Exodus 32-40: more bloodshed, more gold

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)

Exodus 13-16: Red Sea and white fluffy food

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.

Genesis 7-21: women get a raw deal

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 1-4: in the beginning

Was... not the Word. This is the first thing that's struck me reading these key first chapters - because there are so many versions and some of the phrasing is so magnificent, bits you've heard quoted elsewhere stick in your head - and then you find that the version you're reading doesn't have that bit. So the opening line here is actually:

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,"

which is much more straightforward, but rather less poetic. But then we get:

"and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,"

which is a beautiful image and puts me in mind of a William Blake painting which I shall have to try and track down.
But it's good to have gotten started. Marc has a fairly humane sized edition to read, but the only two that Waterstones had in stock the other day were full complete-with-apocrypha versions of intimidating, not to say crippling, thickness and weight. Just opening it was a feat of psychological strength (especially on the depressing wasteland that New Year's Day tends to be).
And I have an appropriate bookmark picked out, a Crivelli Virgin and Child, from an altarpiece in the National Gallery.
But back to the book in hand, and we have lots of creating of plants and herbs and fowl and beasts, which all seems like a generally good idea until we get onto the Man bit, which today I can't help feeling is where it all starts to go a bit wrong. But I suppose the authors don't agree and I should go with the flow for the moment.
(On the literary references, though, these chapters are just dripping with them - we have out River Out of Eden and Adam's Rib and East of Eden and probably lots of others I'm not spotting).
The other danger of reading this properly is that it's making me want to go and read lots of other things I don't have time to deal with, unless I devote my entire working life to this project and I'm not hearing anyone volunteering to pay the mortgage while I do that. But there are bits of 15-year-old archaeology lectures about the birth of agrarian societies in the Middle East lurking around in the back of my skull, and all of this stuff about Cain and Abel and the competition for status between animal and grain growing ways of life is all very interesting, and can we talk about allegories for the development of complex settlement in the Fertile Crescent?
On the other hand, I am just very confused about where Cain and Abel's wives are meant to have popped up from, unless they're more spare rib jobs??? But some of these early and often-forgotten characters do have the most wonderful names, like Adah and Mehujael and Zillah and the brothers Jabal and Jubal, and it's a great pity they feature in a set of verses which are all about family blood feuds... I guess this starts off as a book steeped in hierarchical concepts, with all that rule and dominion over various living things being allocated, and one of the knock-on effects of that is that people start having conflicts over who gets to do all that dominion-ing. Men. Tssk.