Those were some tough Jews

Old Testament

Book Five:  Deuteronomy

Primary Charge of Moses to the People (cont’d)

Chapter 3:  A review of Israel’s journey (cont’d)

Chapter 4:  An exhortation to obey the law

Deuteronomy is apparently mostly Moses talking to Israel before they go into Canaan.  It’s funny, because last time I was conned into thinking, oh, look, God finally did fulfill his promise and now they are in Canaan.  But of course that’s not true!  They aren’t in Canaan yet at all, they’re still on the other side of the valley.  What’s with all the stalling?  Well, we’ll have to wait and see.  It’s interesting that Moses was supposed to be the one to lead them out of slavery to the promised land, and he doesn’t actually get it done.  Instead, here, he tells them that Joshua will be their next leader.  Apparently the book of Joshua is going to be the record of their conquest of Canaan—if it actually happens, we’ll have to wait and see.

These are just some random thoughts I had reading these two chapters.  I might have to limit my reading to two chapters for the time being.  It’s just too brutal to read four chapters in a day.  Oh, this is interesting.  Apparently reading the bible in a year is something fundamentalist Christians like to do to show how devout they are.  It fits nicely at 4 chapters a day, it takes around eight or nine months.  (The idea that someone would read this book in order to get inspiration for their lives is really laughable to me, but whatever.  What in the world does Jane Christian get out of reading Leviticus?!)

Something occurred to me reading today.  There is nothing in the Old Testament about salvation, or heaven and hell.  It just doesn’t exist.  The word “heaven” appears frequently, but it doesn’t mean “the place you go after you die”; it just means out there, the other place, God.  We’ll see.  Moses is going to die in a few days, at the end of this book.  Let’s see what happens.  It’s interesting that Jesus is the only one who ever “ascended” to heaven, because the very concept makes no sense in the Old Testament.  What’s interesting about this is just how insanely disconnected the Old and New Testaments are.  They have nothing to do with each other.  It’s just bizarre that Christians believe the Old Testament is part of their religion.  But they have to, because it is the entire way ALL religious movements exist, right?  You don’t argue that everything they ever thought is wrong, and so here, I’m going to tell you the truth.  You say exactly what Jesus said, they’re not wrong, they just don’t quite get it right.  I am the one who can properly interpret YOUR religion.  Not forget yours, follow mine.  It’s exactly what Paul did with Jesus.  Muhammad did the same thing.  Joseph Smith did the same thing.  David Koresh did the same thing.  It’s all the same thing.  Even the Jewish priests do it book by book in the Old Testament.  They reinterpret the rules to fit the new situation.

Another thing, it is simply amazing that we ended up with this religion rather than some other one.  It is clear from the Old Testament there were tribes running around the Middle East, and that each one had its own similar dumb religion.  (And as I’ve talked about may times, the Old Testament is in fact an conglomeration of older beliefs reimagined to support this new religion.)  Is there anything to learn from the fact that this one survived?  Or is it truly random?  And of course, while Judaism is still with us, it’s not even Judaism that survived, it’s Christianity.  And it’s only half Christianity, it’s also half Islam.  But it all stems from these dumb tribal disputes 5000 years ago.  WHY?  Here is one theory.  Sort of gets back to Nietzsche.  There is something particularly weak about the European mind, and Paul hit on the perfect message for them:  don’t worry that you’re a loser, it will all be better after you die.  What a fantastic message for someone too weak not to take that drink, huh?  And in a weird way, the defeated other tribes in Arabia, the Canaanites and Moabites and so on, they didn’t go anywhere.  They stayed right where they were, and they did this amazing judo move to flip the whole thing on its head and use Christianity to go back to saying no we are in charge.  It’s all amazing and amazingly pointless.

I have another question.  What the hell is really going on with this story.  Is there really a nomadic tribe running around winning battle after battle, apparently taking over a city, raping the women, then leaving to move on?  It’s so bizarre!  And it sounds from this book like they could never lose.  This is the way the Middle East (the Bedouins and so on) were—they were nomadic.  (I get this from Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which I haven’t read in a long time, so I may be drastically misrepresenting it.)  These nomadic tribes were just the way of life on the Arabian peninsula for a long time.  But so did the Israelites really always win?  Or did the always lose?  Did they really stage themselves above Canaan and then attack?  With what?  HOW did these battles go?  It’s all so weirdly false sounding, but at the same time maybe not.  I don’t know, it’s just a very interesting question.

I have one thought, here in Deuteronomy we may still be back in pre-historic times.  These stories may still be legend more than factual record.  It may be that all this is leading up to Joshua’s attack on Canaan, to sort of explain why the Israelites took over Canaan?  That’s a possible—these five books give the Israelites a reason to believe in themselves and obey their leaders.

Oh yeah, something that supports this hypothesis, the notes say that Deuteronomy appears to have been written as an address to the kingdom of Judah.  If that’s true, this may all be exactly what I just said it was.  Tall tales you tell your children about previous conquests in order to instill pride and obedience.

--bibletoenail

Jahaz Hands!

Had enough of Bob Fosse and Ben Vereen?  Learn to do it yourself!

Old Testament

Book Five:  Deuteronomy

Primary Charge of Moses to the People

Chapter 1:  A review of Israel’s journey

Chapter 2:  A review of Israel’s journey (cont’d)

I’m afraid this book is going to be painful.  If you don’t know it already, “Deuteronomy” is Greek for “second law.”  It doesn’t mean new laws, it means we’re just going to tell you what we’ve already told you again.  If you thought it was boring the first time, wait till you get a load of this.

First let’s find out why this book’s name is in Greek.  It’s not in the Jewish bible, of course, but it is here.  In Hebrew, the name of the book is Devarim.  That comes from the first words of the book, “Eleh ha-devarim,” which means “These are the words,” the first words of Deuteronomy.  So what is Deuteronomy?  I love the mistranslations in the bible.  Remember the Horned Moses?  Here’s another one.  Later on in this book, 17.18, it says, “When he has ascended the throne of the kingdom, he shall make a copy of this law in a book at the dictation of the levitical priests.”  The phrase in Hebrew is “mishneh haTorah hazoth” is “a copy of this law.”  (I’m not sure of the Hebrew spelling, or if there is a standard transliteration from Hebrew to English.  The spelling here is from the venerable Wikipedia.)  This phrase was mistranslated into Greek as “to deuteronomion touto,” “this second law.”  Hence “Deuteronomy.”  That still doesn’t actually explain why the book’s name is IN Greek.  Ah, it just occurred to me, ALL the books of the Torah are Greek:  Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus.  All those words are Greek.  Exodus and Leviticus are actually Latin, but they come from Greek originally.  (“Exo-” means “out of”; “hodos” means “way.”)  “Numbers” is actually the odd book out.  The Hebrew name is much better, “In the Wilderness.”

Anyway, after Genesis the bible becomes astonishingly boring.  Deuteronomy is what it says it is, a COPY of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers!  Moses here in these chapters is giving a speech to the Israelites before they move down into Canaan, so it all amounts to an episode of the Chris Farley Show.  “You remember, you remember when we went to the Red Sea?  And, and then God parted the waters? . . .  That was awesome.”  These chapters are really LONG too.  I read the first two, and I don’t want to go all the way to four today, so I’ll read them another time.  Very little happens here, as I said, Moses just recounts what we just went through.

The only exciting thing about the first two chapters is that the Giants come back again!  All these years later they are still insisting on the giants.  And then they went through Jahaz.  I forgot about Jahaz.

Something just occurred to me.  The writing in these last few books is literally God-awful.  It might be that this is what passed for “tension” 5000 years ago.  They’re on the verge of attacking Canaan . . . not yet!  Let me talk to you a few more minutes.  Unfortunately, he (God) must have skipped school the day that they explained that there’s no tension if the reader already knows what’s going to happen.  If sometimes Israel was annihilated that would be cool.  But that never happens.  Presumably they do lose some battles here and there, but that is just part of God’s plan, right?  Oh, yeah, the reason for Moses’ speech is that the real authors of the book (not God) need to retell things to make it fit with God’s latest failed promise.  He promised forty years, so now the story looks like it took forty years.  One interesting and amazing thing always is what liars and bullshitters both God and the Israelites are.  At one point it took them a lot longer than it should have to get through some place (I’m not going to bother looking it up again).  So Moses says it was all their fault, they didn’t believe God.  If they had just listened to him, everything would have been fine.  This is, again, the point of all these books, which I find quite interesting.  The lesson is that God always pulls through eventually, and you should just listen; bad things happen when you don’t listen.  I just love that all of them, God and the Israelites, are so obnoxious; there is something really great about it.

--bibletoenail

Malice Aforethought

I finished another book!  At this rate, my year of reading god should not take more than another 20 or 30 years!

Old Testament

Book Four: Numbers

Israel in the Plains of Moab (cont’d)

Chapter 33:  A review of Israel’s itinerary from Egypt to the lowlands of Moab

Chapter 34:  Israel’s itinerary (cont’d)

Chapter 35:  Levitical cities and cities of refuge

Chapter 36:  An appendix on women’s right to receive property

This was actually fairly entertaining.  Islamophobia has been dramatically on the rise in the last few years, and I periodically get in an argument with someone on youtube about it.  The latest thing relates to Sam Harris’s racist comments about Islam.  Harris is racist for saying “Islam is the mother lode of bad ideas” but his fellow racist Americans really hate to hear that.  So, whenever one of these arguments flares up, I try to get them to narrow down precisely what criteria they use to make such a dumb proclamation.  All of the criteria are, of course, chosen because they demonstrate what they want to prove.  But it is amazingly difficult to get one of these people to see that it’s all arbitrary, no one religion is better or worse than the other.  The real reason they think Islam is worse is because brown people follow Islam, and that allows these people to think things about them that they could never think about an American.  They literally think the Arabs are less human, less intelligent, more violent, whatever, and so, when presented with some dumb idea, they are more susceptible to it than they white Americans would be.  It’s idiotic.  It is equally idiotic to believe in any of them, the only difference between Arabs and Americans is the situation they are living in at the moment.  If the war-torn country was Christian, guess what, it would be in Jesus’ name that the atrocities were being done.  (See Bosnia, Ireland, the second American Iraqi war, the KKK, all done in the name of Christ.)

Anyway, one guy I’ve been talking to recently, his belief is that people try to minimize cognitive dissonance.  Seriously?  We’re talking about religion!  So, he says, being peaceful is more discordant with the Koran than it is with the Bible.  There’s a point here.  The four chapters I just read started with a summary of the Israelis’ journey from Egypt to Canaan.  It has forty stages, to match the forty years promised by God.  Here’s the thing, the summary dramatically contradicts earlier descriptions of the same events.  Here at the end of Numbers the authors purposefully twisted and edited the history in order to make it fit what they want to say.  This is right there IN THE BIBLE, and these people say some religions have more cognitive dissonance than others!  If you don’t start any analysis of any religion by acknowledging that belief requires 100% cognitive dissonance at all times, then you are being dishonest (i.e. dissonant) and blind.

Oh yeah, and once they get there, God tells the Israelites they need to kill all the Canaanites in order to take over!!!  It’s so ABSURD that the Koran is more violent than the Bible.  Then God describes exactly what he wants the boundaries of Israel to be.  I really believe one of the most monumentally stupid things human beings ever did was to put the displaced Jews in Israel after WWII.  If they had found a nice jungle in Thailand or India or the coast of Africa, or an area of Siberia, we simply would not have had the last 40 years of middle eastern strife.  Amazing.

Then chapter 35 was interesting.  The Levites don’t get an area of Canaan like everyone else.  They are given cities throughout Israel.  It’s kind of weird.  Then the rest of the chapter is about how some of those cities have to be refuges for murderers!  There’s this whole interesting discussion about how if a person kills someone with malice aforethought then the family has the right to avenge that killing.  But if they were killed without intent, then the person should not be killed, and can take refuge from the family in one of these cities.  Yes, six whole Escape from New York cities for the murderers of Israel.  One really interesting detail is that, if I understand right, the family is justified in killing the one responsible for the death even if it was an accident, so it is the duty of the community to protect the killer from the vengeance of the family.

All this had a very familiar ring to our understanding of criminal justice today.  Not as refined, but in particular it was interesting that the concept of mens rea (intent) was front and center of this discussion.

The entire book of Numbers ends with a discussion of women’s right to inherit.  It didn’t go well.  It was yet another example of the people arguing with God and convincing him to change his mind.

--bibletoenail