Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Killing Time with Rituals and Magic: Joshua 3 - 5:12

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

The Israelites are ready to begin the invasion, so the author of Joshua takes us through a number of events clearly intended to symbolize Israel's history prior to that long-awaited moment. Following exceptionally detailed instructions from God, the Israelites re-enact the crossing of the Red Sea, this time at the Jordan river, where the priests carry the magic Ark of the Covenant into the water and by doing so make all the waters pile up before them, creating dry land. The Israelites "hurry across."

This verse accidentally gives us another opportunity to estimate Israelite military strength. According to Joshua, the Manasseh, Reuben, and Gad settlers who won't be coming with the rest of the Israelites into the promised land send their full military divisions, totalling 40 000 men-at-arms. Assuming this is representative of Israelite arming trends generally, we can assume they have an army of a little over 200 000 men, organized in 12 divisions. With good tactics and training, this should easily make them superior in any full engagement. Major powers of the time, like Egypt, could raise larger armies through conscription, but would never have moved them all in one formation the way the Israelites seem to do routinely. Keep that in mind when the Israelites require divine aid at every turn - maybe they do, but if the numbers were given are historically accurate, they really ought to be pretty capable of fighting for themselves.

Anyway, the Israelites finish crossing the Jordan and the priests carry the ark out of the riverbed. When they do, the magic dam breaks and the river resumes its normal course.

Afterwards, the Israelites decide to re-establish circumcision. Actually it seems to be God's idea; he tells Joshua they will need a large number of flint knives for the task. According to Joshua, none of the people born in the desert had been circumcised. I wonder why not. What nullified the Abrahamic covenant? Helpfully, the Bible says that "they were uncircumcised beacuse they had not been circumcised." Presumably there's something we're losing in the translation, because that's not a very helpful explanation. Anyways, it's very convenient for the narrative, because after the men have recovered, God says their circumcision has "rolled away the reproach of Egypt from you" and returned Israel to a proper state with God. The Israelites name their camp Gibeath Haaraloth, which sounds a lot cooler when you don't check out the footnote to see that this means "Hill of Foreskins."

Finally, the Israelites celebrate Passover. For the first time, they eat bread and grain taken from conquered land. The next day, they get up to find that God will no longer be sending any manna. Now they will eat real food again, which must come as a relief to those who were tired of eating manna.
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Tuesday, April 29, 2008

All's Fair in Prostitution and War: Joshua 1-2

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Another day, another book. We've left the Pentateuch or Torah now, and passed into what the Jews call the Nevi'im. According ot my always-helpful NIV edition, as we read Joshua we should "make your own choice to serve the Lord, to do his will, and to depend on him to give you victory over the evil one." Sounds like a nice idea, though you'll have to remember to interpret carefully, since this lesson is being drawn from God's assistance to the Israelites in repetated genocidal massacres. Much the same is true of the daily devotionals, the first of which draws, from God's orders to the Israelites to prepare for battle, the need to pray with one another for God's guidance in our lives - most of which don't involve the mass murder of Gentiles, though I suppose killing pagans and getting money to pay the bills are more or less equivalent activities.

God anoints Joshua to be Moses's replacement as general of the army and orders preparations for the upcoming invasion. Joshua apparently gains the respect and consent of the governed tribes with little difficulty; they promise to execute post-haste anyone who rebels or disobeys his orders. Joshua's first action is to mimic what Moses did years before: he sends spies into the land. Only two, however - perhaps in memory of the fact that only two of the original spies came back and told the truth way back in Numbers. The spies go to Jericho and enact the famous story of meeting Rahab the prostitute, who is promised immunity from murder in exchange for assisting the Israelites. If you are a militarist rather than a pacifist, you'll probably like this kind of story, because it suggests that deception and treason are honourable behaviour if it's for a good cause (Rahab does both on behalf of her spies).

On the one hand, Joshua provides a somewhat more gripping narrative once again, which is kind of nice after pages and pages of dry regulations and ordinances. On the other, it rapidly becomes clear how difficult those regulations would be to apply in practice. Should Rahab be celebrated for her treason to her hometown of Jericho? Is merely aiding Israelite spies - which she certainly does - enough to somehow gain her magic immunity to God's original order that she and all of her people be massacred?

The opportunity of coming across yet another prostitute in the narrative has prompted me to reflect on why there are so many. Is it just another manifestation of the Bible's contempt for women? I doubt it. The Levitican laws pretty much removed women from any of the major political and social relations which the Bible is most interested in recording, now that we've moved on from the patrimonial household affairs of Genesis. The only women who remain in the open are the prostitutes, so we hear about them a lot. And the fact that we only hear about them reinforces the Bible's apparent misogyny. Women can be invisible, or they can be prostitutes; pick one. The last woman who had any influence was Miriam, and God smited her for a sin he was happy to ignore when simultaneously committed by Aaron. There are severe and divinely authorized consequences for women stepping into places of influence. Or so goes the story, anyways.

There's another way to twist this, however. I've always heard Rahab described as a prostitute, which is convenient for two reasons - the gendered prejudices that too much of the church continues to embrace, and the fact that starting from a long ways back makes your "salvation" all the more striking. This, incidentally, is why churches prefer to have striking, dramatic testimonies from people who've beaten drug addictions, left a life of crime (providing they've served time in jail), etc.

It wouldn't be nearly as dramatic if we accepted the footnote alternative, which is that Rahab was an innkeeper, not a prostitute. I don't pretend to know which is true, but logically there's more than a prostitute; she must be a madam at least (there's another disturbingly gendered term). She owns a house - a large, multi-storey house built up against the city wall. Evidently she's affluent.

The Israelite spies come to Rahab for information. This doesn't really offer much either way, though if she truly is a prostitute, one has to wonder what their intentions were in going to her in the first place. Rahab offers some interesting claims: she suggests that she and possibly most others in Jericho has realized that the Israelite God is supreme because of his previous mighty deeds and his nation's wartime excesses. Therefore they are fearful and their courage has failed. The Israelites spend the night and then head back with this important bit of intelligence.

The king of Jericho is particularly brilliant in this story. To add a bit of drama to the story, the writer of Joshua claims that the king inexplicably knew in advance that Israelite spies were in the area, and knew precisely where they are, as well. He sent the police to Rahab's house to arrest the spies. Fortunately, Rahab bears false witness and says that the men have already left, and the police go away without conducting a thorough search.
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Monday, April 28, 2008

Bring Back Slavery!, Part 2

Okay, so I said some mean things a couple days ago about how we needed to bring back slavery. And I was right!

Check out this new aspect of the back-to-work legislation which, predictably, the government of Ontario pushed into place this weekend:

Any TTC worker who does not comply with the legislation faces a fine of $2,000 for each day that he or she stays off the job.

Uh...

OK. I get it. It's "freedom and democracy." If you don't show up to work, we will fine you!

The Church of the Orange Sky repeats the urgent need of all Canadians to immediately investigate options for creating a permanent underclass of slaves who have no rights, so that we can safely oppress them without having to worry about the fact that at the moment we're using the power of the state to violate basic human rights simply for the convenience of having an easy way to travel around the city.

Charter of Rights and Freedoms? What's that?
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Moses's Swan Song: Final Reflections on Deuteronomy

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary sponsored by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Deuteronomy was a better written book and the Moses portrayed here has clearly learned how to deliver eloquent speeches, something he claimed he didn't know how to do in Exodus. That's understandable - he's had a few decades to practice. He's also angry, and bitter, and disappointed that his life as prophet of Israel - and indeed, so far, the life of the nation of Israel - hasn't turned out the way God originally promised. Moses has none of the gains of the priesthood under the new order, because as prophet he occupies a strange grey zone between man and God. It's fallen to him, time and again, to stand between God and the faithless people, with neither side really supporting him.

Beyond that, there isn't a lot of new material in Deuteronomy so there isn't a lot to say about it. Most of what's said has been said before, though not nearly so clearly, and not in such an organized fashion. The two major new sets of regulations I spoke of were the reform of the Sabbath, which was an interesting shift from a tax empowering the priesthood to a food redistribution system empowering all marginalized people; and the new rules of war, which are equally interesting but significantly less promising and positive.

The rules in Deuteronomy are pessimistic just as they were in Numbers, but when we separate Moses's long rants about Israel's sins, we can see a layer of intriguing pragmatism. Moses expects the Israelites to turn away from God and to emulate other nations - so he institutes a second set of regulations, a sort of divinely authorized fall-back position, intended to salvage what can be saved from an unfortunate situation. The Israelites should have no other king but God - but Moses expects that they will create a monarchy anyways, and so offers ways that this king can remain righteous in God's sight.

There's an interesting shift in the words of Deuteronomy which, among other things, really ought to have been enough to convince the literalists that Moses clearly wasn't part of writing this book. It starts from the perspective of the wandering Israelites, but as the text goes on, gradually shifts to a retrospective from the future - which might suggest that some of the additions, like the regulations for the monarchy, weren't added in until the kings needed some Biblical support to buttress their secular authority. At the end, the author looks back whimsically toward the old nation of Israel, noting sadly that there has never been another prophet like Moses. This shift is particularly interesting because the Israelites were supposed to be looking forward to a happy future in the promised land. The fact that the authors of Deuteronomy are looking back nostalgically to their time in the wilderness is an early hint that God's promised land experiment isn't going to be as successful as he has so far led us to believe.

(Which I guess wouldn't be surprising, because unfortunately, most of God's plans so far don't seem to have turned out well.)
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Sunday, April 27, 2008

Moses Departs the Field: Deuteronomy 31-34

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Moses's swan song is coming to a close and in these final lectures he tries to set up Israel to function after he's gone. He is, as he notes at the beginning of chapter 31, now 120 years old, "and I am no longer able to lead you." He appoints Joshua to lead the Israelites forces into Canaan, and appoints the Levite priesthood to handle the religious duties, formally transferring all of the written manuscripts of the law into the priests' hands. God summons Moses to one last conference at the porta-temple, where he promises to give Moses some peace, although he adds that the people will soon begin to worship other gods. In what has become a familiar refrain, God promises to turn his face from the sinful Israelites.

Spurred on by this disappointing meeting, Moses delivers a particularly vicious "song" to the Israelites in chapter 32, prefaced by yet another prophecy that "after my death you are sure to become utterly corrupt."

The poetry that my translations calls "The Song of Moses" is a most depressing affair. Moses proclaims the word of God, then laments that the people are shamelessly corrupt, "warped and crooked." God blessed the early sons of Israel immensely, giving them "the heights of the land," the "fruit of the fields," and "doney from the rock." They grew fat, and then wicked; God was angry and rejected them. Israel remains "a nation without sense." But eventually God will have compassion on the downtrodden Israelites; he will proclaim to them that "there is no god besides me. I put to death and I bring to life, I have wounded and I will heal, and no one can deliver out of my hand." A very cool conclusion, after a very pessimistic speech.

After Moses is speaking, God summons him again, this time to Mount Nebo, where he is to die. Before going, Moses blesses the tribes, a very positive affair compared to the speech and one which doubtless contains many inspirational quotes. Finally he climbs the mountain, alone this time. God shows him the promised land one last time, and then he dies. Despite this, the ending to Deuteronomy is well written. Moses dies; Joshua takes his place but, the author laments nostalgically, no one could take the place of Moses at the head of Israel. "For no one has ever shown the mighty power or performed the awesome deeds that Moses did in the sight of all Israel."
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Saturday, April 26, 2008

A Modest Proposal: Why We Need Slave Labour (Or Already Have It)

This post is a proclamation of the Church of the Orange Sky and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Mad Reverends.

I'm not a resident of Toronto but I do live in Ontario for the time being, which hopefully is enough to qualify me to comment on the present chaos in Toronto, arising from the decision by Toronto transit union workers to pull their services this weekend after refusing to ratify the last contract offer from management and subsequently, they allege, facing threats from users of the service which they thought would put members in danger if they stayed on the job over the weekend. This wasn't illegal because they were already in a legal strike position, but it was possibly unethical, since initially they weren't going to go on strike without 48 hours notice, i.e. not until Monday.

I'm most intrigued by the fury that this strike has provoked among Torontonians. Here, for example, is some whining from Toronto Sun columnist Christina Blizzard that the workers are already going to be overpaid and are "touch of us" and intend to "hold the rest of us hostage." They don't deserve more money, Blizzard reasons, and therefore it's time for the government to pass a law requiring all the transit workers to go back to work by Monday or face criminal penalties. (In fact the government has already declared it intends to do just that this weekend.)

I wonder how Blizzard would feel if she were ordered by an act of Parliament to show up to work every day at imposed terms, even if they were generous. Surely she's conservative enough that she would oppose this extension of "big government" as some sort of socialist abuse of individual rights. Why is it not an abuse of individual rights when the government does it to others?

Blizzard is being particularly ridiculous, but these views aren't uncommon. In this Toronto Star article, for example, various people complain that their non-existent right to be informed 48 hours in advance of a strike has been violated. Such strikes are "a danger to society," and "selfish," and one man even thinks they "should be shot" (he's probably kidding... I hope?) because "some people have to work, you know."

The rage here is appalling, as is the proposed solution. People, for some reason, think they are entitled to the services - for middling pay, at menial rates - of scores of servants. Those servants withdraw their services, and the people, irate at this "violation" of their non-existent right to be served at times and places of their choosing, decide that they need to have laws passed to force their servants to keep serving them.

I have news for Blizzard, and others who think like her. Maybe the transit workers are "out of touch," but if you can't keep the transit system operating without paying them more, then their labour actually is worth more. That's how your fucking free market works! One of the people quoted in the Star article actually says that the servants need to be forced back to work because "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few," which is a very convenient position to hold when you are among the many and are hoping to oppress "the few." I wonder if you'd feel differently if you were one of "the few" in question.

As a public service, the Church of the Orange Sky initiated emergency deliberations within its Modest Proposal Research Institute (MPRI), a Church-funded public research institute charged with innovative solutions to everyday problems. After careful consideration, the MPRI has offered a solution which, while it may not resolve the present crisis, will at least reduce problems in the future which arise when bus drivers, manual labourers, and mechanics - in other words, the economic elite which controls our society - get it into their heads that for some inane reason they deserve salary increases as high as 3% per year, when hard-working and downtrodden CEOs must comfort themselves with average annual increases of only 39%.

It is time that all decent God-fearing Canadians rose up in revolt against the hideous economic excesses demanded by these jumped-up chauffeurs!

The MPRI recognizes, as Blizzard and her ilk do not, that is in fact not just illegal but unconstitutional (which, unfortunately, is not usually enough to actually prevent our anti-rule of law government from taking action) to ignore workers' rights to collective bargaining and impose work terms on them. However, thus far the move in Canada to overturn basic democratic rights as well as re-convert the law into a tool of oppression rather than a tool of justice has limited itself to a zany, ad hoc approach which merely encourages one crisis after another. What are needed are long-term solutions.

According to the MPRI, the obvious solution to the problem of servants who have unwanted rights is to create a new class of servants who don't have rights. Ironically, our society used to have just such an underclass, but unfortunately, during the 18th and 19th centuries, Quakers and hippies and humanists basically destroyed it through their so-called "abolition of slavery" campaigns.

It's high time we brought back slavery. That way we would have a sizeable group of non-persons who we could safely order to man all the necessary public service positions, and who we could count on to diligently and obediently do their jobs without wandering into a Blizzardian "fantasy world" of decent wages and safe working conditions. Perhaps if Toronto had ten thousand black men named George, maybe they could avoid this pesky "workers' rights" business.

Of course, we can't have black slaves anymore - this would be racist and unacceptable, and besides it would disqualify Barack Obama for President, which would be a global tragedy. I don't know how we'll divvy up the slavery positions, but I'm willing to volunteer for the first, if Ms. Blizzard will go for the second.

The chief argument against union workers trying to protect themselves and advance their interests is usually that their non-unionized workers have to accept out-sourcing and pay restrictions all the time. Well, that's probably true - except for their non-unionized management, mind you, which tend not to have accept any inconveniences at all. More to the point, this is not an argument for getting rid of those unions which do protect their members. It's an argument for creating more unions, so that more workers can benefit from better pay and job security.

Why can't them working-class subhumans just accept their lot in life and diligently do the tasks that we have set for them at rates and wages which we think are fair for them? Don't they realize that it's their responsibility to make sure we live out our lives in comfort and prosperity?
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Rules, Rules, Rules Again: Deuteronomy 19-30

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary sponsored by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Do not deprive the alien or the fatherless of justice, or take the cloak of the widow as a pledge...

The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of the Law...

This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him.


There are, unfortunately, no more references to the rights of trees.

There are, however, more rules. It's mostly a rehash of things that have been said before, and likewise I've said most of what I wanted to say before as well. Along with the rules of war I spoke about in the previous post, Moses touches on the Levite sanctuary cities, witness procedures for murder trials, rituals to atone for unsolved murders (sacrifice a cow, naturally), stoning of rebellious children (Moses thinks this is a grand idea), some more sex rules, cross-dressing (this is an abomination, probably for the same reason that I suggested homosexuality was a social "abomination"), divorce (you can send your woman away if she "displeases" you), and even adequate latrine facilities for military camps.

A few laws make some sense from a social justice perspective. There are more restrictions on exploitative loans and debts. In chapter 23, Moses actually prohibits you from helping a master capture a lost slave. I'm guessing American slaveowners conveniently forgot about this verse during the 19th century. It's also going to be relevant in the future when I eventually get around to Paul's views on slavery in Philemon, where Paul - so much for the grand Pharisee that so many evangelicals think carefully observed the Jewish laws - breaks this very rule by openly sending an escaped slave back to Philemon. You can even wander through someone else's field eating their food, provided you don't put any in a basket and carry it away with you.

Moses repeats and adds in some sex and marriage provisions which are, as usual, problematic. Moses proclaims that you can execute a woman if you can prove that she wasn't a virgin when you married her. (Naturally, whichever man or men are responsible for this condition are not rounded up and stoned.) If you're wrong about her virginity, you have to pay a fine to the girl's father and stay married. If you're right, she gets executed. She would seem to lose either way. (The "proof," incidentally, is that there must be blood when you have sex the first time, which on its own is probably pretty easy to arrange if you're desperate.) Men, of course, do not have to be "pure" before marriage - they can have sex much more freely.

Moses also expands the adultery provisions to ban sleeping with someone's fiancée - as I suggested before, this is because sexual rights to a woman's body are a form of title to property and therefore certain forms of sex are violations of other men's property. Sleeping with unmarried and unengaged women is notably something not discussed, even in the exceptionally common case of prostitution. In a relatively inspired moment, Moses proclaims new rules on rape, as well, though his reasoning leaves a little to be desired. Rape does not require death for the victim, unless it happens in a city, because if it did, you would expect her to "scream for help." (The fact that no one heard any such scream is taken as proof of her consent to the act.) The most telling example for the property issue, though, is the regulation that follows: if you rape an unengaged girl, you have to marry her after paying a fine to the girl's father. This is because you have taken his property without asking for consent first. And you aren't allowed to divorce a woman that you've previously raped!

Moses gets grumpier and crankier as he goes along, so the rules are increasingly interrupted with admonitions to follow the rules strictly or risk incurring God's lethal wrath. Thus chapter 28 veers off into a wild rant on the suffering and evils that await sinners. The suffering at one point becomes so extreme that Moses uses the following stunning example of the lack of charity and social compassion which is to come: a greedy man will refuse to share the flesh of his children with his wife or his brothers, but instead will eat it all himself. Ultimately, Moses plays the ultimate trump card: the defeated Israelites will sail back to Egypt and beg to be returned into slavery. In an unusually lucid moment, Moses pauses for thoughts and the author declares that the Law belongs to the people, being a gift to them from God.
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Friday, April 25, 2008

Goddamn this "Holy Scripture" Bullshit

This post is sponsored by the Sacrilegious Wire Service of the Church of the Orange Sky.

Five hundred years later, it still comes down to who gets to have righteous sex with whom, and whose gets "blessed" as a result. Watching the ongoing dissolution of the Anglican communion in Canada is like watching the last two seasons of Battlestar Galactica - it's hard to choose sides among stubborn reprobates.

I wrote some posts a few months back when the "Anglican Network in Canada" was taking its first steps to provoke a schism in Canadian Anglicanism. The issue has returned to the secular news, which is usually the only kind I read these days, as a result of South American archbishop Venables' visit to a conference here in Canada, put on by the "Network" schismatics. The schism, and particularly the firm opposition to gay marriage (and somewhat softer opposition to the ordination of women, who are almost as troublesome as gay people, and sometimes even are gay people!), is being justified on the grounds of "Holy Scripture," whatever that is.

(The latest twist has been covered by such major news sources as the CBC and the National Post.

On the one hand, we have Canadian archbishop Fred Hiltz, who demonstrated his opposition but also his impotence in demanding that Venables not make the trip - bluntly adding that the southern bishop should "stop interfering in the life of this province." Hiltz heads up a church hierarchy that managed, in true Canadian fashion, to thumb its nose at every principled position a couple years ago by ruling that gay marriage wasn't forbidden by the core doctrines of Anglicanism, but that Anglican churches wouldn't bless gay marriages anyway - somewhat like claiming that giving food to the hungry is a nice thing to do but that it's best left to someone else with more money to spare. The fact that Hiltz's best argument against the Network schism is that the church of the Southern Cone is violating the sovereignty of its Canadian sister is a sign of how weak the Canadian church's position has become. If the issue really was the hierarchy, then this issue would presumably require some sort of intervention from Rowan Williams of Canterbury, who is keeping deliberately aloof from the squabble. My experience has led me to believe that most Canadian Anglican churches strive for the faithful inclusion in communion of anyone who worships Christ - but this is rapidly going to get lost amidst accusations of border violations and exclusion of those who are part of the new "Network."

On the other hand, we have South American archbishop Greg Venables, who offers the dubious excuse that he wouldn't have supported the schism if the Canadian rebels weren't already causing trouble in the first place - a rationale approximately as morally justifiable, under the church's hierarchical traditions that both archbishops claim to accept, as claiming that it's okay to join in a bank robbery if you walk in while it's already underway. Venables, correctly in my opinion, insists that "truth" outranks "geography" - which in this case means that while claiming to stand up for true Anglicanism, he violates the traditional Anglican order for the sake of the new and novel problem of manning the walls and defending God from waves of gay and lesbian marauders. I normally wouldn't side with hierarchical institutions, but I have to say that Venables is behaving like a Baptist, arguing that any old separation is both legitimized and indeed necessitated by some relatively minor doctrinal differences. As another testament that his point is foolish, Venables even uses the notorious "some of my best friends are gay" argument.

To his credit, it seems Venables also disagrees with the activism of Anglican primate Peter Akinola of Nigeria, who at this very moment is campaigning in that country to have homosexuality declared a criminal offence. These shreds of integrity, however, are further undermined by his blatant hypocrisy over exactly how "literal" the Bible's teachings on sex and gender really might be: he is willing to permit his Canadian flocks to ordain women because this is not a "doctrinal" issue, rather a "secondary" one. What the fuck is this bullshit line of division between "doctrinal" and "secondary" morality?

I've said before, and I will say again, that the proper response from the Anglican Church of Canada should be to call the Networks' bluff, not mutter darkly about border violations and sovereign rights. The position of a church which stands for inclusion of all who have faith in Christ should and must be that those who wish communion with the Anglican Church of Canada may have it, and those who do not wish such communion are free not to share it - and to search for fellowship elsewhere, if they find it necessary, but to do so in the knowledge that the Anglican church will remain faithful and remain welcoming should they ever wish to return. Of course, Hiltz can't afford to take such a position, because he has to look out for the powers and privileges of his institution - which means he can't afford to dilute the traditional privileges of that institution (like sovereign borders and a monopolization of Anglicanism within Canada). So much for the Canadian church.

Now for some of my own biased feelings on this subject. The Southern notion that the Bible defines our "doctrinal" and "secondary" morailties, wherever the line between them may fall, is a transparent fiction worthy of prompt disposal. You can choose to keep all of the law of Moses or none of the law of Moses, but you can't pick and choose which part of "God's moral code" is good enough for you and which can be safely ignored - which also means you can't keep the Levitican ban on homosexuality unless you're willing to consider all of the other sexual rights, privileges and obligations of that law. Even without discussing the explicit issue of owning women (which I will take up later, and have already discussed at length in my Biblical commentaries), let's review some of the sexual morals which according to Venables's argument really ought to be reinstated at once: no sex during a woman's period (penalty: execution or banishment), the importance of female but not male sexual purity (penalty: death for one, nothing for the other), all nudity is evil (penalties vary), concubinage, polygamy, brothers' widows are inherited, sex makes one unclean, interracial marriage is wrong, and so on. Of most interest to unmarried Christians, perhaps, is the obvious point that this Old Testament sexual law doesn't explicitly prohibit unmarried heterosexual consenting men and women from having sex, provided the woman's value as a bride or wife is not endangered in the process.

Presumably, therefore, Venables is drawing on the New Testament for inspiration on the subject of homosexuality, but the sexual message of the New Testament is even sparser and less coherent. Jesus himself was notably unconcerned about sex - it's common to say he never mentioned homosexuality, but really, he hardly mentions sex at all, and only rarely talks about marriage, beyond exploitation (inappropriate divorces and mental "adultery"). So obviously the real meat of the issue must be found in the epistles, which return on several occasions to the very great concern about sex which the Jewish authors had, the early Christian writers also had, but Christ seemingly did not, his teachings more largely concerned with love and integrity, two things which are demonstrably lacking in the Anglican schism.

Even there, of course, it's tough to know what to do with what we find. Paul explicitly declares in Romans and Galatians that we now live beyond the Old Testament law, and that he's not trying to create a new law through his writings. But that doesn't stop Christians from looking for new laws in his writings, anyways. Trouble is, this usually requires much "harmonization" and "interpretation" and such even from those who claim to take the Bible most "literally." In Romans 1, for example, Paul certainly does appear to condemn homosexuality - though in the process he's engaging in some deliberately exaggerated sarcasm, something which would become immediately apparent if people erased that giant and idiotic chapter numeral that cuts Paul off in mid-argument. I guess you could take as binding all of his claims on gender, marriage and sex in Corinthians, Timothy, etc., if not for the fact that they're hopelessly, ridiculously confused: Should unmarried women get married quickly (1 Timothy), or not at all (1 Corinthians)? Can women speak in church, or must they be silent, or must they be silent unless veiled, or perhaps silent except when delivering prophecies? If you're not going to take Paul absolutely literally on those issues (even where he contradicts himself), you have no business claiming there's a "clear" moral teaching against homosexuality, since it would have to be derived from the same flawed books. I guess Jude mentions sexual immorality too, but then, Jude is a useless, paranoid rant, even less worthy of canonical status than the elitist reactionary babbling of 1 Timothy. Of course it doesn't talk about gay marriage, because there was no such thing as gay marriage at the time. Are we going to make moral decisions for today based on the social customs of 1st century Palestine?

The most telling moment, of course, is when Venables says that there is in fact a form of "holy" sex - specifically, heterosexual intra-marital sex. Never mind that the Old Testament said this sex was unclean and St. Paul said it was a "concession" to sinfulness. Holy indeed, which is why we don't have time to worry about "secondary" issues like global poverty, or the massive crisis of food shortages now occuring worldwide even while Western wheat is sold for "biofuel" in what may become one of the greatest crimes of humanity of the present time. No, we can't worry about those problems, because there is a much more severe problem, which is that there are unauthorized orgasms going on! When a man and his wife fuck, it is sacred, because their papers are signed and everything is in order. We cannot possibly worry about poverty, exploitation, or other injustices until we've made sure we won't be accidentally blessing the wrong orgasms.

In the past, the Church of the Orange Sky has always condemned efforts to reduce marriage to sex, most notably in the case of the ridiculous Christian Sex Challenge and its clearly superior successor, Dave's Relevant Christian Sex Challenge. I'd love to continue doing so, but in this case the church is working against me, because pretty much the only thing that can objectively separate heterosexual "marriage" from gay "marriage" is that the latter has greater potential for vaginal intercourse involving a penis, and for the various reproductive opportunities which follow therefrom.

I'm sure there are plenty of people who disagree with my feelings on sex and marriage here, but even granting that I might be wrong, it's hard to argue that there's a clear Biblical teaching on the subject which is so "central" to the Christian gospel that it would justify splitting a church.
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Just War, Deuteronomy Edition: Trees are Innocent!: Deuteronomy 20 - 21:14

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary sponsored by the Church of the Orange Sky.

It's not, I should say off the top, what today we would consider a just war - even those of us who don't begin from the premise that all wars are unjust.

According to Moses, the Israelite army must be fearless, even when going up against chariots or cavalry (neither of which they seem to have at the moment). Before the battle, the army must be blessed by a priest. Touchingly, the officers permit soldiers to depart the field if they have just built a house, planted their crops, or been engaged to a woman. They also are to permit anyone to leave who is "afraid or fainthearted," an interesting concession that most modern armed forces dispensed with in favour of rigid discipline in the line.

As a general rule, Moses proposes, the Israelites are to offer peace terms when besieging a city. These aren't particularly generous terms - the only bargaining position they may adopt is that the entire population of the city be reduced to slavery and forced to serve the Israelites forever - but it's better than what happens after a successful armed siege: all of the men are to be massacred, then the women, children, and livestock may be taken as "plunder."

When it comes to invading Canaan, though, Moses says that even these rules are much too generous to the losers. Here, the Israelites must murder everything - literally "anything that breathes." If anyone is left alive, Moses explains, they will seduce the Israelites into worshipping foreign gods. Once again we see the contempt of the people re-emerging in these rules of war. Foreigners must be slaughtered because the Israelites are too weak to allow them to live. I was always taught in church that God was judging these various nations for their wickedness, but that's not the primary reasoning that Moses is using here.

Bizarrely, God explicitly provides for the protection of trees in his rules of war. When besieging a city, God says, you may not destroy its trees. If they don't bear fruit, you're allowed to use them if you need to build siege machines, if it's absolutely necessary; but if they're fruit trees, they must not be harmed under any circumstances. The first rationale offered by Moses makes sense: if you don't cut down the tree today, you'll be able to eat its fruit tomorrow. Even during wartime this is so. I wonder what the anti-environmentalist segments of the church think of this notion.

The other reason given by Moses is a little weirder: trees are not people, therefore they cannot flee, therefore it is wrong to "besiege them," therefore they should not be harmed. Some of the Christian translations soften the blow to escape the fact that the Bible is actually seemingly making a moral argument against chopping down defenceless trees, but Jewish translations of the Tanakh make it pretty clear what's going on here: "Are the trees of the field human to withdraw before you into the besieged city?" No, they're not, so you shouldn't attack defenceless trees!

Either way, it wouldn't be too tough to stretch this verse well beyond the context - the Israelite laws of war - to argue that here the Bible is making an argument for environmental conservation, if not preservation.

Unfortunately, women get less protection than trees, although they do - unlike men - get the opportunity to live in all but the most genocidal wars of cleansing. Moses basically says that if you've captured a city and see an attractive girl, you should take her with you. You are required to shave her head and give her a change of clothes, and then she can be your wife - unless she's not good in bed or gives you some other reason to be displeased, in which case you can let her go. The sole protection for the women involved is that if you sleep with them you can't trade them away as slaves: you have to either marry them or free them.
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God Wants a State After All: Deuteronomy 16-18

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

God has tried to cut off a permanent goverment structure aside from the priests in the past, but Moses goes back on that in Deuteronomy. He calls for the reappointment of judges and officials, who will "judge the people fairly"; and law courts to resolve those issues that puzzle the judges. The judges are given authority to interpret the law of Moses; "you must act according to the decisions they give you at the place the Lord will choose. Be careful to do everything they direct you to do. Act according to the law they teach you and the decisions they give you." God is creating a permanent common law court system, supposedly.

More dubiously, Moses calls for the appointment of a king. He predicts that the Israelites will eventually grumble that they should have "a king over us like all the nations around us," after which the Israelites must appoint a fair and competent king who is not a foreigner. He must not "acquire great numbers of horses for himself or make the return to Egypt to get more of them." He must not "take many wives." He must not "accumulate large amounts of silver and gold." He must write a personal copy of all of the laws, and read it every day.

The Deuteronomy passages here are both a lot less pessimistic about human nature, and a lot more pragmatic about Israelite society, than the preceding books. This king is not God's first choice - specifically it is someone who will be appointed only if and when the Israelites decide they want to emulate their pagan neighbours. But the Israelites shouldn't want to emulate their pagan neighbours - so the kingly government is something that will only be established as a concession once they have fallen too far into sin.

Moses continues in this vein by instituting some critical reforms to the priesthood. Recall that Numbers created a careful hierarchy in which the Levites weren't full priests - only the descendants of Aaron's line were. Now, Moses specifies, every Levite may be a priest. "The priests, who are Levites - indeed the whole tribe of Levi" will take charge of the sacrifices and, of course, take their commission from each in turn. All Levites have been chosen "to stand and minister in the Lord's name always."

Moses also proclaims that another prophet will eventually be raised up by God. Unsurprisingly Christians take this to mean that Moses is prophecying the coming of Christ, which I suppose is plausible, although Moses is fairly vague. He just says the new prophet will be "like me," which Christ isn't really.

There will also be lesser prophets coming, Moses says, and he proposes a test to ensure that they're honestly the mouthpieces of the Lord: if what they predict comes true, then they speak for God. This is a curious statement; a few chapters ago, Moses warned that some prophets would make correct predictions but still speak against God. I guess prophecy was as complex an affair then as it is now.
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Thursday, April 24, 2008

God Swaps Income Taxes for Potlucks: Deuteronomy 14:22 - 15

This post is part of a revolutionary Biblical commentary sponsored by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Deuteronomy 14 gives the most succint description to date of the tithe, i.e. what began as the 10% flat tax imposed by the priesthood upon all Israel. It will be one-tenth of agricultural production for the year. You can either bring the tithe straight to God or, if it is too far from your home to the central priesthood, you can sell them for silver and take the silver to God, and re-purchase food and livestock once you've arrived at the temple. This is a very interesting development because it means those who own farms right next to wherever the priesthood settles are going to make an extraordinarily lucrative profit off of annual pilgrimages.

On the other hand, Deuteronomy inexplicably - but in my opinion, positively - alters the balance of power. The tithe will no longer belong chiefly to the Levites, Moses decrees. The tithes also belong, by right, to the aliens, the fatherless, and the widows, who "may come and eat and be satisfied" from all the food that is collected in the tithe. In this chapter, Moses even suggests that giving to the Levites is a form of charity - because "they have no allotment or inheritance of their own." Thus Moses is proposing a truly inspired method of national poverty alleviation and wealth transfer, of the sort conservative Christians today often denounce as liberal foolishness. Moses is going to solve crimes of poverty by creating a national institution of food sharing.

What's interesting about this is that God seems to expect the tithes being brought to the central temple to ultimately become a grand festival. Later, Moses elaborates that everyone is permitted to eat from the tithes that they bring to God: indeed, they are expected to bring "whatever [food] your heart desires" and then "eat before the Lord your God and rejoice, you and your household." Deuteronomy is overturning a significant power of the priesthood in doing this.

The tithing rules are brief enough and old enough that they really don't need to be discussed at great length, except that Christians today so frequently draw links from the tithe to our financial obligations today. So, let's take a deeper look at its significance.

Off the top, we can see that the tithing rule will already need some extensive re-interpretation, of the sort literalists usually hate, before it will have any relevance to us. The tithe is quite specifically limited only to the agricultural industry - a fair assessment for a largely rural society, though even Israel was going to have a large number of towns and cities, according to the law. The new rationale for the tithe - the giant festival in which food is available to anyone who is hungry - is quite clearly no longer about donating property to the priesthood. Basically, God is proposing a giant national potluck.

So the notion that the tithing system parallels our obligations to financially support the church today immediately is shown to be quite ridiculous. The tithe envisioned in Deuteronomy is not about supporting the church; it is about sharing directly with every believer, without exception (and non-believers, we might suppose from the "aliens" statement), and it is about doing so through the provision of food for charity.

This sounds well and good, and as Christians arguably we ought to be doing such things anyway, given the shortages of food among disadvantaged people today. However, the tithing system is not the way to go about this process. We are all Levites, to draw the closest possible parallel - or indeed, we are all priests, if one is to accept at face value the frequently bandied-about notion of the "priesthood of all believers," though in truth very few denominations actually practice this so-called belief, or they wouldn't need to create a high priesthood of pastors and ministers and so on.

At the same time as the above, we are also all citizens of the kingdom; hence we are both the givers and the recipients. So we could hold large supplies of food in common and give it to those who had need - and probably we should do just that - but there is no such thing as a tithe, because we have no holier-than-holy inside group entitled to receive the tithe from us.

Thus the largely cash and material donations to the contemporary church have nothing to do with the tithe, and the social order of Christianity does not permit the tithe. It's a nice idea but it's not ours and we shouldn't pretend that is.

It's interesting that Moses follows up his reforms to the tithing system by making further concessions to the disadvantaged. Debts must be cancelled every seven years. Servants must be freed every seven years - and not merely "freed," but sent away with a "liberal" reward of food and drink. When you free your slaves, you must treat them with the same generosity as God showed in liberating the Israelites from Egypt. This is a most intriguing statement, in terms of social criticism, in that it is implicitly criticizing slavery even while permitting it as an institution: if you own slaves, you must treat them the way God treated Egypt's slaves, i.e. you must liberate them.

Even more stunningly, Moses declares that "there should be no poor among you," because there is enough wealth in the land to make sure everyone lives in at least some degree of modest comfort. If there are poor people, he suggests, it is because the rest of Israel has failed to show the appropriate charity. If you know a poor man, you must treat him generously and "freely lend him whatever he needs." You aren't even allowed to withhold loans on the grounds that the seven-year debt forgiveness point is coming up.

Because the people are sinful, Moses concludes, "there will always be poor people in the land." But at the same time, there should not be. Poverty, he argues, is the result of the affluent not keeping the commandments and not showing charity.

I'm guessing this approach wouldn't win a lot of friends today, even within churches.
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Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Instructions for Genocide: Deuteronomy 7 - 14:21

The following post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Circumcise your hearts, therefore, and do not be stiff-necked any longer. For the Lord your God is God of gods and lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes. He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the alien, giving him food and clothing. And you are to love those who are aliens, for you yourselves were aliens in Egypt.

I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse - the blessing if you obey the commands of the Lord your God that I am giving you today; the curse if you disobey the commands of the Lord your God and turn from the way that I command you today by following other gods.


And now that the inspirational quotes are out of the way:

According to Moses, there are already seven nations in the promised land: the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. I thought they'd already slaughtered the Amorites but I guess that was just a subgroup. God isn't going to drive them out on his own anymore, Moses specifies: the Israelites will have to fight them. And what a battle it will be: "you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy." Moses seems to fully expect that many will survive, because he then adds a no-marriage-with-pagan-girls rule, despite the fact that he's seemingly married to at least one pagan and possibly two. One rule for the prophet, another for the people.

I don't know about the gruesome genocidal aspects, but it's interesting to note that the invasion has become a cooperative venture: the Israelites will invade, and God will "send the hornet among" the survivors. Back in Exodus, God was taking care of the slaves. Now, they're assisting each other.

Moses launches into a lengthy diatribe on the grace of God, arguing that God has chosen Israel for his own righteousness, not because Israel is righteous - it isn't - or because it is very large - he says it isn't, although by my historical math they aren't exactly weak. "You are a stiff-necked people," Moses repeats over and over again, but God will lead them, and he will "discipline them as a man disciplines his son." That sounds like the sort of metaphor Christians would use today, although just in the last book, God was killing them by the thousand, which is an interesting method of disciplining one's children. Obey the Lord, Moses warns, or the discipline will be painful. In chapter 13, Moses goes so far as to suggest that entire Israelite cities must be put to the sword if they stray into pagan worship.

I'm summarizing because Moses is pretty repetitive here. Still, if you're feeling conservative and want all kinds of inspirational verses exhorting people to follow the rules and obey the moral codes and remember the Lord your God, I think Deuteronomy 7-11 has about six hundred quotable verses for you.

Some interesting warnings about prophest are given in chapter 13. If a prophet appears to the Israelites, even if his predictions come true, he should be immediately executed if he suggests that the Israelites should follow other gods. Such a prophet, Moses says, is a "test from God." Which part is the test? Will God deliberately give prophets a mix of true and false messages to see whether the Israelites will kill them? That's a bit disturbing.
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Moses Gives his Memoirs: Deuteronomy 1-6

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

In the case of Deuteronomy, I'm actually prepared to (sort of) accept some of the standard authorship claims, at least to the extent that this book really does purport to be in part the words of Moses, unlike the rest of the Torah. Moses's days are drawing to a close and the Israelites are getting ready to invade Canaan, so he knows he doesn't have much time left. He gathers all the Israelites together and delivers a series of speeches recapping the short history of Israel since liberation, the laws given to them by God, and their expectations and obligations in Canaan. It's an interesting approach, which lets the author present a coherent, organized version of history and the law rather than the haphazard jumbles of Exodus, Numbers, and to a lesser extent Leviticus.

Moses has grown bitter and self-absorbed in his old age, or perhaps he's just a little hazy on the details. For example, he takes credit for the creation of the judicial order (the system of judges and arbiters created way back in Exodus), even though the idea actually came from his father-in-law, Jethro/Reuel the priest of Midian (whom the Israelites have since massacred). Moses blames the Israelites for his own death sentence, skipping over his own failure - albeit a seemingly minor one - and saying angrily that "because of you the Lord became angry with me." After a lifetime of struggling with his fickle, reckless charges, Moses is angry and has come to blame them for his own discontent. It's a tragic end to a major Biblical figure. My Man's Bible, it should be noted, is of much help in skipping over the doom and gloom of these verses. In its "devotional" entry on Deuteronomy 1, it reminds me that the Bible proves that in God's eyes every human being has great worth and value, something clearly and blatantly contradicted by Numbers and to some extent Leviticus.

After he's done with the history, Moses moves on to some of the rules. Even through the burden of translation (a burden made heavier by the fact that even the more "readable" translations of the Bible are usually quite stilted), it is clear that whoever's recapping Moses's speeches was a superb writer, and/or Moses himself has indeed learned much since the days in Egypt when he begged God to find another public speaker. Is there any nation, Moses asks, which is greater than Israel? Who has more righteous laws? Is there a more powerful god? (The phrasing is rhetorical but would once again seem to hint at the underlying polytheistic cultural context.) At one point, Moses "call[s] heaven and earth as witnesses" that if the Israelites continue to sin, they will be severely punished. They will be compelled by invaders to "worship man-made gods of nood and stone, which cannot see or hear or eat or smell." But even in the worst oppression, God will redeem them: the Lord your God is a merciful God; he will not abandon or destroy you or forget the covenant with your forefathers, which he confirmed to them by oath." This speech returns us to a more positive view of the divine which isn't necessarily borne out by the Israelites's experiences in Numbers and parts of Exodus, but at least it sounds nice. In chapter 6 he delivers a much more famous line: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength."

Because we're reading a summary thus far, we're missing most of the misogyny and sexism inherent in the other accounts. It's still there, though. And my Man's Bible brings it back to me in chilling fashion with an absolutely appalling entry on Deuteronomy 6, where parents are instructed to teach their children the laws as they themselves have learned them. Normally I don't judge the entries, just mock them, because they're beside the point and most readers presumably aren't holding this ridiculous and lamentable freakchild of holy writ and human stupidity, but this one is disturbing enough to bring up, in part because I suspect they may actually have hit on the sexist subtext of the Torah. And also, a recommendation to readers: please never buy an NIV new. It's owned by Zondervan, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch. This means that the NIV is basically the Fox News version of the Bible.

The devotion is by someone named D. Bruce Lockerbie, who is currently a manager at PAIDEIA, a leadership training and consulting firm. At the time he wrote this he was an academic, at Wheaton College.

Lockerbie selects a verse from chapter 6, a strangely non-gender-specific command to "impress [God's commands] on [your children]. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up." According to Lockerbie, this rule is given to men, not women. It is the father's duty, Lockerbie proclaims with great confidence, to "train and instruct" within the home. From this it follows with elegant logical certainty that fathers, but not mothers, are "representatives of God." That's a very convenient position to hold. I'll bet it gives a man extra weight in domestic disputes, assuming his pet woman has been suitably indoctrinated.
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Saturday, April 19, 2008

The Relevance of the Old Testament Law: A Response

A couple of days ago a reader who is apparently also a professional preacher (I have to admit this makes my cheap online credential from the Universal Life Church look quite worthless) took time out of his busy schedule two days ago to make some detailed comments, on my comments, on Leviticus 25 (the article is older, here).

To reward the inexcusably tiny fraction of visitors (according to my stats counter) who actually leave comments, it is standing policy at the Church of the Orange Sky to respond to lengthy posts with equal verbiage, something made possible by my current lack of gainful employment and ability to procrastinate on my still-incomplete thesis research. The following has not been well thought-out yet, but I hope it counts for something.

According to Toby of Texas, whose blog Beware the Ides of March is here:

Fair enough, but all of these laws are based on 2 ideas that are somewhat unique to Israel's historical situation: 1) the extermination of the Canaanite peoples, and 2) the preservation of the land and seed so that the promise to Abraham could be visibly fulfilled in the Messiah.

With the coming of Messiah, the preservation of the land as ethnic Israel's and in fact of Israel as a distinctive ethnicity no longer has a function. The whole earth is deeded to the Messiah, and the promised inheritance flows through Him to His People, thereby fulfilling the promise to Abraham.

I'm one to take Old Testament law as continually binding for today, with the proviso that the land and seed laws were for a specific time and place. Granted, that interpretation leads to bigger questions about what constitute the land and seed laws as opposed to other aspects of Old Testament law that should govern human conduct in perpetuity, but interpretation will always be a task as long as there is a written text one uses as the basis for law. This is true whether the origin of the written text is divine or not.

I'm a relative novice in the area of theonomy, but if you have any sincere questions about Biblical Law you should consult Greg Bahnsen's work "By This Standard, The Authority of God's Law Today." You will find that he and others like him (myself included) do not toe the line of the popular religious right. We are often lumped in with them, but most of our political views fit the paleolibertarian (think Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry) mold much better than the Republican.

If I have intruded on a blog that is intended merely for satire whose author does not with to seriously engage the ideas of the Bible, my apologies.


First off, Toby, this blog is not intended merely for satire, though I suppose it is riddled with sarcasm, beginning with the frequent references to my Church of the Orange Sky. My proclamation several months ago that I would read and seriously consider the entire Bible was also not made in jest - if it was, I'd have picked a smaller target. I also apologize for lumping too many people into the same category when it comes to Biblical interpretation - it's a shorthand I indulge in which is probably quite unfair, and which I probably shouldn't actually indulge in at all.

I actually started with a more conservative (distinct, I think, from "religious right") view of the Bible, partially as a result of years spent in the pair of Baptist churches in which I first learned the Bible. At one point I in fact embraced total Biblical inerrancy, though ultimately I found that viewpoint not worth keeping, particularly since I am currently convinced that not doing so doesn't detract from the validity of my religious beliefs about what the Bible discusses, and also because I'm convinced that there are too many mythical, inconsistent, and otherwise very probably errant elements to the Bible to cling to any absolute position in that regard which isn't completely necessary.

I didn't really know what my position on the law would be when I started this project because it had been a very, very long time since I'd read the Old Testament all the way through. So we are both "novices," and probably me more than you in terms of any sort of training.

Now that the handshaking and pleasantries are out of the way:

I'm one to take Old Testament law as continually binding for today, with the proviso that the land and seed laws were for a specific time and place. Granted, that interpretation leads to bigger questions about what constitute the land and seed laws as opposed to other aspects of Old Testament law that should govern human conduct in perpetuity, but interpretation will always be a task as long as there is a written text one uses as the basis for law. This is true whether the origin of the written text is divine or not.
I have a couple of principal objections to the viewpoint you're providing here.

First, I'm not all that concerned about the division you're suggesting because my moral and other objections to the law don't really fall evenly on the line between "land" and cultural "purity" laws on the one side, and some category of "moral" or other laws on the other. I know that that division is common, although I'm not convinced it was intended by the initial writers and I'm certainly not convinced that "reading in" that division is an easy or perfect process.

First off, though it's a tempting way to move beyond objections to the more genocidal and oppressive elements, I have to worry that making divisions between "good" rules and "bad" rules - or at least "irrelevant" rules - is an interpretation we're adding on later, which the original writers of the texts that are now in the Old Testament simply did not have. While I am not completely averse to the idea that god may use actions in ways other than they are strictly intended, I am hesitant to do this with respect to the Bible. The legal code of the Old Testament as a whole, barring I suppose (and hypothetically) any rules which might have been added in after the fact by later scribes and forgers, are pretty much a complete set which reflect the thinking of that particular culture.

Nevertheless, I'll accept for the sake of argument, and at least for the moment, that the laws regarding conquest and "seeding" the land are a set which only applied at a particular time in history, and can be easily distinguished from the other rules. I still have two remaining objections.

First, suggesting that they applied only to a particular set of circumstances gets us out of the question of how we'd have to consider upholding them today, but it implies that under those circumstances, those laws were morally justifiable. And I have to say that I can't see those laws as morally justified. As a pacifist, in particular, I believe that there are no circumstances which justify the murder of other human beings. This certainly sets me outside the will of god as his will is interpreted by the writers of the early Old Testament. I have to accept that my conscience leads me in other directions than the plain language of this part of the Bible. It's probably a fairly pointless thought experiment, but if I put myself in the position of an ancient Israelite, I would refuse an order to kill others in order to take their land. (Probably irrelevant because I would also likely have been killed off in the Kohathite rebellion in Numbers, for the sin of protesting the place of the holy priesthood.)

This brings us to my other principal complaint, which is that the laws regarding treatment of other nations in ancient Israel are only one thing I find a little distasteful, if quite understandable given the historical context of what frequently went on at the time. I actually like some of what is in Leviticus 25, and I think it speaks directly against some of our current ideas about capitalism and private ownership, which is intriguing - for example, should we follow this today by suggesting that all loans must be forgiven after seven years, we must never profit off the poor's need for food, the land should be rested, and so on? Which part no longer applies? The process of drawing lines between standing and outdated laws tends to reflect our personal interests as much as anything, and I have to wonder at how convenient it would be if we today were to suggest that private land ownership is now okay, after all.

More to the point, and without going too far along that tangent, I don't like the Old Testament laws for a wide variety of reasons. Even if the treatment of foreigners laws are now obsolete, and that religious wars are no longer justified, I object to many of the rest of the laws for a host of other reasons. For example, I object to the sexual and marital laws, including that of homosexuality, on the grounds that they reflect and reinforce a patriarchal system that comes disturbingly close to owning women, and which I simply do not agree with. Even the Ten Commandments are phrased in such a way that arguably they are for men only. You could read in their application to women as well, I suppose, but that too would be an alteration of the laws as plainly written.

So I like some of the laws, and I dislike some of the others. I won't indulge in some exercise to justify my feelings here, because I fear it would be much too self-serving, providing some dubious theological pretext for moral beliefs that I already hold and would continue to hold anyways. In my view, either all of the law or none of the law must be upheld as morally appropriate (even if some sections were morally appropriate only in specific times and places). Therefore I must choose "none of the law," and seek theological or textaul support for my moral beliefs elsewhere. Ultimately I admit I may not find that support in the Bible, though I remain hopeful that later sections of the Old Testament will change my views on the subject.
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A Darker View of the Priesthood: Final Reflections on Numbers

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

I'm a little confused. Christians basically reproduce the ancient Jewish belief that Moses wrote all of the books of the Torah, though we add in another not entirely helpful layer of Bible-as-intrictae-coherent-word-of-God nonsense that we imported from the Muslims. (I've never read the Koran, which maybe I'll do next, but on the surface they'd at least appear to have a considerable advantage over us on that scale because the Koran really was written fairly quickly and in a single location, whatever else you believe about it.)

But my reading of Numbers has shown extremely significant differences in the approaches taken by the authors of books in the Torah. This goes beyond mere inconsistencies and contradictions, though of course those are there as well. (Having moved further from my evangelical roots with every chapter, I find that hunting for contradictions, let alone finding ways to "harmonize" them, is increasingly dull and irrelevant.) It's about the general mood and the apparent interpretation being placed on various events.

Exodus and Numbers are telling similar stories, but where the former is concerned more chiefly with the immediate moment of liberation from Israel, the latter is concerned more with what happens after the revelations at Mt Sinai. This immediately gives the opportunity to describe some of the darker events in Israel's early history, but the author of Numbers seems to revel in regaling stories of the complete idiocy, incompetence, and general faithlessness of the average Israelite. Even where the stories are retellings of the same events, this new bias is obvious - like the story of the quail, which God once provided out of generosity, but in Numbers provides out of sheer spite, so demonstrated by the fact that as the Israelites begin to eat, he starts killing them even while ordering them to gorge themselves.

In contrast to the fickle masses, the Aaronite priesthood - and Moses - are heroes. They're not perfect; eventually even Moses screws up and God decides to kill him too - but in the meantime they save Israel from God's irrational rage in one strange crisis after another. The Israelites are fortunate they have their priests, the Numbers account says, because every so often God will be seized by fits of uncontrollable anger, and a properly trained priest will have to be summoned to perform a powerful bull sacrifice, or burn magic incense, in order to save everyone from annihilation. And only the priests have the magic hands! Based on the Numbers account, absolute obedience to the priesthood is pretty much a necessity: even if God doesn't blow you away for the mere initial act of rebellion, pretty soon after that he'll kill you for some other reason, and a priest won't be there to stop him. God is a wild, angry force and the priests alone can control him. The theological implications of every component of that statement are immense and unusual, yet Numbers appears to accept the statement as a basic premise. The priests even get responsibility for a variety of new and exciting ritual forms, all to give them something fancy to do as they demonstrate their power over God and everyone.

In the meantime, the Israelites have already started killing people. The context is uncertain and the reasons seem okay, at least to begin with. The first few states they promise not to harm provided they are granted free passage, but after God sentences the Israelites to death, they become understandably angry and bitter. They are no longer simply on the march, so they can't just negotiate for safe passage with various countries. In theory they're not settling yet, but that doesn't stop them from brutally attacking states, and systematically massacring the survivors. They can't take their anger out on God, but the peoples around them are a lot more vulnerable than a deity, in part because of Israel's oversized, massive army. God's role in the military campaign is ambiguous: sometimes he is silent, sometimes he appears to convict the wrong nation of the wrong sin. He lets his only known non-Israelite prophet, Balaam, get killed in a pointless skirmish.

Even as he punished the people with death for their sins, God is starting to reveal more hints about the society he wants the Israelites to build in Canaan. As I've noted in a numbers of posts, this is a seeming stateless one, where most social and economic power is controlled by the priesthood - a power rationalized in Numbers by their apparent ability to manipulate God through reason and powerful magic. Moses has seemingly proposed the first formal separation of church and state through his division of his powers between priest Eleazar and general Joshua, but that is a fiction; Joshua's authority is limited to the conquest of the holy land, but the priests' power is eternal. There is a much more conservative and pessimistic view of human nature, and the priesthood rises to counter this. In the meantime, the Israelites are commanded to love others as they love themselves, but this plainly doesn't apply to non-Israelites, who may be slaughtered with impunity.

There are a few bright spots in the narrative - the first women's rights, for example - but these are buried beneath contempt for people without title, murderous contempt of foreigners, and the steadily growing elite status of a hereditary priesthood. It's painful to admit that in some ways I actually liked and preferred Leviticus.
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Moses Parcels Out Canaan: Numbers 32-36

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

The Israelites are continuing to prepare for their long-awaited invasion of Canaan, and now it's time to make some more specific land and title arrangements. Most of it is pretty dull. The women from Gilead who approached Moses asking to be given their father's land get their due - the only women mentioned in this passage, certainly the only women owning property. It comes at a price, mind you: the (male) leaders of the Manasseh tribe come to Moses complaining that if these women marry out of the tribe the land might go with them. Moses agrees and orders that the women may only marry if their husband is also of Manasseh. This restriction applies only to women who own land, thus subordinating this little bit of freedom gained to the "needs" of the greater community. Some property gained, some liberty lost.

The Levites, as you may recall, don't get any land. Instead, God gives them some cities. Several of these are a new concept in ancient jurisprudence which God calls the "sanctuary city": sacred land to which accused murderers are permitted to flee in safety. In these cities they are guaranteed safety until they stand trial.

The Bible is a little unclear about what happens next. If the act is deliberate or involved a lethal weapon, the accused is guilty of murder and must be put to death. If it was accidental, the "assembly" of the Israelites will come to a judgement. God does not describe how they will do this, except that witnesses are required at a trial - at least two of them.

The punishment, moreover, is intriguing. I speculated before that God was proposing a stateless society, and that seems to apply here as well. The responsibility for carrying out the execution, if one is called for, rests with "the avenger of blood," presumably someone from the victim's family or tribe. So long as the accused is in the sanctuary city, he may not be harmed by the avenger. He may stay there until the death of the high priest; the Bible specifies twice that this is the priest "who was anointed with the holy oil." The suggestion that the holiness of the priest protects these individuals is an interesting one.

A more contentious issue arises in chapter 32, when the herders of the Reuben and Gad clans see that the lands already occupied by the Israelites, in Jazer and Gilead (what we now call the West Bank, I think) are best suited for their livestock. They suggest to Moses and the other elders that they remain there.

Moses is incensed. He essentially accuses the Gadites and Reubenites of being unpatriotic, pointing out that while they rest in relative comfort the other Israelites will still be fighting for their homes. He calls them a "brood of sinners" and reminds them that the last time the Israelites fucked up badly, God promised to wipe out every living adult. The Reubenite and Gadite leaders, clearly better diplomats than Moses, propose a compromise: they will keep this land, but they will go with the other Israelites for as long as the fighting must go on.

Thus the situation is resolved, but it raises an interesting question. Earlier on, the Bible looked with great optimism to arrival in the fabled "land of milk and honey." Now, as the date for the invasion again draws near, suddenly that land doesn't look as attractive after all - some people don't even want to go in and take what is theirs. God doesn't comment in this chapter, so we have no idea whether he feels betrayed by this reversal, or angered by the fact that this essentially means the Israelites will have to hold conquered land that he intended would not be part of their territory in Canaan.
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Friday, April 18, 2008

The War Crimes Begin: Numbers 31

This post is part of a Biblical commentary sponsored by the Church of the Orange Sky.

I know it's anachronistic but I'm not sure what to call it. It sounds silly accusing the Biblical people of atrocities, but that's what they are, and tellingly, on this occasion God is notably silent in the narrative until it comes to counting the booty at the end.

God decides that it's time to "take revenge" on the Midianites, a strange turn of phrase given than a few chapters ago this was supposed to have been done already. On his own initiative, Moses organizes a provisional army of 12 000 men in 12 divisions, and "sends them into battle," accompanied by priest Phineas.

The army attacks Midian and wins easily, killing "every man." Among the victims are the five Midianite kings and, ironically, Balaam of Beor. God lets his prophet be killed by his people, it seems. The fact that Balaam gets put to the sword might be a hint that this mission has reached unauthorized extremes, or it might simply be that God really doesn't give a damn about non-Israelite prophets, even after he went to the trouble of intimate conversation the Israelites themselves are supposedly unworthy of. After the men are dead, they kidnap all the women and children, and plunder the herds and flocks and towns and so on. All the loot is carried back to the main Isrealite encampment.

What follows is highly dubious. God hasn't yet given any blanket genocidal commands, at least not explicitly (he will later, I suspect), but on this occasion Moses takes it upon himself to issue the commands anyways. He is furious that the soldiers allowed the Midianite women to survive. He foolishly claims that Balaam was responsible for the Israelites losing their faith a few chapters ago, something which Numbers itself would appear to contradict. To straighten the matter out, Moses orders that all boys and women be killed. The troops may keep virgin girls alive, if they wish. Moses seems to realize this is a dubious affair even as he gives the orders; he requires that all the killing be done away from the camp and that the murderers stay away for a week, and then have themselves purified before rejoining Israelite civil society.

The priesthood - and, by extension, God - are elated by the profitable expedition. Eleazar orders all the gold, silver, bronze, iron, tin and lead loot purified, and then they divvy up the proceeds: half is divided among the community, half to the 12 000 soldiers. The soldiers must give 1 out of every 500 animals and persons captured to the priesthood - interestingly, the tax on war profiteering is considerably less than the tithe tax on legitimate economic activity. Later, the army commanders collect all the jewelry looted and offer it to the priesthood as thanks for having a fatality-free battle. The priesthood also collects all gold items - which in total weighed about 400 pounds.

In total, the Israelites get about a million animals and 32 000 virgins. The genocide of the Midianites has apparently been a most profitable affair, and all conducted on a very dubious pretext. God says the Midianites harmed the Israelites, but in reality it was the Moabites who did so. Moses blames Balaam, which is most curious because Balaam, despite the incident with the talking donkey, generally acquitted himself pretty well. He followed God's orders at every turn, and has been repeatedly punished for it. The Israelites - and even God - seem more interested in slaughtering foreigners for their women and treasure than they do about any real semblance of justice.
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Thursday, April 17, 2008

Women Can't be Trusted to Swear Oaths: Numbers 28-30

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Time for some more rules! God takes a chunk out of Moses's busy schedule to lay down the law. He orders daily, weekly, and monthly sacrifices to be conducted. The feasting rules are repeated: the Feast of Weeks, the Feast of Trumpets, the Day of Atonement, and the Feast of Tabernacles (nowadays we know these as Shavuot, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot). Lots of offerings, sacrifices, etc. which don't seem worth going into detail to cover - except that it's worth noting that Sukkot sounds like one hell of a barbecue. God orders the following sacrifices to be made at the porta-temple: 71 bulls, 15 rams, 105 lambs, 8 goats, and a variety of grain and drink offerings to round out the field.

The most fun is reserved for a lengthy chapter on the swearing of vows. You'd think this would be unnecessary, since God dispenses with the rules for men pretty quickly: "when a man makes a vow to the Lord or takes an oath to obligate himself by a pledge, he must not break his word but must do everything he said." Simple enough, right?

Maybe, but the rules for women are necessarily more complex. This is because, as I already discussed in the context of the Levitican sex laws, most women are owned by men, and therefore special precautions have to be taken to protect the men from frivolous promises their unreliable women might make. For this reason, a father has the authority to nullify a promise made by his daughter; a husband has the authority to nullify a promise made by his wife. If the husband doesn't nullify the oath, he is assumed to have "confirmed" the oath. He becomes responsible for the oaths.

On the bright side, if your husband dies or leaves you, you're allowed to swear oaths independently.
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Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Church and State, or just Church?: Numbers 27:12-23

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Moses is getting old and Aaron's already dead, so it's time to decide who's in charge in the future. Before this happens, God sends Moses up onto another mountain to give him a panoramic view of the land the Israelites will eventually conquer. Is God seizing another opportunity to torment Moses with what he's missing out on, or is he trying to be kind? I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and go with the latter.

Moses prays that God will arrange for future leadership of Israel, then summons Joshua of Nun and Eleazar the high priest. In the future, God says, Joshua will carry some of Moses's authority. Strangely, God tells Moses that this will happen after Moses gives Joshua "some of your authority." What is this authority? Is it a magic dust that Moses carries around in his pocket?

Joshua won't have the same access to God, though: that authority will rest with Eleazar instead. God, who as every conservative will admit is a big fan of magic divination, says that Eleazar will make decisions using the Urim and the Thummim, the strange divining instrument that was originally described way back in Exodus. Even the high priest, it seems, won't have the same access to God that Moses does. Presumably this will be very convenient for those later priests who demonstrably can't summon and tame God the way Moses does on a regular basis.

What's perhaps even more interesting, though, is that God is essentially proposing the eventual abolition of the state: Israel is going to be a stateless society. That wasn't uncommon among people at that time in history, especially among nomads - but this is less true for a centrally organized agricultural society of the sort that is apparently going to be one day established in Canaan. All of the other peoples the Israelites run into have kings. God will be the Israelites' king, it seems. The only hereditary title is that of the priesthood: the state side of Moses's task is reduced to being general of the army, and while Joshua will do the task admirably, God seems to think even that won't be necessary by the time Joshua dies. He makes no arrangements for the survival of hereditary military leadership the way he does hereditary priestly leadership.

As an anarchist I'd like to think that a stateless society under God is a grand idea, but the book of Judges is coming up, and I'm pretty sure its author has other ideas. Plus there's still the matter of the priesthood, which has a pretty decent tax rate to assure its continuing revenue. And there are all those laws requiring capital punishment. Who's going to carry them out?
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Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Divine Census v2.0 - and Women Can Own Land?: Numbers 26 - 27:11

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

God tells Moses and the new high priest, Eleazar son of Aaron, that he wants another census to be conducted. Presumably because God has poisoned, buried, burned, and blown up so many Israelites since the last count that he wants the numbers tallied again. They count 601 730 Israelites, which means the population has basically flatlined. Given the tens of thousands God has killed in the meantime, not to mention casualties from their various battles, we must conclude that Israelite girls are having a hell of a lot of babies. Which is cool - more profits for the priests!

God decides that the Israelites' future inheritances will be decided based on this census: larger tribes get more land than smaller ones. The Levites, of course, don't get any land, which God had already said is what would happen. At least now we know why they didn't need to be counted along with the rest.

A truly phenomenal incident follows: five women, who the Bible actually names (Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah and Tirzah) come before Moses and say that they're worried about the way the land is being divvied up. Their father, Zelophehad of Hepher, has died in the desert without giving birth to a male heir. This means the land he stood to "inherit" in Canaan will never be allotted. The women tell Moses that the land should be given to them instead.

This half-chapter is markedly more tolerant of women's role in public affairs than most of the rest of the Torah. The Bible actually identifies their genealogy through their father's lineage all the way back to Manasseh, the way it would if it were trying to establish the proper credentials of men. Moses takes the case to God, who immediately agrees that Zelophehad's daughters "are right" and says they have the right to inherit and own land. From then on, God adds, the same principle will apply in every similar case: daughters have the right to inherit land when there are no eligible sons. It's a pretty minor concession, but I'm still impressed and a little surprised. Women have challenged an apparent flaw in the divine law, and God responds in their favour.
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More Israelite Faithfulness, And God Kills the Wrong People!: Numbers 25

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

After our acid trip to the land of talking donkeys and wayward prophets, we return to the more familiar theme of the Israelites behaving like blind idiots.

The Israelites are now staying in Shittim, of all places, and apparently they're there for quite a while - long enough for the men to begin what the NIV calls "indulging in sexual immorality with Moabite women." (I prefer the KJV version, which says much more prosaically that the men "committed whoredom.") These women invited the Israelites to participate in some pagan religious services worshipping the god "Baal of Peor," and naturally the Israelites did. The lesson is obvious - if you fall for a pagan chick, you'll also fall for her pagan gods - but the premise is ridiculous. Do the Israelites believe these are rival gods, or have they simply forgotten who god is? The best explanation is that the worldview of these people accepted the existence of many competing gods, of which God was only one. Only in this competitive polytheism do the Israelites' actions make any sense at all. If you do believe that there are lots of roughly equivalent gods to choose from, you might want to consider dropping the old Abrahamic one; after all, he's tormented you, ranted at you, and promised to kill you. The Bible doesn't seem to consider that there really would be real other gods - after all, it routinely mocks them, beginning in Exodus with the notion that the Israelites could "make" a god in their spare time - but the Israelites apparently feel differently.

You'll be familiar with the result: "the Lord's anger burned against them." He proposes that he kill all of the leaders of Israel to set an example. Instead, Moses tells the leaders to kill all the people who have participated in the pagan ceremonies. In the meantime, God sends another plague into the Israelite camp. God is pretty good with these plagues. The U.S. Army biowarfare program could use someone with his expertise. Instead they're stuck doing ludicrous projects like the ill-fated "gay bomb" experiment.

Whether the elders were prepared to mete out another round of death sentences in the name of God, however, we'll never know, because in the meantime one of the aforementioned pagan chicks causes a commotion when she walked by the porta-temple holding hands with a Simeonite, Zimri of Salu. Phinehas, a priest of God and also Aaron's grandson, picks up a spear and murders both Zimri and his girlfriend. God is terribly excited by Phinehas, proclaiming the young priest "as zealous as I am." He decides to forgive the Israelites, and even stops the plague - but only after it kills another 24 000 people. Jesus Christ.

God's thirst for blood isn't sated, though. He orders Moses to have all the Midianites rounded up and killed, "because they treated you as enemies when they deceived you in the affair of Peor."

This is a strange and senseless verdict. The woman killed by Phinehas was indeed a Midianite, but the women involved in the Peor sacrifices were Moabites, not Midianites. The only other Midianite woman I can think of is Moses's own wife - the daughter of Reuel/Jethro of Midian. Is God confused about who the women are? Is one pagan tribe pretty much the same as another? The "all pagans look the same" argument seems convincing, though you'd think God would find some way to tell the difference.

Along with the unexpected genocide of the Midianites, the Numbers account also explicitly strengthens further the elevated status of the priesthood: Phinehas has been so righteous that God will make a new "covenant of peace" with him and his descendants. They will be "a lasting priesthood." (Of course, as a son of Aaron Phinehas should already be part of a "lasting priesthood," but I guess God wants to make doubly sure."
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Monday, April 14, 2008

God and his Amazing Talking Donkey: Numbers 22-24

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

For those who take the Bible literally, this is where Numbers gets truly bizarre. Actually, I was so interested to hear how this would be rationalized that I went on Google to find some appropriately conservative evangelical websites. You'd be surprised how tough it was on this occasion. In a way it's even more puzzling than the flood story. This is basically a children's fantasy story, told in the stilted, copy-of-a-copy language of the Holy Bible.

The Israelites have finally reached the plains of Moab, where evil king Balak is sitting on his throne, rubbing his hands and cackling maniacally. The Moabites talk with some Midianites, since they apparently cohabit the land, and Balak decides to summon a prophet for advice. He chooses Balaam of Beor. Elders come to Balaam with a "fee for divination" and Balaam promises to give them an answer.

It will surprise you, no doubt, to learn that Balaam apparently worships the same god as the Jews. This doesn't make much sense - why is God on intimate terms with pagan prophets? - and the conversational tone he uses with Balaam is something usually only referred to the lofty Moses, at best. Balaam talks with God and God tells him not to go see Balak. Balak's messengers initially accept the refusal, but the king is unhappy and promises to "reward him handsomely" if he comes anyway. Balaam refuses but promises to talk to God again. This time, God says he's decided that Balaam should go with them.

Weird. Balaam gets up the next day, saddles his donkey and sets out to go see Balak. God is enraged by this and determines to "oppose" the trip. This is yet another example of God forgetting his own instructions; in this case, mere hours after he told Balaam to go to Balak, now he's angry that Balaam's going to Balak. God is "enraged" by the fact that Balaam is obeying the command of God!

Weirder. God's method of disciplining Balaam is stunning and creative. Rather than the various methods of annihilation with which he regularly bombards Israel, God plants an invisible angel in front of Balaam's donkey. Actually, it's only invisible to Balaam; the donkey can see the angel just fine, and stops dead. Several times, which really pisses off Balaam. Now it's Balaam's turn to get angry; he starts to beat the donkey.

What the fuck? God speaks to Balaam using the mouth of the donkey, complaining, "What have I done to you to make you beat me three times?"

I'm not sure what's more disturbing: that God pretends to be a donkey, literally talking out of his ass; or that Balaam is apparently completely unperturbed by the fact that his donkey is talking to him. Balaam's response indicates that he really does think his donkey can speak: "you have made a fool of me! If I had a sword, I would kill you." Were talking donkeys such a regular occurrence in Biblical times that it wasn't even a shock to Balaam? Is he insane and hallucinating?

After toying with Balaam a while longer, God makes his angel fully visible. Balaam realizes now who he's been talking to and begs forgiveness. God then repeats the instructions from the previous night and the prophet resumes his journey to Balak.

Balak holds the requisite sheep sacrifices, and then Balaam begins to speak. Balak wants him to curse Israel, but instead he prophecies that the Israelites are righteous and will not be defeated because God is with them. Balak demands another oracle, so they perform some more sacrifices, and Balaam returns with pretty much the same message, adding that Israel is like a powerful lioness and God has made the tribe mighty. Balak, showing a very strange concept of how divinity works, tells Balaam to try again. He does, with the same result. Balak has had enough and orders Balaam to go home, but before he does, the prophet offers one final oracle: Israel is going to conquer and destroy all its enemies. On his way home, Balaam delivers a few more warnings to random Amalekites and Kenites, telling them that they, too, are doomed to fall under the sword of Israel.
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The Israelites Worship Moses's Giant Snake: Numbers 21

This post is part of a revoluitonary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

The exciting accounts of war and killing I wrote about yesterday are strangely interrupted, halfway through, for some more complaining from the Israelites. Apparently they're getting tired of eating manna day after day after day. According to the last chapter on this subject, the Numbers account of the quail episode (in which God struck the Israelites with poison and plague), it tastes a bit like olive oil. I guess I'd be tired of olive oil after so much time.

God, of course, is not sympathetic. According to Numbers's unusually brief account of this particular little rebellion, God "sent poisonous snakes" into the camp to bite people. The Bible says simply that "many Israelites died."

The survivors, as has become predictable, assemble before Moses and ask for forgiveness. Moses agrees to pray for them and, between the two of them, he and God hit upon what is apparently a fair resolution to the conflict. Moses "makes a snake" out of bronze and puts the idol up on a pole. People who are bitten by a real snake are commanded to come and look upon the fake one; when they do, they are healed.

Why? Who knows! One of my conservative former pastors once said this was kind of like an early analog to Christ being raised up on the cross, but that doesn't make any sense. The snake is a symbol of wrath, judgement, and death here. And in a text notably suspicious of idol worship, for no apparent reason, God decides that the usual sin offerings aren't good enough and orders this strange process put in their place.
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