Exodus 17-23: rules and regulations

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 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 25-33: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob

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.

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.