User:Red Slash/thedukeisthedukeof soul

I liked reading the first eleven chapters of Genesis for several reasons. First, it’s a series of stories that have a lot of depth and meaning, both in the obvious sense (Cain kills Abel) and the subtler sense (what does it mean that there’s a talking snake?) Every time I reread it there’s something new that pops up in my mind. But what I love about getting to discuss this with a diverse, secular Honors audience is that we get to pore through so many things in such depth. One of the things I’ve noticed is that in other books of the Bible, when I study them with groups I’m amazed and impressed by how much I’ve missed studying it myself. Looking at what we’ve read in Genesis, the more striking thing to me is what isn’t there – how little detail is given for some really important things. How long were Adam and Eve in the garden? You look at chapters 2-3, and in consecutive verses it says, “And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed. Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman …” Really? That’s all we get for a timeframe? We don’t even know if they had children prior to Cain. It’s suggested, in Genesis 4:14, when Cain complains that “anyone who meets me may kill me”, but we don’t get to see whether or not his complaint has any basis in reality. And in Genesis 6:4, it says, “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterwards—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.” Who were these “sons of God” that impregnated those “daughters of man”? There remain an awful lot of unanswered questions for me. I love studying the Bible and I have completely enjoyed the discussions so far, but they are still very challenging.

The second part of Genesis was a very interesting day in class for me. As is unfortunately the result of centuries of hurt and pain and oppression and misunderstanding and division regarding the Bible, there are certain issues that stand out over and above just the text. In order to carefully analyze the text and get a decent hermeneutical idea of what it means, we have to take away our cultural understanding of the text and what the text has meant to believers and non-believers alike and simply focus in on the text as it is written. This is true of other works as well; if you want to understand 1984, you have to read the book and notice what is there, instead of looking at the cultural impact it had on people. It’s not that the cultural impact is unimportant; in fact, strong arguments can be made for the impact of the text actually being more important than the text itself. But we need to realize that by focusing on the impact of what’s happened as an ostensible result of the Bible diverts our attention away from the Bible itself. I feel that in our discussions of these chapters we missed a lot. We did get to focus in on the pimp sequences, like in Genesis 20:1-2, “From there Abraham journeyed towards the region of the Negeb, and settled between Kadesh and Shur. While residing in Gerar as an alien, Abraham said of his wife Sarah, ‘She is my sister.’ And King Abimelech of Gerar sent and took Sarah.” And we did get to talk about the story of Lot and his incestuous daughters and the destruction of Sodom, yes, from chapter 19—for example, verse 32, “ ‘Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, so that we may preserve offspring through our father.’ ” But if I remember correctly, most of those discussions actually happened the following day as our class recapped the book in general; we spent a large portion of the class that was devoted to Genesis 12 – 35 discussing the sacrifice of Isaac, especially in the context of what that meant to the Jews later on.

The third part of Genesis was funny to look at again; I’m extremely familiar with it, so I didn’t encounter a lot of surprises. The discussions in class were the most interesting parts for me – hearing everyone’s perspectives on Tamar and Judah was fascinating, for instance. We got a lot of discussion off of Genesis 38—things like verse 8, “Go in to your brother’s wife and perform the duty of a brother-in-law to her; raise up offspring for your brother,” and verse 26, “She is more in the right than I, since I did not give her to my son Shelah.” The little story about Onan deliberately trying not to impregnate his brother’s wife was really brief, but honestly that fit in quite well with the rest of the book – it’s all been very concise and matter-of-fact the majority of the time, although every once in a while it’s really repetitive, like with the two stories of the Flood. I still am not sure how I feel about the document hypothesis. It seems like it makes sense, but it doesn’t seem all that well supported by the text. My favorite part this time around for the discussions was Jacob’s blessing to his children, and the assertion by more than one person in the class that the blessing must have been written from an informed viewpoint later on; I still believe that leads to serious questions about why the blessings are so vague at times and are really far from complimentary for several tribes, including the specially set-apart tribe of Levi—see chapter 49, verses 5-7, “Simeon and Levi are brothers; weapons of violence are their swords. May I never come into their council; may I not be joined to their company—for in their anger they killed men, and at their whim they hamstrung oxen. Cursed be their anger, for it is fierce, and their wrath, for it is cruel! I will divide them in Jacob, and scatter them in Israel.” In any case, Genesis was an absolutely fascinating read, as it always is. I’m really looking forward to the rest of the class.

What struck me the most about Galatians was the extreme emphasis on the law and how following the law is not the way to salvation. It’s a message that runs somewhat contrary to what we see in the Torah, especially after Genesis. The allusions back to Sarah and Hagar are fascinating; it’s something of a challenge to get what exactly Paul means when he calls their story an allusion. It’s difficult to imagine a devout Jew, even one who converted away from Judaism into Christianity, suggesting that a story in the Bible that by all means appears to be being presented as fact is not actually factual but a didactic and prophetic fabrication, serving merely to serve as an example for the Messiah who is yet to come. It seemed to me that he was taking for granted that of course the story was true, and that God orchestrated things in such a way so that there would be a clear foreshadowing of Jesus; it was surprising and incredibly intellectually stimulating to see some of the class assume the opposite. The two most striking things to me, however, were the intensity that Paul scolded those who strove to live under the power of the old covenant – I’d love to call them the “law-abiders” – and the fact that our class discussion did not once touch on the fruits of the Sprit or anything else significant about the letter besides circumcision, the law, and Sarah and Hagar. Seriously? We weren’t able to talk about Galatians 5:22-25? “By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.” Paul was admittedly a lot more interesting when spouting off in Galatians 3:1, “You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly exhibited as crucified!”, but I still would have rather studied more of the book.

Exodus was a fun book to skim through and to discuss in class. There’s so much going on, from the adoption of Moses to the story of the plagues to… well, to a lot of different topics. Our discussions of what was in the book versus the movies was pretty illuminating – I guess I hadn’t ever realized the extent to which our culture’s perceptions about the Bible have risen from just a few movies and plays rather than from the Bible itself. I wish there had been more discussion of some of the topics mentioned in Exodus; we kind of zeroed in on free will and God’s hardening of Pharaoh’s heart. The Ten Commandments themselves—listed in Exodus 20:1-17—were barely touched on at all in class, which was interesting to me. The concept of free will with regard to Pharaoh is a fascinating topic of discussion, as well as one that will be coming more into the forefront when we study the book of Romans, so I couldn’t complain too awful much.

Numbers and Deuteronomy are interesting to read from a historical perspective as well as a cultural perspective; what the texts describe are absolutely critical for the hundreds and thousands of years to follow in shaping the entire Israelite identity and the Christian identity that laters springs up from that. The idea of the “law” is huge not just in Israel but for all time. As for the text itself, I was certainly surprised by the story of the people getting assaulted by snakes in the desert in Numbers 12:9, “So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.” It was a lot less lengthy than I had remembered; perhaps I came to the text with a bit of a bias knowing how Jesus would later compare himself to that snake on a pole. The laws and stories in Deuteronomy did not honestly seem to be something outside of the same textual family (families?) as the rest of the Torah; I am still grappling with the extent to which I buy the idea of the Deuteronomic history.

Joshua has always struck me as a blast to read through; having been exposed to it my entire life, I never once in my life had really pondered and considered what it might look like to the adult reading it for the first time. I suppose that it is a little disconcerting to see all the bloodshed, the wholesale slaughtering of the native tribes, and the emphasis on warfare if your perception of the God of the Bible was not yet particularly well-informed by, well, the Bible. Passages such as Joshua 8:26, “For Joshua did not draw back his hand, with which he stretched out the sword, until he had utterly destroyed all the inhabitants of Ai”, are actually pretty doggone gruesome when you stop to consider them. The overall narrative of God’s chosen people coming in and dwelling in this land provided to them underlies the entire adventure, of course, and it’s not particularly outside of the character that so far has been revealed of God for him to wrathfully destroy the inhabitants of a certain land; we’re just five books removed from a flood that wiped out basically every creature on earth. I thought our discussion of what the crossing over the Jordan meant for the Christian was extremely illuminating—I was surprised by how well the metaphor worked, even if the class discussion was necessarily short due to us not having studied the idea of the Gospels yet.