be great: but truly his younger brother shall be greater than he, and his seed shall become a multitude of nations.”

So, no over-population issues there then...

Chapter 49

So Jacob on his death bed dishes the dirt publicly on all 12 of his sons. Anyone seen “Festen”, that great Danish film that contains a mother doing the same in true Danish style to her kids? Passive-aggressive sliminess to the nth degree.

Reuben's primal scene causes him grief

Verse 4 “Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel: because thou wentest up to thy father's bed: then defiledst thou it: he went up to my couch."

Simeon and Levi get labelled for the bloodthirsty psychos they are

And so it goes on- and on. Read it and yawn.

Verse 33 “And when Jacob had made an end of commanding his sons, he gathered up his feet into the bed, and yielded up the ghost and was gathered unto his people.”

About. Bloody. Time.

Chapter 50

Mourning. Pharaoh's permission to bury Israel/Jacob up north. Shifting the body. More mourning, burying etc.

Verse 15 “And when Joseph's brethren as that their father was dead, they said Joseph will peradventure hate us and will certainly requite us all the evil which we did unto him.”

Ah, the old family-as-Yugoslavia-as-powder-keg-when-Tito-dies. It's a story as old as the, erm, Bible...

And Joseph tells them to chill

Verse 19 “... Fear not, for am I in the place of God? But as for you,ye thought evil against me: but God meant it unto good to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive.”

Joseph sticks around in Egypt and sees (great?) grandchildren.

Verse 26 “So Joseph died, being an hundred and ten years old and they embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt.”

And so ends one of the longest books in the Bible, which has taken two and a half bally weeks to read. As will Psalms, Jeremiah and Ezekiel.

What have I learnt? Erm, not to trust any of these guys as far as you can throw them. It's all cheating, lying, smiting etc. [Ed: Gee, profound.]

Genesis 39-45: dreams and deceits in Egypt

2009-01-19T22:03:00.009Z

So, having had a bit of a weird diversion on the subject of Judah's rather disturbing family unit, we're back to Joseph (minus Technicolour Dream Coat), who has been flogged off to some traders and taken to Egypt as a slave.
Certainly compared with, say, the Triangular Trade in the 17th and 18th centuries or child slavery on cocoa farms supplying multinational corporations around, oh, now, Joseph's experience of slavery seems pretty cushty. He gets made overseer of the house of the rich man, Potiphar, who buys him, and for a while everything goes fairly smoothly.
Then Potiphar's wife takes a fancy to Joseph, tries to get him into bed, and cries rape which he won't comply. Now, stories like this really piss me off. I'm not denying that there are a very few very stupid women out there who do cry rape falsely, but given the numbers of them vs the numbers of women raped as sexual abuse, as expressions of male power, as means of ethnic insult or of insulting an enemy in war, the balance is definitely on the female side in terms of getting a really poor deal. Today, we had really, really nasty headlines about the jailing of some particularly vile young men in London who gangraped a 16-year-old with learning difficulties and then gave her 50% burns by pouring caustic soda over her. And got just 6 to 9 years each in jail (although their sentences are, apparently, possibly going to be revised by the Attorney General). So, yet again, we have this misogynistic bullshit. Fuck RIGHT OFF.
Anyway, in Joseph's case this leads to him getting banged up, but being the resourceful fella he is, prison is more of a networking tool than a punishment for little Jason Donovan here. I think this is quite funny, as it reminds me of the tale of 'la Prision Fecunda' - the 'fertile prison' of the Cuban revolution where Castro got to do lots of thinking before initiating the invasion which culminated in the triumph of the revolution, the defeat of Batista and the general prolonged annoyance of successive US governments. Probably not a comparison many Bible readers would be too chuffed with, but hell, they're going along with the fake-rape scenarios.

Through this prison experience, Joseph's power to interpret dreams comes to the notice of Pharoah, who thinks that Joseph's interpretation sounds spot on, and:

"41/39 said unto Joseph, Forasmuch as God hath shewed thee all this, there is none so discreet and wise as thou art:
41/40Though shalt be over my house, and according to thy word shall my people be ruled: only in the throne will I be greater than thee."

Which seems like a lot of trust for someone whose abilities have actually yet to be proven... but the prophecies do come true, and thanks to them and Joseph's good management, during the seven years of plenty huge stocks have been kept of food to tide everyone through the seven lean years to follow.
As a result, when the famine also hits Canaan, Jacob's remaining sons, without the benefit of prophesying brothers, have fallen into famine. They are dispatched by their father to buy grain from... Joseph (either the LORD is working in mysterious ways or these stories are laden with more dubious coincidences that a double episode of Neighbours. I hear. Oooh look, more Jason Donovan connections. Spooky).
Joseph recognises his brothers but pretends not too and starts off by making them grovel, which I guess is a fair enough response to being put in a pit and then sold into slavery. But he still loves them (sucker) and sends them away with lots of grain, and sneaks their money back into the sacks so they haven't even had to pay for it. Simeon seems to still be very much on the scene, apparently unpunished for being a lying murdering bastard. But Joseph's little wheeze isn't over, and he demands that they come back with his younger brother Benjamin, the only other son of Rachel and the one who she died giving birth to.
Jacob, as Rachel was his favourite, is understandably sceptical of this idea, but is talked into it on the grounds that all of them really, really do need some food. Back in Egypt, they get well fed. But Joseph is still playing games with them, and has his silver cup put in Benjamin's grain sack so that he can be arrested on the way home:

"44/2 And put my cup, the silver cup, in the sack's mouth of the youngest, and his corn money. And he did according to the word that Joseph had spoken.
44/4 And when they were gone out of the city, and yet not far off, Joseph said unto his steward, Up, follow after the men; and when thou dost overtake them, say unto them, Wherefore have ye rewarded evil for good?
44/5 Is not this it in which my lord drinketh, and whereby he divineth? ye have done evil in so doing."

So all the brothers come back again to beg that Joseph will not cause their elderly father's death by imprisoning Benjamin, and in the end he reveals his identity, there are hugs and kisses all round, and he sends them back home to Canaan laden with goodies:

"45/21 and Joseph gave them wagons, according to the commandment of Pharaoh, and gave them provision for the way.
22 To all of them he gave each man changes of raiment; but to Benjamin he gave threee hundred pieces of silver, and five changes if raiment.
23 And to his father he sent after this manner; ten asses laden with the good things of Egypt, and ten she asses laden with corn and bread and meat for his father by the way."

Which must have thrilled the people of Egypt no end, with five more years of famine still to get through.

The image at the top of this post is of a famine stela from Sehel Island, Egypt, sourced from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Famine_stela.jpg

Anita Diamant: The Red Tent

2009-01-18T18:56:00.002Z

The Red Tent tells the story of Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, who appears briefly to be 'taken and defiled' in Genesis 34 and is never mentioned again.

The novel is by Anita Diamant, an American writer who has penned a couple of works of fiction but whose main body of work seems to be a veritable library on the subject of 'modern Jewish living,' ranging from everyday rituals to what names to pick for your children. Her other novels seem to deal mainly with more contemporary subjects, including Good Harbor (a story of friendship between two women in Massachusetts after one of them is diagnosed with breast cancer, which reminded me of some of Alice Hoffman's less magical novels, or a less political version of Marge Piercy's modern-day works) and the forthcoming Day After Night, which I approach with trepidation as it is the story of four young Jewish women in the few years leading up to the birth of the State of Israel/the Palestinian Naqba, or Catastrophe, and I suspect I'm going to find it very offensive, but I'm trying to keep an open mind.
Anyway.
The Red Tent itself is now one of those books which has legendarily sold millions of copies, apparently through the power of word of mouth and reading groups, although I'm now sceptical of most of those claims since marketing companies seem to often have more to do with them than meets the eye. It is an extremely women-oriented novel, telling Dinah's life story – the years of it after the massacre at Shechem by definition entirely fictional. Respecting the probable level of separation between male and female lives at the time, as well as the writer's own apparent interests, the tale deals largely with the lives of the women of Jacob's camp – his wives and concubines Leah, Rachel, Bilhah and Zilpah – with their father Laban, their many sons and even Jacob largely playing bit parts. Female forebears such as Sarai (Sarah) and Rebekah/Rebecca are viewed as wise, powerful figures, whereas while Abram/Abraham is respected he is very distant and nebulous, and Isaac appears as a blind, feeble old man who has never recovered from his near-sacrifice by Abraham:

“Years later, when his grandsons finally met the boy of the story, by then an old man, they were appalled to hear how Isaac stuttered, still frightened by his father's knife.”

In line with this interest in the stories of the women of the family, the Biblical God or El is also a distant figure, very much associated with the men. The women worship a range of different local and family deities – hence the conflict when, as described in the Biblical account, Laban finds his household gods have disappeared along with Jacob and his wives. Diamant frames this as part of one of the book's ongoing themes, the era of Jacob as the cusp of a transfer from matriarchal to patriarchal religions, with Rachel asserting her right as her father's daughter to take the figures of the Gods, and Laban demanding his right according to a newer male-oriented system to leave them to his oldest son, Kemuel. The extent to which this prehistoric female-centred belief system, as set out by archaeologists such as Marija Gimbutas in a range of books, including the Language of the Goddess and the Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, actually existed across the Middle East and Eastern Europe is disputed, but there is certainly plenty of evidence for a much more varied and gender-balanced pantheon than that offered by the great monotheistic faiths.

The book, which is named after the ritual menstrual tent inhabited by the women for three days at the beginning of every month while they bleed, is highly sensual, both in describing the erotic relationships between Jacob and his wives and Dinah and her husband, Shalem, and also in the non-sexual descriptions of the scents and sounds of living a camp existence, surrounded by goats and dogs, and where Jacob may be handsome but he also smells like any other goatherd in a settlement where water must by pulled by hand. The women are wise, but their wisdom and power is sited in the female domains of baking, weaving and brewing, or in midwifery and healing knowledge, or in the secrets and mysteries of the Red Tent, where they are able to build alliances and cook up schemes in what might be seen as an expression of subaltern power, 'weapons of the weak.'
Also interesting about this book is the strength of the indictment it delivers against Jacob and his sons for the murders in Shechem. The killings are depicted as primarily the acts of the jealous, bitter twins Simeon and Levi, but with the complicity of Jacob and some of the other brothers. Contrary to the Biblical account, Jacob's change of name to IsraEl is not by the command of God, but an attempt by Jacob to escape his own name:

“so that people would not remember him as the butcher of Shechem. He fled from the name Jacob, which became another name for 'liar,' so that 'you serve the God of Jacob' was one of the worst insults one man could hurl at another in that land for many generations.”

The men of Shechem, including the king, Hamor, are largely portrayed as generous and honourable, as are many of those of Egypt, where Dinah spends the rest of her life after the massacre. The descendants of Jacob, meanwhile, are largely portrayed as a dysfunctional group, injured by Dinah's curses and with their women diminished by their loss of the female rites and knowledge which they are increasingly denied by their brothers, fathers and husbands.
It's not a perfect book – the language sometimes teeters on the brink between being mannered in its attempt to evoke its ancient setting, and rich in its evocation of the era. The second half, set in Egypt, seems to lose some of richness and depth once there is no background of Biblical scholarship and feminist vs conventional theology to draw inspiration from. But on many levels this is a deeply moving and fascinating book which provides a marvellous alternative version to this section of the Old Testament.

Genesis 37-38: family values

2009-01-18T10:57:00.007Z

I would so love to know where some of those really smug Family Values Christians (oops, sorry, might I have alienated someone there?) get their ideas from. These two chapters are absolute corkers on this front.
In Chapter 37 Joseph son of Jacob, of the "coat of many colours," gets sold off to Ishmeelite traders by his brothers for 20 pieces of silver (prophets apparently rate less than Messiahs, or maybe there were inflationary pressures...) because they are jealous of him. The Ishmeelites, by the way, are apparently the same as Ishmaelites, the descendants of Abraham and Hagar. So this should be a lesson - cast your concubines and children into the wilderness and they will live to buy your great-grandkids as slaves.
OK, so maybe repeatedly telling your siblings about your dreams where you, one of the younger members of the family, get to rule them all is not drawn directly from Tact 101. Reuben and Judah are apparently the nicer brothers for wanting to just a) put him in a hole with no water or b) sell him to the traders, instead of just bumping him off outright. Or maybe the concept of having 'blood on your hands' is taken very literally here, so if someone dies from being put in said waterless hole you DON'T have their blood on your hands. The legal repercussions of that for prison camps commanders the world over would be joyous...
In Chapter 38 we have some more upstanding examples of how to run your family life. Judah's kids keep getting killed off by God - in one case, that of Onan, for spilling his 'seed' on the ground after being sent in to sleep with his brother's widow. For this, he gets bumped off and gets a term for masturbation named after him for about the next four thousand years. Tough punishment. Since the lady in question, Tamar, seems a little jinxed Judah is reluctant to marry his last son to her in case he dies too, so in a fit of desperation she 'plays the harlot.' Interestingly, she is identifiable as such because she covers her face. To complicate matters, the client she manages to acquire is her father-in-law, Judah, who gets her pregnant and very generously decides not to execute her as a whore when this is discovered, because she's rather cunningly asked him for some identifiable gifts.
This story - understandably, since the resulting twins are the ancestors of the great Israelite king David - attracts some interest, despite (like tales such as the Tower of Babel and the rape of Dinah) occupying very little space in the Bible itself. Tamar's actions have been reframed by feminist scholars such as Gila Safran-Naveh, a professor of Judaic Studies at Cincinatti University, as a reclamation of a woman's control over her body and her ego after she is hurt and rejected by being widowed and denied a second proper husband (having been married to one son, she seems to have become the property of her father-in-law's family instead of returning to her own parents). This is one of the most fascinating things about reading the Bible - the massive potential for reinterpretation and for digging beneath the initial, obvious patriarchal messages of stories which actually offer so much scope for seeing women's possession of subaltern power and influence.

As a final interesting point, there seems to be nothing specifically reprehensible in the view of this story about paying for sex - the main concern seems to be the dishonour implicit in not paying for sex that you have had, and breaking the commercial agreement therein. Women are definitely confined with the family as facing death if they have sex elsewhere, threatening male ownership of them and male security in their notions of fatherhood, but if women have been taken outside these structures (by choice or force) and become 'harlots' they do apparently have an identifiable status which should be honoured.

The image of Tamar and Judah is from the Residenzgalerie Salzburg, painted by an artist from the school of Rembrandt

Genesis 34-36; massacres, cheating and the slow delineation of the People of Israel

2009-01-17T17:55:00.005Z

Chapter 34 starts very interestingly with the brief story of Dinah. I had wanted to combine writing about this with the novel The Red Tent, but Genesis has bowled along a lot quicker than I expected, so I'll have to blog about the latter in a while.
So, Dinah, daughter of Jacob and Leah, is 'taken and defiled' by Shechem son of Hamor, a prince of a land also Shechem.
As with Rebekah, but with more drastic consequences, it is never really made clear whether Biblical 'taking' in a sexual sense is an act of rape or simply any form of copulation. Is Dinah 'defiled' because she is raped, or simply because the act of sex has not been sanctioned by her fathers and brothers? Dinah, of course, has no voice in this, so we can never really know.
Shechem, however, seems very keen to marry her:

"And Shechem said unto her father and unto her brethren, Let me find grace in your eyes, and what ye shall say unto me I will give" (chapter 34 verse 11).

And, in accordance with that promise, Shechem and his father agree to have their entire male population, inclduing themselves, circumcised, and appear to be regarding Jacob and his descendants as future neighbours and residents.
Some of Dinah's brothers, however, have other views on the subject and butcher the entire population of the city:

"v25 And it came to pass on the third day, when they were sore [from being circumcised], that two of the sons of Jacob, Simeon and Levi, Dinah's brethren, took each man his sword, and came upon the city boldly, and they slew all the males.
v26 And they slew Hamor and Shechem his son with the edge of the sword, and took Dinah out of Shechem's house, and went out.
v27 The sons of Jacob came upon the slain, and spoiled the city, because they had defiled their sister.
v28 They took their sheep, and their oxen, and their asses, and that which was in the city, and that which was in the field."

And, of course, they take all the women and children captive.
Obviously with my usual tendency towards bias on the issue, one of my reactions is to think that this seems like a pretty standard reaction of Israelis towards Shechem, which is modern Nablus, one of the worst battered cities of the West Bank, where military incursions and checkpoints seem to replicate this indiscriminate violence and economic despoilation.
But in chapter 35, we move briskly on, with no apparent judgement or comment from God as to whether this wholesale slaughter was an OK thing to do. Unsurprisingly, though, there is a note that Jacob and his sons start to be feared from this point. No shit, since they seem to be behaving like a great big gang of bandits, wandering round Canaan doing pretty much as they fancy (any more parallels with what Israel gets away with in the modern era, anyone?)
Interestingly, though, it is at this point that Jacob seems to start consolidating his extended family's religious identity within the worship of the God he has allied himself to:

"v2 Then Jacob said unto his household, and to all that were with him, Put away the strange gods that are among you, and be clean, and change your garments:
v3 And let us arise, and go up to Beth-el; and I will make there an altar unto God, who answered me in the day of my distress, and was with me in the way which I went.
v4 And they gave unto Jacob all the strange gods which were in their hands, and all their earrings which were in their ears; and Jacob hid them under the oak which was by Shechem."

And, in a statement which is going to cause all kind of trouble over the next few millenia, God tells Jacob and his sons that the land is theirs:

"v10 And God said unto him, Thy name is Jacob: thy name shall not be called any more Jacob, but Israel shall be thy name: and he called his name Israel.
"v11 And God said to him, I am God Almighty: be fruitful and multiply; a nation and a company of nations shall be of thee, and kings shall come out of thy loins;
"v12 And the land which I gave Abraham and Isaac, to thee I will give it, and to thy seed after thee will I give the land."

Rachel also dies giving birth to her final son and is buried near Bethlehem, at a place still called Ramat Rahel. There is now a nice little settlement and some archaeological sites there, with a huge and very scary-looking concrete wall (predating the even huger and scarier wall round the whole of the West Bank) and military watchtowers. On my second stay in Bethlehem with ISM I managed to get a bit lost looking for the long road with the cashpoints on it which skirts the bottom of the hill where Manger Square is situated, and nearly walked myself and two friends into the Ramat Rahel checkpoint, which given that the soldiers were very jumpy due to an imminent invasion would not have been a fab idea. Scared the hell out of me, anyway.
Chapter 36, given how far behind I am on this project, is fortunately mainly a list of the sons of Esau and their descendants, the kings of Edom. Edom is one of those myriad Old Testament kingdoms which warrant brief mentions in the act Bible because they aren't in the bloodline which will form the people of Israel, but which were actually very interesting and in some cases powerful regional polities in their own right. Edom itself was situated in what is now Southern Jordan and part of Southern Israel and the Negev, mainly desert areas which contains such natural and architectural wonders as Wadi Rum and Petra and the historically significant Via Nova Traiana, or King's Highway, built by the Romans to maintain control over this part of their empire. Although archaeological evidence for the start date of the Edomite empire is hazy, it certainly lasted a thousand years, often warring with Israel and allying with Babylon to sack Jerusalem.

Genesis 46-47: feast then famine...

2009-01-17T02:08:00.002Z

Chapter 46

So on the long journey to Egypt, Israel/Jacob hears voices again. Apparently a good thing, rather than cause for a different psychotropic prescription.

And another of those big lists of names that give the Old Testament its bad reputation. Interestingly though, only sons seem to count as worth of mention...

Anyway, it's all family reunions

Verse 29-30 “And Joseph made ready his chariot, and went up to meet Israel his father, to Goshen, and presented himself unto him: and he fell on his neck, and wept on his neck a good while. And Israel said unto Joseph, Now let me die, since I have seen thy face, because thou art yet alive.”

And Joseph coaches his family on what to say in the job interview with the Pharaoh. So much for the strength of weak ties hypothesis, eh?

Basically the line to take is “We but simple shepherd folk, yurr m'jesty.” Can't say pharer than that...

Chapter 47

Pharaoh talks with them. Israel/Jacob rabbits on like the seriously Old Man that he is. And it ends well, for now (in the sequel, I believe it's called “Xbox, or Xrayspecs” or something like that, all has not gone swimmingly well in Egypt. Sequels eh, so derivative)

Verse 11 “And Joseph placed his father and his brethren, and gave them a possession in the land of Egypt, and the best of the land, in the land of Rameses, as Pharaoh has commanded."

But the crop crunch becomes a credit crunch

Verse 15 “And when the money failed in the land of Egypt,and in the land of Canaan, all the Egyptians came unto Joseph, and said Give us bread: for why should we die in thy presence? For the money faileth.”

So Joseph accepts barter- cattle, horses, flocks and stuff.

But next year folks come back and say 'we really don't got nothing now, no word of a lie.'

Verse 10 “Wherefore shall we die before thine eyes, both we and our land? Buy us and our land for bread, and we and our land will be servants unto Pharaoh, and give us seed that we may live and not die, that the land be not desolate.”

Thank god (no, really) we've moved on from such barbaric conditions and there aren't billions hungry and semi-starving, and Indian farmers topping themselves in huge numbers. I mean, that would be a damning indictment, wouldn't it?

So via Joseph, the Pharaoh becomes rich in deed.

Verse 20 “And Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh: for the Egyptians sold every man his field, because the famine prevailed over them: so the land became Pharaoh's.”

and he ethnically cleanses-

Verse 21 “And as for the people, he removed them to cities from one end of the borders of Egypt even to the other end thereof.”

And Joseph is like a smug Monopoly player, with hotels on those green and blue spaces. And devises a 20% flat tax, which is of course very regressive...

Verse 24 “And it shall come to pass in the increase that ye shall give the fifth part unto Pharaoh, and four parts shall be your own, for seed of the field, and for your food, and for them of your households, and for food for your little ones.”

And these craven capitalist running dog lick-spittle ragged trousered philanthropist lilly-livered black leg freeloading scabs from Nottingham say

Verse 25 “... Thou hast saved our lives: let us find grace in the sight of my lord, and we will be Pharaoh's servants.”

And so it goes. Anyhow...

Verse 28 “And Israel dwelt in the land of Egypt, in the country of Goshen: and they had possessions therein and grew, and multiplied exceedingly.”

And Israel/Jacob hits 147 and makes Joseph promise to bury him (once he's dead of course) in his burying place, which is not in Egypt.

Genesis 43-45:Joseph's technicolor melodrama

2009-01-17T01:37:00.003Z

Chapter 43

Things are not going well for the Jacob and co.

Verse 1-2 “And the famine was sore in the land. And it came to pass, when they had eaten up the corn which they had brought out of Egypt, their father said unto them, “Go again, buy us a little food.”

Yep, famines sharpen wealth inequalities. The rich get richer and the poor get the picture...

Judah reminds Jacob of the deal with the weird guy in Egypt- no youngest son, no more food for sale.

Israel/Jacob is not happy, but Judah says he'll “be surety for him”

Israel/Jacob says oh alright, pack some gifts and twice the money [always good advice for travellers].

When they get to Joseph's, they have second thoughts

Verse 18 “And the men were afraid, because they were brought into Joseph's house: and they said, Because of the money that was returned in our sacks at the first time are we brought in: that he may seek occasion against us, and fall upon us, and take us for bondsmen, and our asses.”

Asses? Did they take the Last Exit to Sodom by mistake? Oh, donkeys, I'm with you...

Joseph tells them to chill, gives them back Simeon, asks after their (and his) dad. Joseph almost loses it when he sees Benjamin

Verse 30 “And Joseph made haste: for his bowels did yearn upon his brother: and he sought where to weep: and he entered into his chamber, and wept there.”

And goes back out and breaks bread with 'em. But...

Verse 32 “And they set on for him by himself, and for them by themselves, and for the Egyptians which did eat with him, by themselves: because the Egyptians might not eat bread with the Hebrews: for that is an abomination unto the Egyptians.”

And it's one of those mythical scenes of impossible plenty. All Pantagruel and stuff...

Chapter 44

But Joseph wants to yank their chains some more, and gets his steward to frame them by planting a silver cup in Benjamin's ass.

Verse 3 “As soon as the morning was light, the men were sent away, they and their asses.”

He chases 'em, “finds” the evidence, has wrecked 'em. Or has he? Da-da-daa-da....

Jacob's sons aren't happy Benjie's in trouble. Poetically now...

Verse 13 “Then they rent their clothes, and laded every man his ass and returned to the city.”

Judah begs for mercy and says, explains the trip back last time, the haggling. In summary- 'my dad's ancient, this'll kill him, take me instead.'

Chapter 45

Joseph can't live a lie any longer.

Verse 1 “Then Joseph could not refrain himself before all them that stood by him: and he cried. Cause every man to go out from me. And there stood no man with him, while Joseph made himself known unto his brethren.”

'Hey guys, it's me, the brother you dumped in the hole and sold into slavery. But chill, it's cool, all part of the plan.

Verse 7 “And God sent me before you to preserve you a posterity in the earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance.”

Ah, the heroic redeemer who must suffer greatly to do his job. I wonder if they'll use that archetype later on in this grotesquely over-written novel?

But hang on, this is really dodgy from a free will/determinism side of things.

Verse 9 “So now it was not you that sent me hither, but God: and he hath made me a father to Pharoah, and lord of all his house and a ruler throughout all the land of Egypt.”

Great. But if God did it, it wasn't their fault, and so why all this elaborate hoax to yank their chains and put them and Israel/Jacob through so much misery?
And if God's micromanaging, does that mean I can tell my wife that those triplets she catches me with next week aren't my fault, but the Man Upstairs? Hmm? Theodicy schmeodicy...

So anyhow, Pharaoh hears of Joseph's situation, says “bring the family and I'll make ya happy.”

So they schlepp back to Canaan, tell Jacob/Israel that the long lost son is alive and kinging.

Verse 26 “... And Jacob's heart fainted, for he believed them not.”

But he soon perks up, and then he does believe them. Aah.

Genesis 39-42: Crying Rape, Interpreting Dreams and Yanking Chains

2009-01-14T23:38:00.004Z

Chapter 39
Meanwhile, back to the kidnapped Joseph

Verse 1 “And Joseph was brought down to Egypt: and Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh,captain of the guard, an Egyptian, bought him of the hands of the Ishmeelites , which had brought him down thither”

But he has God on his side and becomes prosperous. And in true Calvinist style, other folks spot he is wealthy and therefore one of the Elect. So the guy who bought him (and this isn't transatlantic slavery, red in tooth and claw, more sort of Greco-Roman slavery. There's a difference) hands over lots of autonomy/responsibility. And you know how these things end...

Verse 7 “And it came to pass after these things, that his master's wife cast her eyes upon Jospeh: and she said, Lie with me.”

Don't do it Joseph, don't get laid where you get paid!

Verse 8 “But he refused, and said unto his master's wife. Behold, my master wotteth not what is with me in the house and he hath committed all that he hath to my hand. There is none greater in this house than I; neither hath he kept back any thing from me but thee, because thou art his wife: how then can I do this great wickendess and sin against God?”

And she persists, and he resists, and she really persists and he has to run out of the house, leaving his “garment”. And she Cries Rape, hell having no fury like a woman scorned. Oh, and she throws in some anti-Semitism, just to add to the charm of it all...

Verse 17 “And she spake unto him [hubby] according to these words, saying, The Hebrew servant, which thou hast brought unto us, came in unto me to mock me...”

Joseph gets banged up in chokey, but God is Still On His Side, and gets the chief warder on Joseph's side.

So by not screwing, Joseph gets well-Screwed, virtue being its own reward and all that...

Chapter 40
The Pharaoh bangs up his butler and baker and Joseph serves 'em. Joseph interprets their dreams. (Cue flowery stuff about vines and birds and so forth)

The butler is gonna be back in favour- Joseph asks to be remembered.

The baker is gonna hang- and Dead Men do no favours.

And so it comes to pass, but the butler forgets his mate wot he did porridge wiv. Like always.

Chapter 41
Two years go by. And Pharaoh has some weird dreams involving seven fat and thin cattle, and likewise ears of corn that no-one can interpret. But then t'butler fesses up to having forgotten that nice young Hebrew lad with the talent for dream interpretation.

Verse 14 “Then Pharaoh sent and called Joseph, and they brought him hastily out of the dungeon: and he shaved himself and changed his raiment, and came in unto Pharaoh.”

Joseph lets God take the dream interpretation credit and says

Verse 26-7 “The seven good kine are seven years: and the seven good ears are seven years: the dream is one. And the seven thin and ill favoured kine that came up after them are seven years: and the seven empty ears blasted with the east wind shall be seven years of famine.”

So unlike our current bunch of clowns, Pharaoh listens to the best scientific advice of the day and makes preparations. He appoints Joseph, who's pushing 30, as his Preparer-for-Famine-in-chief.

Verse 47 “And in the seven plenteous years the earth brought forth by handfuls. And he gathered up all the foods of the seven years which were in the land of Egypt and laid up the food in the cities: the food of the field, which was round about every city, laid he up in the same.”

Verse 49 is cute-“And Joseph gathered corn as the sand of the sea, very much, until he left numbering: for it was without number.”

Reminds me of Marvin Harris' point again- that centralised power is possible when leaders can store food. No long-term storage, no credibility as saviours from famine, no authority...

Joseph has two kids before the predicted bad years hit.

Verse 56 “And the famine was over all the face of the earth: And Joseph opened all the storehouses, and sold unto the Egyptians: and the famine waxed sore in the land of Egypt. And all countries came into Egypt to Joseph for to buy corn; because that the famine was so sore in all lands.”

Chapter 42
Jacob, peckish up north, sends his sons to buy corn, keeping his youngest Benjamin (the one he re-named despite Rebekkah dying in childbirth) at home.

They turn up in Egypt...

Verse 8 “And Joseph saw his brethren, but they knew not him.”

And accuses them of being spies. “Nah, just merchants” they say.
And Joseph creates a hostage situation, and can overhear Reuben and the others arguing, (because he has been pretending not to speak their lingo, using an interpreter subterfugily.)

Verse 24 “And he turned himself about from them, and wept: and returned to them again, and communed with them, and took from them Simeon, and bound him before their eyes.”

And Joseph sends the rest away with bags of corn and their money hidden inside, which they discover on the way back to Canaan and get weirded out by.

Verse 28 “...and their heart failed them, and they were afraid, saying on to another What is this that God hath done unto us.”

The sons explain to Jacob what's gone on, and he doesn't want to lose Benjamin too.

Verse 37 “And Reuben spake unto his father saying, Slay my two sons, if I bring him not to thee: deliver him into my hand, and I will bring him to thee again.”

But Jacob it too risk-averse...

Genesis 37-8: Beastly behaviour, onanism

2009-01-14T07:40:00.006Z

Chapter 37

Verse 1 “And Jacob dwelt in the land wherein his father was a stranger, in the land of Canaan.”

Which is pretty poetic.

But he plays favourites with his sons (“loved some more than others” as Paul Kelly sings in his wonderful mournful dirge “South of Germany").

Verse 3 “Now Israel [Jacob] loves Joseph more than all his children because he was the son of his old age: and he made him a coat of many colours.”

Ah, the technicolour yawn- sorry, overcoat....

Hated by his brothers, but seemingly oblivious (or just insufferably smug?) 17-year old Joseph makes himself even more popular by telling of dreams which are interpreted (by the others? And himself?) of them bowing down to him.

Even his dad is pissed. He tells him to flock off and tend the sheep with his other brothers in Shechem.

He goes “out of the vale of Hebron”,- and it would be nice if more people would do that- and meets a stranger (God again?) who helps him narrow his search.

They see him coming and are going to kill him and frame a “wild beast”, but are moderated by Reuben, who says “nah, get all Saddam on his ass”

Verse 22 “ And Reuben said unto them, Shed no blood but cast him into this pit that is in the wilderness and lay no hand upon him, that he might rid him out of their hands, to deliver him to his father again."

So they do it.

Verse 24 “And they took him, and cast him into a pit: and the pit was empty, there was no water in it.”

But along comes a trader with camels bearing spicery and balm and myrrh, going to carry it down to Egypt.

And brother Gilead sees a chance to make them some cash from this Ker-azy Scheme, so they sell Joseph to the Ismeelites for twenty pieces of silver.

And Reuben comes back (gone where? Like Pam Landy's sidekick at the climax of Bourne Ultimatum, his absence is unexplained and inexplicable)

Anyway,

Verse 31-2 “And they took Joseph's coat, and killed a kid of the goats, and dipped the coat in the blood: And they sent the coat of many colours, and they brought it to their father, and said This have we found: know now whether it be thy son's coat or no.”

Which is pretty damn cruel.

Jacob gets it. The language is so poetic- this is why we've plumped for the King James version, ya see...

Verse 33 “And he knew it, and said It is my son's coat an evil beast hath devoured him: Joseph is without doubt rent in pieces. And Jacob rent his clothes and put sackcloth upon his loins, and mourned his son many days.”

Australians of a certain age will be thinking Azaria Chamberlain. Readers of Barbara Ehrenreich's “Blood Rites” will be going “aha”.

Blood Rites

And Joseph has to learn to walk like an Egyptian.

Chapter 38
Erm, on that cliff hanger, they decide to go for a (comic?) interlude. Nice sense of pacing. No, but seriously, this seems to be an utterly interpolated chapter.

So Judah knocks up a woman called Shuah. It's a shuah thing.

And she has a son named, er... Sorry “Er.” No, really.

And she has another son named... drumroll please... Onan. Some of you will see where this is coming... I mean, going.

And a third son called Shelah. I hope you're taking notes, there's going to be a short quiz next period...

So Judah gets Er a wife, called Tamar.

But there is trouble ahead...

Verse 7 “And Er, Judah's first born, was wicked in the sight of the LORD, and the LORD slew him.”

Which puts Judah's plans for a big family back a bit.

Verse 8 “And Judah said unto Onan, Go in unto thy brother's wife, and marry her and raise up seed to thy brother.”

The order seems to be confused here- 'start shagging her, marry her, ejaculate in her'. That's one long public shag. I don't think you'd find a registrant willing to marry a couple coupling...

(Yes, I know the third bit means 'raise the kids as if they were Er's, but that's not nearly as funny.)

Verse 9 “And Onan knew that the seed should not be his: and it came to pass when he went inn unto his brother's wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother.”

So Onanism, as many a pedant will have pointed out is not a five knuckle shuffle/taking Captain Picard to warp speed/burping the worm/a menage a moi/making love to Mrs Palmer and her five daughters etc. It is coitus interruptus.

And God doesn't like disobedience.

Verse 10 "And the thing which he did displeased the LORD: wherefore he slew him also."

That's my God! Forgiving and compassionate, oh yes.

Tamar, the unimpregnated wife gets told to cool her heels till her brother-in-law (the living one) is grown.

Verse 12 “And in the process of time the daughter of Shuah Judah's wife died, and Judah was comforted and went up to his sheepbearers to Timnath, he and his friend Hirah the Adullamite.”

So, close family then...

So Tamar puts on a veil and plays the harlot.

Judah, not knowing who she is says “How much for t'business?”

And she says not just a baby goat but the following as a surety...

Verse 18 “...Thy signet and thy bracelets and thy staff that is in thine hand.” And he gave it her, and came in unto her, and she conceived by him”

No safe sex there then. But Judah completes what sons Er and Onan didn't. Has anyone thought of this as an Eastenders plot? Or maybe for the Bold and the Beautiful??

Judah tries to get his stuff back, but the harlot is vanished... And he says “better keep schtum in case anyone finds out I've been kerb-crawling.

Verse 24 “And it came to pass about three months after, that it was told Judah , saying Tamar thy daughter in law hath played the harlot: and also, behold, she is with child by whoredom. And Judah said Bring her forth, and let her be burnt.”

At which point Tamar brings out the signet and bracelets. And one of Judah's staffs. He still had another, which had gotten him into this mess...

And Judah goes “Yup, my bad. I shoulda had my third son, Shelah, schtupp her.”

“And he knew her no more.” That's not agnosia following a stroke, that's “knew” as in “shagged.”

So after Er and Onan and finally Judah, Tamar gets her reward- twins.

Verse 28-9 “And it came to pass, when she travailed, that the one put out his hand and the midwife took and bound upon his hand a scarlet thread, saying This came out first. And it came to pass, as he drew back his hand, that, behold, his brother came out: and she said How has thou broken forth? This breach be upon thee; therefore his name was called Pharez."

Make a good write up as a case study in the Babylonian Medical Journal...

Scarlet thread boy gets called Zarah, but who was first??

So, more using women's bodies without their consent and weird family dynamics. That's Genesis all over.... Family values? You're having a laugh...

Genesis 35-36: no outstanding acts of depravity this time

2009-01-12T23:37:00.003Z

Chapters 35

Monotheism versus polytheism- God tells Jacob to go to Bethel and Him an altar. Jacob tells his family to leave their phony gods behind.

God lays down some suppressing fire

Verse 5 “And they journeyed: and the terror of God was upon the cities that were round about them, and they did not pursue after the sons of Jacob.”

Rebekkah dies in new labour and Jacob can't even be bothered to honour her dying act of naming the kid... You can say I'm applying today's values, but misogyny is misogyny, whenever.

But Jacob is now finally rebranded Israel, by the Big Bearded PR Man in the Sky.

Anyway, son Reuben "lay with" (shagged) one of his dad Jacob's concubines (Billah). So it goes.

And we get a list of Jacob/Israel's sons, but not daughters, who are worth nuffink, it seems.

Jacob/Israel meets up with pa Isaac, a mere 180 years old. The meeting is brief.

Verse 29 “And Isaac gave up the ghost, and died, and was gathered unto his people being old and full of days: and his sons Esau and Jacob buried him.”

Chapter 36

A little of the family tree of Esau
[I looked up my family tree once, and found I was the sap]

And he and Jacob split

Verse 7 “For their riches were more than that they might dwell together : and the land wherein they were strangers could not bear them because of their cattle.”

[Normally I'd toss off some glib eco-comment about carrying capacity, but I read an article by Adrian Wilding called “Ideas for a Critical Theory of Nature” in Capitalism Nature Socialism Dec 2008 the other day. And there was a footnote to an intriguing sounding article by on Nathan Sayre, “The Genesis [ho ho], History and Limits of Carrying-Capacity” in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers Vol. 98, No 1, 2008 pp. 120-134. I will let you know what it says and if it's, IMHO, any good..]

And there's some begatting and “duke”-ing and a little bit of smiting and the eyes run down the page like two egg yolks in a tipping saucepan.

But hark, a name! In Verse 39 we have “and Hadar reigned in his stead, and the name of his city was Paul and his wife's name was Mehetabel.”

Geddit? Archy and Mehitabel? Don Marquis? One was the cockroach (Archy I think) and the other the cat. They're really funny books!

And more duking, which suits me fine, since it's late and a school night...

Genesis 25-33: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob

2009-01-11T22:14:00.007Z

Despite his advanced age, Abraham somehow manages to remarry after the death of Sarah, and fathers yet more children (as if the first two hadn't resulted in enough troubles). Fortunately - since there's quite enough internecine bloodshed in this book as it is - they seem to be happy enough to be sent away with 'gifts' on Abraham's death, as befits the sons of a mere concubine.
Ishmael also dies at a great age, bestowing on us the phrase "gave up the ghost" (Ch 25 v 17).
There is also a certain sense of repetition in many of the themes. Rebekah, like her mother-in-law, proves to be barren, necessitating more prayer from Isaac before the Lord relents and 'opens her womb' (interesting how the bodies of women are such potent tools of men's relationships with their God, despite the fact that many of the women concered don't even seem to believe in the same deity. In a similar manner to Robert Graves' interpretation of way in which different versions of the Greek Myths reflect the shift of power from women to men in Bronze and Iron Age societies, could all of this be a reflection of the declining power of female deities in the region and concomitantly of women in increasingly patriarchal societies?)

So, despite her initial barrenness, Rebekah conceives, accompanied by predictions of yet more familial strife:

"And the LORD said unto her, Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels; and the one people shall be stronger than the other people; and the elder shall serve the younger" (Ch 25 v23)

And this prediction is brought about by the younger - Jacob - very sneakily cheating his starving brother out of his birthright in exchange for "a pottage of lentiles" (actually I'm not convinced that this is such a bad deal, if you've got a really good lentil soup recipe).
In yet another sense of deja vue, Isaac imitates his father's weird shenanigans by telling poor old Abimelech, King of the Philistines, that Rebekah is his sister not his wife, again apparently in fear that having a good-looking wife will get you killed. This is despite the fact that Abimelech proved himself perfectly honourable last time, and does so again, although he must be getting pretty confused about hsi repeated bizarre guests who go around apparently getting jiggy with their sisters.
Unsurprisingly, relations with the Philistines start to deteriorate somewhat, although the whole weird sister/wife thing is just a sideline to the growing economic (read: sheep) power of Isaac. In yet another disturbing precursor to modern strife in the region, Isaac and the Philistines get aggro over water supplies, with some proper conflict (Ch 26 v16-22) and a bit of extra well-digging and negotiation, leading to the establishment of the modern city of Beersheba.
Having cheated him of his birthright, Jacob and Rebekah now collude to make sure that when Isaac is dying, Esau is also deprived of his father's blessing. This is achieved by Jacob dressing up in the skins of a couple of young goats, which just goes to show the amount of blood and killing that goes into keeping these internecine conflicts going, and even the poor livestock get hauled into it all.
And, just so that history can repeat itself yet again, Jacob gets sent away to marry "outside the land of Canaan" (more exogamy), as Rebekah and Isaac have already been angered by Esau marrying some local Hittite girls:

"34 And Esau was forty years old when he took to wife Judith the duaghter of Beeri the Hittite, and Bashemath the daughter of Elon the Hittite:
35 Which were a grief of mind unto Isaac and to Rebekah."

In order to find a wife from outside Canaan (but not very exogamous - he's gone to find his uncle Laban to marry one of his daughters), Jacob heads off to Haran, now in modern Turkey. He falls sufficiently madly in love with Rachel, Laban's second daughter, that he's prepared to work for seven years to earn her, and is therefore somewhat understandably miffed when he gets given Leah, Rachel's older sister, instead. As usual, Laban is calling the shots and the women aren't obviously getting much of a look-in here (however, as I'll be writing about later, we could put some of this down to the male authors, not entirely to events themselves, and there are some attractive literary alternative versions of this story.)
But to stick to official version for the moment, once Jacob has done two lots of seven years labour in return for Rachel, she turns out to be barren as well:

"And when the LORD saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb: but Rachel was barren."

I'm not sure if this is supposed to be the LORD giving Leah some kind of consolation for the fact that she's stuck with a husband who's doing nothing to hide the fact that his is profoundly dischuffed to be married to her, or if he's just playing more nasty games with women's bodies. I have my suspicions.
In an attempt to address the fact that Leah has stopped bearing children (after four, which seems reasonable enough) and that Rachel's not having any at all, Jacob now also gets to sleep with Bilhah and Zilpah, Rachel and Leah's handmaids respectively. So yes, once again, the slavegirls get shagged, presumably without anyone asking their opinion on the matter. And have we learnt from all the bitterness and jealousy and people getting slung out into the desert that we saw with Sarah and Hagar and Ishmael? No we haven't. And, as with Sarah, Rachel finally gets pregnant after all that anyway and produces two sons to get all jealous and internecine with Leah's six and the several that the slave women have had forced on them too.
After all that, you'd think that Laban might actually be quite glad of the peace and quiet of a smaller family, but Jacob feels compelled to sneak off with large numbers of sheep and goats which he has legitimately earned. A bigger deal seems to be the fact that Rachel secretes the household gods in with the packing too, pretending to be menstruating when Laban asks where they are, which implies that there is still little unanimity on the subject of the LORD, God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob but not apparently of their wives and other relatives.
However, on the way Jacob wrestles with a mysterious figure who might indeed be God himself and who renames Jacob Israel, just as he's about the cross over the Jordan River back into Canaan. This is a key moment in the consolidation of both a religious and ethnic identity amongst this branch of the descendants of Abraham. And, despite his general sneakiness a couple of decades before, Jacob finally comes home to Canaan to a warm and generous welcome from his brother Esau.

Tidying up the bookshelves...

2009-01-11T15:13:00.003Z

apart from being a good way to get rid of dust and cat-hair residues (wow, I am such a skanky housekeeper) is also a great way to be reminded of books you forgot you had.
So, I now have an excuse to include in here the first verses of a poem I've always loved, since before I had the faintest idea what he was going on about (I'm not guaranteeing that that bit's changed).
Franci Thompson was a "Victorian mystic... who trained as a priest but was found to have no vocation" and died in 1907, a poverty-stricken opium addict. The Hound of Heaven seems to me terribly evocative of both the sense of feeling that there is some kind of God out there, but being unable to come to personal and psychological terms with that feeling and its meanings, and also of the kind of terrible and vengeful God we seem to have been reading about in the Old Testament so far:

"I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I feld Him, down the arches of the years;
I feld him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated, Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbed pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy.
They beat - and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet -
'All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.'"

(The Hound of Heaven, Francis Thompson, Phoenix Paperbacks)

Genesis 32-4: The usual rape and pillage.

2009-01-11T13:05:00.002Z

Chapter 32

Jacob wants to head home, but is worried Esau is still sore [Ed: you've used this one before]
Jacob reminds God of His promises of safety, sends a big fat bribe

Verse 24-5 “Two hundred she goats, and twenty he goats, two hundred ewes, and twenty rams. Thirty milch camels with their colts, forty kine, and ten bulls, twenty she asses, and ten foals”. And a partridge in a pear tree.

And Jacob sends his two wives and two womenservants and eleven sons (the daughters aren't mentioned) over some ford and is All Alone.

And Jacob does some Greco-Roman wrestling (alright, that's anachronistic) with an evenly matched stranger. It's a stalemate until Jacob blesses the guy, who says “Now you're called Israel”

Verse 28 “... for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men and hast prevailed.”

Anyhow, because these two were touching each other up at the hollow of the thigh, this is why

Verse 22 “Therefore the children of Israel eat not of the sinew which shrank which is upon the hollow of the thigh, unto this day: because he touched the hollow of Jacob's thigh in the sinew that shrank.”

[Of course, for the really loopy dietary restrictions, wait till Leviticus, some time in February]

Chapter 33

Esau ain't sore [Ed: what did I just tell you? You're fired] and

Verse 4 “And Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him and fell on his neck and kissed him: and they wept.”

He tells Jacob/Israel to keep his prezzies. “No, I insist.” says Jake.

Esau heads home,leaving some of his flock. Jacob heads of to “Succoth” and builds himself a house, then to Shalem where he buys some land and builds an altar.
Doesn't he worry about all the work he is creating for Biblical scholars and archeologists? His carbon dating footprint must be massive!

Chapter 34

Dinah, Leah's daughter went out to see the daughters of the land.

Verse 2 “And when Shechem the son of Hamor the Hivite, prince of the country, saw here, he took her, and lay with her, and he defiled her.”

Not clear if she's a willing participant (see this great column by Dan Savage about rape), but he loves her and wants her as a wife. So his dad Hamor meets Jacob and asks for her hand (well, all of her actually) in marriage for his son. And wider than this-

Verse 9 “And make ye marriages with us, and give your daughters unto us, and take our daughters unto you. And ye shall dwell with us: and the land shall be before you: dwell and trade ye therein, and get you possessions therein.”

So, straightforward exchange-of-women-as-foundations-of-civilisation stuff. Stops you from splashing around in the shallow end of the gene pool.

No can do, says Jacob's lot, cos you have foreskins, and our kinship possibilities are quite circum... scribed.

So these clowns have a big spokescouncil/Samoan circle

Verse 20 “And Hamor and Schehem his son came unto the gate of their city, and communed ith the men of their city, saying..."

Jacob and his lot are so worth having around that (male readers of a nervous disposition may want to look away now. Everyone will unconsciously cross their legs...

Verse 24 “And unto Hamor and unto Shechem his son hearkened all that went out of the gate of his cityl and every male was circumcised, all that went out of the gate of his city.”

And you feel like yelling out, “It's a trick, don't do it”, like in a horror movie “Don't go down there!!”

And sure enough

Verse 25 “And it came to pass on the third day, when they were sore, that two of the sons of Jacob, Simeon and Levi, Dinah's brethren, took each man his sword, and came upon the city boldl, and slew all the males.”

It's nice to know that such barbaric collective punishment isn't done anymore by soi-disant Chosen People of God. Oh, wait....

Anyhow, they go on a looting binge

Verse 28 “They took their sheep, and their oxen, and their asses, and that which was in the city ,and that which was in the field. And all their wealth, and all their little ones, and their wives took they captive, and spoiled even all that was in the house.”

Because two wrongs make a right, you see.

And Jacob worries about the perception management dilemma they know face

Verse 30 “...You have troubled me to make me stink among the inhabitants of the land, among the Canaanites and the Perizzites, and I being few in number, they shall gather themselves together against me and slay me: and I shall be destroy, I and my house.”

“WTF, pa” say Simeon and Levy;

Verse 31 “Should he deal with our sister as with a harlot?”

Genesis 30 to 31: Handmaids, Catfights and Good Fences

2009-01-10T21:43:00.005Z

Genesis 30

Catfight between the sisters! Rachel, the one Jacob wanted from the get go, can't get going with the pregnancy thing.

Verse 3 “And she said, Behold my maid Billah, go in unto her,and she shall bear upon my knees that I may also have children by her.”

Yup, I remember Faye Dunaway lying down so Robert Duvall could schtupp Natasha Richardson in the film of The Handmaid's Tale , which was nowhere near as good as Margaret Atwood's book.

So, there's a lot of boring bearing, as Rachel and Leah compete for Jacob's favours.

And Reuben (Leah's oldest) went

Verse 14-5 “in the days of wheat harvest, and found mandrakes in the field, and brought them unto his mother Leah. Then Rachel said to Leah, Give me I pray thee, of thy son's mandrakes.
And she said unto her. Is it a small matter that thou hast taken my husband? And wouldest thou take away my son's mandrakes also? And Rachel said, Therefore he [Jacob] shall lie with thee to night for thy son's mandrakes.”

The pimping backfires, cos somehow Leah goes from post-menopausal to spitting out MORE brats. Then God, who seems forgetful (huh?)

Verse 22 “And God remembered Rachel, and God hearkened to her, and opened her womb.”

And she spits out Joseph

And Jacob wants to leave his host (Crikey, it must have been at least 20 years, and you'd think Laban would be glad to see the back of him). But no, they haggle and in lieu of a severance payment for work rendered, Jacob says

Verse 32 “I will pass through all thy flock to day, removing from thene all the speckled and spotted cattle, and all the brown cattle among the sheep, and the spotted and speckled among the goatts: and of such shall be my hire.”

And Jacob has some sneaky selective breeding/genetic engineering scam afoot, involving rods of green poplar etc, and ends up with a bigger stronger load of animals than Laban.

A fine way to repay Laban for his hospitality. These Old Testament blighters aren't very Christian...

Genesis 31

Laban ain't happy. Jacob tells his wives Rachel and Leah “your ded ripped me off for wages.”
This is why you need to be in a union.

Anyway, Rachel and Leah leg it with Jacob.

Verse 19 “And Laban went to shear his sheep: and Rachel had stolen the images that were her father's.”

So there's a hot pursuit (a sheep chase rather than a car chase?)

Verse 25 “And then he took his brethren with him, and pursued him seven days' journey: and they overtook him in the mount Gilead.”

God does a cameo in one of Laban's dreams, telling him to play nice or else.

Laban tells Jacob that he is protected, but that he wants his gods (i.e. the images Rachel half-inched), back. Jacob doesn't know Rachel did this. Laban looks everywhere, but Rachel is sitting on them, and says she's on the blob.

Verse 35 “And she said to her farther, Let it not displease my lord that Icannot rise up before thee; for the custom of women is upon me. And he searched but found nto the images.”

Jacob gets angry and “chode” with Laban.

Verse 37 “Whereas thou hast searched all my stuff, what hast though found of all thy household stuff?"

So they argue some more, pile some stones like a cairn and from what I can gather agree that that is the boundary between them, but if Jacob beats Leah or Rachel or takes more wives There Will Be Trouble, God or no God.

You know what they say- good fences make good neighbours... Presumably all this obsessing about whose sheep is whose and where boundaries between tribes will be is a reflection of the shrinking wilderness as populations increased and/or environmental degradation kicked in? Dunno.

Genesis 27- 29: The Soap Opera continues.

2009-01-10T20:49:00.004Z

Genesis 27

Isaac is counting the days, wants some venison, which is quite dear.

[What do you call Bambi with his eyes poked out? No idea. What do you call Bambi with his eyes poked out and his legs chopped off? Still no idea.]

Esau heads off to get some while his mum, Rebekkah, overhearing, decides to play favourites.

She gets Jacob into drag (he ain't hairy, he's Esau's brother) and he feeds Isaac, pretending to be Esau. Isaac supplies an apparently non-revocable and Once Only blessing on Jacob.

Esau was mighty sore he saw what Jacob had done.

Er, is this a repeat of the Cain and Abel thing, with the honest horny handed son of soil being shafted by the untrustworthy “knowledge worker”

Anyhow, this is another of those iconic stories that I used to hear in my youth, that used to be part of our collective heritage (I shan't say memepool ) that seems to be fading? Or was it ever thus? How would you prove it?

Rebekkah tells Jacob to get the fuck outa Compton

Verse43-4 “Now, therefore, my son, obey my voice: and arise, flee thou to Laban my brother to Haran. And tarry with him a few days, until thy borther's fury turns away.”

A few days?? I thought the pre-TV version of human was abel to hold a grudge a bit longer than that!

Chapter 28

At Rebekkah's inistence, Isaac tells Jacob that he can't have a wife from Canaan, and that he should head off to Padan-aram. Esau takes some wives also not from Canaan to keep on his dad's good side (Stockholm syndrome is my diagnosis).

Jacob has his dream, the one with the ladder.

Verses 13-14 “And behold, the LORD stood above it and said I am the LORD God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest to thee will I give it, and to thy see:
And thy seed shall be s the dust of the earth and though shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: an d in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.”

Oh dear. The hallucination of a Bearded Sky Man telling you everything you see is yours is no basis for territorial claims in the 21^st century. Grow up.

Jacob wakes up, presumably has the three eshes, then finds some sheep and a stone and a well.

Chapter 29

Jacob hooks up with his mum's family, and fancies Rachel the daughter of Laban his mother's brother. (So, er, his cousin)

Verse 11 “And Jacob kissed Rachel, and lifted up his voice and wept.”

Jacob, who don't forget has had to leg it cos brother Esau Wants Him Dead, then sticks around for seven years in order to marry Rachel who was “beautiful and well favoured.” I am under strict instructions from t'wife not to speculate that well-favoured might be a euphemism for incapable-of-breaking-her-nose-if-she-fell-forwards...

But come the big day, seven years later, Laban does a bait and switch on Jacob.

Verse 23 "And it came to pass, that in the evening, that he took Leah his daughter, and brought her into him; and he went in unto her."

Jacob is peeved, Laban says

Verse 26 “...It must not be so done in our country, to give the younger before the first born.”

Gee, you think Laban would have explained that at some point in the last seven years, or found someone to take Leah off his hands. She probably had a lovely personality.

So another seven years until he can get his, er, hands, on Rachel. Who God makes barren.

As philosophy prof John Clark says “If you just keep in mind God was a Jewish comedian it all makes perfect sense.”

Anyhow, Leah pops out four of the little brats- Reuben, Simeon, Levi and Judah.

People ask me if I like children, and my standard response is “Yeah, but I couldn't eat a whole one.”

Genesis 25 and 26- Abraham dies, famines, water sports, in-law trouble

2009-01-07T23:00:00.004Z

Apologies for getting the chapters muddled. Must Be More Careful...

Chapter 25

Abraham takes another wife, and shagged some concubines. Isaac stays his favourite-

Verse 6 “Unto the sons of the concubines which Abraham had, Abraham gave gifts, and sent them away from Isaac his son, while he yet lived, eastward unto the east country.”

And then Abraham “gives up the ghost” aged 185. Isaac and Ishmael (Hagar's kid) bury him.

A modicum of begatting.

Rebekah gets up the duff with some IVF (Invisible Vengifier Fertilisation) but “her children struggled within her.”

“Whassup with this kicking, God?” she asks.

Verse 23 “And the LORD said unto her, “Two nations are in thy womb and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels; and the one people shall be stronger than the other people and the elder shall serve the younger.”

There may be trouble ahead...

Out pops red and hairy Esau, and from the description he's a bit like Groundskeeper Willie
Out pops Jacob “and his hand took hold on Esau's heel.”

Esau was a cunning hunter (or, as the spoonerism would have it, a German Casanova?)

Jacob was a “plain man” and dwelling intense. Or in tents.

Verse 28-34 "Isaac loved Esau because he did eat of his venison: but Rebekah loved Jacob.
And Jacob sod pottage: and Esau came from the field, and he was faint:
And Esau said to Jacob, Fee me I pray thee, with that same red pottage; for I am faint: therefore his name called Edom.
And Jacob said, Sell me this day thy birthright
And Esau said, “Behold I am at the point to die; and what profit shall this birthright do to me.
And Jacob said Swear to me this day: and eh sware unto him, and he sold his birthright unto Jacob [for a mess of pottage]."

So, Jacob is a capitalist scumbag, waiting till the poor are desperate in order to hoover up their assets. (cf famines)

Chapter 26

There's a famine, Isaac is going to emigrate to Egypt, but God tells him to stay put.

Then Isaac passes his wife Rebekah off as his sister. (Just Like His Dad...)

But then the local king, Abimelech (the same as with Abraham? We're not told) is sitting in his palace one day...

Verse 8 “And it came to pass when he had been there a long time, that Abimelech king of the Philistines looked out at a window, and saw, and, behold, Isaac was sporting with Rebekah his wife.”

I wonder if Isaac's defense to shagging his “sister” will be “no, it's ok, she's my wife”, a la Abraham?.... Yep, history repeats. Abimelech lets him off, shouts out a “don't fuck Rebekah” law and

Verse 12 “Then Isaac sowed in that land, and received in the same year an hundred fold: and the LORD blessed him.”

Hmm, returns like that would make even the most trusting investor wondering if this was a Ponzi scheme...

Isaac gets rich and the king says “Go from us for thou art much mightier than we.”

So Isaac leaves and there are some water wars between his lot and the herdsmen of Gerar.

But Abimelech sees God is on Isaac's side and wisely makes peace, and so doesn't get smited (smote?)... yet.

And Esau, purveyor of birthrights, makes a match his parents disapprove of.

Verse 34 “Judith the daughter of Beeri the Hittite and Bashemath the daughter of Elon the Hittite. Which were a grief of mind unto Isaac and to Rebekkah.”

It seems the parents-in-law aren't going to Hittite off...

Genesis 22 to 24: death, marriage and sacrifice

2009-01-07T20:30:00.017Z

Chapter 22, in which Isaac nearly gets sacrificed. Given this rather unpleasant and bloody scene (at least for the Ram, and probably fairly traumatic for the kid too), it seems somewhat appropriate that at least some Jewish and Muslim traditions place the situation of the near-sacrifice as the top of Mount Moriah in Jerusalem and therefore one of the sites within the much-disputed Temple Mount. It seems a fitting start for this extraordinarily beautiful and disturbed city.
Other scholars put the site of the sacrifice at Moreh, near Nablus (Biblical Shechem), another beautiful and bloody city where the Israeli army spends a fair amount of its time executing people and stifling the economy with checkpoints, when they're not committing mass butchery in Gaza.
A brief outline of the reasons behind the various theories can be found here.
Immediately following God's intervention in the sacrifice of Issac, Sarah dies. It's not made clear if the two incidents are related... but she is buried in Hebron, at what becomes the Tomb of the Patriarchs or the Cave of the Double Tombs. This is said to be the site of the burials of Adam and Eve (although some traditions put Adam in Jerusalem, under the site of Golgotha), Abraham alongside Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah and Jacob and Leah. It is, like so mnay of the ancient sites in Palestine, Israel and surrounding countries, tremendouly sacred to Jews, Muslims and Christians, and has therefore of course been the object of innumerable battles for ownership, including capture by Saladin from the Crusaders and a massacre of 67 members of the local Jewish community in 1929. The current uneasy situation is that the building is divided into two, one section each for Jews and Muslims. All visitors, including the very, very occasional tourist, have to pass through a number of security gates and checks, staffed by Israeli military.

In February 1994 the Tomb was the site of a massacre by a right-wing Zionist settler from the (frankly rabid) community which has established itself in Hebron, where local Palestinians are regularly physically attacked and have rubbish and toilet water poured onto them and their market by settlers who have occupied the upper floors of their buildings. Baruch Goldstein, an off-duty Israeli army reservist from Brooklyn, entered the mosque side of the Tomb during Friday prayers and shot dead between 29 (from Israeli accounts) and 52 Palestinians, wounding 150 more. He is now venerated by some right-wing Israeli settler groups and political parties as a hero.
In chapter 25 Abraham orders Isaac to find a wife from outside the land of Canaan; this is ringing major bells from the compulsory course on kinship I had to do as part of my social anthropology degree. This is exogamy, marriage outside the group, a practice which is attributed to many needs from the genetic (bringing new genes to maintain diversity and prevent hereditary diseases) to the political (marrying into new families, dynasties etc to form alliances which might be useful in power struggles, times of economic need and so on. Early Twentieth century anthropologists used to spend entire careers drawing complicated diagrams and classifying entire societies according to who they allowed to marry whom.

In pleasant contrast to much of Genesis so far, the resulting bride, Rebekah, is selected on the basis of her kindness and generosity, qualities notably lacking in some of the family she's marrying into. Although maybe it's only the ladies who are supposed to be nice to people. In any case, much of Chapter 25 (perhaps verses 8-32 and 43-46), though repetitive, has a serenely poetic quality, talking about the camels which the messenger of Abraham brings with him and the water which Rebekah fetches for them - a reminder of the complete necessity of water to the desert and arid-country societies amongst which the Bible is set.
Interestingly, given the alarm which Muslim veiling seems to inspire in the modern age, Rebekah's response to seeing the man she is going to marry is:

"she took a vail, and covered herself."

There is something calm and dignified in Rebekah's choice and her stately generosity that is a welcome antidote to the bloodshed and bitterness of the Flood, Cain and Abel, Lot and the destruction of the Cities of the Plain, the Tower of Babel, and Abraham and Sarah's exploitation of Hagar.

Genesis 23 and 24- Sarah snuffs it, Isaac gets a wife

2009-01-06T22:36:00.005Z

Chapter 23

Sarah is cruelly snatched in the first flush of youth, a mere 127.
Abraham insists on paying the local yokels for a decent burial site, haggling them upwards from nothing to 400 smackeroos.. Why she(ke)lling out was so important, symbolically, I dunno (or care).

Chapter 24

Abraham sends his top servant on a mission- to find a wife of suitable ethnicity for his son, Isaac. (the locals are OK, but you wouldn't want one for a daughter-in-law, apparently).

[Silly butler joke: “My sister has a butler who is missing his left arm. Serves her right.”]

It's not reported what sort of counselling Isaac received to help him over the trauma of his dad almost chopping his head off.

So the servant (un-named)

Verse 10 "...arose and went to Mesopotamia, unto the city of Nahor."

There he performs a Camel test.

Verse 14 "And let it come to pass, that the damsel to whom I shall say, Let down thy pitcher, I pray thee, that I may drink; and she shall say, Drink, and I will give they camels drink also; let the same be she that thou hast appointed for thy servant Isac: and thereby shall I know that thou hast shewed kindness unto my master."

Anyway, some wee virginal lass called Rebekah rocks up and blow me if she hasn't gone and

verse 18-9 "said, Drink, my lord: annd she hasted, and let down her pitcher upon her hand, and gave him drink. And when she had done giving him drink, she said, I will draw water for thy camels also, until they have done drinking."

Now, that's a big favour, cos camels can drink a LOT (check how much here)

So, this Rebekah bint; you can be sure the kids she spits out are yours. She is self-effacing and works hard to meet your desires. What more could a real man (not one of these namby-pamby Politically Correct eunuchs) want in a help-meet?

So there's some repetition, as per an oral poem written down. But basically the servant and Rebekah's brother, Laban, agree to her future. After she is asked "Wilt thou go with this man?" (it's unclear whether her answer matters or is just a formality) the servant and Rebekah and their retinues head off to where Isaac is waiting, presumably with a raging case of blue balls.

Verse 67 "And Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah's tent and took Rebekah and she became his wife and he loved her and Isac was comforted after his mother's death."

Relationships on the rebound rarely work out. As for Isaac, I reckon 'e'd 'a pulled any warm body, no need to send off to Egypt.

Oh, and "took"? Are we going to need a tag "euphemism for (forced) sex"?

Genesis 7-21: women get a raw deal

2009-01-05T22:22:00.010Z

Yes, I know this may be a bit of a recurring theme, but it does stand out quite remarkably here. Perhaps because I've been slacking a bit so I'm having to have a catch-up session, reading 3 days' worth of chapters in one go.
So, from chapters seven to nine we have the Flood, Noah and the aftermath of these events. The Flood and Noah's Ark are another of those iconic tales, with references to one bit or another appearing throughout popular culture. I also remember a particularly bizarre pseudo-archaeology documentary, screened years ago, which featured some weirdos running around Mount Ararat in Turkey, finding a big stone shape (metamorphic in sedimentary rock, perhaps?) which they'd managed to convince themselves was the petrified remains of the Ark, where it settled on the mountain. There seem to be quite a lot of people doing this sort of thing, like these and these.
Whatever.
I think the dove which Noah sends out from the Ark to find land, and which returns from its second journey with an olive leaf in its bill, is the first reference to olives in connection with peace. Ironic, given the habit of Israeli settlers and soldiers of cutting down and mutilating Palestinian olive trees. Fortunately there are also some great organisations replanting them...
But apparently its ok because God again confirms that man gets to be boss of everything, which is just such a depressing prospect anyway:

"Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things."

As well as being speciesist, we also of course get into some nice stuff which in millenia to come will get used as textual justification for slavery, since apparently Ham getting a full-frontal of Daddy warrants his hapless sons getting used as servants by their cousins from time immemorial.
Although amidst all this rather depressing and disturbing stuff, we at least get some wonderfully resonant and mellifluous placenames to conjure with: Nineveh, Rehoboth, Sidon.
And, of course, the name Gaza makes its first appearance. Which seems apt, what with the origins of so much racism, bloodshed, prejudice, violence and racially justified land grabbing apparently being laid down on these very pages. And meanwhile in the modern world... racism, bloodshed, prejudice etc etc etc. The Israeli army is busy butchering woman and children in Gaza as I write, ambulance medics are apparently fair game in Jabaliya, and the spineless bastards at places like CNN and the BBC continue to peddle Israeli propaganda under the title of news.

Oddly, in the middle of all the Biblical violence and general badness, the Tower of Babel, another of those highly resonant phrases, only actually gets a couple of lines in Ch10, verses 7-9:

"7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of the earth: and they left off to build the city.
9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there counfound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroard upon the face of all the earth."

After this, we get onto Abraham, Sarah, Lot and some other big Biblical names. In Chapters 12 and 20 Abraham seems to hand his wife over - ie not once but twice - to various kings, because he's afraid that he's going to get killed so that they can kidnap her. There seems to be little indication of how Sarai feels about being farmed out to strange men at the drop of a hat, but Abraham seems to do quite well out of it on the sheep, cattle, gold and silver front.
Hagar, Sarai/Sarah's servant, also comes out pretty badly. She also gets handed over to a random male - in this case, Abraham himself - in order to bear Sarai a child, but then the mistress changes her mind and Hagar ultimately gets turfed out into the desert. Being a slave (presumably therefore a descendent of Ham?) she doesn't get asked if she wants to be knocked up by the geriatric Abraham. And, again, given that we are dealing with the stories which establish the concept of God's Chosen People as being superior to anyone else, it is unpleasantly prophetic that Ishmael, viewed by some traditions as the father of the Arab peoples, is descibed as dwelling "in the presence of all his brethren" and yet as an outcast and a 'wild man.'
The wonderful novelist and short story writer Sara Maitland has a deeply moving and disturbing short story called Triptych in the Book of Spells collection. It tells the tale of Genesis 16-21, first from the perspective of the abused Hagar, then from a bitter and miserable Sarah, and then it refuses to tell it from Abraham's perspective since, since, as she notes, "almost everyone knows it already." And, as she observes:

"Father Abraham is, frankly, a real bastard. Among other things, he lives off his wife's immoral earnings (cf Capter 12 verses 10-20 et al), he is prepared to bump off his suposedly beloved son in order to please his boss and gain material advantages (Chapter 22). He is almost certainly insane and demonstrably selfish, autocratic, lecherous, cowardly, violent and megalomaniacal. all of these things are renamed 'virtue.' This is called Patriarchy."

Maitland's writing on the women in the story is much more uplifting, in a beautiful and savage kind of way that is typical of her best writing:

"To understand all is to forgive all. And I do not want to forgive. I cannot forgive. I am Hagar who is driven into the desert. I am Sarah who betrays her friend. This nasty cynicism which destroys joy, hope, transformation, magic, truth, love, it is still necessary, still - as always - a useful mutation, an adaptation vital to the survival of the species. As we dance, dance on the hot sands and rejoice, as we laugh, laugh in the cool tents and weep, we must remember and give thanks for that too, alas."

And in between the various stories of Abraham's efforts to breed, we also have the story of destruction of Sodom and Gomarrah, and the turning of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt in Ch19, v26:

"But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt."

This particular incident follows the destruction of the Cities of the Plain, due to the wickedness of their inhabitants. It's likely that this does actually record some kind of seismic event - the Dead Sea is the northernmost end of the Great Rift Valley and therefore a volcanically active area, and naturally-occurring bitumen was exported from the area from hundreds, or thousands, of years BCE. This is also evidence of thousands of graves at the southern end of the Dead Sea, some of which have been revealed by the shrinkage of the Sea due to Jordan River water being drawn off for Israeli and Jordanian agriculture, and it's thought that these graves date back to Biblical times and the era of the Cities of the Plain.
The wickedness of the inhabitants of these Cities (including some homosexual activity, what the Bible being so liberal on sexual preferences and all that) is contrasted with Lot's virtue, which is apparently demonstrated by the fact that he's willing to hand his virgin daughters over to a baying mob to:

"do ye to them as is good in your eyes,"

just so long as they don't lay a finger on his two male guests.
Great.
I really didn't start reading this version of the Bible seeking to be hostile. I'm busy telling myself that somewhere ahead we've got Ruth and Naomi and Boaz demonstrating some kindness and generosity, and Esther showing that women can be brave and intelligent. But really, I'm not doing so well here on finding much that's admirable or virtuous in the lives of the patriarchs.

Genesis 19 to 23- Attempted gang rape, nukes, incest, wife-swapping, conspiracy to child murder.

2009-01-05T21:32:00.008Z

Before we get going, an observation. I knew that this “Bible equals 'family values'” was nonsense, but the behaviour of God's favourites is just appalling.

As Roddy McDowall, playing “Benjamin Fischer” said in the The Legend of Hell House (1973)-

Ann: "What did Belasco do to make this house so evil?"
Benjamin: "Drug addiction, alcoholism, sadism, beastiality, mutilation, murder, vampirism, necrophilia, cannibalism, not to mention a gamut of sexual goodies. Shall I go on?"

As the title of this posting says- Attempted gang rape, nukes, incest, wife-swapping, conspiracy to child murder.

Remind me to post the DR and Quinch Go Straight front page one day where the judge finishes a charge sheet with the line "32 crimes so unusual and horrible they do not have names"

Is there a sin these lot haven't committed yet? Or were these things not sins until the Ten Commandments? Answers to these Theological Conundra welcome, via the comments box.

Chapter 19

Lot's tooling around at the gates of Sodom when two angelic guys turn up. First they want to cruise around the town, but he insists- as later the Romans do of Jesus- on putting them up. But the Sodomites, who infamously punt from the Cambridge end, have other ideas

Verse 4-5 But before they lay down, the men of the city, even the men of Sodom, compassed the house round, both young old and young, all the people from every quarter: And they called unto Lot, and said unto him, Where are the men which came in to thee this night? Bring them out unto us, that we may know [translation: “fuck”] them.

Lot says nope (good hosts don't let any forced sex take place, regardless of what bits of genitalia are going where. Surely as long there is informed consent between adults it's nobody's fucking business, eh?). The whole sorry mess becomes a bit like one of those siege scenes in a zombie movie. The angels do some blinding and smiting and tell Lot to get outa Dodge...

Verse 13 “For we will destroy this place, because the cry of them is waxen great before the face of the LORD; and the LORD hath sent us to destroy it.

Lot legs it with his wife and two unmarried daughters, (his sons-in-law telling him to piss off.)

More zombie analogies though- there's always that scene where zombie arms burst through windows/doors and start groping the hardy band of survivors!

Verse 16 “And while he lingered, the men laid hold upon his hand, and upon the hand of his wife, and upon the hand of his two daughters: the LORD being merciful unto him: and they brought him forth, and set him without the city."

The angels (or the Lord?) tell Lot to literally head for the hills, but Lot demures (i.e. disobeys) and heads to a city called Zoar.

Sodom (and Gomorrah) gets nuked. Not that I am a von Danikenian, but it does sound a bit like a nuclear bomb that the angels don't know how to dismantle and they've lost the timer for. The Fourth Protocol of the Elders of Zion, maybe?

And Lot's wife ignores what the Gallaghites told her. And suffers the consequences. And you can imagine one of the daughters saying “Leave her dad, she's NaCled...”

So Lot leaves Zoar, and does go the mountains. And his daughters... gentle reader, you may not want to read it... take turns to get him drunk and shag him to get themselves knocked up.

Huh? WTF? One, if he was so drunk he didn't know what was going on, how did he stay the course? Two, Founder Effect. Three, this is grim grim grim.

Chapter 20

Back to the aged Abram/Abraham. He travels, with family to the kingdom of Abimelech, and... bloody hell, passes his wife off as his sister AGAIN and king Abimelech marries here.

They never told me in Divinity class (I got an A and endured parental teasing) that Abraham was into the wife swap thing- I mean this kind of wife swap, not the tv show. These sorts of allegations should be dogging his good name.

So God tells Abimelech in a dream to knock it off or else

Verse 3 “thou art but a dead man”

And Abimelech says Abraham never effing told him, and anyhow he didn't touch her. God takes the credit for that (so what is the point of the whole effing, or rather, non-effing story, if God already fixed it?) Abimelech is understandably pissed at Abraham for dropping him in it with the Bearded Sky Man.

And Abraham's defence? “It's OK, my wife's actually my half-sister.” Huh? WTF??

So Abimelech's family gets its fertility back.

NB This Sarah must be one hot GILF...(this kind, not this)

Chapter 21

Sarah at a mere 80-something spits out a kid, Isaac.

Hagar, the Handmaid and her son get exiled and “she wandered in the wilderness of Beer-sheba." Typical, it's the men what get the pleasure, the women who get the pain. But God bails Hagar out, and her kid by Abraham gets an Egyptian wife. So that's alright then.

Meanwhile, Abraham and Abimelech are having more carrying capacity problems.

Chapter 22

Another doozy. Abraham is tested by the Lord, sorry “LORD”, who gets him to take Isaac up a mountain in order to slit his throat.

At the last minute the LORD allows for a switch-hitter sacrifice, (there's a burning bush etc).

But how's the kid gonna feel, knowing his dad was gonna slit his throat cos the voices in his head told him to?

Joseph Heller, author of the hilarious but horrifically misogynistic “Catch-22” I think covered this in his novel “God Knows”, which I may get round to reading some day.

Oh, bugger, Chapter 18 got lost in the mix.

The LORD does a house call to Abraham and Sarah, tells her she will get up the duff, and doesn't strike her dead for disbelieving him.
Then the LORD reveals his plan to wipe out Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham demures about killing the righteous along with the wicked (aka "collateral damage") and God lets himself get haggled down to Ten Righteous Men will ensure the city's salvation. Generous chap, that God.

Genesis 13 to 17- smiting, land grabs, inconceivable fertility

2009-01-04T20:00:00.005Z

Chapter 13

Abram and his brother's kid Lot are big and rich

Ch 13 verse 6 And the land was not able to bear them, that they might dwell together: for their substance was great,so that they could not dwell together.

So, here we could talk about carrying capacity, and critiques of Hardin's tragedy of the commons. But we won't.

So Lot lights out for the territory (Sodom, where the men were wicked), which you can't do nowadays that the world ain't empty.

And Abram heads for Hebron. Sigh.

Chapter 14

Kings smiting each other. Or rather, kings getting their underlings to smite each other.
What's a bayonet- a weapon with a worker at both ends...

And Abram goes behind enemy lines to rescue his nephew Lot, and then refuses the booty the King of Sodom offers him.

Chapter 15

So God rewards Abram with a kind of whack fertility programme

verse 9 Take me a heifer of three years old, and a she goat of three years old, and a ram of three years old, and turtledove, and a young pigeon. And some slugs, snails and puppy dogs' tails while you're at it.

Crikey, Abram nods off and then...

Verse 18 In the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying. “Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates...

There may be trouble ahead... God's no better at real estate than he is at terra-forming...

Chapter 16

Sarai can't get up the duff. She gives Abe her Handmaid, Hagar, to knock up.

It works, but be careful what you wish for

Ch 16 verse 3 And he went in unto Hagar, and she conceived: and when she saw that she had conceived, her mistress was despised in her eyes.

Abram gives Sarai permission to be a cow to Hagar. Sarai is a cow, thus Hagar legs it. She gets skiptraced and brought back by one of gods angels acting as a bailbonds~~man~~angel, who says the kid, “Ismael” is going to be a proper psycho. Which should be no hassle for an 86 year old dad to cope with, eh?

Chapter 17

Abram gets a deed poll from God as a 99^th birthday present- now “Abraham” and Sarai becomes “Sarah.”

And here's the deal. In exchange for the real estate previously mentioned ("all the land of Canaan”) then Abe's lot

Verse 10 Every man child among you shall be circumcised

So, what's the materialist anthropological take on this? Enquiring minds would like to know.
[Tacky joke- “What's the biggest drawback?” “An elephant's foreskin.”]

And Abraham actually laughs in the face of God

Verse 17 Then Abraham fell upon his face and laughed and said in his heart. Shall a child be born unto him that is an hundred years old? And shall Sarah, that is ninety years old, bear?

God says 'yup, and he'll be called Isaac. And chill, Ishmael the psycho will not be forsaken.'

And Ismael will not be foreskinned either.

Abraham, Ishmael and all the blokes are then circumcised. These verses are basically repeated, which I'll be has made congregations through the ages wince and cross their legs repeatedly when they hear them.

Genesis 8 to 12- Arks, Babels, Cuckolds and Dogging

2009-01-03T15:58:00.004Z

So, the waters recede...

Ch 8 verse 21: And the Lord smelled a sweet savour; and the Lord said in his heart I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of a man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every living thing, as I have done.

Er, doesn't that therefore invalidate the whole Revelation schtick? And hasn't he/He put constraints on what he/He can do (e.g. Make a rock so heavy he/He can't lift it), which I, er, didn't think he/He could do. Just sayin'...

And here's the kicker, Noah gets a little reward for his obedience-

Ch 9 verse 2 And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered.

Now, at the time God's stenographers were taking this down at 100 thunderbolts a minute, humasn would still have had some sort of folk memory of being prey rather than predator, so this is kind of a comforting bit of news. Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a fantastic book called "Blood Rites" about what it meant to be eatee rather than eater. And she followed it up with "Dancing in the Streets", which has great stuff on Dionysus/Jesus, which we will come to when the time is right (about September, I reckon).

Hamming it up- Ham, Noah's youngest son, sees his dad naked, tries to get his brothers in on the joke. They do a goody-two shoes thing of covering Noah up and Noah is not a happy patriarch...

Ch 9 verse 25 And he said “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.

And this is the textual figleaf the Church applied to the slave trade!! Really. How morally bankrupt can you be?

Chapter 10 is another "begatter" chapter. Nimrod, the mighty hunter gets a look in. Aren't there clapped out RAF planes named for him?

Chapter 11 deals with the whole Tower of Babel myth

God, although a lousy terra-engineer, at least gets the basics of counter-insurgency and imperial control, i.e. “divide and conquer"

Ch 11 verse 6 Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do' and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

And as your eyes slide down the begatting, you get (gat?) used to folks living 200 or so years. I suppose any lie told often enough becomes familiar, which is a step on the way to plausible.

Chapter 12 introduces Abraham and all that. I seem to recall some Social Services involvement, with Baby I. But not yet...

verse 11 and he said unto Sarai his wife, Behold now, I know that thou art a fair woman to look upon

And so say I, too..

But then Abraham goes to Egypt and- to save his skin- plays at being his wife's sister. The Pharaoh innocently takes Sarah as another "wife" finds out and exiles Abraham. I don't get this. Was Abraham into the whole cuckolding thing? Shouldn't Sarai be stoned to death now?

Capitalism as religion- great article by Julian Gough

2009-01-02T22:32:00.003Z

Julian Gough wrote a highly entertaining take on tragedy and comedy that will be the subject of a later post, on a slow day (when there's a lot of begatting going on).

I had a look at the archive of his pieces on the Prospect website, and stumbled across
"The Sacred Mystery of Capital" from July 2008.

Though there's bits to disagree with, it's full of provoking and intriguing ideas, and is so well written you can just quote chunks. Among the best are these gems-

"But religions evolve, and recent events show that capitalism has begun to evolve less in the manner of the Galapagos finches (whose beaks adjusted over millennia to suit the berries of their individual island), and more in the manner of the Incredible Hulk. Incredible Hulk capitalism can expand the muscle of its credit so swiftly that its clothing of real world assets cannot stretch fast enough to contain it. Expansion, explosion, collapse—Incredible Hulk capitalism sprawls, stunned and shrunken again, in the rags of its assets.

"Or, returning to our religious analogy, if capitalism was a religion, it would now be a delightfully demented pseudo-scientific cult. Incredible Hulk capitalism is to the capitalism of Adam Smith what Scientology is to the Christianity of Christ. Both modern high finance and Scientology use the language and tools of science to ends that are religious, not scientific. Both meet a need, a yearning which the old forms of religion and capitalism no longer meet. The need for a mysterious power greater than us, in which we can believe. It must be powerful—but it must also be mysterious. And mystery has been vanishing from the world ever faster, ever since Galileo."

Genius stuff...

Planetary domination

2009-01-02T22:04:00.003Z

I'm pleased to say that this blog has only been running for about 48 hours and I already have an excuse to include a cartoon from the magnificent Marc Roberts. Concepts of human mastery over all dominion, anyone?

Genesis 5-6: the prelude to the soggy bit

2009-01-02T21:45:00.005Z

One of the many hideous memories I have of the long and painful years I spent at Old Palace School for Girls in Croydon is of a production one of the dance classes put on, including the song The Animals Went in Two by Two. It featured pairs of girls playing various types of animals parading up the central aisle of the Banqueting Hall (which served as an assembly room, theatre, gym etc etc). And the fucking bitches who were our PE teachers at this time, who I'd better not name for libel reasons, in case they're not burning in some appropriate hell somewhere, cast as the hippo who "got stuck in the door" a girl who, whilst very popular, pretty and generally lovely, was also rather large.
Of limited relevance, I know. But we all need to have the occasional cathartic PE-teacher rant, and it seemed like a good opportunity.
These two chapters are pretty much all begatting, and some very, very, very old men (bit short on women, shock horror). And a big boat made of gopher wood. Which sounds kinda cool, but no-one actually knows what it was. And being the sentimental type, it seems a bit sad to create all those creatures - including beasts, fowls of the air and creeping things - and then kill them all off. The giant humans I seem to be less concerned about, given that we'd already apparently started killing each other off and generally embarking on the unpleasant activities characteristic of the species. Sigh.

Genesis 5 to 6- Noah business like noah business...

2009-01-02T20:19:00.008Z

Jesus Christ- or rather, "Yahweh": The Old Testament is notorious for it, but I didn't think there'd be so much begatting already. The eyelids do weigh heavy, gentle reader....

As begats... I mean befits an oral history written down, there is some redundancy- ya get the same information repeated. You get the same information repeated.

Methusaleh does his cameo so early (but sticks around for so long). On grotesque longevity, I am reminded of an anecdote (possibly apocraphyl- how begat... befitting) that gerontology researchers were running all over the Caucasus, esp. Georgia, interviewing people who were apparently 90 years old and yet healthy and working in fields. Was it diet? Genes? The semi-starvation during their youth? Or, er, was it that they had "borrowed" their parents birth certificates to avoid the draft. Though the wikipedia link above has a more interesting take.

Anyway, here comes Noah's ark, all ship shape and bristol fashion. And I'll repeat yesterday's observation- this God chap seems to be a pretty cack-handed SimCity player. He's already ctrl alt deleting and we're only on day two of this book...

The idea that a hard rain is gonna fall and clear the streets of grime/crime has stuck around of course. Thomas Pynchon has written well of violent redeeming and badasses, for example.

So anyway, this is an extinction event. And I'll repeat yesterday's link to the sixth extinction, caused by us, homo sapiens killthemallandletgodsortthemoutiens. A Pending Ecological Debacle indeed.

Did I read somewhere that this whole Big Flood story may have been inspired by the creation of the Black Sea when the Med spilled through?

And aren't there are a few obvious questions- like why didn't smaller vessels, not laden down with two of everything do OK? You'd expect an arc of survival, if you look at it in -gasp- selection pressure terms. And what about the Founder Effect?

I suppose tomorrow I'll get to write about the Sons of Ham and the egregious defences of slavery that the Church put about. But all wicked things in time, eh?

PS One of my favourite (OK, the only one I can think of just now) fictional representations (well, other fictional representations) of the flood is the woodworm narrator in Julian Barnes' “A History of the World in 10 and a half chapters.”