Let's Get This Party Started

As you may have noticed, I stopped writing (and reading) just a couple weeks into January of this year. As I said, I've read Genesis about 30 times, but I've never gotten past Leviticus. I got busy at school and stopped. Now I'm home for Christmas break again, so I am going to continue. At the least I will get through Exodus this Christmas, hopefully more!

"You are lazy, you are lazy!" --Exod. 5:17

Old Testament
Book Two: Exodus
Israel Enslaved in Egypt (cont'd)
Chapter 5: Prologue - Pharaoh cuts the supply of straw
Chapter 6: God the Forgetful hires Moses again
Chapter 7: Moses meets Pharaoh again for the first time, and the first plague
Chapter 8: The second, third, and fourth plagues

Starting a book several times is an interesting phenomenon. It must be that certain books get really boring at a certain point, and the urge to put them down is overwhelming. Two or three books have this effect on me. I've never read past Leviticus in the bible, and I've never read past page 87 in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. I have read the first pages of Twenty Thousand Leagues at least a dozen times--it is my white whale! (Hey, Leviathan, Leviticus, get it?)

Speaking of which, the movie Leviathan is an amazing example of the lattice of coincidence that lies on top of everything. In that movie, the alien appears as monsters that were seen in the opening pages of Twenty Thousand Leagues. The characters finally realize that the alien is getting his shapes by reading the nightmares of one of the characters, who in turn, had read Twenty Thousand Leagues as a boy. But here's the kicker: he never got past page 87! Whoever wrote this book had exactly the same experience I did! I can still tell you precisely where on the shelves that book can be found in my grade school library. I checked it out every year, and never finished it. The book is still on my list (like the bible!), but to make it more difficult for myself, my goal now is to read it in French! And guess what: I've never gotten by about page 87 in the French version, Vingt mille lieues sous les mers."

One last thing about Jules Verne's book. As I progress through life, mysteries present themselves. One of my greatest joys is when, 20 or 30 years later, I figure out something that mystified me from long, long ago. I don't know if I'm getting smarter, or if I am just revisiting my past more lately, but I have been figuring out the mysteries of my life quite frequently in the past few years. One big mystery in my life was the title of the book, "Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea." Ever since a child, I have tried to figure that out. I would look up what a "league" is. It is about three miles. That would mean the Nautilus went sixty thousand miles under the sea! But even as a child I knew the earth is only about eight thousand miles across. How in the world did the Nautilus go that deep? At its deepest point the Pacific is only, I think, two miles deep. It never made sense, but I thought Verne must just not have known the diameter of the earth, and made up a really really deep number.

Well, a few years ago it finally dawned on me what the title means. It doesn't mean the Nautilus went 20,000 leagues straight down. It means that while under water, the Nautilus traveled 20,000 leagues! I must admit, some of my mysteries are more mysterious than that one! But I was very happy to figure it out.


Anyway, when we left off, God had just hired Moses, then tried to murder him, then Moses' wife saved him by cutting off the end of her baby's penis, rubbing it on her baby's face, and screaming "blood bridegroom by circumcision! Blood bridegroom by circumcision!"

Unfortunately, as I think I have portended, the excitement of the bible drops off precipitously after that. Each story of the bible is longer than the last. The early ones were just a chapter long (all the world was created in just a few verses), until by the end of Genesis, Joseph's story took 13 chapters. Now Moses and Aaron fight Pharaoh. I am sorry to say, in the entire four chapters of Exodus from 5 to 8, there is not a single moment of sex, not a single rape or incest, no loose pussy, no tight pussy, no bukkake, hardly any murder, absolutely nothing that makes the bible so great.

Remember that God engineered all of Israel moving to Egypt. That was the climax of Genesis. He did all that, typically, only so he could make the Israelis suffer, so he could then "save" them (sounds a little like David at the beginning of Endless Love burning down Jade's house so he can save her). Is there any doubt remaining in the dear reader's mind who is the antagonist of this book? The greatest villain in human history?

The story, very quickly, is that Israel is enslaved in Egypt. God hires Moses to go tell Pharaoh to let them go. But, and this is the important part, GOD HARDENS PHARAOH'S HEART. Then Moses performs several miracles before Pharaoh finally lets them go. Each one of the miracles is a "plague" on Egypt.

I like this story for two reasons. First, it demonstrates again how and why Christians so drastically misunderstand the bible. And second, it demonstrates what the bible actually is. The bible was written some time in our history, and it was written surrounding certain historical facts, and for a certain historical group of people. The purpose of the bible (the old testament) is to give the Israelites an identity, a common cultural memory, as we Americans have the revolutionary war, the Boston tea party, and so on. Probably 75% legend, but the point is it illustrates that "Don't Tread on Me" American attitude that makes us proud. (Speaking of which, it is for that reason I find the American dislike of Palestine so baffling. In the Israel-Palestine conflict, our obvious brothers-in-arms are the Palestinians, the Israelis are their redcoats. (It's not actually baffling--Israel has an enormously powerful Washington lobby.))

So, a couple of interesting things to consider while reading the bible are one, what factual history backs the stories, and two, what's the point? This story of Israel's "deliverance" from Egypt is fascinating for that reason. The first thing I love about the plagues Moses visits on Israel is that they are natural--not miracles at all. First, the Nile floods (plague #1). As a result frogs breed (plague #2). The frogs die, and maggots appear on the carcasses (plague #3). Flies are born from the maggots (plague #4). The flies carry disease to the animals (plague #5). This being the bible, where everything is repeated, it happens again (plague #6). (See 9:1-12. The cows that are killed during plague #5 become diseased in plague #6!)

I think this is an interesting moment. Most of the miracles to this point have been in the ancient past, and are just flat-out myths--the flood, the rainbow, the tower of Babel, and so on. This story, I have a feeling, is within more recent memory of the Israelites. And now, God's miracles aren't miracles at all--they are entirely natural occurrences, one after another. This story reminds me of an episode from Le Petit Prince. The Little Prince meets a king who is ruler of everything, even the stars and the planets. The key to being obeyed is to keep your commands reasonable. If he wants to command the sun to set, he does not do so in the middle of the afternoon; instead he consults an almanac to discover a more reasonable time to command it to set. On that particular day, the reasonable time for such a command was 7:40PM. If he commanded the sun in the middle of the afternoon, and it did not obey, that would be the King's fault, not the sun's. Same here with God. He does not order the flies to come first, that would be unreasonable. Instead he orders them to come after the maggots, and lo and behold, they do!

But this story is layered. It is also directed toward the gods of Egypt. The story is a battle of magicians, Moses versus Pharaoh's. Each time Moses "makes" something happen, the Egyptian magicians do the same thing. The frogs are making fun of the Egyptian frog-goddess Heqet. The cow-plague (the first cow-plague, #5, when the cows die (the one before the cows are diseased), is directed toward the bovine-deities Hathor and Apis. (I'm getting this information from the notes in my bible.) But there's an enormous problem with this story, for a Christian: other gods exist! WTF? How can this be? Exodus entirely, completely, and irredeemably denies Christian belief. Christians, simply, don't read the bible very carefully.

How do we explain the ten commandments, then? "Thou shall have no god before me"? Well, even that commandment implies other gods, does it not? Is God saying no other god exists? or is he saying other gods do exist, but you Israelites are only to worship me? This entire story taken as a whole, I think the latter reading is the only reasonable one. The story is straightforward. Israel has its god. Egypt has its gods. Israel escapes Egypt, and their god tells them, only worship me from now on.

The old testament is a straightforward battle of beliefs. Each tribe in the region had its beliefs, and the tribes defined themselves based on their differences. The old testament made fun (repeatedly) of these other beliefs, and explained why their beliefs were better. Nothing more, nothing less. It's a wonderful, funny, inspiring book written 5000 years ago, taken in that light. But if you try to take it seriously today, you're taking it out of context and completely misunderstanding it. I think even the authors of the bible would laugh at the idea of Christians trying to defend these old stories 5000 years later as literally true.

One more detail from these four chapters, one of those things that again proves the book was man-made. In chapter 4, Aaron is a minor figure. But in 7:8-13, the same story of God hiring Moses is told again, this time with Aaron having a much larger role. The reason? According to the notes, this book "took its final shape when the Aaronite priesthood ruled Israel, and hence it enhances the role of Aaron." It's not true, for god's sake, it is simply, humanly, one group propping up their leader. The way we today have Ronald Reagan airport. How could we have an airport named after such a mediocre president? Simple: his followers took control of Congress in 1994. (Cf. Gen. ch. 38, and my blog entry on it. (The authors inserted a chapter on Judah, because much later King David comes to prominence, and he was from the tribe of Judah.))

Well, I wrote way too much today! and now I'm exhausted. I think things are going to get really boring very soon. Which might mean you will hear much rumination from me, much less about the bible until we can get to another interesting story. (After the ten commandments, I don't even know what the next good story is--we'll have to wait and see!)


--bibletoenail