Saturday, May 31, 2008

The Army, Useless, Idolatrous: 1 Samuel 4:2 - 6:1

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

In the previous post, I argued that the first chapters of 1 Samuel attacked the position of the priesthood. Now, it's time to attack the position of the military (at least for the time being; this will change later). The Israelites fight a major military engagement with the Philistines (yes, them again) and suffer several thousand casualties in an unexpected defeat. Displaying a strange new attitude about God as divine good-luck charm, they decide to bring the Ark of the Covenant from Shiloh to the front lines in the hopes that it will bring them victory.

Eli's sons, Phineas and Hophni, lead the triumphal procession from Shiloh out to the main encampment, after which the Israelites hold a large and excited rally. The Philistines, displaying a courage their enemies rarely seem to possess, are initially taken aback that "a god has come into the camp," but they rally, attack the Israelites anyway, and win an even more resounding victory. This time, the Israelites lose tens of thousands of soldiers, the priests themselves are murdered, and - worst of all! - the Philistines capture the Ark of the Covenant.

In a series of bizarre and unlikely accidents, God continues the punishment behind the lines by killing off the rest of the priesthood. Father Eli learns about the death of his sons from a Benjamite deserter; stunned and grieving, he falls from his chair, breaks his neck, and dies on the spot. Phineas's wife goes into labour early and also dies. Her last words, after giving birth to a son, are that "the glory of the Lord has departed from Israel."

After proving that the Israelite military and priestly orders obviously can't properly defend the nation, God takes matters into his own hands. (After a fashion, anyway - initially his presence can't seem to extend far beyond the immediate proximity of the magic Ark.) The barbarous Philistines triumphantly carry the Ark into their own temple, devoted to the god Dagon, and set it before the idol of Dagon, symbolizing Dagon's dominance over the Israelites' own god. God dislikes the symbolism, naturally, and during the night knocks over Dagon's idol. The priests set up the idol again in the morning, so God repeats the act several times, gradually upping the stakes by lopping off poor Dagon's head and hands.

Once again, the theistic symbolism here is a little unclear. Dagon's body is said to be prostrate before God. Is the suggestion that God is the only god, or that Dagon is clearly an inferior God to the Israelite's very powerful LORD (as it is usually spelled in the Bible)? Obviously both we and the Jews have moved far enough into monotheism to make an answer seem obvious, but the original readers may or may not have shared our assumptions.

At any rate, Dagon is destroyed and God resorts to the more time-honoured custom of Numbers: plague. In this case, it's hemorrhoids - or possibly "tumours in the groin," according to the NIV. The Philistines, already unnerved by the damage done to their god in his own temple, reach what seems like an illogical conclusion: they will send the Ark on tour!

So, the Ark goes to Gath, but they start getting hemorrhoids too, so it's moved to Ekron, with much the same result. The Ekronites are incensed and hastily send the Ark back to the priests. But the priests don't want it either, so after some hasty consideration, they send it on its way back to Israel, along with a peace offering of five gold rats and five gold tumours - a very strange offering, you'd think, and I'm having trouble picturing the gold tumours. Miraculously, when the Ark is put on a wagon and the wagon hitched to a couple of cows, the cows march straight into Israelite territory and stop at Joshua's field, where the Israelites discover it, sacrifice the poor cows (so much for gratitude), and rejoice at having recovered the Ark. This comes at a price - 70 of the locals look into the Ark, and so God kills them all. It's so nice to see the old wrathful God again after all this time.
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Friday, May 30, 2008

The Priesthood, Useless, Corrupt: 1 Samuel 1-4:1

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

Another book, another polygamous marriage gone sour. That's right, it's time to return to traditional patriarchy after a brief if flawed foray into women's standpoints in Ruth. The temple priesthood doesn't come off well in this one, either - in fact, in the beginning they seem pretty much useless. Perhaps this book is going to try to justify some alternative social order on the grounds that the priesthood is failed in its responsibilities.

An Ephraimite named Elkanah has two wives, one barren whom he loves, one with children whom he loves... less. Hannah is apparently emotionally abused by fertile Peninnah. After one particularly stressful festival in the holy city of Shiloh, Hannah goes to pray to God, vowing that if he lets her conceive a son, she will make sure he serves God forever as a Nazirite. Another Nazirite! Hopefully this one turns out better than Samson. Unfortunately, she meets Eli the priest, who is seated on a chair next to the tabernacle. He sees Hannah praying and decides she must be drunk, so he berates her about her drinking habits. Hannah protests that she was actually "pouring out my soul to the Lord." She is polite to him, but this must be a difficult episode - escaping her abusive co-wife and now being attacked by a priest. Eli decides to bless her anyways and she goes away cheerful. She gets the kid she asked for.

Significantly, everything about Samuel concerns his mother: Elkanah wanders around a bit but takes no action. After Samuel is born, Eli is going back to the temple for the annual sacrifice, but Hannah tells her husband she won't be along: she's going to stay home with Samuel. Another insult for the priesthood! Hannah makes up for it by taking her son, after he's been weaned, and leaving him at the temple, swearing his live over to the Lord. This is a bit of a strange decision given that it looks like one of the themes of 1 Samuel is that the professional clergy are going to be corrupt and unlikeable, and it's also another disappointing episode for opponents of modern save haven laws, I'm sure. Hannah sings a song about her kid - it's usually women singing songs in ancient Israel, interestingly - and then Samuel is left to grow up under Eli. Let's see how that works out:

Eli's sons are "wicked men" who have "no regard for the Lord." Among other things, the priests have started taking an excessive commission in meat from sacrifices. This sort of price gouging was a "very great" sin, 1 Samuel tells us. What's probably worse, however, is that they are having sex with the female interns who "serve at the entrance" to the tabernacle. Eli discovers one of them in the act and is most irate.

Meanwhile, Samuel has helped minister for them and "grows up in the presence of the Lord," even though he's an Ephraimite. This, too, tells us that the Aaronite priesthood has fallen, since the Levites have let outsiders perform religious duties. He's more righteous than they are.

Eventually, an anonymous prophet foretells the complete doom of the Aaronite high priesthood. He appears to Eli and declares that God has had enough with the priests. He will only honour those who honour him. Eli's sons are going to die - on the same day, no less - and a new "faithful priest" will be appointed directly by God.

So what's the priesthood for? When the new high priest is appointed, God claims, the remnants of the old priesthood will come before him and ask for jobs so that they "can have food to eat."

In due course, God appoints Samuel to be the new high priest, even though he isn't even a Levite. Eli is old and nearly blind. God calls Samuel, but in what must be a deliberately humorous passage, Samuel initially mistakes the calling for the voice of Eli. The third time he makes this mistake, Eli concludes that it must be God. God prophecies that Eli's entire house will be shamed for what they have done to the priesthood. A reluctant Samuel tells this to Eli, who seems unhappy but lets Samuel step forward as the new prophet of God.

Despite the pro-priesthood clauses of Leviticus and Numbers, much of the Bible has continued to be notably skeptical of the professionally and genealogically religious (which, among other reasons, is why I expressed surprise when God supposedly established an inherited priesthood under Aaron during those books back in the Torah). It looks like we're going to continue the skeptical trend, with a certain cynical tinge: priests assuming that praying women are drunk, pastors' kids hooking up in the sanctuary, God choosing an outsider as his new prophet, and so on. I don't remember most of the Samuel books being about the priesthood, so presumably this also serves as a quick way to get the priests out of the way so we can focus on the prophets again.
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Commas aren't Christian

I was killing time fighting for pacifism on the Christianity.com forums today and just about fell off my chair when I came across this post (#7 at link, and yes, I'm aware of the militaristic metaphors I've just employed):

i would just like to say that i am not fond of paragraphs spacing at all i think it is overrated as is any sort of punctuation or period to end the sentence i have felt this way all of my life and believe that it is based on biblical evidence the bible is clear that commas and periods were not used at least when you see the original latin and greek versions i cain't always understand what they are saying but i can see with my own eyes that they did not put periods or commas in there that is an invention of king james people when they wrote the bible so that he would understand it better as he must have been not the smartest king either that or a tyrant as his people had to bow to his whim to make a book that he could understand though i kind of see his point because the hebrew and latin letters are funny and the alphabet doesn't seem as long and they don't have a word for and which i find is really silly much less having another word for silly and that brings me back to the fact that i do not personally believe that one should use punctuation nor should one put a space to show a new paragraph has started there is really no need to start a new paragraph because every word that i say is so important that it needs to be read putting a space in there would only actually take up more space on the page and i would rather fill those spaces with important words usually my own words and they don't have to be coherent or make any sense but to me they are golden and worth more than the internet...

Well done, sir.
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Thursday, May 29, 2008

Ruth as Pro-David Propaganda: Ruth 2-4

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

Ruth starts working in the fields, doing something she has a legal right to in Israel but doesn't today (an interesting example of how society has become more oppressive): she goes into farmers' fields and begins collecting food left behind by the harvesters for the poor. By chance, she meets a wealthy landowner named Boaz who tells him she can stay with his servants and thus get more of the food (he also tells "the men not to touch you" and offers her free water). Ruth is shocked by the charity but Boaz, honourably says that he's heard that Ruth was nice to Naomi and now feels that Ruth deserves a "rich reward" from God for her good deeds. Boaz is clearly attracted to her, beacuse he then quietly orders his men to leave extra food and permit Ruth to gather "among the sheaves," which evidently is a social miscue. Naomi is pleased by the good fortune of her daughter-in-law, claiming that "in someone else's field you might be harmed" but she will be safe with Boaz.

Somewhat dubiously, Naomi then essentially suggests that Ruth should go and seduce Boaz. The Biblical account is innocent and vague, suggesting merely that she lay on his uncovered feet for the night, after which Boaz gives her some barley and sends her home. Presumably there are thick layers of euphemism here. Later, Boaz decides that he will marry Ruth (first he gently manipulates the lawful kinsman-redeemer, who would have had first claim to Ruth in marriage). Should I be pleasant or cynical about this sequence of events? At least nobody launches a holy war and demolishes the town, as probably would have happened in Judges.

This is where my positive feelings about Ruth end. Hopefully Ruth actually ended at 4:10 in its original because then it would remain the romantic short story that it's been so far. Actually, come to think of it, I'm not sure how positive I would have been, really. This story may be about Ruth, but according to the story, being Ruth is all about being a good wife. She loses her husband and moves to Israel; she promptly marries and becomes a fully accomplished "young woman." Still, at least no one dies.

Unfortunately, the ending for Ruth is kind of weak. Either it used to end early and was later appropriated, or this was the goal all along, but with the last half of chapter 4, it comes to appear that the purpose of this book is not to explore the much more human story of a woman converting to Judaism, but to provide a heroic story to prop up King David (and, by extension, the descendants of David).

There's something interesting about royal genealogies. I'm not talking about the long, unbelievably detailed lists of legal heirs to the throne routinely updated by, say, the British Crown. No, I'm talking about the medieval and ancient genealogies routinely made by the very "objective" historians and genealogists of the royal court, in which, for example, various noble houses developed competing and almost certainly spurious "lineages" linking themselves to historical figures such as Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, and even the rulers of Troy. (Others went the Christian route and linked themselves to David or even the family of Christ.)

This is essentially the role that Ruth is twisted to play for King David and his line of rulers. In a transparently self-serving move, some royal scribe from the Jerusalem court invokes the story of Judah and Tamar, as "the elders" of Bethlehem bless Boaz and Ruth and pray that they will have great "offspring." Immediately, she conceives a child, which the last author of Ruth takes as proof positive that Naomi, too, has redeemed herself from the tragedies of her time in Moab (after all, she's now a grandmother). The Bible carefully specifies, then, that this infant - named Obed - is the grandfather of King David.

And, just to hammer home the point that David is of good lineage, it closes with a completely patrimonial genealogy which has nothing to do with Ruth at all, since in fact it's Boaz's: it turns out, lo and behold!, that Boaz is the great-great-great-great-grandson of Perez, son of Judah. So David really is of direct lineage from Judah!

There are only two things that need to be said about this ridiculous genealogical addendum to Ruth. First, it ruins the story: the purpose clearly shifts from a story about Ruth to a story about the grand lineage of David. This is propaganda, contrived by some official historian of the later court of the Kingdom of Israel as an effort to provide some great historical "proof" that David and his descendants were indeed well qualified for leadership of Israel by their history of being humbly blessed by God.

Second, this genealogy is plainly wrong. From Perez's birth to Obed's, there has probably been about 500 years - 400 years in Egypt, 40 years wandering in the wilderness, and change. (We're not sure just how much change is left over because it's not clear at what point in the time of the Judges that this story occurs.) By my account, this would mean that every man in the genealogy was a good eighty years old when his wife bore the next link in the chain. Even by the rather lengthy lifespans of some of the old Israelites, this seems completely implausible. You have to wonder why a few more links weren't added to make it look real.

So, what to do with this little story? On the surface, most of it is kind of nice - until you realize that it's basically about Ruth finding a husband, which I suppose might be intended as very empowering by the Israelite who wrote this (given the sexism of the time), but now seems a bit sexist. Even that would be ok, except for the ending, which is clearly veering towards propaganda.
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Wednesday, May 28, 2008

And now for something completely different...: Ruth 1

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

Following the Christian canonical order, we come to Ruth next. There are benefits and drawbacks to this. In the Christian order, we get a book that I guess is as much social criticism of the Joshua/Numbers/Deuteronomy elitism as Judges is, but written so far more positively, which is probably why it's a lot more popular: this one is about how people don't need power to be good, not how people with power are always evil. On the other hand, the Jewish order places it within a later group of books - Song of Songs, Esther, etc. - where God is nearly silent and very withdrawn, which also makes some sense.

Also significantly, this is the only book in the Bible that is named after and written about women. (Esther is named after a woman but is really more about her uncle, Mordecai.) I don't know which group of ancient Jews managed to sneak this into the canon, but it obviously wasn't the ones who pushed through the prayer "Thank you, God, for not making me a woman."

The Bible starts with Naomi, the widow of a Judean living in Moabite territory, and her two Moabite daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth. Their various husbands have died before the story begins. Significantly, they aren't struck down by God for their sins: they simply die. It frames the story completely differently than what has come thus far, even counting the cruelly sarcastic "God did it!" tone of Judges: in this book, people make their own choices, and they're capable of making good ones, and living with bad ones. Naomi decides that with her husband gone, she's going to return to her home in Judah, and her two daughters-in-law agree to go with her. Initially Naomi is reluctant, saying that she thinks she's been cursed by God - by being a son-less widow in her old age - but that Ruth and Orpah are old enough to remain in Moab and re-marry.

Orpah agrees, but Ruth stays with Naomi. In a moment, she converts to Judaism: "where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me." Naomi returns to Bethlehem during the harvest and seems to be greeted warmly, although she remains depressed, saying that she would prefer to be called Mara ("bitter") rather than Naomi ("pleasant").

Already the book has set quite a different tone than the dark cynicism of Judges. We have seen a genuine conversion to Judaism based purely on friendship and faith. There is no burning bush, no grand patriarchal "I shall decide for my household" declarations, no plague, no miraculous event whatsoever. No killing - which is how the Israelites usually deal with foreigners - and no deception - which is how the Gibeonites persuaded Joshua to let them survive. Not even a trade deal, conversion for intelligence - the sort of deal the spies made with Rahab in Jericho. The first chapter claims that Naomi and Ruth arrived in Israel during the time of the Judges, but the peaceful agrarian setting of Bethlehem has little in common with the gruesome political intrigue of the book of Judges.
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Monday, May 26, 2008

Speaking of which...

Maxime Bernier, whom I spoke of in the previous entry, is gone already. The Church of the Orange Sky has spoken, and the Canadian government has responded!

Actually, in this case, Bernier is supposedly leaving because of "accidentally leaving classified documents in an insecure location," which is interesting for two reasons:

- under the excessively broad security laws imposed after 9/11, I think that might actually qualify as a crime if committed by an underling (I'm not really sure if it is, but I am sure of one thing, which is that either way, Bernier will certainly never be investigated on the subject)

- "accidentally leaving classified documents on the coffee table" is a code phrase for "leaked classified documents to a former girlfriend who is also an airport security contractor with possible ties to the Hell's Angels."

I'm not sure which is more disturbing from Harper's supposed "law and order" national regime - the fact that this corrupts the contracting process, or the fact that the Hell's Angels might have links to airport security. Seriously, what the fuck is going on here? And how can the Conservatives spout this claptrap about trivial accidents that, one the one hand, are not serious enough to warrant a real investigation, but on the other hand, are so serious that they require the immediate resignation of the minister? The contempt shown for the public through such propagandistic posturing is sickening. I hate them for thinking I have an IQ of 45. Even if there is nothing more to it, the slick used-car-sales-man-style delivery by the Prime Minister's Office would still make me suspicious, which is unfortunate for everyone involved, including me. (Paranoia is not cool.)

Media links:

- CBC
- CTV
Ministry of Truth
- Stephen Taylor

Update: Apparently the documents in question related to the Afghan mission and the woman in question refused to read them; they made her "uncomfortable." How nice. I guess our airport security is safe after all. Unfortunately, our foreign affairs aren't - Harper's given the portfolio to David Emerson, the semi-elected turncoat from Vancouver.
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How many lives is democracy worth?

A Canadian journalist, Scott Taylor, has the gall to point out the obvious truth about the bombastic propaganda streaming from the Canadian government on the state of the war in Afghanistan:

The official NATO line on the Taliban’s use of a young boy in a suicide attack [last week] was that this is further proof of a desperate defeated foe. Last year, when the Taliban in Kandahar province abandoned any attempt at conventional attacks and began relying solely on IEDs, we were told this meant our tactics were working because we’d driven them underground. On May 6, when Cpl. Michael Starker was killed in a rare firefight with insurgents, again we were told this was a positive step forward because we were now driving the Taliban out into the open.

Consistency in explanations? What for?

Nor are we really in Afghanistan for the sake of building democracy, Taylor points out:

that rosy little picture was irreparably ruptured last month when Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier denounced the governor of Kandahar as a corrupt official. While I have little doubt that Bernier has concrete proof of Gov. Asadullah Khalid’s sticky fingers in the funds, demanding that Afghan public officials be shuffled and replaced on demand would make the Karzai government appear to be nothing more than puppets of the Western occupation force.

Actually, Taylor could have gone further - Bernier didn't just denounce the governor but openly called for his replacement. I'm pretty sure if an Afghan minister visited Saskatchewan and demanded that the premier be ousted by the armed forces, Canadians would have something to say about it.

The blessings of the Orange Sky be upon Scott Taylor. Actually he sounds like Noam Chomsky. I didn't know Taylor, but it's not what I would have expected from an editor of Esprit de Corps.
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Power Corrupts: Final Reflections on Judges

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

One of my friends has said that Judges was one of the greatest initial challenges to his faith in the Bible (a faith he's since lost, though not because of Judges). Another said the book made him feel sick. It's one of a very few passages in the Bible where conservative interpretations go out of their way to emphasize that the Bible isn't making moral judgements, just reporting the sinful excesses as they happen. It never made me sick when I used to read it, perhaps because I could comfort myself with the latter "interpretation" and also because too many years of political science and military history have thickened my skin when it comes to appalling human suffering.

Even in this reading, I've said some harsh things about the author of Judges. However, I've begun to change my mind. In retrospect, the author of Judges is actually quite skilled, if a bit morbid and gruesome. One of the biggest steps towards appreciating this is realizing that he is not really interested in providing a literal account of supposed history, nor is he all that interested in providing a story of how a powerful God is overseeing everything and making sure it all turns out for the better, complete with immediately obvious theological lessons for our lives today. Judges descends into moral lunacy if we hold the first of those views, and sheer absurdity if we hold the second. More so then any other book so far, we must read more carefully to see what is going on. When we do that, we see that the author of Judges is telling stories, not history - and is doing so to subvert and mock some fairly basic conservative ideas about God and society that have been taken for granted in Joshua, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

It's easy to draw simplistic moral and political lessons from Judges, and if we do that, the book turns out to be pretty conservative. Time and again, the Bible reminds us that "there was no king" in Israel at this time, which at first glance does seem to imply that if there was a king, everything would be ok. Too, when push comes to shove, God always comes to the aid of the Israelites against foreign enemies - so they are sinful people, but God's grace leads him to relent and help them despite their despicable evil.

For conservatives, the implications of this view are very, very convenient. The first leads to an unproblematic assertion that we need a worldly government - i.e. "a king," or the modern-day equivalent - to prevent moral decline. (You can see this today in the Western religious right, which is attempting to establish an authoritarian legal system to "maintain" moral order even while preaching the need for less public charity, lower taxes, and more rights to sinfully accumulate wealth and property.) The second reinforces the self-loathing inherent in evangelical Christianity: we are evil, we always sin, without God we do appalling things - but God is gracious and forgiving, and will be at our side when we repent and turn to him for help. (And indeed, God does seem to bless the Israelites when they go into battle.)

On the other hand, a more careful reading reveals that the author of Judges has no interest in either of these positions. He may say there is no king, but one of the basic premises of Judges is that everyone with power is corrupt and evil. Why a hypothetical king would be beyond this principle is beyond me - "power corrupts, but absolute power doesn't corrupt at all"? Look at the record in Judges: Gideon is given power to fight the Midianites, but then uses it to kill Israelites and build idols; Jepthah is given power to fight the Ammonites, but kills his own daughter and starts a murderous civil war; Samson is given power to fight the Philistines, but usually uses it fighting over women; and the whole of Israel is given power to punish Gibeah for the rape of the Levite's concubine, but they use it in a murderous rampage, and then, to make matters worse, try to paper over their sin by yet more killing and abducting of girls. Priests collaborate with the killers, the military engages in brutally excessive orgies of destruction, and the elders conspire and plot. The lesson of Judges is that authority exists to be abused.

The idea of a simple "us versus them" war in which God eventually comes down on the side of "us" in crushing "them" is also overly simplistic; the author of Judges deliberately and repeatedly subverts that simple dichotomy. In a way, despite his abhorrent subject matter, he's doing something that we still struggle with today: questioning the simple "inside/outside" propaganda strategies that go into justifying war. Again, this is a theme that isn't immediately obvious: the author of Judges deliberately frames the stories in ways that a simple reading permits a crudely moralistic conclusion that justifies military nationalism. But look below the surface, because the moral boundaries turn out to be pretty fluid in Judges:

- Deborah leads the Israelites in a heroic war to liberate themselves from the Canaanites. But, in doing so, she cruelly mocks the mother of an opposing general, whose son will never return from battle - and another "heroine" of the story, Jael, violates ancient sacred custom by failing to protect her houseguest, a refugee from the battle (not only does she not protect him, but she kills him herself with a tent peg through the skull).

- Gideon leads the Israelites in a heroic war against the Midianites. But, after doing so, he slaughters entire towns full of fellow Israelites, who have committed no sin worthy of death.

- Jephthah leads the Israelites in a heroic war against the Ammonites. But after doing so, he uses his forces against the Ephraimites, killing tens of thousands of fellow Israelites.

- Samson could have led the Israelites in a heroic war against the Philistines. But he preferred spending time with the Philistines himself, and when he is violent - usually brutally violent - it is for reasons entirely irrelevant to the well-being of Israel. He only kills Philistines for mistreating his Philistine wives.

- Israel punishes the Benjamites for raping a woman to death. But, regretting the extremism of their actions, they kill more of their own - families who had not sinned as the Benjamites did - and then abduct Israelite women into illegal sex slavery.

Throughout this whole process, the author of Judges plays fast and loose with the role of God. The "spirit" of God descends upon Israelite leaders and lets them win battles, but he spends most of his time lurking in the shadows as his children play. He basically just permits them to do evil. Not only do they repay him by worshiping idols, but they repay him by subverting his festivals to justify the abduction and enslavement of Israelite girls. God is either incredibly careless with his power, or the author of Judges is being deliberately sarcastic.

Today it's not uncommon for religious people to suggest that God's spirt "led" them to do something they were probably going to do anyway - like moving to a new city to take a higher-paying job. Pastors are notorious for this, but that's only because we listen to them at religious events more often: pay attention to the ways people legitimize decisions in religious circles, routinely attributing things to God for no other reason than that if something's happening, God must be behind it. The author of Judges may be deliberately mocking this silliness - or rather, the ancient Israelite equivalent of it - by claiming that the "spirit of God" is inspiring men when they perform even the most ridiculously and cartoonishly outrageous violence. This is most obvious in the story of Samson, in which Samson's God does nothing more than let him fly into a foaming rage and murder large numbers of random people.

Also, despite the extraordinary evil that is perpetrated in this book, often against people who have done nothing obviously wrong, the author displays a surprising ability to highlight, even briefly, both the suffering of those afflicted, and the righteousness of those who are traditionally silenced. Look at the Israelite women in this book: virtually all of them live up to some measure of righteousness. Not all of these measures are very liberating for them - the Levite's concubine, for example, displays her righteousness by returning to the master who let her be raped. Jephthah's daughter willingly submits to her own death to save her father's righteousness - she dies in order to save him from his own sin, and thus plays an early analogue of Christ in that story. Samson's mother recognizes God, but his father does not. At the end of the book, by the time the men of Israel have completely given themselves over into violent moral degeneracy, the women are still worshipping the Lord and keeping his festivals. We know they are, because the men use it to commit sexual violence against them. Here, the book closes on a note that is simultaneously dark and uplifting: the women suffer, but they do so because they have sided with God. The book of Judges is not just about immoral Israelites - there are moral ones, but they usually suffer immensely at the hands of those who are less restrained.

The themes in Judges can be seen more clearly when we realize that there are only a very small number of "story" elements in this book. It seems like we're progressing through a long period of history because the author retells them over and over, combining different elements each time and making each iteration progressively gorier, until the climax in the final chapters, when the Benjamites are slaughtered and there's a mass conspiracy of corrupted men against faithful women. (It's easy to be distracted by the brief and amusing little "judges" interspersed throughout the narrative, the ones with dozens of sons riding dozens of donkeys.)

We begin with a couple of righteous archetypes, ideal types put forward by Jewish militarism - Caleb, who treats his daughter "well" by giving her away to a victorious warrior; and Othniel, who defeats the Aramites - who are righteous men set up in opposition to the other stereotype of earlier books, the faithless and idolatrous masses of the average people. Then the author spins this out into successive retellings, each one more gruesome. Ehud's assasssination of Eglon is an exciting and somewhat amusing story of an Israelite hero leading his people to liberation. But then this becomes Deborah's and Jael's defeat of the Midianites - in which the Israelites still win against the foreigner, but in doing so must be led by women and violate a sacred ethical code. This becomes Gideon's defeat of the Midianites - in which the Israelites still win against the foreigner, but in doing so murder two of their own towns and build some false idols. This becomes Jephthah's defeat of the Ammonites - in which the Israelites still win against the foreigner, but then kill tens of thousands of their own in a limited civil war. Here, the author introduces a second element to the story: the betrayal of righteous women. This time, it's only one such woman: Jephthah's daughter is killed in a human sacrifice.

Now we move on to the story of Samson, where a righteous woman (his mother) is ignored but not sacrificed; Samson has the opportunity to liberate the Israelites from the foreign Philistines but ultimately ends up not doing so, because he actually prefers the company of foreigners, especially their women. The penultimate tragedy begins with the story of the Levite, where again a righteous woman is sacrificed. This time, however, there is no more foreigner: the offenders are Israelites. That doesn't stop the Israelites from killing them anyways, combining the act of fighting the foreigner and fighting oneself. And finally, as they sit among the bloody remains of the Benjamite tribe, the regretful Israelites have no enemy to fight, so they create one by killing Gileadites, and then once again harm the righteous women (in this case, they enslave them rather than kill them, perhaps less morally outrageous but nevertheless blatantly illegal under the law of Moses). With each iteration of the basic story - righteous Israelites rise up against an enemy, but then indulge in sinful excesses - the author of Judges makes their actions a little more outrageous, and simultaneously takes away a few more potential rationalizations for their actions, until by the end of the book, there is nothing left but rigid oppression and pure evil.

Given the interpretation I've provided here, it's rather striking to see Judges at this position in the Bible. It seems like a deliberate rejection of Joshua's militarism and Numbers's and Deuteronomy's priestly elitism: in Judges, those with power are always corrupt, those who are righteous will be oppressed by those who are corrupt, and God will not always leap to the aid of the righteous. The fact that this message has to be concealed somewhat is telling about the politics of Biblical writing, but the fact that it's so clearly there speaks to an interesting measure of balance in the Bible. The Jewish Old Testament provides books which take very different positions on the relationship between Israel and the divine. The Biblical canon is politically and theologically balanced: fair representation for a number of diverse viewpoints. They say you can prove anything with the Bible - and you can, because the books of the Bible are making very different arguments. The book of Judges may contain some particularly bloody and disturbing stories, but to me, its scathing social criticism - of power, of religion, and of gender - makes it far more interesting than any of the preceding books.
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Sunday, May 25, 2008

Sex and War, Part 3: Judges 21

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

Whether or not going to war to honour the principle of women's sexual purity is probably debatable, but even so, the following story pretty much proves to me that the issue is once again one of protecting men's sexual and property rights, not one of protecting women, or even avenging them.

The Israelites assemble again at Bethel (the leaders go separately to Mizpah) and some people notice, as they "weep bitterly" about the battle, that one tribe is missing. They ask God why the tragedy has happened. Have they forgotten? They also vow not to give any of their daughters in marriage to the surviving Benjamites (as you may recall, there were a few hundred who managed to survive the fratricidal carnage in the previous chapter).

On the one hand, they want to punish the surviving Benjamites. On the other hand, at least some of those present, by the general crying and moaning, seem to regret indulging in mass murder. They feel sorry and want to somehow make up for their military excesses - today we'd call it ethnic cleansing - by taking care of the survivors. They want the Benjamite tribe to survive, even if in drastically reduced form, as a salve to their own consciences. So they decide on a novel and morally dubious solution.

The Gileadites, a quick count reveals, haven't sent anyone to either the memorial at Bethel or the summit at Mizpah. Therefore, the assembly rules, the Gileadites are no longer Israelites! They mobilize a new army of twelve thousand men and order them into Jabesh Gilead to kill everyone living there - "including the women and children," the Bible specifies helpfully. Only one group is permitted to survive: virgin girls. The army attacks, captures 400 girls, and brings them to the surviving Benjamites as wives.

It's a testament to the creativity of the author of Judges that this episode is not the most morally shocking moment in the chapter. The Israelites have killed the Benjamites, so they want to take care of the survivors. The way to do this is to give them females to have sex with - an incredibly ironic gift given that the war also started when someone gave the Benjamites a woman to have sex with. But they've taken an oath not to give their own daughters to the brothers of rapists. So the solution is to literally vote the Gileadites out of the tribe, thus making them legal foreigners, and thus subject to summary execution. Once they've been executed, there are some sex slaves freed up, which the Israelites can then give to the Benjamites. The morally twisted logic that allows the ritual banishment and complete slaughter of yet another clan simply to free up some unattached women is almost impossible to follow. This chatper doesn't mention the will of God, perhaps because even the author of Judges isn't willing to go so far as to suggest that "the spirit of the Lord" is descending on anyone in this fight.

But it's not enough! Only 400 girls survived the murder of the Gileadites, but there are 600 Benjamite men. So the Israelites need to find another 200 girls.

The elders therefore meet and decide on what can only be described as a covert black op. They note that there's an annual "festival of the Lord" which will be held in Shiloh in a few weeks, in which large numbers of girls are expected to come out and dance in the fields.

Now, the Israelites have agreed not to give their daughters in marriage to the Benjamites - but, the elders reason, abduction followed by marriage doesn't count as breaking the oath. So they secretly tell the Benjamites to wait in the fields and then, when the girls come out to dance and celebrate, rush in and carry off one girl each. In the meantime, the elders will pointedly look the other way. They fully expect other Israelites to be irate when their daughters are kidnapped, but they have an explanation ready: fathers and brothers will be "innocent" because they didn't "give" their daughters to the Israelites, they simply looked the other way while they were abducted and carried off into sex slavery.

Just as the slaughter of the Benjamites is a retelling of Jephthah's slaughter of the Ephraimites, so the abduction of the Israelite virgins is a retelling of Jephthah's sacrifice of his daughter: the author of Judges is spinning out his story once again, trying to make it even more disturbing than the last time. This time, the entire leadership of Israel is complicit. It is quite literally a conspiracy of men against women.

There's no human sacrifice, but in a way, I think he's succeeded anyways. Every moral principle is subverted in this story except for the principle of men's ownership of women: the Israelites claim the non-existent right to banish clans from the nation for the dubious sin of failure to assemble in court (which isn't listed in the detailed commandments of the Torah, and certainly doesn't seem like a valid reason to engage in mass murder against an entire clan). They capture Israelites - women, granted, but still Israelites - as sex slaves, something that in theory can only be done to foreign women. They subvert the festivals of the Lord by using them as a means to engage in mass banditry, kidnapping innocent girls and carting them off into forced marriage. No one seems to care that the women are having their lives ruined in the process. The only things that remain intact in this sad story are men's ownership rights over women's bodies - and men's holy oaths.

When a man makes an oath, it is a sacred and holy thing. Much like in the Jephthah story, everything here can be explained by the Israelites' decision to swear an oath that they would not give their daughters to the surviving Benjamites. After making this foolish oath, they realize they don't want to let the Benjamite tribe die - so the Benjamites need wives. But they can't get wives because of the oath! So, the Israelite elders come up with a variety of creative ways to sneak girls to the Benjamites under the table, so to speak. First, they kill the men of Gilead - and with the men dead, no one is alive to "give" the women in marriage. They are captured, not given, and therefore no one has broken their promise. The price of the oath in this case is the lives of every man and almost every woman in Gilead.

That's not enough, so they plot a mass kidnapping of girls from Shiloh. Once again, the girls are abducted - their taken to marriage, not given by their fathers, and so therefore no one has broken their promise. In this case, however, the price of the oath is even higher: the men of Israel have conspired against the women of Israel and abused God's sacred festivals in order to do it. It is perhaps the most extreme and explicit example of the patriarchy using the divine to legitimize the oppression of women that we have yet come across in the Bible. By making that link the author of Judges also suggests that the men have, in the act of setting themselves against the women, also set themselves against God. On the other hand, God doesn't seem all that interested in coming to the women's defence.
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A Basic Profiteer's Guide to Christianity

Steps for making Godly profit:

1. Locate a secular trend, program, or other profitable opportunity.

2. Insert appropriate Christian rhetoric about "bringing yourself closer to God," "improving your walk with God," avoiding "issues that can keep you from growing closer to God," and otherwise "surrendering yourself to God." Buttress with at least one additional inspirational Bible quotation that seems marginally relevant. More quotes are better, but only one is really necessary - look at what Wilkinson was able to do with capitalism via The Prayer of Jabez, for example.

3. Go to church, find a few susceptible assistants, and announce that you feel the Holy Spirit has been leading you towards something you think the church really needs in order to reach out to the lost.


An excellent case study can be found here, in an article from USA Today, published yesterday, about new Christian fitness programs. One of the group leaders, Kim Melchor, explains - Ă  la Corinthians - that our bodies are "God's temples," and therefore we need to take care of them. Because, presumably, if you want to attract worshippers to your temple, you have to keep it in good condition.

Ironically, Paul was speaking against prostitution in that passage.

Unfortunately USA Today doesn't really explain what's especially Christian about the exercise involved. Maybe there's a special rhythm involved in jogging with Christ.
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Saturday, May 24, 2008

Sex and War, Part 2: Judges 20

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

The Levite has had his property violated, and it's time for revenge. The Israelites, in response to his rather provocative decision to cut up her body and send it around Israel on a grand tour, mobilize the largest army ever assembled in the Bible (at least the largest actually counted in a single show of force): four hundred thousand men-at-arms. The Levites denounces the Benjamites' rape of his woman as "lewd and disgraceful," conveniently omitting from his story that he was the one who gave her to the mob to begin with. The assembled force agrees to march on Gibeah and demand that the Benjamites surrender the rapists.

The Benjamites mobilize their own force, though at 26 000 swordsmen it's only a fraction of the size of the Israelites'. The Bible makes the effort to say that 700 of these men were left-handed, which apparently made them excellent stone-slingers. They refuse to surrender the guilty men.

The Israelites respond by attacking, though apparently they really suck in battle. They get trounced twice, then retreat to Bethel for much prayer, fasting, and sacrifices to God in front of the Ark of the Covenant. Aaron's grandson Phinehas, who must be very old by now but apparently is considerably more righteous than Moses's grandson, the professional priest-for-hire described a couple chapters ago. Phinehas preaches holy war against the Benjamites in God's name, and this time God tells them to try again, and promises to "give over" the Benjamites.

This time, God answes their prayers in full. The Israelites then besiege Gibeah, and after losing an initial skirmish, they lure the Benjamite army into an ambush and kill almost the entire force. The Benjamite army thus disposed of, the Israelites storm Gibeah and murder everyone in the city. Six hundred Benjamites flee into the desert and survive as a sort of guerrilla force, but while they hide, the Israelite army sweeps back and forth through Benjamite territory, killing everyone they can find and destroying every city.

Here, after the cynicism about the priesthood in the previous story, we have some counterbalancing praise of the priesthood. The Israelite army actually asks God for advice twice before going to Bethel, and on both occasions the Benjamites defeat them handily. Forty thousand Israelites - ten percent of their army - is killed in these fights. God responded, and sent Israelites to their deaths. It is only when the priesthood intervenes that the divine will can be realized.

It would be easy to draw a simplistic moral lesson about the importance of truly turning our hearts to God - and in fact that is what is done by commentaries like this one, to cite one chosen just by my quick Google search just now, which proves that many Christians are in desperate need of a moral compass.

On the one hand, it's a thrilling tale of Israelite solidarity. A woman is raped in an appalling act of violence - and so the entire nation rises up in vengeance. On the other hand, that vengeance is based on a Levite's testimony, and he actively deceives them about what has happened. Even if he didn't deceive them, execution in capital punishment (according to the laws way back in Numbers and Deuteronomy) requires the testimony of multiple witnesses. Only the Levite testifies. Therefore according to the laws, this campaign would be illegal even if the slaughter was limited to the guilty parties.

And the slaughter isn't limited to the guilty parties. The Israelites respond by destroying every single person in the Benjamite tribe, except for those who escape into the desert as armed refugees. The nation of Israel is falling apart, and even though most of Judges is concerned with foreign invasions, the real damage is being done to themselves. The Gileadites kill 42 000 Ephraimites, and the other Israelites kill almost all the Benjamites. That makes two tribes down now.

Tellingly, God is silent when it comes to the slaughter of the civilian Benjamites. This is in some ways an exaggerated repetition of the story of Gideon, where God appeared to bless the military to begin with, but then let it rampage through Israelite towns without offering either guidance or protest; or the story of Jephthah, where much the same thing happened when the army raised to kill Ammonites ended up killing Ephraimites. The military is a dangerous weapon. God blesses the army, but it still cannot be trusted not to lose control and engage in unnecessary bloodbaths.
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Why I'm Looking Forward to November

Three days ago, we were in the pub and I was despondently explaining why I wasn't looking forward to the November elections, because in that month the most powerful man in Canadian politics - despite being unelected in that sphere - was going to step down and be replaced by someone who wasn't nearly so funny or nearly so stupid. On the bright side, Bush's successor probably won't be nearly so warlike, either, which is some comfort.

Today, however, I'm in slightly better spirits because I've realized there's hope after all.

First of all, there's Barack Obama, the closet sexist who keeps calling female politicians and reporters by inappropriate pet names.

Then there's John "No Change" McCain, a demonstrable bigot who looks uncomfortable as hell here while Ellen Degeneres tries to provoke him into slamming her upcoming marriage. McCain, quite the religious right asshole here, insists on calling her marriage nothing more than a "legal contract." Heh. I never thought a Christian conservative would reduce marriage to a scrap of paper. McCain didn't used to be such an idiot. Pandering to the religious right has made him into an asshole.

And finally there's Hillary, God bless her. This week she made the absolutely unbelievable gaffe of implying that she wasn't going to withdraw from the Democratic primary campaign because Obama, like Robert F. Kennedy in the 1960s, might always be assassinated before the end of the race, and if he is, that would leave her as the winner.

It's too bad Hillary has almost no chance of winning at this point. She's also the one who a little while ago concocted a fictitious story about being shot at in Bosnia, then tried to excuse it away on the grounds she "forgot [she] wasn't shot at." I'm sure there are yet more chillingly asinine statements in her head, waiting for a chance to emerge and cause yet more trouble.
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The Church of the Orange Sky Condemns the New International Version

If you're interested in dry self-defensive commentary by the International Bible Society, here's a link for you, where they defend their badly flawed New International Version of the Bible, as well as their strategy of "translating" the Bible by secretly "correcting" flaws in the "inerrant" original texts, all before the text gets to you, the reader, so that you never have to know just how seriously not-perfect the book really is.

Among other things, the conservative and pro-inerrancy NIV translators proclaim the authority to add words into the Bible whenever they think it's appropriate. Grand irony and hypocrisy, all in one.

The best part, however, is on p. 67, where the NIV committee discloses that - oh, no! the horror! - one of the consultants to the translation, Virginia Mollenkott, was a lesbian. I guess that will teach them to use women as consultants. In true Christian fashion, the committee promptly washes their hands of the evil woman and casts her to the wolves:

Virginia Mollenkott was consulted briefly and only in a minor way on matters of English style. At that time she had the reputation of being a committed evangelical Christian with expertise in contemporary English idiom and usage. Nothing was known of her lesbian views. Those did not begin to surface until years later in some of her writings. If we had known in the early seventies what became public knowledge only years later, we would not have consulted her at all. But it must be stressed that she did not influence the NIV translators and editors in any of their final decisions.

Her lesbian views? Her list of sins, helpfully supplied by the stone-throwing Fundamentalist Baptists over at Way of Life Literature, apparently includes such heinous statements as these:

- the Bible does not mention sexual orientation (wait... that's true)

- Mollenkott attended the Metropolitan Community Church, which she shouldn't do because there are gays there (new rule! Christians should not associate with sinners!)

- homosexuals are equals

And so on and so forth. The amount of hatred and paranoia in the Way of Life document is actually quite unbelievable. It's almost as bad as the calm patronizing bullshit from the IBS itself.
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Today's Asinine Headline of the Day

The CBC wants us to know that Life exists after teen motherhood: StatsCan.

Actually, StatsCan, I don't think that particular point was ever in doubt.
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Friday, May 23, 2008

Sex and War, Part 1: Judges 19

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

I wondered in the last post why the story of Micah kept repeating that "in those days Israel had no king," when this was never mentioned before. It crops up again in the final three chapters of the book, making me suspect rather that the author of the last third of Judges simply wasn't the same person as the author of the first two-thirds. With that out of the way, it's time to turn to what may be the most disturbing story in the book, Jephthah's human sacrifice possibly excepted. (Samson's massacres were also disturbing, but the suspension of disbelief required to read about that cartoonish episode softened the psychological blow.)

When the Bible really wants to talk about sexual violence against women, it's perfectly capable of doing so, at least for a few lucid verses. A Levite living in Ephraim buys a concubine in Judah and starts to head home when she escapes, running back to her father's house in Bethlehem. Judges says she was unfaithful, which given the context might mean she was adulterous, or could also simply mean that the act of escaping was the act of unfaithfulness. The Levite goes to Bethlehem and begs his wife to come back with him. The father-in-law initially welcomes the Levite but then seems kind of reluctant to let his daughter go. He plays a sort of Arabian Nights-esque delaying game, delaying the Levite with offers of food, drink, entertainment, and so on. After a few days, the Levite leaves anyway.

He, the woman, and his servant arrive at a town named Jebus (actually, this is Jerusalem), which at this point is supposedly populated by non-Israelites (even though the Israelites conquered the city decades ago). The servant wants to stop, but the Levite makes a fateful decision to keep going, since he reasons they will be safer with their friends the Benjamite Jews, who live in Gibeah.

It turns out to be a fateful decision. They are offered free lodging for the night by an old man, but "some wicked men of the city" came to the house and demanded that the old man give them the Levite so they can rape him. It's shades of Sodom and Gomorrah, but with actual human beings involved instead of mysterious angels, the narrative is a lot more painful. This time, the Levite throws his concubine out the door (helpfully, the old man offers a virgin daughter to the mob too, but apparently the Levite's woman is enough for them). She is gang-raped all night and then left laying at the door.

The Levite is notably unsympathetic. He finds the woman sprawled unconscious on the doorstep the next morning. He tells her to get up, "but there was no answer," so he puts her on his donkey and keeps going. At some point - the author of Judges doesn't say when - the woman passes away, so the Levite, in a gruesome and dubious rite, cuts her body up into pieces and sends them around Israel. He wants vengeance.

As usual, Judges takes no moral position on the incident except, it would seem, to imply that there is no moral behaviour. The Benjamites are supposed to have descended to the same level of general sexual depravity as the Sodomites. The Levite knew precisely what was going to happen when he handed over his concubine to the mob. Complaining after the fact that they committed a heinous crime seems a little ridiculous.

Only the concubine displays any degree of real personal loyalty - after being sent away to be raped, she tries to crawl home to the Levite, before collapsing by the door. (This is an interesting reversal of the incident at the beginning of the page, when she left him for several months and he came after her to get her back.)

Once again, the concubine doesn't even get a name in the narrative. She is simply an object to be fought over: it would appear that the Levite is more upset that his rights to her body have been violated than that she has suffered personally from being raped. The fact that he's willing to mutilate her remains is also exceptionally dubious; perhaps as a Levite he's been cutting up animal corpses so long that the mutilation of dead bodies has simply become second nature. I could comment on the sheer absurdity of a social order in which homeowners are expected to turn over their daughters to be raped, but I did that already months ago in the context of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Indeed, one can't help but wonder if the author of Judges is simply recycling that story in order to make a point about Israelite depravity.
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Priests and False Idols: Judges 17-18

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

Okay, this one's kind of weird. Not crude or disturbing, just queer.

An Ephraimite named Micah - obviously one of the ones who escaped Jephthah's fratricidal slaughter along the Jordan river - recovers a large pile of silver which had been stolen by his mother and, in gratitude, she makes an idol for him. I'm sure the author of Judges considers blaming the whole thing on the woman, but then he adds that Micah already has a shrine and "some idols," as well as an ephod - a word we can't translate but which comes up every so often as some sort of special religious icon. So another idol, we can assume. We don't know who these idols are supposed to represent.

Micah finds a travelling Levite and hires him as his own personal priest. Eventually, however, a mob of homeless Danites come along and steals the idols. As they do tis they meet the priest, and take him with them. Micah protests that "you took the gods I made, and my priest, and went away," but the Danites threaten to kill him. They take the idols and th epriest and massacre a city, tear it down, rebuild it, and call it Dan. Then they set up the idols.

This story actually seems to take a position on the importance of government: twice, it states that "in those days Israel had no king and everyone did as he saw fit." The fact that the sentence is simply injected into the narrative at seemingly random intervals would make it seem like a later addition, except that clearly if it was a later addition, the person doing the adding was pretty lazy with their forging. It also doesn't make a great deal of sense given that all of the leaders in Judges thus far have been pretty useless. Is it an argument for a hereditary monarchy? So far God hasn't wanted one, but maybe by the time Judges was written there was pressure to legitimize one of the later Jewish monarchies.

The sudden regret about the lack of a king is coupled with contempt for the priesthood. This meandering Levite is an utterly useless figure as a religious leader. He sells his services to Micah, thus falling into idol worship. When the Danites come along to steal from Micah, the priest "was glad" and readily agreed to come with them. Later, the Danites are said to have a chief piest who is Jonathan the grandson of Moses, and while it's not made clear, the narrative seems to imply that the priest has been this grandson of Moses all along. It didn't take long for the core of the high priesthood to fall into mercenary paganism.
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Thursday, May 22, 2008

Canada will deport war refugees, after all

One of the American deserters has lost his court hearing this week and is now subject to deportation next month. Since most of the rest also have failed to get any permanent standing thus far, I have to suspect the government intends to ship the rest of them out to prison in America too, as soon as it can push their cases through the legal system.

This is a disgraceful episode, even compared with some of the rest of Harper's thuggish government's dubious immigration policy decisions. I have to wonder why they're still so insistent about bending over for Bush. Don't they realize he's going to be out of office rather shortly?

In the meantime, kudos to the Canadian Friends, the United Church, and the Toronto Catholic Workers for helping some of the Americans in question. I'm sorry most of the rest of us wouldn't stand with you when it mattered.
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Torture is Fun, Kids

When you're new to something like torture, you always want to solicit advice from those who have more experience in the industry. So I guess it doesn't surprise me all that much to learn that the U.S. military collaborated with its Chinese counterparts in torturing and interrogating detainees at Guantanamo Bay, beginning with a 2002 secret treaty.

Secret treaties like this are common in intelligence matters. Canada's currently subject to several hundred, according to public testimony. (Naturally there's no list of them anywhere.)

"... an FBI agent reported a detainee belonging to China's ethnic Uighur minority and a Uighur translator told him Uighur detainees were kept awake for long periods, deprived of food and forced to endure cold for hours on end, just prior to questioning by Chinese interrogators... When Uighur detainees refused to talk to Chinese interrogators in 2002, U.S. military personnel put them in solitary confinement as punishment."

And so on, and so on.

Source: Justin Rood, "Report: U.S. Soldiers Did 'Dirty Work' for Chinese Interrogators," ABC News, May 20.
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Lessons in Free Market Economics; and, My Last Mac

A very dull story: a few weeks ago, Apple Computers acquired a small semiconductor manufacturing group, P.A. Semi, which is based in California. As usual, the information technology industry - kind of like the banking industry - has nothing to do with so-called "free market economics." In this case, the Department of Defence and major contractors like Raytheon and Lockheed promptly got involved because, you see, P.A. Semi is one of their own, and the DOD wants to make sure it gets a continued supply of P.A. Semi's products after the merger.

Being a defence contractor is generally a pretty good deal. On the one hand, you're helping people kill people. On the other, you get a continuous stream of top-notch government welfare, the sort conservatives usually deny to poor people on the grounds that it "enables dependence."

Unfortunately, this is where the story gets personal because


Source: Wikimedia


my favourite computers now come from a defence contractor. I think the army actually used to order the odd Apple server anyways, but now via P.A. Semi they're part of the regular dedicated contractor system.

I'm sad to say that now I will never get to buy a new Mac again.

The Church of the Orange Sky's continuing policy of minimizing beneficial association with professional killing institutions requires that purchases which benefit military contractors be kept to an absolute minimum.
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More Exciting Stories of Raging Samson: Judges 16

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

Samson's in trouble again (of course). Fortunately, the spirit of the Lord is still with him (also of course). So he continues to behave like a villain from a children's cartoon (except for the whores, I guess).

One day, Samson visits Gaza and sleeps with a prostitute. For some reason the people of Gaza hate him so they decide to kill him in the morning, but Samson leaves the brothel in the middle of the night. For some reason, instead of fighting them, he simply walks to the town gate, tears away the doors and gateposts, and carries the whole mass on his shoulders up to the top of a nearby hill. There's no apparent reason for the author to even include this brief little anecdote, except I guess to prove that Samson still possesses his monstrous strength, and is basically addicted to foreign women (so much for the obeying the laws of Moses).

A while later, Samson meets another Philistine woman named Delilah, frm the valley of Sorek. This one is a honeytrap: the Philistine rulers offer her an enormous pile of silver in exchange for seducing Samson and getting him to tell her "the secret of his great strength." Samson lies - and lies badly - by claiming that if he's tied up by seven bowstrings he'll lose all of his strength. Delilah tells the Philistines and then ties him up while he's asleep, but Samson snaps the ropes.

You'd think this would be enough for Samson to dump Delilah, but apparently the "spirit of the Lord" has made him stupid. Instead, it's Delilah who's angry at this turn of events: she accuses him of lying to her. So Samson tells her another lie: that he must be tied with virgin ropes. So Delilah ties him up again, calls the Philistines, but Samson snaps the ropes again. Rinse and repeat: Delilah is angry, Samson comes up another strange lie (that his hair must be woven into fabric by a loom while he sleeps), and she "captures" him again. This time, Samson wakes up and lifts the entire loom up off the ground by his hair.

Finally, Samson tells Delilah the truth. You have to wonder why he'd bother at this point, but Delilah promptly has his hair cut off while he sleeps, and this time, Samson really is captured.

The Philistines gouge out Samson's eyes and set him to forced labour, but for some reason they let his hair grow back. One day they hold a great festival for their god Dagon and bring out Samson, but he walks to the side of the Philistine temple, pushes it over, and crushes three thousand people, including himself. This is the one and only time Samson is recorded praying with any sort of humility, but he's still blatantly self-interested: "let me with one blow get revenge on the Philistines for my two eyes." Basically Samson is the first suicide bomber. He shows no interest whatever in actually liberating Israel from Philistine rule; he's just continuing his personal vendetta.

Where before the Israelite military was an unreliable instrument claiming divine blessing, now that divine blessing is reduced to an absurd magic strength charm. Samson doesn't even pretend to serve God. He spends more time with the Philistines than his own people, and his entire life (at least as described here) revolves around chasing down one woman or another. He doesn't care about Israel, and if God cares about him, it's only because he doesn't cut his hair. My Man's Bible valiantly tries to draw moral lessons from this story about how pride causes "great men" like Samson to fall into sin, but Samson was never particularly great at anything except killing men and (apparently) sleeping with women.

Aside from the obvious fact that the author of Judges is seemingly contemptuous of holy violence, divine intervention, and even the Nazirite vows in this story - all of them come off looking quite ridiculous, after all - I think the story of Samson, more than any other in Judges, has to be enough to make it foolish to take this book as some sort of literal account of Israelite history.
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Wednesday, May 21, 2008

The Influence of the Orange Sky Spreads

An American columnist has actually started to defend the Church of the Orange Sky's previously declared position on the elimination of state supervision and authorization of marriage (here and here). Fuck the gay marriage debate, says Froma Harrop: we need a proper "marriage-neutral" government. Harrop also points out that the "traditional marriage" is already a minority of households in America, which I didn't know.

Unfortunately, most writers still don't seem to have grasped the concept. This writer, for example, is apparently upset that the California Supreme Court blew up the "reasonable middle ground compromise" position of non-marriage "civil unions" for gay people. The Boston Globe similarly adds that we should let the debate over civil rights be fought out in the democratic sphere rather than the judicial one.

Of course, if and when these white married writers see their own constitutional rights violated, I suspect you'll see them racing to the courthouse as fast as they can bring their well-paid lawyers to bear, but never mind that! We can "compromise" when it comes to civil rights for gays and lesbians - instead of "real" marriage, they can have second-class civil unions. I think we should make similar compromises on other rights - for example, many people think men should have the right to vote, but I think men shouldn't. I'm sure we can agree on the reasonable middle ground compromise that men can vote during an election, provided it's on a separate "civil plebiscite" ballot, which gets tallied separately and doesn't count towards the real election.

Doubtless if I were able to persuade a state government to pass such a law, legions of good moral anti-gay-marriage men would say, "No, we won't pursue our civil rights through the courts - civil rights are something to be settled democratically." They'd say that... wouldn't they?

As usual, commentators continue to insist that allowing gay marriage is inevitably going to pave the way for allowing polygamy, despite the fact that there is no logical basis for this position whatsoever.

Still, I think the most lunatic argument so far was recently advanced in the Los Angeles Times by a moron named Glen Lavy, who self-righteously seizes the opportunity to gratuitously beat up on bisexuals - a group, I should point out, whose failure to fit properly into either the "mainstream" or "peripheral" boxes tends to make them doubly marginalized. Lavy, who has obviously never befriended a bisexual (or at least realized he was doing so), claims that bisexual people are going to argue that they require polygamy in order to "fully satisfy" themselves - i.e. one same-sex spouse, and one opposite-sex spouse. Right.

It's interesting to see how desperate and pathetic the anti-gay-marriage front has become in the last few years. Their best arguments now can apparently be summed up as "Look! Evil polygamists!" If the California Supreme Court had accepted that argument when it was raised in 1948, inter-racial marriage would also still be illegal.
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The Irrational Rage of the "Spirit of the Lord": Judges 14-15

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

Samson is referred to later on as a judge or leader of Israel, which makes no sense at all, because he's never shown leading or judging anything. He was also supposed to be a Nazirite, so holy that even his mother wasn't allowed to drink during the pregnancy, but by the time he's grown up clearly that's gone by the wayside.

The author of Judges seems to have decided to begin deliberately mocking the supposed connection between the powerful Israelite soldier and his God. Before, it was merely subverted; now, it's a joke. Whenever Samson begins to fight, the author solemnly pronounces that "the spirit of the Lord came upon him," whereupon he performs stunning feats of physical might and destroys Israel's enemies, usually the Philistines. On the one hand, this is not a story about the dangers of the unchecked Israelite military. On the other, it is apparently a story about the dangers of the unchecked violent power of the divine. Has the author of Judges moved from criticizing the military to criticizing God?

Samson is in town one day and sees a cute Philistine girl who he decides to marry. In theory this is forbidden for any Israelite, and certainly for a Nazirite one, but Samson doesn't give a damn. He orders his parents to "get her for me as my wife." They protest, not on moral grounds but quite literally by voicing aloud why he couldn't find a nice Jewish girl instead. Eventually he gets his way.

On his way back to Timnah to pick up his girlfriend, Samson is challenged by a lion in the middle of a vineyard. This seems mildly implausible, but never fear! The "spirit of the Lord" descends upon Samson, and he tears the lion apart with his bare hands, "as he might have torn apart a young goat." What fun!

Samson gets engaged to the girl, and on the way to the wedding, he visits the rotting carcass of the lion, which some honeybees have turned into a nest. Samson makes up a riddle about this which he tells to 30 men present at the wedding, none of whom are able to guess the answer. The men get progressively more upset at being stymied until they go to his new wife and threaten to burn her alive unless she tells them the answer. Eventually she gets the answer from him, and immediately tells the other Philistines.

The Philistines tell Samson, and he flies off the handle. Once again, "the spirit of the Lord" descends upon Samson. He goes to another town, named Ashkelon, and kills thirty men at random. Then he takes their clothes and carries them back to Timnah as "prizes" for the men who solved his riddle. He also seems to believe they've had sex with his wife, because he accuses them of getting the answer to the riddle by "plowing with my heifer." His fiancée's father, understandably concerned at the maniac his daughter is engaged to, withdraws his permission for the wedding and promises the girl to Samson's best man.

The only obvious characteristics of the "spirit of the Lord" in this story are that it is irrational and prone to extreme violence. The lion story could go either way, but it's hard to believe "the Lord" would be interested in random mass murder over a riddle. Especially seeing as how Samson's marriage to a Philistine was legally illegitimate in the first place.

The story becomes even more ridiculous. Samson arrives at his would-be wife's house and goes into get her, but her father blocks his way. He says he thinks Samson hates her. Samson decides he has "a right" to revenge, so he gets 300 foxes from somewhere, ties torches to their tails, and chases them into the Philistines' grain fields, causing massive fires and wiping out their crops.

The Philistines retaliate for this act of terrorism by killing Samson's woman, as well as her father. Samson then vows revenge and begins to "attack viciously and slaughter" large numbers of Philistines. Eventually a large group comes up into Judah to arrest Samson. The Judeans tell Samson he should know better than to challenge the Philistines, tie him up, and hand him over.

The Philistines come to pick up the prisoner, but once again, "the spirit of the Lord" descends upon Samson. He breaks the ropes. Absurdly, he continues his drunken rage by picking up a donkey's jawbone and killing one thousand men with it. Then he orders God to give him free water, so God gives him some water to regain his strength.

The marriage massacre was extreme, but the violence in this one is almost cartoonish in its ridiculous extremes. Supposedly it comes from God, but Samson doesn't serve God in any obvious way. He drinks and parties with Philistines, which he shouldn't be doing as a Nazrite. He even tries to marry one, which God says is a death penalty offence for all Israelites. He doesn't worship pagan idols - but that's largely because he doesn't worship anything, including God. All of this mad random violence is perpetrated by Samson in retaliation for what he perceives as the Philistines harming his woman - but that woman is also a Philistine! Samson isn't protecting Israel from foreigners: he's motivated purely by rage and a desire for personal vengeance. He's a brutally violent, possibly insane individual whom God repeatedly bestows with magic strength in order to perform impossible and grossly immoral deeds.
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Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Prelude to Samson: Judges 13

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

We've almost made it to the story of Samson, which I've been looking forward to for a while. To balance out the ridiculously chauvinist elements of that story, however, the author of Judges begins with a few anecdotes about his mother and father.

God appears to Samson's mother, who, as is typical in this book, actually has no name. This is unfortunate, but the fact that God has appeared to her is unusual and worth noting. On the other hand, virtually the only time women get to see an angel is when it involves some element of conception and pregnancy.

The angel tells Manoah's wife that she's going to have a kid who God wants to be a Nazirite. To ensure his Nazirite purity, the mother must also take a Nazirite vow: she must not drink any alcohol or eat any unclean food during pregnancy. I think the former is a rule that people still follow today, though for slightly different reasons.

Predictably, Manoah doesn't believe his wife when she comes to tell him of the encounter. So Manoah asks the angel to come back and talk to both of them. The angel comes back, but once again only to the wife. She rushes to get Manoah and initially Manoah doesn't believe it's an angel. Instead he seems to think that the man is some sort of prophet, and he offers to prepare a meal for him. Instead, the angel demands a burnt offering, and once Manoah has got the fire going, the angel "ascends in the flame" and disappears.

Manoah reaches the strange and somewhat inexplicable conclusion that this means they are going to die. His wife, rather more sensible, tells him to stop being an idiot: if God were going to kill them, he wouldn't have appeared to them and told them about the boy.
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Monday, May 19, 2008

A Salute to Ronald Weinland

Procrastinator's Link of the Day: First off, I think that the world isn't going to end in 2008, and I wonder if Weinland has considered that if he's wrong about this, as a false prophet he is eligible for execution according to the Levitican law. (Not that I'd kill him, of course, because quite fortunately I happen to believe Levitican law doesn't apply and is also full of shit.)

Nevertheless, I respect Mr. Weinland because of his book and website, here, which I came across recently. Months ago, the Church of the Orange Sky called for those who held important religious truths to make them available for free. This is precisely what Weinland has done: you can go to his website and collect a free copy of his book, 2008: God's Final Witness.

Thank you for your selflessness, Mr. Weinland.
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Public Service Announcement

Canadian professional killers are permitted free Via Rail tickets for economy-class vacations during the month of July.

Bon voyage.

Of course, one happy effect of this will be that civilian customers who would have got cheap tickets during the summer will have to upgrade to first-class cars. A small price to pay to keep our nation safe.
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Civil War Doesn't Take Much in Israel: Judges 12

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

That crack about thirty sons riding thirty donkeys and owning thirty towns has been trumped! Ibzan of Bethlehem becomes judge; he has thirty sons and thirty daughters, and uses his sons to get thirty daughters-in-law. And then, even better, there's Abdon of Hillel, who has forty sons and thirty grandsons, who rude on seventy donkeys. I'm convinced we're missing some puns here. But more importantly....

It's Jephthah again! He gets a second section because this is a fundamentally different story than the last one. Also disturbing, but in quite a different way.

Once again, the Israelites' out-of-control warmongering turns inward. The Ephraimites didn't get to go with Jephthah to the battle against the Ammonites, and they're hopping mad about it. Tensions escalate quickly and the Ephraimites tell Jephthah that they intend to "burn down your house over your head." Jephthah says this is ridiculous, but his Gileadites mobilize their forces anyway and the two sides start to fight.

The fighting soon becomes a massacre. Ambushing enormous numbers of Ephraimites at some strategic fords of the Jordan river, the Gileadites kill a stunning 42 000 Ephraimites. It's a hideous slaughter considering that these are fellow Israelites and the initial offence was that they didn't get to join a raiding party.

Adding insult to dishonour is that the author of Judges records some ridiculous tales about hunting down Ephraimites based on their accents. See, it turns out that they can't pronounce "Sh" properly. So Jephthah's forces start challenging everyone along the Jordan to say "Shibboleth." If the challenged man answers with "Sibboleth" instead, he's instantly executed as a suspected Ephraimite.

Unless the Israelites have somehow developed notably different regional accents by now (which I suppose is at least possible), this basic test makes about as much sense as identifying German Jews by measuring their noses. The level of violence done here is truly appalling.

Once again, there is no one righteous in Judges - and perhaps this is the point. The Ephraimites are irrationally upset over missing out on holy war with the Ammonites. They threaten to attack the Gileadites. In response, the Gileadites massacre all the Ephraimites they can find. Despite the fact that Jephthah is supposedly the "judge" of all Israel, clearly the Israelites feel no particular loyalty or kinship with one another. They kill the Ephraimites at least as zealously as they do non-Israelites - and they ever make silly linguistic jokes about it, too.
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Canada's Ridiculous New Abortion Debate, Part 2

A while ago I wrote about the covert attempt to re-introduce the abortion debate in Canada via a private member's bill, noting that the present Criminal Code gives more protection to pregnant women than the new amendment would (read: very little protection at all) but that the C-484 bill on its own probably doesn't matter very much one way or the other.

I said the justice committee, being stonewalled, would pretty much mean the end of the bill, but Liberal MP Brent St. Denis has other ideas, having introduced a bill of his own into the House with the attention of heading off C-484 at the pass, so to speak. (The news article at the link is a Christian evangelical one, so naturally it repeats a deceptive Environics poll from last year in which Canadians say they'd support legislation on this issue). This is potentially even more pointless than the original bill from Ken Epp, since it would formalize something that's already done - consideration of pregnancy or spousal abuse as aggravating factors in sentencing. (The new bill is short and to the point.)

Ken Epp strikes back in the Ottawa Citizen, where he wrote an asinine screed late last week on women's "so-called right to end a pregnancy." If you wanted a clue to Epp's hidden intentions here, there it is. "So-called right"? I realize Epp is only a lawmaker, and therefore has little knowledge about well, the law - but perhaps he should beef up on his Supreme Court precedents, because it is a right, and has been for some while now.

Later, he says the resort to the abortion debate is a "scare tactic" by various groups supposedly conspiring against him. Is Epp really that dense? He used to be a college instructor. He ought to be smarter than he's making himself out to be.

As usual, Epp arrogantly claims that he's standing up for freedom of choice - "Let us not abandon those pregnant women who choose life for their babies." Right.
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Sunday, May 18, 2008

Human Sacrifice for God: Judges 10-11

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

Arguably this is the most disturbing moment in Judges. I can explain it with my theory of female property, which is more than a lot of people can manage - but the fact that God's on side with it then makes the story all the more disturbing.

The author of Judges throws us a couple of meaningless judges by way of a breather before moving on to the next bloodbath: Tola of Puah (whose grandfather was Dodo!), and Jair of Gilead. There's probably a pun in the original Hebrew here, which is yet another reason why we should always bear in mind that Biblical language is made stilted by the need for a "faithfully" literal translation: Jair "had thirty sons who rode thirty donkeys. They owned thirty town."

It will come as no surprise that, once again, the Israelites have begun to worship foreign gods. Actually, it's not really clear whether they ever stopped, beginning with Gideon's idol at Ophrah. The Philistines and Ammonites promptly invade and "shatter and crush" the Israelites for 18 years. The people repent again, but this time, God is exasperated and bitter. He tells the Israelites he's not going to save them this time. He taunts them to beg their other gods for assistance instead. But the Israelites keep praying, so God changes his mind and agrees to save them.

Which brings us to Jephthah of Gilead, and another opportunity to berate the NIV translators. Jehpthah, Judges begins, "was a mighty warrior." Then it discusses his background, which is somewhat less than mighty: the illegitimate son of a Gileadite and a prostitute, shunned by his family and forced to become a criminal. He gathers a group of bandits, which for some inane reason the NIV calls a company of "adventurers." Adventurers? Really? Come on. What the hell's the point of that?

Inexplicably, the Gileadites decide that Jephthah is the natural leader for a revolt against the Ammonites. Jephthah correctly reasons that this is a strange request to a banished bastard. Jephthah agrees and sends an extraordinarily lengthy message to the Ammonites, basically a history of Israel combined with a warning that many of the Israelites' previous enemies have wound up dead. Interestingly, the Ammonites suggest that they're interested only in a limited territorial dispute, but Jephthah either doesn't believe them or doesn't care. They go to war and Jephthah wins handily, massacring the inhabiants of twenty cities.

In the meantime, however, Jephthah has made a dangerous promise: he will sacrifice the first living thing he sees upon his return home, in gratitude for the victory. Surprise! It's his only child, his daughter. He confesses what he's done and she agrees to let him kill her, but first he lets her spend two months with her friends, allegedly mourning the fact that she will never marry. She comes back after the two months and is killed. The Bible carefully specifies that she died as a virgin.

If for some strange reason my previous posts haven't convinced you, this chapter should: any notion that the Israelites in the narrative continuously cherished the sanctity of life dies with Judges 11, in which a man's need to keep his oath is worth more than the life of his own daughter. It is either a testament to her devotion or a sad fact of oppression that his daughter consents to her own murder - for that is what this is. Even more painfully, the Bible does not even give this daughter a name. She is simply "the virgin."

It should come as no surprise that the response of many modern Christian readers has been to look for an exemption, an exception, some minor translation error. The fact that the Mosaic law flatly bans human sacrifice of children, and provides no guidance for how to conduct a ritual, helps this. So, oddly, does the Judges focus on virginity, which leads people to conclude that what "sacrifice" in this contact really meant was that she had to live out her life as a virgin. I hate to say it, but that strikes me as an idiotic suggestion, given the context: Jephthah says he will sacrifice her as a burnt offering, and Judges says he "did to her as he had vowed." The virginity in this context, I think, is used by the author of Judges to highlight the severity of the tragedy. The alternative notion is touching but kind of silly - the Jews didn't have any ritual guidance for lifetime sexual abstinence in place of sacrifice at the time either, nor did Jephthah's own distress at his predicament suggest he's worried about not being able to give away his daughter's virginity properly. The fact hat the ancient Israelite women apparently honoured the story of Jephthah's daughter with a four-day memorial every year is also suggestive of the real sacrifice interpretation.

The notion that Jephthah could vow to sacrifice his daughter simply cements in my mind the fact that to the ancient Jews, women were owned property - the fact that Jephthah seems upset about what he must do doesn't change that fact. At no time does he decide that breaking his oath, and thus sinning himself, would be preferable to human sacrifice. This is certainly an extreme case, but all attempts to apply the Jewish laws to our context today must consider this fact. Is Jephthah righteous for upholding his oath, or wicked for sacrificing his daughter? Did he commit murder - and if so, why is he not punished for it?

It's hard to say, because the author of Judges doesn't give an explicit answer to these questions, but it certainly doesn't condemn Jephthah for his actions. Jephthah remains the loyal and righteous judge of Israel. What he has done is horrendous, and something that should never have happened, but Jephthah remains respected for upholding his oath. The apparent lesson here is not to make foolish oaths - and, by implication, that even a foolish oath is worth more than the life of a fellow human being. Oaths have power. Jephthah's actions are terrible but he does right by keeping his oath.

Tellingly, God is silent throughout the story. Judges says that the Lord was on their side in the initial victory against the Ammonites, but for the most part, the author of Judges knows fuck-all about God. God has stepped out for most of Judges; he only rarely speaks, and this notion of battle-as-oracle is frankly unconvincing. The author of Judges clearly thinks that what Jephthah did was right, but on this occasion if no other, we must begin to question how closely we really do agree with the authors of the Bible on basic moral issues, and, for that matter, how closely they agree with God.

You don't have to accept that point, of course. You could accept that God really did bless Jephthah for his oath and permit him victory over the Ammonites. In that case, however, you're going to have to explain why an all-knowing God sanctioned human sacrifice in order to buy Israel a military victory. In that case, why would God not redeem Jephthah's daughter the way he redeemed Abraham's son? Is it merely because she is female?

A final possibility, it occurs to me, is to accept that the author of Judges actually intends to write a story in which events are deliberately morally complex. There is, on reflection, perhaps no such thing as righteousness in Judges. Gideon builds an idol, Jephthah murders his daughter. This is not about the xenophobic military propaganda of Joshua, the priestly arrogance of Numbers, or the liberation of Exodus. Is the story of Jephthah, with God's suspicious silence, a celebration of a system in which a man's oath trumps human life - or is it a veiled criticism of that ethical system in which such ridiculous extremes would be legally justifiable? It can only be the latter if the author of Judges is being deliberately flexible about God's "role" in battle, I suppose, but it does offer something in the way of an alternative explanation. Thus the problem, or perhaps the point, of Judges is that there is no victory, no divine liberation, no promise, no hope: even the apparent defeat of foreigners is tainted by the repugnance of the Israelites who are carrying out the battle in the name of the Lord.

Judges is by design and intent the greyest book in what is supposedly a very black and white Bible, and that, perhaps, is what makes it most difficult to read.
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Saturday, May 17, 2008

The Church of the Week...

... is Peace Lutheran Church Abbotsford. They deserve donations, or preferably volunteer time.

Once upon a time, city council threw up its hands and admitted it couldn't be bothered to do any more to help the poor and homeless than it was already, and hoped maybe the churches in town could help out.

Churches agreed. Peace Lutheran's pastor Christopher Reiners and a group of volunteers have been giving out food in Jubilee Park a few weeks now.

Now, however, council members are changing their minds thanks to complaints from the business association, which doesn't like charity and feels that the homeless should just be ordered to starve to death instead. According to the complaint, "indigent people" should go elsewhere than the park.

Hahaha. Yes, "elsewhere." Every place they go, they're told to go "elsewhere." There is no land, even public land, that we can afford to spare.

Reiners is defying the attempt to suppress charity, to his credit, and points out that there really ought to be housing, detox programs and other necessary social services available - which they aren't.

This one's also funny, but I've used up my sardonic laugh for the day. See, back a few years ago, the deal was, the rich people could have their Olympics, and the poor people could have a large boost in social programs and low-cost housing. That was the bargain under which the Olympics were brought to Vancouver. Guess which side of the bargain couldn't be assed to keep their word?

Be wary of agreements with the wealthy, for they are compulsive liars. - Old Testament, Proverbs 23:1-3
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