Jesus Drives an SUV

Assyria Invents Missionaries? 2 Kings 17:24-41

2008-07-13T05:26:00.000-07:00

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

With the Israelites for the most part all shipped off into Assyria (most are relocated to Halah, the Habor river, and Medes, though I have no idea where those places are), the Assyrians move Babylonians, Cuthahites, Avvites, Hamathites,and Sepharvaimites into the land of Israel. This tactic of mass forced resettlements is a common one among Biblical-period states (and has also been adopted occasionally by more recent states), intended to cut off local resistance movements and dilute cultural independence in a way that is significantly less bloody than Israel's traditional method of simply killing everyone.

This time, though, something odd happens. The blessing of God, for some theologically inexplicable reason, has passed from the people of Israel to the physical land of Israel. So does his wrath - the new Assyrians don't worship God either, so he curses them in various creative ways, including an invasion by lions.

The king of Assyria devises an interesting solution: he wants Israelite priests sent back into Israel from their new homes in order to preach to the Assyrian settlers and teach them to serve God. Unfortunately for everyone concerned, the result is apparently a syncretic religion involving some Israelite ritual practices along with the preceding practices of "each national group." Christianity has often done this in order to aid in its expansion, but the author of 2 Kings is less convinced, judging that "even while these people were worshiping the Lord, they were serving their idols."

Going to Rome

2008-07-12T22:25:00.000-07:00

After forays into Anglicanism over the past several years, in the past three weeks I've begun attending a Catholic church here in Ottawa with my Catholic girl friend (she's really not going to like that I said it that way). This is a great irony because it turns out that a considerable number of Anglicans are considering crossing the floor. They're experimenting because the Anglicans are too liberal. I'm experimenting because the Anglicans are too conservative - though Catholicism can't really do much about resolving that.

As you can see from the pictures here, it's a rather impressive structure and no doubt the interior decorating costs could have fed a small island country for a year. It's also the first church I've gone to that had a real genuine organ, which was impressive to me, though perhaps less so for others.

I don't know what to think of Catholicism. I could actually keep up with 90% of the liturgy - it being fairly similar to the Anglican liturgy I'm more familiar with. The sermons - homilies, I guess I should say - are also quite recognizable. (Conservative, evangelically inclined speakers are apparently the same pretty much everywhere; so are liberal ones, though the lines are drawn a little differently than they were in Anglicanism.) The ceremonial aspects were more elaborate, though this might partially be because I was in a much larger and more established church than I'm used to. There was also less singing, which turned out to be okay - this meant not having to flip awkwardly between multiple songbooks the way the Anglicans do.

I doubt I would ever convert to Catholicism, partly for the same reason that I would not actually call myself an Anglican - I have no real interest in submitting to the structure of any church. It turns out there are Catholic anarchists - the Catholic Workers, for example - but I have no reason to use a label that means nothing to me. If the Catholic Church begins ordaining women and blessing gay couples, maybe I'll give some marginal thought to reconsidering. In a way this is a shame because there are a considerable variety of Catholic charity organizations, at least in the east, which would be interesting to work within. The evangelicals of my own past weren't very good at doing charity without preaching.

The fact that I'm formally excluded from communion is also irritating. The fact that this irritates me also interests me, because it's not as if I was ever particularly attracted to the formality of it in any church. Apparently I was only care-free on the subject so long as I had freedom of choice. Even today, when there's a real conflict, the refusal of communion takes on considerable symbolic significance. For this reason, during the gay marriage debates back in B.C., there were some churches whose members would refuse to take communion when visiting certain other churches. (Some conservatives in Vancouver, for example, would refuse to take communion in a church that was willing to bless gay couples.) Communion politics are an intriguing holdover of the religious conflicts of the past five hundred years. The Catholic Church isn't the only one which technically, at any rate, restricts baptism to its own membership, though most Protestants now offer communion to anyone who is baptized (in theory), or to everybody who wants it (in practice).

The decision to restrict communion only to baptized or converted Catholics is of course the Catholics' own prerogative. Formally, the Catholics and certain Protestant groups, I think including the Church of England, have formally recognized one another as Christians, but the Catholic church argues that this is a partial, "imperfect" communion, and therefore - in spiritual terms - apparently we cannot share fellowship before God. I suppose it's a start - in one of my Baptist churches, the question of whether Catholics could even be considered Christians would have been a very divisive one, and most of the congregation would have settled on the negative. Of course, the pope's idea of returning to full communion with Rome appears to be acceptance of his own authority as chief spokesman of God, so I have to say that the Catholic pronouncement of the goal of reconciliation rings somewhat hollow.

Still, I find it rather ridiculous. If we accept that we worship the same God, according to the same Apostles' Creed (though I do have some problems with that one, and this gets more complicated if you toss in the Orthodox, whose creeds are older and unedited), and we're willing to eat together as people (which we are, for the most part), then it seems rather silly to say that we cannot eat together before God. Of course, then there's the whole transubstantiation thing, but the Catholic church doesn't really exclude people based on doctrine, but rather based on baptism.

Ah, well. Yet another church I feel obligated not to join.

The End of the Kingdom of Israel: 2 Kings 14 - 17:23

2008-07-12T04:50:00.000-07:00

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

Now that Elisha's gone, the story of the kings starts getting even more depressing than Judges, which at least blanketed evil in a comforting layer of inexplicable superpowers.

After good king Joash of Judah comes Amaziah, who kills all the conspirators who murdered his own father, then defeats the Edomites in glorious battle, and then, excited by his military success, provokes a pointless civil war with Israel. Even the sinful king Jehoash of Israel seems to realize this is worthless and tries to avoid battle, but eventually their armies meet. Jehoash wins and captures Amaziah as a prisoner of war, then goes to Jerusalem, breaksdown the Jerusalem wall, and raids the temple of the Lord for gold and silver. (This seems to happen pretty much once every generation, so in a way it's kind of surprising there's any gold left in that temple.)

Jehoash's son, Jeroboam II, actually leads a successful military campaign against foreigners, restoring Israel's original boundaries. However, the author of 2 Kings actually reverses the traditional logic that God's approval is known through success in battle, instead arguing that in this case God doesn't give a damn about Jeroboam - he's only letting Jeroboam win in battle because he cares about the people of Israel, who are suffering greatly under various oppressive rulers.

Once Jeroboam dies, it's time for another revolution in Israel. His son Zechariah is assassinated by Shallum of Jabesh, who proclaims himself king. In a rather gruesome aside, the Bible tells us that his capital city was sacked by Menahem of Gadi, who in the process "ripped open all the pregnant women." His rebellion successful, Menahem proclaims himself king. Later he has to amass a huge silver payment to the Assyrians to prevent an invasion. Menahem is supposed to be evil, but at least it's worth noting - for me, anyways - that he collects these silver by taxing only the "wealthy men." Progressive taxes!

Israel thereafter considers its downward spiral. Menahem's son Pekahiah becomes king, but is assassinated by the military under Pekah of Remaliah. Pekah becomes king but can't prevent a series of successful invasions by the Assyrians - nor can he prevent a conspiracy by Hoshea of Elah, who assassinates him.

It's under Pekah that Israel as a people finally starts to dwindle. During the Assyrian invasion, all the people of the Naphtali were rounded up and "deported" into Assyria to become slaves. I don't know if we'll ever see them again - I know they become a "lost tribe" at some point.

Back in Judah, Azariah has become king, and continues to be both personally righteous but openly tolerant of other faiths. (This is becoming a trend in Judah, which despite having loyal kings and the Jewish Temple seems to be the most tolerant kingdom.) For this sin, God punishes the king with leprosy, and he's forced to give day-to-day control of the kingdom to his son Jotham (yet another J) even while he's still alive. Joram, which the Bible later incorrectly says is the son of "Uzziah" rather than Azariah, leads a pretty uneventful reign.

By this time, however, the Assyrians are invading the Kingdom of Israel, and Jotham's son Ahaz decides something will have to be done. Trouble is, he's become as evil as his pagan cousins to the north, and converts to foreign religions. He's caught off guard when Israel, which really ought to be worrying about the Assyrians, instead signs a treaty with the Arameans, who attack Judah with Israelite assistance. Ahaz decides to call in the Assyrians himself, formally completing the separation of the two kingdoms, who have fought "civil" wars against one another before but, at least until now, haven't allied with foreign states against one another.

The Assyrians obligingly invade and sack Damascus, then kill the Aramean king Rezin. Ahaz goes to Damascus for a peace conference with Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser (cool name), and while there sees a pagan altar he really likes. He takes sketches and sends tem to his chief priest, Uriah, to build a replica in Jerusalem. Later Ahaz takes the Jewish Temple's bronze altar and places it alongside the new pagan one. Ahaz proposes a novel new idea: he will offer his sacrifices on the pagan altar, but he will ask for the guidance of the Lord on the Jewish one. I think this mix of Jewish and pagan religious practices is supposed to mirror the mix of Jewish and pagan state politics that has occurred under the disastrous reigns of kings Ahaz and Pekah.

Finally, God's had enough and decides to wash his hands of the troublesome Kingdom of Israel. Hoshea, who replaced Pekah, makes a treaty with the Assyrians, but secretly approaches the Egyptians, who are apparently better hegemons than the Assyrians. Every time the Israelites turn to the Egyptians, it's always a bad omen. This time, the Assyrians find out about the secret talks and invade, imprisoning king Ahaz and marching around Israel capturing Israelites and deporting them into slavery. The author of 2 Kings finally can't hold back and engages in a long rant about the sins of the Israelites, delivering a lengthy verdict and ultimately concluding that the destruction of the kingdom is clearly the sentence delivered by God in punishment for their many sins.

The role of God here is intriguing. He doesn't really seem angry that his own people are out of the land - if he was, you'd think he'd have attacked the Assyrians immediately. Instead, he only sends in the lions when they ignore his laws and worship pagan gods. Later, they mix in some Jewish religious practices with their own, and God is content to leave the Assyrians alone.

Elisha's Done: 2 Kings 13

2008-07-11T04:39:00.000-07:00

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

Meanwhile, back in Israel, things are falling apart even faster than in Judah. In a confusing series of "J" kings, Jehu's son Jehoahaz becomes king, listens to God for only a brief period of time, frees his people from Aramean oppression for a short time, but eventually loses his entire army to the Arameans. He's followed by Jehoash, who becomes while even while Joash is king in Judah.

It's during Jehoash's time that Elisha the prophet kicks the bucket, apparently after a long illness. He therefore gets one last story in chapter 13, but unfortunately, Elisha's miracles still seem rather aimless. King Jehoash comes to see him because he needs to rebuild the army in order to fight another war with Aram. Elisha, for no obvious reason, immediately tells him to fire an arrow out the east window. As soon as he does, Elisha announaces that the arrow is "the Lord's arrow of victory over Aram."

Then, stranger yet, he tells the king to start striking the ground with the arrow left in his hand. The king obligingly strikes the ground three times.

Not good enough! Elisha is most upset that the king didn't keep striking the ground until he told him to stop. By way of punishment, Elisha explains, instead of totalling defeating the Aramean invaders for all time, Israel will win only three key strategic victories. As prophecied, Jehoash defeats the Arameans three times and "recovered the Israelite towns."

Later, Elisha dies and is buried. Quite coincidentally, the Israelites bury another man in the same tomb and his body happens to touch Elisha's. Immediately, the man is raised back to life and "stood up on his feet."

Although these powers are impressive, they continue in the same vein of miraculous but seemingly ungodly - or at least non-Godly, which I suppose is an important distinction - acts commonly practiced by the ancient prophets, with Elisha simply being the most important example. There is a fairly restricted set of things that prophets can apparently do on their own, without needing any further help from God: they can find donkeys and lost axheads, heal the sick, bring food, raise the dead, and so on. God's powers are only called in when they need to move outside their personal skill set and do things like strike entire armies with blindness or hold magic bull sacrifices to intimidate the Baal prophets.

Joash Rebuilds the Temple: 2 Kings 11-12

2008-07-10T13:44:00.000-07:00

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

In the aftermath of Elisha's meddling, a clever priest named Jehoiada - acting without any direct and explicit inspiration from God, according to the narrative - is able to piece together an order in Judah. As a result of Elisha's and Jeru's murders, Ahaziah's mother Athaliah was able to control the kingdom - and kill most of the rest of the royal family, for good measure. Her daughter Jehosheba manages to save one of Ahaziah's sons named Joash, and hide him away with the help of the priesthood.

I don't know where the priests go for most of these stories, but the author of Kings seems considerably more sympathetic to them than to the kings. Eventually Jehoiada manages to negotiate control of most of the army; with them standing watch, he brings out Joash and proclaims him king of Judah. Athaliah realizes she's been betrayed but it's too late: Jehoiada has her killed. He also has the Baal priests killed.

Because the temple is falling into disrepair, Joash invents the building fund, consisting of free will donations to be used to "repair whatever damage is found in the temple." Unfortunately, most of the priests have less integrity than Jehoiada, and after 23 years (you'd think Joash wouldn't have waited nearly so long to check up on the fund), they admit they've been taking the money and spending it elsewhere. So Joash the tinkerer also invents the collection box: a "chest" with a hole bored into it which will hold all the money. Only the high priest and the royal secretary may count the money in the box, and they have to do it together - an interesting merging of church and state in order to prevent corruption. The work finally gets finished. Unfortunately, no sooner has the temple been redecorated than the Arameans invade Judah and Joash has to raid the temple for "sacred objects" to give to the Arameans to prevent them from sacking the city. Shortly after this embarrassing defeat, his officials assasinate him while traveling on a road outside town.

Even though God remains silent, king Joash seems half-decent, as far as kings go. This might be because he was only seven when he was crowned, and therefore grew up under the influence of the priest Jehoiada - after all, the book of Kings is considerably more sympathetic to the priesthood than to the monarchy. Joash is a proper Jewish king but pemits religious tolerance - that is, he lets the "high places" remain intact so that the peple can offer sacrifices.

Elisha's and Jehu's Grand Massacre: 2 Kings 8:16 - 10:36

2008-07-09T13:44:00.001-07:00

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

Like all good men in the Bible, king Jehoshaphat of Judah is a useless father, so naturally his son Jehoram becomes king but "does evil" and fails to put down a rebellion by the Edomites, amongst other failures. He's succeeded by Ahaziah, who is equally useless. Ahaziah and Joram fight a joint war against the Arameans but the latter is seriously wounded.

At this point Elisha returns to the scene, once again playing the role of covert kingmaker. (I suppose this is marginally better than simply supporting the existing pagan establishment in Israel, but still, he really lacks the punchiness of Elijah.) At thsi point he's recruited his own "company of prophets," out of which he selects one and sends him to Jehu, one of Jehoshaphat's younger sons. Jehu is from the Judean royal line, but with the Israelite king wounded, Elisha sees an opportunity, so he orders his junior prophet to secretly anoint Jehu as king of Israel.

Jehu is pleased by his new task and promptly rides to Jezreel to get rid of the wounded Joram. Joram tries to send messengers but, when Jehu won't reply, eventually rides out in his own chariot to see what's going on. Jehu insults Joram's mother, accusing her of "idolatry and witchcraft" (some of the cooler, older translations say "whoredoms and sorceries"). Joram realizes he's in trouble and turns to flee, but Jehu shoots him in the back with a bow.

After this, Jehu goes a little nuts: he sees king Ahaziah of Judah and orders his men to kill that king, too. Later, he also has the villainous Jezebel killed too. This murder is particularly gruesome: she's thrown out a window, and then trampled by horses (so that "some of her blood spattered the wall and the horses as they trampled her underfoot"), and finally eaten by dogs.

Jehu's not finished! Continuing his murderous rampage, he sends messengers to the guardians of all 70 of Ahab's children who were still alive, challenging them to combat. These were much younger boys, it seems: the Bible doesn't actually say they were chlidren, but it implies it by saying that the letters were written to their guardians rather than to the boys themselves, and that the guardians were those who were "rearing" the kids.

This makes what follows all the more chilling: none of the guardians accept the challenge, so Jehu sends out an ultimatum: they must kill their young charges, or else. All 70 of the "leading men" promptly slaughter the boys, "put their heads in baskets and sent them to Jehu."

Still not finished! Jehu stacks the heads of the children in two piles at the gates of Jezreel and delivers a speech to the people of the city in which he condemns the hous of Ahab. Then he kills all the remaining friends, priests and servants of the house of Ahab. Later, Jehu goes up to Beth Eked and does the same thing to the survivors of Ahaziah, murdering 42 of them; and then goes to Samaria and indulges in yet another massacre.

Jehu has one more murderous rampage up his sleeve. Out of nowhere he announces that he's converting to Baal worship and orders a grand religious service performed to commemorate his conversion. But it's a ruse! No sooner has the ceremony started than Jehu draws his sword, slaughters all the Baal priests, and trashes their temple. And so Baal worship in Israel came to an abrupt end.

Now, all of this is a result of Elisha's political meddling, and you might conclude from this that it's divinely blessed. Well, it's certainly divinely authorized - God always enjoys killing pagans, it seems - but it's in no way an indication that honouring God is back in vogue. You see, Jehu isn't killing the Baal worshippers because they've offended God - he's killing them because they've offended the golden calf gods who, it turns out, he's been secretly worshipping all along!

So God continues to sit in the background as his people squabble. The murderous rampage sparked by Elisha dosen't result in a new, revitalized, God-fearing Israel - it just results in a lot of corpses. Jehu might have had a chance to unite the clans - after all, he killed both the Judean and Israelite kings - but he fails to do even that, becoming king of Israel only. So much for Elisha's influence.

Elisha the Establishment Prophet: 2 Kings 6:8 - 8:15

2008-07-08T13:16:00.001-07:00

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

The Arameans attack Israel, and finally Elisha finds a purpose for his magic powers - not a very good one in my mind, though. He starts aiding the king of Israel, who as you will recall is living well outside the grace of God. God's previous prophets hated the kings of Israel - and the feeling was usually mutual, because authoritarian leaders generally don't take preachers unwilling to toe the appropriate patriotic line. But Elisha doesn't seem concerned about such things.

In order to do his bit in defending Israel, Elisha starts feeding critical intelligence to the king, telling him in advance where the Arameans will attack. The king of Aram eventually divines that a prophet is responsible for this and sends out a force to kill Elisha. Finally, Elisha actually prays to God for a change, but these aren't normal prayers - they're basically commands, which God promptly "obeys" (at least according to the narrative). Elisha strikes the enemy force blind, then stands before them and tells them he is a guide. The deception accomplished, he leads them into Samaria and surrenders them to the king as prisoners of war. King Joram is ready to kill Elisha's prisoners, but instead, Elisha decides that they ought to live. So he commands a great feast prepared, wines and dines the foreigners, and then "sends them away" back to Aram.

Later, the Arameans return to Samaria in force and besiege the city, trapping king Joram inside. Food grows so scarce inside the city that donkey heads become prized commodities and the poorer folk begin engaing in cannibalism. For some reason, a frustrated Joram decides that Elisha is responsible for the siege and decides to kill him. To save his life, Elisha promises his best miracle yet: the siege will lift and immediately food will become cheap again.

Just as promised, during the evening God causes all the Arameans to hallucinate, imagining they're hearing the sound of an enormous cavalry force charging the camp. They decide that Hittite and Egyptian mercenaries are intervening on behalf of the Israelites, and promptly flee, leaving their tents and supplies behind. Four lepers are the first to discover the abandoned camp, because as lepers they're already living outside of the city, and at thsi point quite coincidentally decide that they should try to defect to the Arameans.

The lepers feast on the army supplies and then race back to the town to declare the good news. Initially Joram believes it must be a ruse, so he stands outside the gate and despatches scouts on fast horses. The people are more willing than the king to accept their good fortune, though, and stampede out to the Aramean camp. In the process, Joram comes to a most ignoble end: he is trampled to death by the crowd.

After this, Elisha appears to retire from politics again. He proclaims a famine, though for no apparent reason - he doesn't bother condemning anyone or providing a reason why God is going to cause this famine. He finds the woman whose son he resurrected and carts her off to live with the Philistines for the duration of the famine. Later he leaves Israel himself, going to Damascus to meet with the Arameans.

Elisha's next act is a most strange one. The Aramean king, Ben-Hadad, is ill, and sends his chief aide Hazael to offer Elisha forty camel-loads of "finest wares" in exchange for a treatment, or at least a prophecy about the illness. Elisha admits to Hazael that the king is going to die, but inexplicably he orders Hazael to tell Ben-Hadad he's going to recover. Why the deception? Elisha also prophecies that Hazael is going to be king after Ben-Hadad dies, something which distresses him greatly because he seems to think Hazael is going to do great harm to Israel and its people. Hazel, cheered by the prophecy, promptly goes to the palace and assassinates Ben-Hadad.

What the hell is a superbishop?

2008-07-07T07:58:00.000-07:00

While the Canadian Anglican church careens towards what looks increasingly like an inevitable schism, the global Anglican church is headed in much the same direction. Not just over gay marriage, it turns out, but over something equally scandalous, the ordination of women. I was really disappointed to read this article. I thought that after I'd left the Evangelical Baptists, who at the time had just fought over the issue (my side lost), this wouldn't be too much of a problem anymore. Reason No. 22 why I won't actually call myself an Anglican despite my current preference for that denomination.

(Speaking of which, at the moment I've started going to a Catholic church. I'll write about that another time, perhaps.)

The article is both vague and flat-out wrong on the history so I'll provide my own. Activism during the 1960s led to a concession at the 1968 Lambeth Conference that there were no conclusive, Scripturally-justified arguments on either side of the debate. This is an interesting concession since a conservative could definitely argue that there is just such a Scriptural argument against the ordination of women, and also because it bears an intriguing parallel to Canada's current inconclusive approach to homosexual marriage.

During the 1970s, renegade provinces - Canada, the U.S. and Hong Kong - began ordaining women without formal international permission. At the 1978 Conference, there was an air of crisis over the issue, but it was resolved with a traditional Anglican compromise, one which unfortunately that church seems unwilling to apply to the present issue of gay marriage: live and let live. Provinces were allowed to decide for themselves on the issue of female ordination. The compromise was repeated at the 1988 Lambeth Conference, though shortly thereafter, New Zealand and the U.S. upped the ante by appointing the first female bishops.

By the 1998 conference, formal egalitarians commanded an international majority. The conference was attended by a dozen female bishops, all from Canada, the U.S., and New Zealand. This provoked outrage from some of the more extremist conservative bishops, who apparently believed that the uterus ruins one's ability to discern God's will. Most of the protestors were American; some decided to hold a parallel conference of their own, and others decided simply not to show up for sessions where women were present.

The conference won broad approval for formal gender equality, though with a disturbing compromise option available for those groups within the church who wished to preserve traditional morality, i.e. traditional sexism: the Church would supply acting bishops to parishes who didn't want to accept the authority of a woman over them. These bishops became known by the hilarious informal term of "flying bishops."

The new proposal would provide a formal framework for the informal "flying bishops," under which they'll now be known as "superbishops" and be made available anywhere there's a female bishop. The Daily Mail seems to think this is a new proposal, but actually it's just a formalization of the old policy. There are also rumors, incidentally, that some conservative bishops are considering moving back to Rome over the issue.

This is of course a ludicrous sham compromise and sooner or later will have to be resolved. Ironically, if they were shorter on ethics, some of the egalitarians might be able to win some friends by siding with the conservatives on the other issue that's now threatening schism, homosexuality. (This promises to start other fights at the 2008 Lambeth conference). The oppressor of my victim is my friend.

Elisha the Pointless Prophet: 2 Kings 3 - 6:7

2008-07-07T06:26:00.000-07:00

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

I was wrong before - this new king Joram is still of Ahab's line, just a younger son. His chief benefit is that he's no quite as evil "as his father and mother," which is a bit of a backhanded compliment but more than one might expect under the circumstances. At this point, Moab was still paying tribute to Israel, but at some point after Ahab dies, they decide to stop and see what happens. Joram therefore mobilizes Israel's armies to punish Moab. Once again, king Jehoshaphat agrees to send some troops from Judah to help Israel. The army of Edom ends up with them, though it's not clear why.

After a week's pursuit, the three kings realize they're in the middle of the desert and short on water. Why they were foolish enough to get into such a predicament is also not clear, but now, Jehoshaphat decides, it's time to call upon some prophets of God to find out what they should do. It just so happens that Elisha is nearby, and they decide to consult him.

Now, I have to say that so far I'm disappointed by Elisha. He certainly has all the miracle-working power of his mentor Elijah, but he seems to lack purpose. The old prophet would have mocked and tormented these incompetent kings and no doubt peformed some sort of exaggerated ritual to prove his point, complete with fire from heaven. But Elisha merely gives military advice, and even magically brings water to the land so that the army can drink and recover - but only after a harpist is summoned to play him a song, which seems like an odd trade. With Elisha's help, the Israelites invade Moabite land and win major victories, destroying towns and damming brooks and cutting down "every good tree."

Usually Israel is permitted to wage wars against its foreign enemies with complete impunity, and according to the old militarist yardstick, God must be with them on this occasion - after all, are they not fighting the evil Moabites? Has not the prophet of God given water to the army? Well, maybe. But this last statement about the war contains a key warning: the Israelites cut down the "good trees." They're not supposed to do that - back in Deuteronomy, the rules of war explicitly protected trees.

Once the war's over, Elisha wanders off again, and what he does next sort of proves my point about him lacking a purpose. With apparently nothing better to do, he starts trying to reproduce the miracles once performed by Elijah. First he performs the old ever-flowing-jar-of-oil trick. Then he goes to Shunem and raises someone from the dead - once again a young boy - in a very similar ritual, except that this time when the boy returns from the dead, for some reason he sneezes seven times.

With that over with, Elisha branches out into some miracles which parallel Christ's later miracles in the New Testament. He blesses a pot of stew and turns it from "death in the pot" - whatever that is - into good food. He takes twenty loaves of bread and feeds a hundred man (actually, this seems within the realm of possibility, especially if Elisha is doling out the bread in contemporary communion-sized helpings).

However, perhaps the lowest point in Elisha's career as prophet so far is when he sinks to the level of the donkey-finding prophet, the silly little God-blessed mystic that seemed popular in Saul's time. At the beginning of chapter 6, a lumberjack working along a lakeshore accidentally loses his iron axhead in the water. Fortunately a prophet was found - Elisha, naturally - to perform an inexplicable ritual involving throwing sticks into the water, after which the axhead was retrieved. This is a variant of the "find the donkey" story - in this case, prophets can recover your belongings through magic tricks if you've accidentally lost them somewhere.

With nothing better to do, Elisha goes into the private medical business. An Aramean army commander named Naaman comes to Israel hoping that this famous prophet will cure him of his leprosy and, fortunately, Elisha can do just that; he prescribes a treatment including seven separate baths in the Jordan river. Elisha seems willing to do this for free, and when his servant Gehazi secretly demands payment for the cure, Elisha flies into a rage and strikes him with leprosy instead. In the meantime, Naaman asks for - and seemingly gets - Elisha's permission for a very strange thing: the right to worship foreign gods. He won't offer any sacrifices to those gods, Naaman promises, but he will bow down in their temples because he is expected to by his master, the king of Aram. Perhaps, because Naaman isn't an Israelite and therefore simply isn't subject to the laws of Moses, Elisha is simply telling him that he has to make his own moral judgements. If so, that would be cool, I guess.

Unlike Elijah, Elisha isn't following God's explicit guidance in performing most of these miracles. Back in 1 Kings, Elijah would hear God's word, and then would go and do something. Elisha doesn't. Random things just seem to happen around him.

In fact, I have to wonder at the divine authenticity - if there is any - for what Elisha is doing so far. He has basically no political or social role as an activist or dissident, the way most of the major prophets have so far. He can certainly perform miracles, but he doesn't seem to ascribe any great theological meaning to what he does. He's even responsible for the Israelite strategy of damming creeks and cutting down trees, which basically means that this so-called "prophet" is telling the Israelites to commit war crimes prohibited by God's own law.

Elijah Checks Out: 2 Kings 1-2

2008-07-06T05:54:00.000-07:00

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

Ahab dies and his son Ahaziah replaces him as the kingdom of Israel's chief pagan flunky. Flunky, indeed: Ahaziah promptly falls out of a window in his "upper room" and "injures himself." I'll bet he did. Most distressed, Ahaziah sends messengesr to Ekron to ascertain from the pagan god Baal-Zebub how long it will take him to recover from his injury.

And... it's Elijah! Again! Taking his marching orders from God as usual, Elijah intercepts the messengers on the road and gleefully informs them that because Ahaziah sought advice from the wrong god, now he's going to die.

Ahaziah doesn't take the news well. Once again, a king is upset at the fact that God's prophets are behaving more like political dissidents, so he sends a force of soldier to arrest Elijah. Fifty soldiers to one prophet, which aren't nearly as good odds as you might think. "If I'm a man of God," Elijah vows when the soldiers confront them, "then may fire come down from heaven and consume you." As soon as he's done speaking, that's exactly what happens, and Elijah goes on his merry way. Ahaziah sends another fifty men, and Elijah burns them to a crisp, too.

So Ahaziah, who like most of his lineage is dumber than paint, responds by sending still another group of fifty men, though you'd think he might have detected a pattern by now.

The third captain is clearly smarter than his king; he beggs Elijah to save his men's lives. Elijah says "take me to your leader," or some Hebrew equivalent, and the captain in question escapes with his life. Elijah sees Ahaziah right on schedule and says, with his usual caustic wit, "Did you go to Baal-Zebub because you couldn't find a god that was closer to home? Now it's time for you to die!"

Ahaziah dies before having children, and for that reason, his line dies. (He's succeeded by Joram, of uncertain lineage.) With Ahab's blood gone from the throne, Elijah's work is also done, so God prepares a fitting finish for his kickass prophet: a fiery chariot that flies in a whirlwind. Before going, Elijah works one last miracle - he splits the waters of the Jordan so that he and his apprentice Elisha can across on dry land - and then formally passes on the mantle of chief prophet to Elisha. Then the chariots come down and he "went up to heaven" in a way that hasn't happened since Enoch, way back in Genesis.

I'm going to miss Elijah.

Fortunately, in the meantime we can comfort ourselves with Elisha, who at once sets about establishing his authority as prophet in the manner to which the ancient Israelites were apparently accustomed: fancy miracles, in this case for little apparent purpose. Elijah strikes the waters of the Jordan so that he can walk across on dry land, just like his master. Then he walks over to a nearby city where the water supply has apparently gone bad. Elisha throws some salt in, which really shouldn't do all that much, and then declares that he has "healed the water" - and he has! Then he gets jeered by some "youths" along the road, so he calls two bears out of the woods, and they proceed to maul 42 of the youths. This one seems a bit unnecessary, since the most serious insult they could come up with was apparently "baldhead."

Interestingly, in the Elisha story we have an early echo of the sort of scene that happens in practically every modern book and movie when the hero falls and the apprentice picks up his mentor's sword, or gun, or tools, or books, or whatever the hell he needs to do his job - and then carries on in his master's name. In this case, Elijah drops his cloak while he's climbing into the chariot. So Elisha picks it up and starts flapping it around, and it's at this point that the miracles start happening, because, of course, Elijah's cloak is actually a magic cloak.

More Meddlesome Prophets: 1 Kings 22

2008-07-05T05:32:00.000-07:00

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

Thanks to the diplomatic skills of the comparatively righteous (and at least God-fearing) king Jehoshaphat of Judah, Judah and Israel are trying to bury the hatchet. Jehoshaphat and Ahab meet and plan a joint war against Aram, in order to retake the land of Ramoth Gilead. Ahab's ready to go into battle but Jehoshaphat, following the old military tradition, thinks they should seek divine guidance first.

Ahab's reluctant. There's only one real prophet left in Israel, he admits, and it's an annoying man who's always insulting him. (Once again, 1 Kings describes prophets as social activists rather than donkey-finders.) Jehoshaphat doesn't care and summons this "Micaiah son of Imlah" anyways.

While they wait for Micaiah, Ahab brings in a group of other, quite useless prophets who behave more like hawkish newspaper columnists than spokespersons of God. Some of them even seem to be religious con artists, the sort who today can be found selling holy water and other magic charms. One named Zedekiah, for example, presents the kings with a pair of iron horns and announces that these can be used to "gore the Arameans until they are destroyed."

Eventually Micaiah arrives, but he refuses to agree with the pro-war prophets. Before he goes into the king's presence, the messenger who summoned Micaiah tells him he'd better agree with the other prophets and support the war. For some reason, Micaiah does this, but even Ahab seems suspicious by the terse answer he gives, and commands that Micaiah tell the truth.

I've no idea why Micaiah lied, but his next answer is clearly critical: the people of Israel, according to God, "have no master. Let aech one go home in peace."

Ahab doesn't like the notion of the people of Israel not having a king - after all, that would mean the end of his very profitable career! He turns to his fellow king Jehoshaphat and tries to commiserate: "See why I never bring this troublesome prophet to my court?"

A little irritated that they're talking over him, Micaiah imparts another vision, claiming that the Lord summoned the demons to his own heavenly throne room and asked them to lure Ahab into battle at Ramoth Gilead so that he could die at the hands of the Arameans. A "lying spirit" came forward and volunteered to do just that. This lying spirit, Micaiah claimed, has subsequently come and infected all of the king's false prophets.

The false prophets in question are irate and Zedekiah, strangely, wants to know "which way the spirit went" after it left God's throne room. Huh? Micaiah keeps provoking them, so Ahab orders him thrown in jail until he gets back from the coming battle. He never gets back, of course - he's shot and killed by an Aramean archer. Jehoshaphat returns to Judah and leads his kingdom in righteousness and peace (not military victory, but rather peace, I note). Israel, by contrast, gets another useless pagan king, in the form of Ahab's son Ahaziah.

Elijah's Back! 1 Kings 21

2008-07-04T05:16:00.000-07:00

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

Another day, another sorry episode in the life of corrupt King Ahab. This time he wants to buy a vineyard near his palace, which is owned by a man named Naboth. Naboth refuses to part with it, either for a fair price or in exchange for another vineyard. The land is his inheritance, Naboth says, so he won't sell it. Actually, it's worth noting, if it's inherited land he can't sell it to Ahab, under the laws of Moses. But I guess that hardly matters because no one's following those laws anymore anyways.

Ahab sulks over the failed land deal but his wife Jezebel, who once again is the female embodiment of evil, promises to get it for him. (I'd say something about troublesome women in the Bible but I think I've said it more than enough already. Suffice to say that, as usual, women are causing trouble by their very presence.) Jezebel holds a banquet and frames Naboth for blasphemy; on the bribed testimony of some "scoundrels," the people of Naboth's city stone Naboth to death. With Naboth out of the way, Ahab marches into the vineyard and attempts to occupy it by force.

This little scheme would have worked, presumably, except that God decides to have some fun at Ahab's expense, and sends in Elijah. In exchange, Elijah pronounces, he is going to "bring disaster on you": Ahab will lose "every last male in Israel," and dogs are going to eat his wife! What's particularly chilling here is that Elijah is speaking in the first person, as though he is going to do these things himself. My NIV translation puts in the appropriate extra quotation marks to make it seem as though Elijah's just repeating God's words here, but there weren't any such marks in ancient Hebrew. This appears to genuinely freak out Ahab, and he puts on sackcloth and begins fasting and behaving "meekly" for a change.

Afterwards, God and Elijah get together and compare notes on their little operation. God is quite pleased with himself: "have you noticed how Ahab has humbled himself before me?" He decides to postpone the coming "disaster" until after Ahab dies.

Judge Not Others...: 1 Kings 20

2008-07-03T04:54:00.000-07:00

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

Our fun tour with Elijah over, it's back to the sinful kings of Israel. The king of Aram mobilizes an enormous combined force, with the help of 32 allied kings, and besieges the Israelite city at Samaria, demanding gold, silver, and women in tribute. King Ahab accepts the terms initially, but King Ben-Hadad gets greedy and says he's going to send more looting parties to search the king's palace and other houses and make sure nothing is missing. Ahab summons the elders of Israel and then decides to refuge Ben-Hadad's demands. In response, Ben-Hadad attacks.

We know Ahab is an entirely ungodly king, but for whatever reason, Ahab successfully enlists the help of prophets in devising a winning combat strategy. They surprise Ben-Hadad's army in the early afternoon, just after the latter has finished a large liquid lunch. The surviving Arameans try to flee, but the Israelites overpower them even as they retreat.

The Arameans, distressed by the loss, consult their own prophets, who offer an interesting philosophical rationale for the defeat. According to their rather unlikely explanation, the Israelites won the battle because it took place in hilly territory, and the Israelites worship "gods of the mountains." So the next battle should take place on the plains - because the Arameans worship the gods of the plains. As an afterthought, they also suggest that all the defeated kings be replaced with competent military officers, which certainly makes much more sense.

The Arameans attack again, and this time God again comes to Ahab's aid - not for Ahab's sake but for his own, because, he explains, he wants the Arameans to know that he is a god of the plains as well as a god of the hills. The Arameans lose again and this time Ben-Hadad and Ahab negotiate a peace treaty.

Today, we'd call this a decent ending to a tragic war, but unsurprisingly, the God of the Old Testament doesn't see it that way. Ben-Hadad is an enemy of Israel and therefore he ought to have died in battle. Ahab needs to be told this. So God sets up an absolutely ludicrous confrontation between Ahab and yet another wandering prophet, who are so implausibly numerous in 1 Kings that you'd think you couldn't walk a mile in ancient Israel without accidentally bumping into one.

This particular wandering prophet is walking up to people on the road asking them to injure him. The first refuses, and as a result, the prophet kills him (well, actually, God kills him using a lion, but you get my drift). Eventually someone agrees to strike and wound him, wihich the prophet accepts with grace. Then he stands by the road waiting for Ahab to ride by, pulling his hood down over his face to hide his identity.

Ahab arrives and the prophet falsely identifies himself as a soldier who was present at the battle and was set to guarding prisoners of war, but let his prisoner escape, for which he now fears that his life is forfeit. Under standing orders, if you let a prisoner escape, you either had to forfeit your own life or pay a fine of 75 pounds of silver (quite a bit of silver, actually). Obviously this is a test.

Interestingly, it's also a test that Jesus later retells as a parable, so remember this outcome: Ahab is unsympathetic, saying that if that's the penalty the soldier must pay, the soldier will simply have to pay it. He offers no money to help out, and we have to assume the result might have been different if he had. As it is, the prophet lifts the cloth from his face and tells Ahab that he's going to be judged by the same standard by which he would have judged the soldier: "you have set free a man I had determined should die. Therefore it is your life for his life."

Despite the bizarre "strike me or I'll kill you" beginning to this part of the story, it's actually well written. Ahab is judged by the standards by which he would have judged others.

These are the Days of Elijah: 1 Kings 17-19

2008-07-02T04:10:00.000-07:00

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

We interrupt the sad procession of failed kings to bring you the prophet Elijah, who really kicks ass as far as prophets go. Elijah the Tishbite appears out of nowhere before Ahab and proclaims that for "the next few years," he and he alone has the power to decide when it will rain and when it will not. Then Elijah turns on his heel and walks out. He moves to a ravine east of the Jordan, where, of all things, he has ravens bring him breakfast every morning and dinner every evening. Eventually, the lack of rain causes his creek to dry up, so he moves out of the ravine and starts getting food from Sidonian widows instead. (As compensation for this, he blesses their flour jars and oil jugs so they become magic and never run out of food.)

Elijah can be a bit of an obnoxious asshole when he's angry, but at least he has God on his side, which is more than pretty much anyone else in this part of 1 Kings can honestly say about themselves. We know this not just because God routinely talks to him - which he does - but also because of Elijah's impressively varied repertoire of miracles, which include everflowing oil jugs, psychic control of ravens, control of the weather, and - for the first time in the Bible - raising the dead. Yes, Elijah raises his supportive woman friend's deceased son who dies of a strange illness. Unlike Jesus, however, Elijah's resurrection spell is rather complicated, requiring an intricate ritual in which he "stretches himself out on the boy" three times while praying. God, I hope that isn't a euphemism. Eventually the boy recovers and Elijah happily announces his progress to the boy's mother.

After a few years of clowning around in Sidon, Elijah decides to go back to Ahab. On his way, he meets a fellow prophet named Obadiah, who has spent the last several years hiding prophets in caves so that they won't be killed by Ahab. Elijah's been withholding the rain, so Ahab tells Obadiah - who apparently he's still on speaking turns with, despite the whole hiding-prophets issue - to go to find some springs and rivers somewhere. "Go tell your master that Elijah is here," Elijah says ominously. Obadiah complains at length, apparently fearing that Ahab will kill him upon hearing such news, but Elijah tells him to go and do it anyways.

Ahab meets Elijah in person, calling him a "troubler of Israel," which is a cool title for a malcontent, I suppose. I wouldn't mind being a "troubler of Canada." Elijah is unperturbed, proposing what amounts to an early interfaith debate - actually, one that I think should be the model for all future debates on the subject of "does God exist?" or, more appropriately, "which gods exist?" because that's the one really at issue here. Elijah will represent God and no less than 850 pagan prophets, handpicked by Ahab, will represent Baal and Asherah. Elijah doesn't seem troubled at being so heavily outnumbered.

Elijah asks for two bulls to be brought. Then he summons the pagan prophets and sets down the ground rules for the debate: each side gets to build an altar using only the wood available on hand, and place a dead bull on that altar. The victory conditions are pretty basic: whoever's god sets fire to the sacrifice first, wins. This game, he adds, is for all the marbles. Whichever god wins gets the complete devotion of everyone in Israel.

Elijah, always generous, spots the Baal priests an eight-hour head start, which the pagans use to pray and call upon Baal. During this time, he gleefully mocks them, suggesting that perhaps their god is meditating, or working, or on vacation, or even sleeping.

After their head start time is up, Elijah casually begins building his altar, which apparently he hasn't even started yet. He decorates the altar with a shallow trench and twelve marker stones, one for each tribe - "my altar is called Israel," he declares as he sets the stones in place. He lays the bull on the wood, then he dumps twelve large jugs worth of water onto the altar, so that the wood is drenched and the trench is full.

Finally he points triumphantly at his creation and prays confidently for divine intervention. God promptly strikes the altar with a pillar of fire, burning the sacrifice, the wood, and even the stones, and leaving the soil scorched black.

"Thus my argument prevails," Elijah says, or something to that effect anyways, after which he tells the Israelite onlookers to storm the debate floor and kill all the pagan prophets. Then, at long last, he calls down rain. And then, hilariously, he tells king Ahab to go have a drink. Alone except for a servant, Elijah climbs up a hill and sits, hanging his head between his knees, to await the coming rain.

It's brilliant. Except for the mass murder bit, I definitely think we should institute this format for religion debates. It's certainly going to be a lot less annoying than watching Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort arrogantly tell ridiculous stories about bananas and soda cans. I promise you today, the first priest I see who can call down fire from heaven to burn up a stack of logs will win me as a convert for life.

Unfortunately, Jezebel isn't nearly as impressed, and plots to have Elijah murdered. He flees from Israel into Judah and, somehwat depressed, actually prays for God to kill him. Instead, an angel gives him food and drink to lift his spirits. He lives in a cave for a while, then hears from God that it's time for another impressive performance.

This time, Elijah stands on a mountain and proclaims the "presence of the Lord." God's presence comes, preceded first by a "great and powerful wind" so strong it "tore the mountains apart," and then by a powerful earthquake, and then a wildfire. Finally there is "a gentle whisper," which apparently is the "presence of God." Very nice, author of 1 Kings.

Next, God sends Elijah to Damascus, where he's supposed to anoint someone named Hazazel as king of Aram, then anoint Jehu of Nimshi as King of Isarel, and finally appoint Elisha of Shaphat as his own successor as prophet. Somewhat ominously, God is apparently planning a massacre: he says that Jehu will murder any who Hazazel doesn't, and Elisha will murder any who Jehu doesn't, and then there will be seven thousand left who "have not bowed down to Baal." Elijah promptly goes out, finds Elisha plowing a field, and makes him "his attendant." Naturally, Elisha responds by throwing a feast and killing all the oxen he was just using to plow the field - all twelve of them.

Elijah is brilliant, cruel, and sarcastic, the Dr. Greg House of ancient prophecy. If he wasn't so bloodthirsty, I'd really love him.

One Useless King After Another: 1 Kings 14:21 - 16

2008-07-01T03:50:00.000-07:00

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

With Jeroboam out of the way, 1 Kings launches into a long and confused summary of the reigns of the dynasties of Judah and Israel, moving back and forth fast enough that it's easy to get confused. The general theme is that all the kings are sinful and all the kings support the worship of false gods, and that as a result God abandons the kingdoms to their depravity and lets foreigners win in battle (a partial return to the traditional militarist yardstick).

In Judah, Rehoboam (whom we talked about before already) lets his people set up Asherah poles on every hill and under every tree (a bit of an exaggeration, perhaps?). There are "even male shine prostitutes" in the land now, which is particularly disgusting to the Israelites because of the threat that sex between men poses to the traditional gender order. After a few years, Judah is invaded by the Egyptians, who ransack the palace and the Temple and carry off most of Solomon's gold trinkets. Rehoboam tries to replace them, but he can only afford cheap bronze replicas.

Rehoboam's son Abijah (confusingly, Jeroboam also has a son named Abijah, which makes one wonder whether there's a mistake here somewhere) becomes king of Judah after his father and apparently does no better. The author of 1 Kings makes the ridiculous and totally false claim that God let Abijah remain as king because David was without sin in the eyes of the Lord, with the singular exception of the murder of Uriah the Hittite. God does permit a continuous civil war between Judah and Israel, however.

Abijah's son Asa is the next king of Judah. He seems to be a decent guy: he expels the shrine prostitutes, dismisses his own grandmother for idol worship, and disperses the royal treasury to make peace with Aram. (This is where the good news stops - once Asa is at peace with Aram, he convinces the foreigners to join him in making war against Israel.) His punishment for this, 1 Kings records, is that as he grew older "his feet became diseased." How awful for him.

Over in Israel, Jeroboam is replaced by his son Nadab, who is as sinful as his old man. He also has to deal with some rebels, one of whom - Baasha - succeeds in assasinating Nadab and becoming the new king of Israel. Baasha promptly murders Jeroboam's entire family. But Baasha turns out to be no better, and God sends a prophet to try and scare the king straight. (It doesn't work.)

It's rapidly becoming apparent that, unlike Judah, Israel can't even maintain political stability (both sides are united in their general sinfulness, but Judah has a functioning monarchy to oversee its depravity - is this better or worse? I'm not sure...). Baasha's son Elah becomes king, but after only a couple of years, the commander of his chariots, Zimri, stages a coup. Zimri tries to proclaim himself a king, but he's committed one of the most basic mistakes of military conspirators - he's forgotten to make sure he actually has the support of the military. The infantry refuses to recognize a charioteer as king and names a competing king, Omri. Then they march on Israel's new capital of Tirzah, where Zimri sees the approaching masses and promptly sets his palace on fire, immolating himself in the process. Yet another Biblical ritual suicide, it would seem. Omri eventually does become king, though only after killing a few other challengers to the throne. He's a pagan too, though, so God is still angry.

The last king in this sequence is Omri's son Ahab, who rules Israel for 22 years and is more evil than anyone yet. He marries a foreign girl named Jezebel (always a bad idea) and introduces Baal worship to the various other pagan faiths already in Israel. He also lets his subjects begin rebuilding the city of Jericho, which has been laying fallow since Joshua's time and was never supposed to be rebuilt.

At this point God has basically stepped out of the narrative. Aside from the occasional grumpy prophet, the only role he plays is to stand around progressively getting angrier and angrier.

Jeroboam, Pagan King of Israel: 1 Kings 12:25 - 14:20

2008-06-30T03:32:00.000-07:00

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

Rehoboam's rule has collapsed and he's left with Judah to preside over. The rest of Israel, exercising dubious judgement, immediately votes to let Jeroboam become their new king. He takes over the city of Shechem and proclaims his land the kingdom of Israel. Unlike Rehoboam, Jeroboam is somewhat politically savvy, reasoning that his rule will never be secure so long as people owe their ultimate fealty to God, and therefore are continually going back and forth to Judean territory in order to worship at the Temple.

The solution, obviously, is to create a new religion which won't require trips to Judah. (I'm sensing a return to the elitist view of commoners-as-dumb-sheep here.) He creates two golden calves, which I guess is twice as good as the one golden calf that Aaron made back in Exodus, and starts spreading around a story that these gods have been with the Israelites ever since they left Egypt, but have been in hiding for the last four centuries. He sets up the calves in Bethel and Dan and the people obediently start worshipping the new gods. (I was right about the sheep thing, then.)

Thoughtfully, Jeroboam also democratizes the priesthood, letting anyone - even non-Levites become priests at his new "high places" and shrines. He creates new festivals and sacrifices at the altar in Bethel.

It's at this point that God appears in the narrative again, predictably choosing sides against the king. He sends an unnamed "man of God" to stand at the altar and proclaim the new paganism evil. Jeroboam personally rides to Bethel and reaches out to strike the prophet, but at that moment, God simultaneously paralyzes and "shrivels" the king's right arm. He also strikes the altar with his other mighty godly hand, splitting it apart and sending ashes spraying in all directions. Jeroboam tries to bribe the "man of God" with food and drink and an unspecified "gift," as though this will somehow assuage God's anger. The "man of God" says he won't keep company with such despicable sinners, turns his back on the king, and walks out of Bethel.

Rather cruelly, God decides to kill the "man of God" shortly afterwards, for a considerably lesser transgression than pagan idol worship. The man of God is traveling from Bethel and meets a fellow prophet, who invites him in for dinner. The man of God says he can't, because God doesn't want him to eat any food while he's in this degraded land of Israel. The prophet says this doesn't count, because an angel told him it would be all right. But it isn't all right! The man of God sits down to eat, and the prophet immediately stands up from the table and announces that the man of God has broken God's commands and is going to die for it. The next day, sure enough, he sets out to return to his home in Judah, but while travelling, he's mauled and eaten by a lion. This is rather cruel - either the second prophet is cruelly deceptive, or God, even more questionably, has deliberately used one of his prophets in order to trap another. The second choice is particularly disturbing, theologically.

Even the second prophet seems to realize that this sorry event was most unfair. He goes out and buries the body in his own tomb, then tells his sons that when his own time comes, he wishes to be buried alongside the Judean man of God. It's a sad and troubling story.

Sad and troubling for the prophet, but not for Jeroboam, who continues undeterred. One of his sons, Abijah, falls ill, so Jeroboam decides to send his wife in a disguise to find a man of God and arrange for a magic healing to take place. (We're returning to the idea of prophet as magician, though in this case healer rather than donkey-finder.) Jeroboam's unnamed wife finds the prophet Ahijah in Shiloh, but even though he's blind, he knows exactly who she is, because God has filled him in. Because of Jeroboam's sin, Ahijah proclaims, the house of Jeroboam is also going to lose its kingship. One day God's going to get so upset, he adds, that he's going to break Israel like an uprooted plant and scatter the people from Jerusalem to the Euphrates and beyond.

God's really got it in for this monarchy idea. He fires Saul, inexplicably likes David (for the most part, anyways), grows to hate Solomon, punishes Rehoboam for the sins of Solomon, and he passionately hates Jeroboam, if the lengthy speech from this Shiloh prophet is any indication. So much for the promise of having a national state.

Rehoboam and the End of the Unified Kingdom: 1 Kings 11:14 - 12:24

2008-06-29T02:50:00.000-07:00

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

God doesn't play around when it comes to clashing with kings. The Israelite empire has been struggling for years with local resistance movements in Aram and Edom, where they conducted genocidal campaigns under David and Joab. In Solomon's later years, however, God raises up an enemy from within the Israelite ranks to rankle Solomon: Jereboam of Nebat, an Ephraimite in charge of the slave labour forces. Jeroboam has a seemingly chance meeting with a prophet just outside Jerusalem - a real prophet, not the "find my lost keys" kind of prophet that Saul was familiar with - who says Jeroboam will be made king of ten of the tribes of Israel. Solomon tries to kill Jeroboam but the latter escapes into exile in Egypt, which is rapidly becoming a haven for anti-imperial dissidents, sort of an ancient Middle Eastern version of Cuba or Venezuela. Then Solomon dies and leaves his eldest son Rehoboam to fight the gathering storm.

Rehoboam chooses the city of Shechem for his coronation, which is a bit of a strange choice - not a lot of good things happen in Shechem. Jeroboam returns and leads what basically amounts to a labour protest movement, calling on the king to "lighten the harsh labor and the heavy yoke he put upon" the forced labor contingents. Given the social structure of Solomon's empire, this comes perilously close to a slavery abolition movement.

Rehoboam's senior advisors are actually in favour of this move, noting that it would make Rehoboam very popular politically. Rehoboam's childhood friends, however, aren't convinced, and illogically claim that instead Rehoboam should instead be even crueller in his repression of the slaves. They also suggest he deliver some public speeches suggesting that Solomon had a small penis (the NIV helpfully euphemizes this to say that Solomon had a small "waist." Come on, now.) The king follows their advice, except for the bit about penises.

Maybe it's the lack of penis jokes that did him in, but in any event, the Israelites are unsurprisingly not impressed by their new king. All of the tribes except for Judah declare that they have no "share" in King David, and certainly have no share in King David's grandson Rehoboam, and therefore they have no intention of serving him as subjects. Rehoboam sends out his slave boss, presumably with some armed men, to try and lay down the law, but the Israelites rise up and stone them to death. 1 Kings implies that "Israel" is "in rebellion against the house of David," which I suppose is true, although in this case it seems like a perfectly legitimate cause for resistance.

When the police fail, the state usually turns to the army - and that's precisely what Rehoboam does. He mobilizes 180 000 troops from the Judeans and the Benjamites, a small tribe which apparently remains loyal to him despite everything that has happened and prepares to force everyone back to work (essentially this is the first back to work legislation, which the governments of Ontario and British Columbia will doubtless find inspiring in their relentless efforts to annihilate their citizens' civil rights). At this point, however, God intervenes on behalf of the oppressed workers, sending a prophet named Shemaiah to Rehoboam to warn him that God doesn't want any fighting to take place. Rehoboam's army obeys the word of God and dissolves.

This is a fascinating moment. The kingdom of Israel is broken - actually, both the monarchy and the state in general have been preserved as valuable institutions, but they're no longer presiding over a unified nation of Israel in the name of God. Just as God said he would do, he's split Judah from the rest of Israel and left the son of Solomon with a single tribe to rule.

Perhaps most insterestingly, though, this is a mostly bloodless coup. God's direct intervention in the story is extremely limited - indeed, the most direct action he takes is actually the moment where he intervenes to tell the army to stand down, which they do in good faith. It seems the God of the Book of Kings is no longer interested in the sort of militaristic relations that characterized the books of Samuel and Joshua and (in a sarcastic form) even Judges. This God actually seems more interested in nonviolence, at least for the time being. It's refreshing.

Solomon Goes Too Far: 1 Kings 10 - 11:13

2008-06-28T01:41:00.000-07:00

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

We had some firm social criticism, and after a brief break to praise Solomon's wisdom, the author of 1 Kings returns to what is becoming his favorite pastime. (The Bible is like Fox News: fair, and balanced.)

Solomon receives a visit from the queen of Sheba. She has heard of Solomon's great wisdom and excellent walk with God, so she comes to visit, "to test him with hard questions." What sort of questions? Logic? Theology? Theoretical physics?

No one seems to know where Sheba is either, for that matter; Wikipedia says it was either in Ethiopia or Yemen, which aren't even on the same continent, though they are both south of Israel, which I guess counts for something. Either way, the queen of Sheba - who doesn't get a name in the narrative - is most impressed, though she seems more impressed by the wealth of the palace than by the wisdom of Solomon. She promises to deliver a positive report to her country and agrees with Solomon that God must love Solomon and Israel, in order to do such wonderful things for them.

Ah, yes, the Benjamin Franklin argument: "If a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?" No, I suppose it isn't - but then, we'd have to look at all the other empires God has therefore "aided." Like the evil Egyptians, for example. And the Romans. And all the others who oppress the ancient Jews, though I suppose we haven't got to those yet.

Solomon also profits handsomely from the visit, adding new treasures from Sheba to what the author of 1 Kings is now referring to as the king's "royal bounty." In this case, he gets 120 more talents of gold, along with "precious stones" and the largest shipment of spices ever delivered to ancient Israel.

And that's just the start! If there was any doubt that the author is contemptuous of Solomon, the next verse sweeps that doubt away:

Solomon now has an annual income in gold alone of 666 talents, i.e. about $650 million a year, which is a tidy sum, I suppose. (This doesn't include an extra set of separate revenues that Solomon collects from his trade with the states in Arabia.) All together that gives him enough excess gold that he indulges in a massive renovation project for his palace, including two hundred large gold shields (each weighing 7 pounds), three hundred "small" gold shields (about half the size for each), and a new gold-and-ivory throne complete with golden lions - "nothing like it had ever been made for any other kingdom." Solomon also orders all the palace's cutlery and dishes remde from gold, and throws out the old silver dishes on the grounds that Israel is now so rich they have no need of cheap silver. He sponsors yet another fleet of trading ships, which sails with its counterpart in Tyre on three-year voyages to collect cargoes of ivory, apes, and baboons.

Baboons? Cool. Though I don't know why Solomon would need baboons.

In addition to the 40 000 horses referenced before, Solomon now has a chariot army numbering twelve thousand horses and 1400 chariots. He makes silver "as common in Jerusalem as stones," plants cedar groves everywhere, and even has a flourishing international arms trade, importing chariots from Egypt and selling them at a profit to the Hittites and the Arameans. Even worse, Solomon starts importing horses along with the chariots - yet another violation of Deuteronomy 17.

That covers the horses and riches restrictions on kings, which Solomon clearly isn't concerned with. Now it's time for the restrictions on marriage, an area in which Solomon's excesses are probably much better known. Solomon, says the author, "loved foreign women besides Pharaoh's daughter" - and he loved them in the hundreds. Solomon marries Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians, and Hittites - and his excesses become so extreme here that the author actually interjects with an explicit judgement, reminding readers that God once told the Israelites never to intermarry with foreigners. Solomon doesn't care: he has 700 wives "of royal birth" and three hundred concubines, presumably those who are not "of royal birth."

According to 1 Kings, it is the women more than anything that cause Solomon to go astray. He starts experimenting with the various religious faiths of his many wives, like Ashtoreth, Molech, and all the other fun pagan gods that the Israelites have alternately loved and hated through the years. Eventually he's persuaded to introduce religious tolerance to Israel, building ritual places for the Moabite and Ammonite faiths. He burns incense and offers sacrifices to every god imaginable.

Unsurprisingly, this makes God quite angry. He says that Solomon is going to be fired as king, just like Saul was (actually the same language is used, something about "tearing away" the kingdom from the king). But because David was righteous, God says, he will spare the royal house and let one tribe remain as a "kingdom" for future generations. I'll bet it's Judah! God also says that because Solomon was so nice in building that Temple and all, he's going to hold off on the rebellion until after Solomon dies.

What is the lesson to draw from Solomon? We could be misogynistic and suggest that his foreign wives were what did him in (indeed 1 Kings seems to think this one is the most important). It certainly doesn't appear that he was inherently an evil and despicable man - after all, one of his first acts as king (after the dubious murders conducted at the beginning of his reign, anyways) was to ask God for wisdom and guidance so that he could be just, after which he promptly built a Temple for God, the first truly permanent structure of worship in Israel.

It's tempting to stop at the "foreign women are dangerous" line, and a quick Google search suggests to me that a lot of people do, but it's worth noting that this is just the last of the many sins that the author of 1 Kings is chiefly concerned with (except for the brief reference to the Pharaoh's daughter early on). What about his massive gold hoard? Or his excess of horses? If we go by the measure of Deuteronomy 17 rather than the more limited prohibition against foreign wives, we can see that Solomon is much more corrupt than just the presence of some pagan wives can explain. And this has occurred to him despite the fact that he seems to be righteous and well-intentioned to begin with.

Indeed, it's hard to draw from 1 Kings the implication that Solomon has really become so depraved that he honestly believes in and worships all these gods - at least not without doing great injustice to the notion of Solomon as a wise man. He's known God on an intimate basis and devoted much to furthering God's position in Israel - at least as he understands it, which is in the form of permanent physical monuments to God's power. I suspect Solomon isn't a pagan so much as a politician. He sees political benefit in appealing to minorities - so he shows up to their worship services and follows along in exchange for their support for his government. Maybe I'm trying to write too much contemporary culture into ancient history, but I can see this being plausible. It certainly happens often enough today.

And for most of his life, it pays off - he's a pretty successful king by any normal material measure.

The problem, I suspect, is meant to be a systemic one. God never did want a king in Israel, and, the author of 1 Kings suggests, this is the inevitable result when frail human imperfection is combined with the potential power of a militarized and imperial state. In the short term the state can try to wed the religious and secular agendas by showering the priesthood with fancy gifts like new temples, but in the long run the goals of these two institutions are mutually exclusive.

Solomon's Largesse: 1 Kings 9:10-28

2008-06-27T01:43:00.000-07:00

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

I was wrong - the author of 1 Kings is just wildly bouncing back and forth between fawning praise and bitter criticism.

A couple days ago I noted the conditions set out in Deuteronomy for determining a bad king - too many horses, too much contact with Egypt, too much gold, too many wives. The latter half of 1 Kings 9 implicitly adds another: too much fraternization with foreigners.

Before I noted that God seemed pleased with the work done in his name, but now the author of 1 Kings sounds a note of caution. Part of the payment given to Tyre, says the writer, was a promise that 20 Galilean towns would be given to the king of Tyre as vassal properties. Solomon follows through on this promise, though Tyre seems less than grateful, since it names the new province "the Worthless Land." It's also revealed that at some point during the proceedings, Tyre also made a personal payment to Solomon in the amount of four metric tons of gold. Deuteronomy 17 said a king shouldn't own too much gold or silver. I don't know how much gold is too much, but I know that 4 tons of gold is currently worth about $115 million, which sounds like a great deal of gold to me.

Later, Solomon builds a fleet of ships which sails to Ophir and bring him a profit of 420 talents of gold - in other words, an extra $400 million or so. Gold, gold, gold for everyone!

The next paragraph starts with the rather chilling phrase, "Here is the account of the forced labor King Solomon conscripted to build the Lord's temple, his own palace, the supporting terraces," and the city walls. The slave labour is also used to rebuild a new city given to Solomon by the Pharaoh as a wedding gift (he captured Gezer, burned it to the ground, slaughtered its Canaanite inhabitants, and then gave the smoldering ruins to Solomon as a wedding present). They were also used to build large military bases throughout Israelite territory. The slave labour allegedly included pretty much everyone in the area who wasn't an Israelite - Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Hivites, Jebusites, and so on, and Solomon made them into a permanent "slave labor force," according to the Bible. The Israelites remained as Solomon's "fighting men, government officials, officers, captains, and commanders."

The division of labour is interesting because it suggests that Israel has gradually transitioned from an introverted Israelite society based on Israelite labour into an empire built on slave labour, à la ancient Rome - or, more relevant to the present discussion, ancient Egypt, which also had a grand king (the Pharaoh), state religion, slave labour (in the form of the Israelites), and so on.

Adam Michnik once said that "Those who start by storming Bastilles will end up building new Bastilles." It took the Israelites quite a while, but 1 Kings seems to be suggesting that that is precisely what they have done. To the dealings with Egypt I mentioned before, we can now add an excessive personal supply of gold. The author of 1 Kings is gradually chipping away at the image of Solomon as ideal king.

Solomon the Architect: 1 Kings 5 - 9:9

2008-06-26T00:05:00.000-07:00

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

Solomon decides to build the long-awaited permanent temple of the Lord in Jerusalem, and even though he doesn't get a long dictation of instructions from God (as Moses did in Exodus), the Bible still takes a long time to describe his plans, which call for the finest in imported Lebanese cedar. At the center is an "inner sanctuary" in which the Ark of the Covenant will be kept. (Today, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church has a similar space within which it claims the Ark now rests.) Various bronze decorative items are prepared for Solomon, mostly by a famous craftsman named Huram. Finally, the Ark of the Covenant is brought to the temple by the priests and Levites.

With the temple built, Solomon turns his attention to the matter of his own palace. This is a symbolic reversal of his father David, who built his own palace and then wondered about making a house for God. Is this a subtle criticism of King David, injected by the author of 1 Kings?

Solomon's palace, like the temple itself, is an impressive structure; he calls it the Palace of the Forest of Lebanon and it's also, as the name would suggest, made of imported cedar.

What's interesting about Solomon's work is that his architecture is a multinational project. Israel's xenophobia is starting to diminish, it would seem (is this moral criticism of Solomon or some long-awaited tolerance on the part of the author? One wonders...). The cedar is purchased from Lebanon via Tyre. Huram is also from Tyre, though his mother was a Naphtali Israelite. Partly in exchange for the work and the resources, Solomon gives twenty Galilean towns to the king of Tyre.

The various Israelite royal festivities have been competing with each other in gore and blood for a while now, beginning under Saul and David. Solomon now tops them all by dedicating the new Temple in a ceremony which saw the sacrifice of "so many sheep and cattle that they could not be recorded or counted." Given the penchant of the Biblical authors for counting damn near everything, this is a telling admission - especially in light of the fact that someone was on hand to count all the animals available in a second, smaller part of the ceremony which followed later, and involved the sacrifice of 22 000 cattle and 120 000 sheep and goats. Holy fucking Christ. Israel sure has a lot of spare meat available for an early agricultural society.

The Ark is placed carefully into the holiest part of the sanctuaries by the priests and then a dark cloud fills the temple. Solomon takes this as a sign that the Lord is ready to "dwell forever" in the new Temple. He therefore delivers an extremely lengthy speech, followed by an extraordinarily lengthy prayer. It's actually a really cool, well-written passage in my opinion, even if I don't think much of Solomon himself. It's so well written, in fact, that I actually find myself agreeing with my Men's Bible, in which Philip Yancey calls the prayer "majestic." God seems to agree, and he appears to Solomon in a dream again, promising him that if he is righteous God will "establish your royal throne over Israel forever."

In the last entry I speculated that the author of 1 Kings was critical of the monarchy, but at this point I have to wonder whether I was being a little idealistic, or at least jumping the gun a little (since I know for a fact that the criticism of Solomon will resume later). God seems quite pleased with his new king's deeds, despite the fact that way back in 1 Samuel he didn't seem to want a king at all. By blessing Solomon's joint architectural projects (the temple and the palace), God is simultaneously blessing the new social and political order of Israel.

Solomon the Wise? 1 Kings 3-4

2008-06-25T23:44:00.000-07:00

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

The following two chapters appear to be fawning praise of Solomon. He offesr a ridiculously enormous sacrifice of a thousand burnt animals, and then has a dream in which God offers to grant him three wishes (well, only one wish actually). Solomon asks for wisdom that will help him as king, acknowleding that he is young and inexperienced. The dream-God seems surprised that he didn't ask for wealth or long life, or even death to his enemies, but "discernment in administering justice" - the mark, it would seem, of a truly good king. So much for the militarism that still survived in Samuel. Because Solomon is so selfless, dream-God says that he will give Solomon riches and a long life too. Solomon responds by holding even more sacrifices, plus a giant feast. He appoints officials over all Egypt and creates a sort of feudal structure under which they collect taxes in the districts and then pay him a portion of their income.

Solomon's wisdom rapidly becomes the stuff of ludicrously high praise. Solomon, the author of 1 Kings writes proudly, was wiser than anyoe sel on earth, even "the men of the East." He was famous, spoke 3000 proverbs and wrote over a thousand songs. He was a botanist, a biologist, and a sage. When two prostitutes came to him disputing over an infant (one has killed the other's, and now falsely claims that hers is the infant who is still alive), Solomon tricks the guilty woman into admitting her guilt by making the ghoulish proposition that the baby be cut in two and half given to each woman. (The guilty woman is prepared to accept half the baby, but the real mother, naturally, would never bear to see her son killed.) The Israelites are "awed" by Solomon's wisdom and justice.

It's fawning praise and I suppose I can understand why I thought Solomon was supposed to be a positive model. On the other hand, even in these early years of his reign, there's a disturbing layer of subtext. Recall that way back in Deuteronomy 17, "Moses" included some rules for the future Israelite monarchy. Along with exhortations to know and follow God's laws, Moses establishes five specific prohibitions that a king must not under any circumstances violate: he must not have too many horses, he must not make people go back to Egypt or buy horses from Egypt (the symbolic humiliation of returning to Egypt was a common threat in the Torah), he must not take "many" wives, and he must not accumulate excessive wealth.

How's Solomon doing, according to this Mosaic measure of quality rulership? Not very good, it turns out.

First, Solomon starts out chapter 3 by marrying the daughter of Egypt's Pharaoh. Marrying foreigners was explicitly banned under the Israelite law, and marrying a Egyptian must be particularly dubious given the history of the two countries.

Second, Solomon has an enormous number of horses. How many it's not entirely clear: the NIV says it's four thousand stalls for chariot horses and twelve thousand horses, but admits in a footnote that according to the Hebrew manuscripts, it's actually forty thousand horses and twelve thousand charioteers. I realize Deuteronomy didn't specify exactly how many horses was too many, but I'm fairly certain that 40 000 is enough to qualify.

Whether Solomon has excess wealth is unclear, but he certainly has great appetite for material goods. His empire spans from Iraq to the Sinai and he collects enormous tribute, including "daily provisions" in the amount of 200 bushels of flour, 400 bushels of meal, thirty cows, a hundred sheep and goats, and innumerable deer and birds. Yum!

So then, even while the author of 1 Kings seemingly falls over himself praising Solomon's fine qualities as a just ruler, he works in some details which, given the Mosaic context, have to be interpreted as sharply critical of the king.

I suppose the only question remaining is: did the author of 1 Kings write as he did in order to criticize Solomon in light of Deueronomy, or did the author of Deuteronomy write as he did in order to criticize Solomon in light of 1 Kings?

Solomon the Murderer: 1 Kings 2

2008-06-24T23:15:00.000-07:00

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

Solomon may have come to the throne through dishonest means, but David does seem fond of him. In a very Mafia-esque scene, he and a few others cluster around David's deathbed and listen as David metes out instructions for settling scores once he's gone. He has the nerve to tell Solomon to obey the laws of Moses, something David himself clearly didn't care about all that much. David wants some people killed (like Joab) and some others rewarded for their faithfulness (like the sons of one Barzillai of Gilead). He especially wants Shimei of Gera killed, who, as you may recall, was the one who tried to stone David during his pilgrimage to the Mount of Olives. This is an odd one, because at the time David forgave Shimei and promised not to harm him. So much for that promise! David's metaphors are particularly cruel: "bring his gray head down to the grave in blood."

Solomon spends the rest of the chapter carrying out David's final instructions and consolidating his own power base. Dangerously, the disgraced Adonijah asks for the hand (and the rest of the body, of course) of David's last prostitute, Abishag the pretty young virgin. Solomon flies into a rage, worrying that he can't afford to do any favours for Adonijah because, after all, Adonijah is the elder brother and really should have been king. There's an obvious solution to this! He orders his servant Benaiah to go out and murder Adonijah. The deed is done and Solomon no longer has to worry about rightful succession troubles.

Next, Solomon retires priest Abiathar, one of Adonijah's allies. He doesn't actually kill Abiathar; instead, the man is simply dismissed from royal service and sent to his family's fields in Anathoth. His life has been spared, Solomon explains, only because he once carried the Ark of the Covenant, and even Solomon isn't going to stoop to killing a holy man.

General Joab isn't so lucky, however. Realizing there's a purge going on, he races to the temple and grabs the altar, just like Adonijah did. Solomon orders Benaiah to murder him anyways, a particularly dubious and unethical move given the ancient laws surrounding the altar. With Joab out of the way, Solomon is able to reward Benaiah, his hit man, by making him general of the army.

Next up, it's Shimei's turn. Solomon says he should move to a house in Jerusalem and that if he ever leaves the city, he will be killed. Shimei agrees, but two years later, two of his slavse escape to Gath. Shimei naturally saddles his donkey and heads off to reclaim them. Solomon happily seizes the opportunity, recalls Benaiah, and has Shimei murdered.

The bloodbath safely out of the way, the second chapter of 1 Kings ends somewhat chillingly with the sttement that "the kingdom was now firmly established in Solomon's hands."

Under the circumstances, perhaps it's not surprising that God isn't playing much of a role in events. I always remembered Solomon as being a wise and good king who ultimately fell into sin, but only in his old age. After all, he's the one who made the Temple, and authored some of the later books in the Old Testament, and so on - right? Maybe not. Whoever wrote 1 Kings really doesn't seem all that fond of Solomon.

Solomon the Usurper: 1 Kings 1

2008-06-23T22:54:00.000-07:00

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

In contrast to the praise that 2 Samuel heaps upon the idea of a Godly monarchy, 1 Kings starts out with some pointed criticism of the Israelite state. It's a little early to tell, but I have to suspect we're moving towards a rather different view of the usefulness and morality of the monarchical state.

The first story is a deliberate emasculation of King David, who was strong and virile in 2 Samuel (sometimes a little too virile for his own good), but is now old and weak. He has a permanent chill and has taken to laying under thick blankets. His sympathetic servants therefore go out and find him an exceptionally pretty young virgin named Abishag, and put her into bed with the king. Presumably they except David to shag Abishag, and in his younger days I have to suspect he wouldn't have passed up the chance. Now, however, "the king had no intimate relations with her."

With David on his deathbed, David's son Adonijah puts himself forward as a potential future king. (The Bible actually takes time out to specify that David hadn't disciplined Adonijah as a child.) Adonijah gains the support of the military (via General Joab) and the priesthood (via Abiathar the priest), which, despite being thoroughly marginalized by the new institution of the state, can still exercise political influence in such uncertain circumstances. Tellingly, David's closest friends don't support Adonijah.

It's not entirely clear what Adonijah did to make himself an enemy, but he is certainly prophet Nathan's enemy. Nathan is one of David's good friends; he's the one who condemned the affair with Bathsheba. Now, however, Nathan is deadset against Adonijah becoming king. He watches with alarm as Adonijah holds a massive animal sacrifice to gather popular support for his cause, and then approaches Bathsheba. The two work out a way to manipulate David into choosing Solomon as successor: Bathsheba will go into David's chambers and "remind" David that when he was younger he promised to make Solomon the future king, and then Nathan will rush in while they converse and tell David that Adonijah is holding sacrifices and claiming to be king. The scheme has the desired effect: an angered David calls in his loyal officers and orders a counter-demonstration at which Solomon will be proclaimed king.

Adonijah, fearing for his life as his supporters flock to Solomon, races to the temple and grabs the horns of the sacred altar. He can't be killed in such a position, because since he's technically on the altar, to kill him would be a human sacrifice which would profane the temple of the Lord. Solomon and Adonijah negotiate a compromise under which Solomon will let Adonijah live in peace provided he behaves honourably and does no evil.

All of this is a very nice story with a couple of key flaws: Adonijah is Solomon's elder and the rightful heir, and there's no record of this mysterious promise made to Bathsheba. They're playing a trick on old David, whose memory fails him. It's a retelling of the Esau-Jacob story, in which Jacob swindles their father into getting Esau's inheritance in similar deathbed contiditions.

Consequently, by the very hereditary terms by which the future kings of Israel claim legitimacy as rulers, 1 Kings 1 argues that Solomon (and therefore every ruler which follows him) is actually an illegitimate king who steals the throne from its rightful heir.

Does Israel Need a King? Final Reflections on the Books of Samuel

2008-06-22T22:41:00.000-07:00

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

It's a little hard to know what to make of 1 and 2 Samuel. In these books Israel undergoes a bloody transition from the failed anarchy of the Judges period to a supposeldy superior state-based society led by a human king. It's supposed to be a bottom-up transformation - this time God still chooses the king, but the decision to create the state isn't his. It's the people's. And it seems to be an unwise choice, so far.

On the one hand, 1 Samuel in particular is pretty critical of the state. 1 Samuel 8 is practically a Christian anarchist's creed. Samuel himself, who only lasts for a few chapters of this lengthy work, isn't a king - and he's one of the few really praiseworthy characters portrayed in the narrative. The kings are more dubious characters - God seems to be deliberately mocking Israel when he chooses the incompetent buffoon Saul as the first king, and he lets the country be destroyed in civil war as a result of the appointment of the second king (David). If Joshuan militarism is correct in suggesting that God's will is shown through military success, as 2 Samuel seems to imply, then David ought to have been a fantastic king - yet despite being undefeated in battle for the most part, he's plainly much less than perfect as a statesman. And despite the fact that he's supposed to be a man after God's own heart, he's a blasphemer, an adulterer, and a murderer. (Also an extortionist, but that's not explicitly one of the commandments.)

On the other hand, there's a distinctly pro-monarchist flavour to Samuel, which becomes most explicit by the end of the second book, which basically descends into bombastic militarist and monarchist propaganda, tempered only by the strange story of the census in chapter 24. Multiple stories are presented to prove that David was chosen as a great king by God, by the state, and by the military. He slaughters Israel's enemies and ultimately leads the land into peace (though there's a great deal of bloodshed along the way).

The elitist slant of the book becomes especially obvious as the people become, in David's own words, "just sheep" - huge quantities of lives to be traded, whipped, and occasionally sacrificed in order to see whose side God is really on. Despite his numerous personal faults, David is a great king - and because he's a great king, he's allowed to survive crimes which God's own law says he really ought to be executed for, multiple times over. At the end of the day, God is on David's side, because David is the king. The priesthood is now not only marginalized but explicitly subordinated to the state, which supplants the role of priest and prophet as chief spokesperson for God.

What the Fuck? Part 4: Yet Another Census Crisis: 2 Samuel 24

2008-06-21T22:20:00.000-07:00

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

Continuing our tour of the absurd appendices of 2 Samuel, we come to the story of David's last census, which strangely comes after David's last words.

Just like he was in the good old days, for no apparent reason God is "burning" with anger against Israel. As a result, he orders David to go and take a census. The king delegates Joab and the army to handle the census. Joab thinks it's a bad idea but he's unwilling to disobey orders from the king. Ever the faithful general.

This census superstition has come up before. I'm not really sure what the significance was, but perhaps it had to do with the idea that one shouldn't be counting one's resources. If the true strength of Israel's armies lies in divine power, then it shouldn't matter how many men you have with you - and therefore to count them is a demonstration of a lack of faith. I guess.

Anyways, David finishes the census and is then overcome with guilt, confessing that he has "sinned greatly" against God. He begs forgiveness. Eh? What happened to God ordering David to do this? Jumping ahead a bit (I know I shouldn't do this), it might be worth pointing out that the 1 Chronicles version of this story actually says it's Satan who rose up and spoke to David. Come on, Bible. Which is it? God or Satan?

Whatever the case, God appears to be angry too and actually offers David his choice of punishments for the census: he can have three years of famine, three months of war, or three days of plague. David thinks it's better to "fall into the hands of the Lord" than to "fall into the hands of men," so he chooses the plague.

Of course, because David is a king rather than a human being, you won't be surprised to know that he's not actually the one who's going to suffer, despite the fact that he was the one who sinned. (This is another example of God punishing the wrong people.) God sends an angel to spread a plague in Israel, and 70 000 people promptly drop dead. The angel is so efficient at his work that God actually recants haflway through and tells the angel to hold off for a moment.

David is upset too, and tries to reason with God, one elite to another. The people of Israel, he says, are "just sheep." He's the one who sinned - therefore he's the one who should suffer. Aside from the ridiculous elitism, I have to agree with this sentiment, and respect David for expressing it. For whatever reason, of course, God has no intention of punishing David.

So, David takes advantage of the respite to hurry over to a farmer and build an altar in his barn. (Why he had to go find a barn for this purpose is unclear, but he did have the support of his chief prophet Gad in doing so.) The new altar prepared, David starts making sacrifices and keeps going until God lifts the plague.

This story is so convoluted it's hard to tell what the point is. Why does God tempt David into sin? Why does he then offer David a choice of punishments - certainly something he's never done before? Why do none of those punishments actually affect David? How many tens of thousands of subjects is God willing to kill in order to prove a point with the king?

This latter question is particularly disturbing because, as you may recall, the last time something similar happened, God was killing Egyptians in order to make his point with the Pharaoh. Now, apparently, he's just as happy to kill Israelites as he was then to kill Egyptians. The lesson for average non-noble folk like myself is that when God gets on intimate terms with the elites, it's time to head for the hills, because he clearly doesn't give a fuck about us.

Heil David! 2 Samuel 22-23

2008-06-20T21:59:00.000-07:00

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

Once again, my Men's Bible makes me want to cry, with a ridiculous devotional aside by Walter Trobisch encouraging us to celebrate our salvation because it makes us into "whole men," worthy and competent and secure and confident and all those other good things we can take pride in thanks to our penises.

King David has pretty much had his day, and he sings a long song to God followed by some last words. David isn't exactly going out with humility and grace, as it's hard to tell whether the song is more about God's glory or his own.

Here, for example, is a particularly implausible stanza in which David makes the most unlikely claim that he is blameless and without sin, perhaps forgetting the times when he was consorting with Philistines, throwing Israel into civil war, committing adultery, extorting money, and so on:

The Lord has dealt with me according to my righteousness;
according to the cleanness of my hands he has rewarded me.
For I have kept the ways of the Lord;
I have not done evil by turning from my God.
All his laws are before me; I have not turned away from his decrees.
I have been blameless before him and have kept myself from sin.
The Lord has rewarded me according to my righteousness, according to my cleanness in his sight."

Uh huh. Sure, David. Later on, he arrogantly asserts that the God in question belongs only to him: God helped him destroy all of his enemies, including his own people (verse 22:44); he has so many subjects that he doesn't even know them all, thanks to God; God "avenges me, puts the nations under me, sets me free from my enemies."

David's last words continue on in much the same vein, claiming that he is "the man exalted by the most high, the man anoited by the God of Jacob." He claims that he is "like the light of morning at sunrise on a cloudless morning." Better yet, God has "made with me an everlasting covenant," and will "bring to fruition my salvation and grant me my every desire." I could go on but it gets kind of tedious and sickening.

Next, the Bible contains a long list of accolades for David's best soldiers, which it hilariously refers to as "David's mighty men." I think I almost fell off my chair upon reading that term. Some of these men look like they should have been back in Judges: for example, there's Josheb-Basshebeth, who killed eight hundred men in a single encounter using his magic spear; Eleazar, who fought the Philistines for so long that his hand "froze to the sword"; and Shammah, who single-handedly defended a lentil field from a company of Philistines (this feat seems somewhat less impressive, but apparently was enough to qualify him).

Better yet! These three men are especially remembered because, during one particular campaign against the Philistines, David offhandedly complained that there wasn't enough water to go around. So, "the Three" - as the Bible refers to them from here on - crossed the front lines and stole water from a Philistine well for David.

Then there's also Abishai, who killed three hundred men; Benaiah, who killed a lion in a snowstorm; and another thirty-odd men who are important enough to be remembered but not important enough to have their exploits recorded.

I include this section more because it's amusing then because it's theologically significant. Basically, whoever was responsible for finishing off 2 Samuel has changed it from religious scripture into meaningless propaganda. It would make me ill if it wasn't so amusing. Who mentioned God? Bah! We're talking about real human heroes now! It's a marked departure from the flawed heroes of most of the Old Testament.

What the Fuck? Part 2: Giants Again: 2 Samuel 21:15-22

2008-06-19T21:45:00.000-07:00

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

For no particular reason, it's time to talk about giants again. David is in the middle of one of his innumerable wars with the Philistines, and faces a series of four giants. Why? I have no clue! The Bible has a strange fetish for these mysterious creatures.

The first goes by the really cool name "Ishbi-Benob," and wields a spear with a heavy bronze head. David is old now, and for a moment it seems that Ishbi-Benob is going to kill him, but fortunately the king's life is saved by Abishai of Zeruiah. Once again the officers tell David it's simply too dangerous for him to fight with the men, and instruct him to stay back from the fighting "so that the lamp of Israel will not be extinguished."

Up next is Saph, who fights the Israelites at Gob. Aside from the strange names, apparently there's nothing significant about this guy; he's killed by Sibbecai the Hushathite, and that's all we know about Saph.

Then there's another battle in which Elhanan son of Jaare-Oregim slays the mighty "Goliath the Gittite." Uh, what? I thought we already killed Goliath! Oh, well. Goliath dies again (the 1 Chronicles retelling actually says this is Goliath's brother, not Goliath himself), and in the process loses his mighty "spear with a shaft like a weaver's rod."

The final giant is my favourte, "a huge man with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot." Helpfully, the Bible counts them all for us, and correctly concludes that there are "twenty-four in all." The "huge man" challenges the Israelites to battle but Jonathan, David's nephew, kills him.

And that's the end of the giants, at least for the time being.

What the Fuck? Part 1: Avenging the Gibeonites: 2 Samuel 21:1-14

2008-06-18T21:35:00.000-07:00

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

The major intrigue is over now and the remainder of 2 Samuel is a bizarre series of appendices. In the first, God makes his triumphant return to the narrative, appearing to David in the midst of a national food shortage and declaring that the shortage is the result of "Saul and his blood-stained house," who made an evil decision to "put the Gibeonites to death."

I'm afraid I have absolutely no idea what God is talking about here. Saul never gave any orders to put the Gibeonites to death, or to do anything else with them for that matter - at least not in any form that is recorded in the Book of Samuel. What's going on here? Is God losing his mind?

No matter. David promptly summons some of the surviving Gibeonite elders and asks how he can make amends for what was done to them by Saul. The Gibeonites are initially quite graceful, saying they want neither money nor blood vengeance, but David presses, so they make a chilling proposal: David should take seven sons of Saul and execute them "before the Lord" at Gibeah. David obligingly selects seven of Saul's surviving offspring and hands them over to be executed. Their remains are buried, and God's anger melts away. God "answers" the prayers of the people and restores full food production.

This incident is disturbing for more than just the strange story of the mysterious Gibeonite massacre, however. There is no mention in the Bible that the seven sons of Saul were guilty of anything beyond being sons of Saul. The separation from the initial crime, not to mention any Biblical prescription of punishment (they appear to be killed by "exposure" to the weather), brings their deaths perilously close to a human sacrifice meant to appease God's wrath, rather than a just sentence of execution in accordance with the law.

(I would think any execution unjust, but for other reasons; what's telling is that this execution can't even cling to the law of Moses's minimal legal basis for state-sanctioned killing.)

It's also telling, I think, that for what I think may actually be one of the first times in the Bible, God actually explicitly takes the side of one of Israel's former enemies, against his own people, in order to right this alleged wrong. In the past he's occasionally let foreigners punish Israel as a means to show his people they have sinned, but he's never actually taken the side of those foreigners before. Here Israel is in the wrong and Gibeon is in the right. It's a sign of how far the people have fallen or, alternatively, how far God is now distancing himself from Israel.

The Restoration of Israel: 2 Samuel 19:8 - 20

2008-06-17T21:14:00.000-07:00

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

Inconveniently for the incompetent scribe who put numbers in my Bible, the next section of the story of David actually begins not only in the middle of a chapter, but in the middle of a verse. The civil war with Absalom seems to be over now that Absalom is dead, but the country is in tatters. There are enormous numbers of refugees (which today we'd call "internally displaced persons," I suppose), and the people bicker about whether to accept David back as king. David reaches into the confusion to appease the priests and the Judeans, offering to let General Amasa replace Joab as his right-hand man.

The Judeans organize a huge crowd to welcome the return of David as king. Shimei, who tried to stone David a few chapters ago, comes forward to beg forgiveness, and David happily grants it, promising that "you shall not die." Mephibosheth also aks forgiveness, and David orders him and his former slave, Ziba, to divide up their inherited properties evenly. (Mephibosheth selflessly suggests that Ziba can have it all anyways, because he's just so glad to have a good king back.)

Unfortunately, the Israelite tribes aren't ready to lay down arms. As David is proceeding along the Jordan with his prized Judean troops, some men from the other tribes come forward to protest that they have "stolen the king away." The Judeans argue that "the king is closely related to us," but the others argue that this shouldn't matter: "we have ten shares in the king." It's a little unclear, but I think David is in the wrong here. He's been reinstating Judean friends left and right, and the rest of the kingdom feels cheated out of what should been an equitable restoration. Basically they're protesting the same sort of nepotism that still happens in post-conflict situations today, so that, at least, should be fairly easy for us to identify with.

Matters come to a head when a Benjamite named Sheba of Bicri declares that his tribe actually doesn't even want David and the Judeans to come back into power, and calls for a rebellion. The Judeans escort David safely to Israel (where, in a very questionable act, he punishes the concubines Absalom raped by having them locked up "in confinement till the day of their death"), but he has his mind on the new rebellion already and orders his forces to pursue and apprehend Shiba. Even though David earlier appointed Amasa his new general, he hands the pursuit over to Joab, a fateful decision - Joab, skeptical of Amasa's integrity, promptly assassinates him. Eventually Joab hunts down Sheba, too. (Actually, they trap him in a city, and the inhabitants of the city agree to toss out Joab's head in exchange for their own lives, a bargain which Joab cheerfully accepts.)

With order seemingly restored, David sets about appointing a new cabinet. Like today, there's a defence minister (Joab), and a few other key posts (secretary, recorder, chief priest, etc.). There's even someone "in charge of forced labor," which is intriguing. Sometimes I wonder why we don't have a Minister of Slaves anymore - a much better-sounding title than "Minister of Labour," and the job function (putting down strikes) seems to be pretty much the same.

Once again, it's intriguing to note that God seems to play little part in events. Even David isn't seeking his guidance during the restoration of Israel. The priests, moreover, are now completely irrelevant - they've been decisively subordinated to the state and have simply become one set of ministers and advisors among many. (David actually has three priests he puts in charge: Zadok, Abiathar, and his personal priest, Ira the Jairite.)

David's Sons are Worse than Jacob's: 2 Samuel 13 - 19:8

2008-06-16T20:19:00.000-07:00

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

As usual, David is a Biblical hero, and therefore he's a horrific father figure. Years later, he has at least two adult sons - Amnon and Absalom - and a very attractive daughter, Tamar. As usual, the name "Tamar" spells trouble. This is a major clue, because actually the chapters covered here are a creative re-telling of the story of Jacob's kids at the end of Genesis. David doesn't have as many, mind you, but there are some obvious similarities (all the acts of evil have to be compressed onto the heads of only two brothers instead of 11, mind you).

The story initially makes it seem like the villain is brother Amnon. Egged on by his frat brothers, Amnon rapes his sister. He actually uses David to get at her, feigning illness and asking his father to tell Tamar to bring him some "special bread." In what has got to be one of the creepiest pickup lines of all time, he openly tells her, "Come to bed with me, my sister." Very subtle, Amnon. Tamar protests, but "he was stronger than she." Afterwards, Amnon is disgusted and furious - perhaps more with himself than her - and tries to send her away, but she begs him not to, arguing that to send her away afterwards would merely add insult to injury. Absalom quietly vows vengeance; David hears about it but does nothing.

Despite the trauma she suffers from being raped, this story isn't really about Tamar. The fact that she's Amnon's sister makes the incident obviously evil, but aside from that she could have been anyone. The fact that this is really a story about duelling brothers becomes clear from the fact that Tamar plays no further part in the narrative: sent by David, then raped by Absalom, she takes refuge in Absalom's house, where she lives as "a desolate woman." We don't hear from her again.

Two years later, at Ephraim, Absalom calls out Amnon and has his men-at-arms kill him (it helps that Amnon is drunk). Implausibly, Absalom orders his assassins to "be strong and brave" as they murder the drunk Absalom. Initially, the news gets garbled and David is told that all of his sons have been killed, but his nephew Jonadab soon arrives to correct the record. David doesn't seem all that comforted, though - even one dead son is too many. Worried about what his father might do, Absalom flees and lives in exile for three years.

Time passes, and General Joab, David's favourite killer and pretty loyal if occasionally deceptive, finds "a wise woman," dresses her in "mourning clothes," and sends her before David to tell him a parable which convinces David to summon Absalom to return. Absalom now has children of his own, one of whom he names Tamar, in memory of his sister.

Absalom is not a particularly likeable individual. David, embittered by the murder of Amnon, refuses to see Absalom in person. Joab is the unfortunate middleman who's willing to talk to both, and as punishment for this, an infuriated Absalom sets fire to Joab's barley fields. Joab finally agrees to bring the two men together, but Absalom hasn't had enough yet. He buys a chariot and an honour guard, then rides around Jerusalem dispensing summary justice and proclaiming that things would be different if he were king. Eventually, he becomes king - sort of, anyways: he goes to Hebron and announces to the people of Israel tha the is now the king. All of Absalom's time delivering stump speeches and judicial decisions has made him quite popular with the people, many of whom flock to his cause. Time for another civil war!

Concerned by Absalom's growing popularity, David and his advisors flee Jerusalem, leaving the palace to be administered by ten of his concubines. (This leads one to wonder just how many concubines he has.) David initially has his original six hundred companions from the rebellion against Saul, but gradually he dismisses all of his retinue until he is alone, wearing rags, on a pilgrimage to the Mount of Olives. In a particularly bitter moment, he learns that Jonathan's son Mephibosheth has deserted him, so he instantly frees the man's slave Ziba, and gives all the properties to Ziba instead. Presumably this isn't going to be an easy decision to enforce, at least until the civil war is over.

Some of David's other meetings in his wanderings are less friendly - he is attacked by another descendant of Saul's house, Shimei, who actually tries to stone him. Some of those present are willing to kill Shimei in retaliation, but David tells them not to, admitting that he deserves his current "distress." He only hopes that the Lord "will see my distress and repay me with good for the cursing I am receiving today." He's very serene in his suffering.

Absalom, meanwhile, marches on Jerusalem and takes the palace. On the advice of one Ahithophel, whose advice "was like that of one who inquires of God," Absalom carries out a rather crude and disgusting ritual to symbolize his supremacy over David: he brings the ten palace concubines up onto the roof and has sex with each of them in turn, "in the sight of all Israel." Then he makes some effort to summon the army (under a new general, Amasa, who replaces Joab) and apprehend his father, but David is clearly a superior commander, even now that he's been reduced and demoted.

David gathers a new army under Joab and proclaims his intention to lead it personally, but his men tell him to stay back, suggesting his life is more valuable than theirs. Uh-huh. Very convenient, having a "God-breathed" text saying monarchs' lives are so worthy. At any rate, it's interesting - his men clearly still respect him, despite all that has happened. An enormous pitched battle occurs, which David's forces win.

The battle also leasd to the death of Absalom. In another example of the twisted sense of humour of the author of 2 Samuel, Absalom is riding to the battle on a mule when he fails to duck low enough while racing under an oak tree. His head is "caught" on a tree branch and he is left dangling from the tree while his mule goes on without him. Joab, ever the loyal soldier, immediately hurries over and kills Absalom. David is disconsolate at the loss of his son, even though were fighting a war just the day before. This is another example of how the lives of the "little" people of the kingdom seem totally irrelevant in these clashes of kings and nobles - and in this, for a rare moment, I actually agree with Joab, who tells precisely that to David in hopes that it will encourage the king to resume his duties.

In some ways the story of Joab is as interesting as that of David. Joab isn't exactly honourable, but he unfailingly does what he thinks will be best for the state of Israel, and for the status of David as rightful king. The fact that he's willing to kill, even to assassinate, political rivals might say something about the dubious moral code he follows - but at least he follows one. Unlike his king, he's not being regularly distracted by cute girls.

It's telling that God basically vanishes at this point in the narrative. After the final warning to David, delivered via Nathan, God appears to wash his hands of the new Israelite state. He tried to warn them that kings wouldn't work out, and now he's had enough. Whatever shreds of unity and kinship Israel still had have basically been destroyed through years of civil war. David sets about to restore the monarchy, but in the meantime his country has been devastated.

David Can't Keep it in his Pants: 2 Samuel 11-12

2008-06-15T19:49:00.000-07:00

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

Things seem to be going fairly well for King David and Israel when he fucks up again, pretty seriously this time, and God basically withdraws his blessing from the new government. So much for the monarchy being a grand idea.

This story is probably the most recognizable part of 2 Samuel. David sees a pretty woman bathing and summons her for sex. (Hilariously, the Bible suggests that htis occurred, "in the spring, at the time when kings go off to war.) Bathsheba is pretty passive throughout this story; teh only thing she actually does on her own initiative is to tell David she is pregnant.

I always remember this story as David wanting to take Bathsheba for himself, but that's not quite how it turned out. David seems to have started out with the idea of a simple one-night stand. He actually panics when she says she's pregnant, and tries subtly to get Bathsheba's husband, Uriah, to come home and sleep with his wife as soon as possible, in order to cover up what he has done. Uriah doesn't seem all that interested, though, insisting that he is a soldier and will sleep with the hired men until he's on leave. Only then does David decide that he will have to kill Uriah by sending him into a dangerous battle - which he does, in the process killing numerous other people as well. With Uriah out of the way, he makes Bathsheba his wife (this would be wife number four, for those who are counting), but there's no sign he's initially all that attracted to her beyond the sexual encounter that caused all this trouble.

While David does eventually suffer for this act, it's worth noting that this is not an isolated event - David has a pattern of doing dubious things. It's not even the first time he's picked up a widow just as her husband dies: he did this back as a rebel too, when he married the wife of Nabal after the latter refused to pay protection fees to David's gangsters. David's penchant for chasing women is a pattern, not an isolated incident.

God has generally stood aside while all manner of evil was practiced by Israelites, including kings, for many years now, but he decides to take strong action now, for some reason. Nathan the prophet, regaining the role of prophet as important political protestor and social critic (something that, for example, was never present in 1 Saul, when prophets helped people find lost keys and lost donkeys and such), courageously informs the king that God is incensed and will punish David's house. David breaks and admits his sin, so Nathan says God will take away the suffering that was coming to David, but nevertheless, "the son born to you will die."

Sure enough, Bathsheba gives birth to a son but he is ill and dies within a few days. Uncharacteristically, David actually celebrates the death of his infant son by worshipping and holding a feast. His servants are nonplussed, but David reasons that his son has gone to a better place.

I have to wonder whether there's more going on here - I know a lot of people love David, but seriously, how many fathers celebrate the death of their newborn children if they really wanted those kids in the first place?

The story is doubly interesting because, as you may recall, way back in the laws of Moses one of the penalties prescribed for adultery was that the priest would mix bitter water as a sort of trial by ordeal, and this trial would - if the woman were guilty - induce a painful abortion. Sure enough, here God has killed the child in question. Interestingly enough, in this case we know precisely who committed adultery - David and Bathsheba - but, intriguingly, no one seems to expect that they have to be killed for this. (I know Uriah is dead, but still.) This is because a new and troubling new law has been established as part of the creation of the monarchy: the king is not subject to the law of Moses. Oh, he has to follow the moral prescriptions - but he isn't subject to the same penalties as everyone else, and neither are those who fall under his protection.

Even more worrying, I suppose, is the fact that while David may personally escape the penalties for his actions, punishment and suffering is then imposed on his subjects, who have done nothing wrong. This is a consequence of the new monarchist slant of Biblical elitism. Recall that in the past God would punish an entire family for the sins of the man who headed the household. In the new social order, there is a man who heads the nation - and therefore, when that man does wrong, the nation must be punished. It's a seriously questionable approach to morality. God once said he would punish men only for their own sins, but he's never really followed that rule, and he certainly isn't following it now.

(There's an alternative, of course, which is not to excessively spiritualize what's going on. Perhaps the coming collapse would happen even without some form of mysterious divine intervention, because, after all, people are pretty much the same selfish ingrates that they've been in most of the other books so far.)

David Fraternizes with the Other Nobles: 2 Samuel 9-10

2008-06-14T19:29:00.000-07:00

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

David's still playing surprisingly gracious with other nobles - as long as they don't slight him.

For example, out of nowhere, he decides it's time to repay some of his debts to Saul's family. He misses Jonathan and wants to "show kindness" to someone from tha thouse. They find that Jonathan had a disabled son named Mephibosheth who's still alive, so David has him summoned and promises to give him some land that would have belonged to him had there not been the civil war and the death of Saul. He also orders one of Saul's former servants, named Ziba, to become Mephibosheth's servant, along with all of Ziba's own sons and servants.

This is an intriguing moment - David orders someone into servanthood with no apparent expiration date. Does the king's writ now override the laws of Moses?

David is considerably harsher with the Ammonites. Because he was once on good terms with king Nahash, David decides to send emissaries to Nahash's son, the new king Hanun. I think this is nice and diplomatic of David, although it does seem a considerable divergence from the original God-given rules against making treaty with foreign nations.

Hanun doesn't seem particularly angry himself, but his nobles, suspicious that the emissaries are in fact spies, humiliate them: they "shave off half of each man's beard, cut off their garments in the middle at the buttocks, and send them away." This is evidently so embarrassing for the men in question that David refuses to look upon them, preferring to find out how the emissaries fared by means of messengers.

David doesn't seem determined to react, at least initially, but then he learns that the Ammonites have hired some mercenaries from Aram and Maacah, so he sents General Joab with his full army. Predictably, Joab trounces them. Later, David joins the battle with reinforcements and delivers such a crushing defeat that the system of alliances the Ammonites and Arameans have signed to protect them against Israelite aggression collapses, and various vassal kings make separate peace treaties with Israel.

We seem to be moving from holy war towards uneasy inter-national politics (I use this term carefully because it has a particular meaning today which obviously wouldn't apply nearly as smoothly to the people groups of the ancient Near East). David's connection with God continues to be seen through battle, but the narrative has shifted, at least for the moment, into an extremely elitist political space where nobles and kings and their senior generals are, for the most part, the only people worth mentioning. This leads to shorthand such as the dubious claim that David killed 700 charioteers and 40 000 soldiers at the Battle of Helam (near the end of chapter 10), whereas of course this killing would have been done by David's army, just as today we say that "Bush invaded Iraq."

Don't worry. The high politics narrative won't last long, because David's penis is about to get in the way.

David Retrieves the Ark: 2 Samuel 6-7

2008-06-13T14:02:00.000-07:00

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

With David's own legitimacy firmly established in battle, it's time to worry about God's place in Israel. (Recall that in the new system, for better or worse, the priests, and thus religion, has been subordinated to the state.)

Since its recovery from the Philistines, the Ark has been sitting in a rural town, so David summons thirty thousand troops and marches down to get it. The ark is reverently placed on a cart and hauled off, and here's where things get a little strange. At one point the oxen stumble and, concerned that the Ark may topple off the cart, one of David's men, Uzzah, tries to steady it. God is apparently infuriated by this transgression and immediately kills Uzzah. Angry and a little frightened by this development, David drops off the Ark at the house of Obed-Edom the Gittite. But Obed-Edom gets "blessed" by God for having the Ark, so David promptly goes down and gets the Ark again. He brings it into Jerusalem in a truly gruesome parade, which sacrifices a bull and a calf every six steps. David "leaps and dances" in the front of the procession, causing his wife to rebuke him for behaving like a fool. (David doesn't care, saying he can afford to be "undignified" in the service of God.)

The reduction of God to magic charm here is a little strange. Theoretically we could say that God killed Uzzah because it was against the rules for anyone moving the Ark to actually touch it (this was covered back in Exodus or Numbers, I can't remember which) - and indeed evangelicals often do that, suggesting Uzzah was disobedient. I'm not buying that, though - there's one hell of a lot of disobedience going on here, beginning with the fact that the wrong tribe is moving the Ark. God isn't usually concerned with striking people dead for disobedience anymore. There's also no good reason why Obed-Edom ought to be blessed - he hasn't done anything except live in proximity to the Ark. In a religion that is usually very short on magic relics, the Ark is a strange exception.

Back in Jerusalem, David decides that it's time to properly honour God by building him a home. His intentions actually seem honourable here - if he's living in a palace, God should too - if a little misguided, because, as God points out through his prophet Nathan, God has never asked for a house, and doesn't particularly need one. (If that's true, why is God's presence so centered on the Ark?) Still, God is impressed, and promises to make David's house endure as kings of Israel, and give to one of David's sons the responsibility for creating the promised home of God. David responds with a very long prayer praising God to the skies.

David Kills Some Pagans: 2 Samuel 5:6-25, 8:1-14

2008-06-12T13:33:00.000-07:00

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

Now that he's king, David starts a war to purify the land of Israel. His first target is the "fortress of Zion," the city of Jerusalem. I have to say this is a little strange, because the Jebusites were supposed to have been slaughtered back in Judges 1 (which, mind you, I already argued was a fictitious book of social and theological criticism), and for this reason David paraded to Jerusalem with the head of Goliath back in 1 Samuel 17. Why would David bring the head of Goliath to Jerusalem in celebration if that city was still in Jebusite hands?

Either way, the Jebusites are confident David can't take the city, but he does. He accomplishes this feat either by using scaling hooks to take the city walls, or by sending his men crawling up a water shaft into the city (v. 8). These are rather different accounts and I'm surprised my NIV doesn't explain why it can't figure out which is which.

Next, he starts a war with the Philistines again, and unlike Saul, David defeats them handily. The Philistines retreat in such haste that they forget some of their idols behind. You'd think David wouldn't have much interest in idols, but for some reason, he and his men "carry them off" to God knows where.

Later, David engages in a series of military campaigns nearly worthy of Joshua's lengthy string of successes. In chapter 8, the Bible describes him racking up an impressive list of kills "in the course of time": the Philistines, the Moabites, the Zobahites, the Arameans, and the Edomites. The kings of Tyre and Hamath are impressed and send him great quantities of treasure - in fact, the former even builds David a palace in Jerusalem. Somewhat disturbingly, after Moab surrenders, David apparently has them separated out by lots and executes two-thirds of them at random, then demands tribute from the survivors.

Only after all this has been done, at the end of chapter 8, does David set all aright politically by appointing qualified advisors, military commanders, and so on.

The new social order being created in Israel is an intriguing one if a disappointing one. The king is first and foremost a military figure, and in that sense the book of Samuel draws on the strongest militarist section of the Bible to date to measure David's success and his intimacy with God. Back in Joshua, in particular, military success was taken as a sign of divine support. Divine support is even more important for a king whose children would inherit the throne than it is for a general whose children would not, however, and so 2 Samuel's description of David's military skill is politically significant.

Contrast David's swift victories in chapter 5 with Saul's bumbling tactics back in 1 Samuel. Saul isn't a bad fighter, but he just can't seem to win a lasting victory against any of Israel's enemies, especially the Philistines - and eventually it leads to his death. David, by contrast, fights short, decisive battles: he routs the Jebusites in just one verse, and beats back the Philistines "from Gibeon to Gezer" with very little difficulty. God must be with him! Look at his successes!

Beyond the military, the end of chapter 8 suggests that David has undisputed command over every aspect of Israelite society: he appoints the high priests, the generals, and the officials of the royal court. Giving total control over all these things to a single person is something God was reluctant to do before, but apparently it's okay now.

In 1 Samuel, I suggested that there were three stories of David's original accession because the writers needed to appeal to three different constituencies to legitimize David's rule - the religious, the political, and the military. These early victories fulfill the militarist expectations for the legitimacy of his rule: God has demonstrably chosen David to win on the battlefield. It is only afterwards that he starts to worry about other issues - like God.

Special note on Biblical inerrancy: Here, again, the NIV (and possibly others, though I'm not interested in checking this time) deliberately distorts the words of the Bible in order to defend its inerrancy doctrine. 2 Samuel 5:25 actaully says in the Hebrew manuscripts that David beat back the Philistines "from Geba to Gezer." Oops! Over in 1 Chronicles 14, the Bible says it was "from Gibeon to Gezer." So naturally the NIV just slips the right words in, taking it upon themselves to correct God's mistake in the transmission of his holy writings. They defend this on the grounds that the Septuagint does the same thing, mind you, which is better than they've done on other occasions. Still, I have to wonder at this tactic (which they do adopt here) of justifying alterations to the text on the grounds that part of the duty of the translator is to correct errors in the text.

David Becomes King: 2 Samuel 1 - 5:4

2008-06-11T06:18:00.000-07:00

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

With Saul disposed of, the way is theoretically cleared for David to take over the kingship of Israel. The first two chapters of 2 Samuel contain a strange story about the death of Saul which has nothing to do with the one at the end of the previous book - a foreign Amalekite appears in David's camp and claims that he is the one who killed Saul, and, even more humiliating, that Saul begged for death before the end. Furious, David kills him. Then he mourns, probably more for Jonathan than for Saul, though the Bible says he lamented the loss of both. Then he goes to Hebron and proclaims himself king.

The Israelites, as it turns out, have other ideas, and it's time for another civil war - a real one this time, the sort we haven't seen since Judges. Saul's general Abner tries to establish what today we'd call a military junta, under the formal figurehead Ish-Bosheth, one of Saul's surviving sons (probably a young one, since he wasn't at the battle with the Philistines). Thus David is king only of one tribe, Judah, which was with him at Hebron. The war drags on, but eventually Abner is cast from Ish-Bosheth's government after the latter falsely accuses him of sleeping with a royal concubine. Abner tries to defect to David, and bring David's first wife Michal with him, but the job is botched - David's other general Joab, returning from a raid, is convinced Abner is a spy and therefore murders him. David is forced into mourning again. He also curses Joab for the action, in a most creative fashion:

May Joab's house never be without someone who has a running sore or leprosy or who leans on a crutch or who falls by the sword or who lacks food.

Yikes.

Next, it's Ish-Bosheth's turn - the rogue king of Israel is murdered by two of his own mercenaries. They rush off to tell David the good news, presumably thinking he will be pleased. He isn't - David promptly seizes both men and has tem executed rather violently (first, their hands and feet are cut off, then the bodies are hanged.

It's hard to figure out what David thinks about the killing of the other kings, beginning with Saul. He certainly has some interest in putting forward this notion that a king - any king - is one of the "Lord's anointed," even after the Lord explicitly turned his back on that king (as happened in the case of Saul). It's an ancient form of the divine right of kings, and will serve David well once he is king. And he is indeed king - with Ish-Bosheth out of the way, he orders all the elders to assemble at Hebron and anoint him king over all Israel.

The Samuel sections are deeper narratives which make more interesting reading, but they're also not particularly prone to theological considerations. This is political intrigue, not theology. We'll get to that later. In the meantime, God continues to play a fairly minor role in events, occasionally answering questions from David but usually in terse, one-sentence affirmations of things David is already thinking.

Conversations with the Dead: 1 Samuel 28

2008-06-10T02:33:00.000-07:00

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

In chapter 25, we interrupted the David-Saul story to see one of David's more dubious actions - the near-murder of Nabal, which was eventually given to David by the hand of God.

Now it's Saul's turn to wander far from the beaten track of righteousness. You may recall that, way back in the beginning of this book, Saul decided to go to a prophet for the ridiculous task of finding a lost donkey - always a good use of God's time. This time, faced with an impending Philistine invasion, he seeks God again - in the prophets, his dreams, and even the Urim and Thummim, which apparently are still around for divining purposes - but God doesn't answer. He reaches the next logical conclusion: maybe a medium will help! The NIV needlessly calls this woman a "witch" in its subtitle, in case any stupid readers couldn't guess that what's going on here is an unsanctioned spiritual activity.

Interestingly, if we were to take 1 Samuel as a literal account of history (or even a purported literal account of history), we would have to assume that the Bible teaches that the spirits of the dead really do exist, and that we can communicate with them. Because that's exactly what happens here: through the medium, Saul talks to the spirit of the recently deceased prophet Samuel, who is "called up" by the medium. Samuel is angry, though apparently more that his rest has been "disturbed" than by the fact that Saul is consorting with evil sorceresses. He says God is also angry with Saul and therefore Saul is going to die at the hands of the Philistines. So much for useful spiritual guidance.

It's also significant that the specific instance of using a psychic medium doesn't appear to anger God, at least according to Samuel - instead God is angry because of Saul's previous sins with respect to the failed war against the Amalekites. Does this mean Samuel and God are willing to look the other way when we talk to psychics, or is it simply that Saul is already so far gone that a few more strikes against him hardly matter at this point?

I admit I don't know much about ancient Jewish views on the afterlife, and I haven't thought about it much yet because to be honest it's not a question that preoccupies much of my time. Even when I was much more orthodox in my beliefs, I never much liked the idea of either heaven or hell. The second is theologically absurd and the first really ought to be theologically unnecessary, or at least the extent of the prestige and splendour with which it's usually described ought to be unnecessary. Promising grand eternal prosperity in a beautiful new paradise doesn't really jive with the call to be selfless in one's love for God and for others. It's not that it wouldn't be nice to have somewhere to go after we check out from this Earth, it's that I just don't see the theological point of worrying about it.

Anyways, that's beside the point. What's going on here is most intriguing: Samuel's spirit is "resting" somewhere below (below in the metaphysical sense if not the physical one; the medium "brings him up" so that he may speak). Wherever it is, pretty soon Saul is going to join him there (verse 19). These mythical halls of the dead bear little relation to later notions of heaven or hell, or even to some sort of unconscious oblivion souls rest in while waiting for judgement day. I suppose that's not particularly surprising, given the Greek influence which pervades present Christian ideas about the afterlife.

David the Mafia Boss: 1 Samuel 25

2008-06-09T01:53:00.000-07:00

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

The ongoing battle between David and Saul is interrupted in chapter 25 for a curious story of David's treatment of an unaffiliated rich landowner named Nabal, who lives at Carmel. He owns a thousand goats, three thousand sheep, and a wife named Abigail. David's men watch Nabal's shepherds in the desert but don't try to take any of the livestock for themselves. Later, David sends messengers to Nabal and says he owes David for this. To repay the debt, David's men thoughtfully suggest that Nabal give them "whatever you can find" in the way of food and gifts.

Uh huh. Well, we could "interpret" this as evidence that rich people need to be charitable, or that David is a man of God and therefore we should support him, or even that we as Jews and Christians have a moral obligation to finance guerrillas and rebels (admittedly a more radical interpretation than any I've ever seen advanced in a church). It's a feast day, so Nabal really should be generous, at least with the immediate visitors. This is what you'll find in most conventional evangelical interpretations of the story - like this one, for example.

There's something to it, though most conservatives would probably hesitate to suggest this gives us the right to finance armed rebellions against legally constituted governments, even though that's exactly what's going on here.

What's much more interesting is that David is basically operating a protection racket here. He didn't agree on these terms with Nabal in advance. His men just show up and say "you know, we've been standing around making sure your flocks weren't harmed these last few months, and, well, you kind of owe us now. Wouldn't it be a shame if we weren't protecting you?" David's armed band is the largest group in the area - there's an unspoken threat here that they might start raiding the flocks if Nabal proves disagreeable. If they were speaking with an Italian accent, they would be threatening to break Nabal's kneecaps just about now. And while it's not charitable, Nabal's claim also isn't entirely unreasonable: he doesn't enough food to feed six hundred extra men, and he would really prefer to give the food to his own servants, who are relying on him for nourishment.

Put in this light, David's reaction becomes understandable: furious that Nabal has rejected the terms offered to him, he takes four hundred of his men-at-arms and marches against Nabal to punish this uncharitable landowner for his transgression. Such an action is necessary because there are probably other landowners in the area who David is extorting in similar fashion. Fortunately for everyone involved, at this point Nabal's wife Abigail intervenes and secretly defects, sneaking off to David's camp. She warns David that, even though Nabal is foolish and clearly inferior to "my lord" David, what David's about to do is still murder. David hesitates, then agrees, telling Abigail that she has demonstrated "good judgement" by preventing a murder from taking place.

God, naturally, takes David's side in this sorry affair. David has decided not to murder Nabal - and therefore, God rewards David by killing Nabal all by himself. First he gives him a heart attack, after which he "became like a stone"; then, after a few days, "the Lord struck Nabal and he died." Chillingly, David thanks God for killing Nabal. Then he finishes the story by marrying Abigail himself.

He's starting a decent collection of wives, it must be said - the Bible adds as an afterthought that in the meantime he's also married Ahinoam of Jezreel. Ain't polygamy grand?

The Fulgencio Batista of Israel: 1 Samuel 22-31

2008-06-08T01:34:00.000-07:00

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

If you're going to be a righteous political revolutionary, you have to have an evil authoritarian dictator to fight, and Saul fits the bill admirably. When he hears that David has fled, he accuses his senior officials of plotting against him and eventually learns that David was spotted with priest Ahimelech. Ahimelech is summoned and doesn't seem to realize that David is in the doghouse - he praises David and pleads ignorance. Saul isn't amused; he flies into a rage and kills 85 priests, including Ahimelech. Saul's men don't stop there: they also kill the entire city of Nob, where Ahimelech was living. Only one man, Ahimelech's son Abiathar, escapes, and Abiathar makes his way to the rebels, where he joins David.

Eventually, David gets around to doing what Israelite armies are supposed to do (naturally): protect Israelites from the barbarous Philistines. His small band races to Keilah to lift a Philistine siege and help the Judeans living there, but the treacherous Judeans thank him by sending a message to Saul saying they know where David is. Saul decides to repay everyone involved by razing the town, but by the time he's ready to begin the siege, David has moved on - fortunately for the residents of Keilah, who are therefore spared. David flees to Ziphite territory, but they betray him too; and then to the Desert of Maon, where Saul's forces finally trap him. But, good fortune! At the last moment, Saul gets an urgent message that the Philistines are attacking, and he rushes his army away to fight this more serious threat. David is spared.

Never let it be said that the author of 1 Samuel lacks a sense of humour! The Philistines retreat, and Saul resumes the chase after David. Completely by chance, the king steps into a cave where David is hiding in order to "relieve himself." Egged on by his comrades, David sneaks up and cuts off a piece of the king's cloak. He then presents the piece to the king as evidence that he could have killed Saul, but has chosen not to. Saul is stricken and begs David's forgiveness for all that he has done. The two men appear to make peace, exchanging oaths: Saul blesses David and asks God to bless him too, and David promises not to "wipe out" Saul and his family once he has become king.

The truce doesn't last - in chapter 26 the two are at it again. Actually, it's not entirely clear why, and the circumstances are sufficiently hazy that we could conclude this is just an alternate telling of the original cave story. The Ziphites betray David again, Saul comes down to find him, but David sneaks into the enemy camp during the night and steals Saul's spear and favourite water bottle. Like before, he then challenges Saul - though this time out of pride and arrogance, rather than guilt and humility, which might be significant or at least noteworthy - and Saul admits that he has done wrong. The two men make peace and go their own way.

This time, David has no expectation that the truce will hold. Convinced that Saul will eventually come after him, he defects to the Philistines along with his entire band, seeking asylum from king Achish in Gath. David and his merry band of mercenaries turn rogue, randomly raiding Geshurite, Girzite and Amalekite territories and murdering everyone they find, before stealing their livestock and even their clothes. Usually I use murder as broadly as possible, but here I use the term in the specific Biblical legal sense: there's no other apt word for what's going on here. David is murdering people so there will be no witnesses left alive afterwards. He has a reason for this: he's secretly lying to king Achish by telling him the raids are actually targeting Israelite communities in Judah.

(Saul has his own problems, as he's presently off consulting with spirit mediums, but I'll get to that in a separate post.)

Eventually the Philistines decide to attack Israel again, and this time Achish demands that David's band go with them. David actually agrees. We don't get to see whether David would actually be willing to kill Israelites to further his ruse, because the Philistine army refuses to march alongside a group of Israelites, so Achish sends David home. Instead, David's men decide to attack the Amalekites, who in the meantime have raided the Negev and kidnapped David's wives. They easily overcome the Amalekite raiders and recover the stolen property and women. David establishes new rules for handling war booty and sends some of the captured treasure to the Judean elders "who were his friends." Hurray for petty corruption!

In the meantime, while David is killing Amalekites, Saul is actually defending Israel from the Philistine invasion. The battle isn't going well: all Saul's sons (including Jonathan) are slayed and Saul's position is overrun by the enemy. Wounded nad surrounded, Saul and his armour-bearer commit ritual suicide so that at least they won't have been killed by the uncircumcised Philistines.

The supposed role of God in this set of stories is intriguing. David basically uses God as an oracle, occasionally engaging in some strategic question-and-answer sessions and usually getting useful results. Saul, too, claims that God is on his side on numerous occasions (see, for example, 23:21, among many others). David actually accepts this - on more than one occasion, he refuses to harm Saul specifically on the grounds that Saul is "the Lord's anointed." At some points God really does seem to be on both sides, but in the end the militarist yardstick may be used to show that the author, at least, favours David: David survives his battle with the Amalekites, but Saul dies fighting the Philistines. The fact that David is chasing down a small raiding party and Saul is defending the homeland from a massive invasion doesn't seem to enter into the equation.

The Fidel Castro of Israel: 1 Samuel 21 - 22:5

2008-06-07T00:54:00.000-07:00

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

David, on the run, starts a guerrilla revolt against Saul's government, which rapidly proves the thesis that there is very little righteousness in war on either side. In this case, we have the "God-chosen" David blaspheming God and consorting with enemies of Israel, and the God-damned Saul chasing after him with the armies of an Israel he doesn't deserve and shouldn't have. Very good fiction, though. David has become the Fidel Castro of ancient Israel.

His campaign gets off to an ignoble start when he thoughtlessly violates the laws of Moses, with a complicit priest named Ahimelech. Arriving at Nob, David orders the priests to get food for his men. First, David openly lies to the priest (so much for the "Ten Commandments"), claiming that he is on a secret mission from King Saul. No dice! says the priest, who has only holy bread available. That's okay with David, who foolishly argues that he has the right to this bread because he and his men haven't had sex recently. So much for the sacrificial laws, which don't say anything about getting special access to the consecrated foodstuffs after you've abstained from sex. This is a very curious "man after God's own heart," seeing as he doesn't appear to give a damn about God's own laws. David eventually gets his way and takes the bread, though only after advancing the even more dubious proposition that "men's bodies are holy even on missions that are not holy." What the fuck? By some bizarre fluke, Ahimelech the priest also just happens to have Goliath's old sword on hand, so David takes that as well.

David's been spotted by one of Saul's flunkies, so he's off again, this time leaving Israel entirely to meet up with king Achish in Gath. Worried that he's going to be recognized as a dangerous Israelite general (and probably executed as a result), he feigns insanity, scratching the walls with his fingernails and drooling all over the place. Achish eventually grows tired of the performance and orders the mad Israelite kicked out of his palace. (Hilariously, he phrases it thusly: "Am I so short of madmen that you have to bring this fellow into my house?" Tragically, the pagans are much wittier than the Israelites, who don't crack these sorts of jokes at all, at least not in 1 Samuel.)

Dvaid moves from Gath to Adullam, where he gathers a group of 400 men who are "in distress or in debt or discontented" - basically, a bunch of malcontents and miscreants. He meets the Moabite king, who agrees to grant asylum to David's father and mother lest they be harmed by Saul. Then he and his men go into the Hereth forests to continue their campaign.

I don't necessarily mind that David doesn't care about the sacrificial law, because I don't care about it either. But what is intriguing is that David's character here is thoroughly opportunistic and manipulative - and in retrospect, it always has been. David loves both Jonathan and Michal - but ultimately he uses them against their father for his own benefit. He deceives the priest into giving him bread. Israelites aren't really supposed to consort with foreigners like the Gathites and the Moabites, but, like Samson before him, David doesn't seem to mind. Neither do the Gathites or the Moabites, who see an opportunity to weaken Israel and, like good political realists in any age, they promptly seize it.

David's Foreskin Collection: 1 Samuel 18-20

2008-06-06T00:38:00.000-07:00

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

In Iceland there's actually a penis museum. Here in 1 Samuel 18 we have a collection of foreskins, which isn't quite the same but is almost as impressive in a crude and disgusting way.

It's at this point that the militarist version of King David's story takes over the narrative entirely.

It begins, incongruously, with a description of the close friendship that develops between David and prince Jonathan. The language employed here is so suggestive that it's not surprising that a lot of people cheekily suggest this was a homosexual relationship, although I personally happen to think it's perfectly possible for two people to have an extremely close and completely non-sexual relationship regardless of what sex organs they happen to have. In this case, still, one has to wonder: Jonathan and David "became one in spirit" and are so close that Jonathan takes off all his clothes and gives them to David as a gift. How nice!

Saul is more suspicious of David. He makes David a commander in the army and David becomes extremely successful - too successful, in fact, so that Saul grows jealous and David is more popular with the chicks. Saul is angry that all the girls in Israel are infatuated with David, and even tries to kill him - twice! - while David plays the harp. Eventually he sends David off to the front on an indefinite military campaign. Saul seems to think if he keeps David in the field long enough, eventually a Philistine soldier will kill him, but this doesn't happen, supposedly because "the Lord was with David."

In the meantime, David falls in love with Saul's daughter Michal. (Following the battle with Goliath, he was supposed to be married to Saul's elder daughter Merab, but he turned her down, so Saul married her off to some nobody named Adriel of Meholah.) Saul is "pleased" to learn that they want to marry - not because this will bring the two men closer together, but rather because he believes Michal will be "a snare to him so that the hand of the Philistines may be against him."

This logic at first seems tortuous, but the plot soon becames clear: Saul will set a high bride price. High, indeed: he orders David to go out and collect a hundred Philistine foreskins. David again one-ups the king by killing two hundred Philistines and presenting their foreskins. In exchange, Saul gives him Michal.

This is a rather dubious bride price. I realize the Philistines in question are foreigners and perhaps therefore unworthy of the same rights and privileges given to Israelites - but surely this is an act of mass murder. We can expect it from Saul, who is nearly as immoral and crazy as Gideon or even Samson, but David doesn't bat an eye, either.

Saul's immediate reaction to the presentation of the foreskins is not recorded, but we may presume that it was something along the lines of "Curses! Foiled again!"

In the next two chapters, Saul continues to conspire against David but can't get the support of his own kids. At the beginning of chapter 19, he decides to kill David, but Jonathan sends David away and intercedes, persuading his father to relent. David returns to the court but once again Saul throws a spear at David and this time the latter escapes with the help of his wife Michal. David comes back yet again to speak to Jonathan, who has inexplicably forgotten the event in the previous chapter and initially refuses to believe his father would genuinely want to kill David. The two conspire to find out Saul's intentions and, finally convinced, Jonathan covers for David as he once again flees the king's court.

Sadly, despite the fact that this book is named after him, Samuel has been relegated to a bizarre secondary role by this time in the narrative - as has God, really, but that's another matter. David flees to Ramah at the end of chapter 19 and ultimately comes across Samuel, who apparently has taken to standing around with a group of men delivering vague prophecies. When you were a political refugee in Israel, yu could stand among the men - which David did, so that on three separate occasions Saul's men refused to apprehend the fugitive. Ultimately Saul goes himself to meet up with Samuel, and "the Spirit of God" possesses him - as it apparently possessed all of his deputies - and he strips naked and starts prophecying. What the hell is this lunatic prophecying craze? Why do people in Samuel's presence automatically turn into gibbering soothsayers? The Pentecostals doubtless find it exciting, but I just find it kind of stupid. Why the Spirit of God would be at all interested with Saul at this point is totally unclear - he's already been thoroughly condemned.

The Three Stories of the Anointing of David: 1 Samuel 16-17

2008-06-05T20:26:00.000-07:00

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

Like several other parts of the Old Testament, there are actually three stories about how future king David meets disgraced king Saul and begins his long climb to the top of ancient Israelite politics. The Bible doesn't actually explicitly separate them, and in fact the first two can potentially be combined so that we have two stories. But even if we do that, the remaining incongruent details are such that you pretty much have to pick one or the other.

It's interesting that the same book is putting a very different spin on the same events - the sort of thing that happened in the two creation accounts at the beginning of Genesis. Later on, different views tended to be separated: for example, the quail stories differ dramatically in Exodus and Numbers, but the perspectives in those stories generally reflect the very different theological and social assumptions made by those two books.

The Divine Calling of David

In the first story (verses 16:1 through 16:13), which is less well known, the prophet Samuel goes to Jesse's house to choose the new king, following orders from God. He picks David, the youngest son, whom Jesse thought such an unlikely candidate that initially he didn't even bother to call David in from the fields, where he was working. Once again, in choosing the youngest, God and his prophet display a complete disregard for the notion of inheritance. This is the priestly narrative of the calling of David: Samuel goes to find a future king, God helps him choose one, and ultimately David is the nominee. Samuel anoints him with oil and "the Spirit of the Lord came upon David in power." God chooses David directly through his priestly intermediaries.

The Political Calling of David

In the secondary story, which is least well known, we start off with the fact that king Saul has gradually become demented since God left him during the war - or, in the words of the Bible, Saul is being "tormented" by an "evil spirit" sent by God. This story begins at 16:14 and goes until the end of the chapter. Saul's attendants, worried about the king, ultimately conclude that as long as he's listening to music, the evil spirit will stay away. I'm a bit skeptical of the logic, but anyways, it seems to work. So they begin searching for the best musician in Israel, and lo! it's David. Saul eventually comes to like David so much that he promotes him from chief musician to armour-bearer.

This story legitimizes the calling of David on the basis of his acceptance by the royal court, i.e. the political structures of Israelite society. It isn't God's prophet Samuel who goes out to find David, but rather "one of the servants" of the court. We know that servant couldn't be Samuel, because the relationship between Samuel and Saul is at this point so bitter that they're not even on speaking terms.

It's possible to harmonize these two stories of the calling of David, because they're not mutually exclusive. In other words, it's perfectly reasonable to say that God sent Samuel to anoint David even while he allowed the Israelite court to select David for other reasons. It does seem mildly improbable - after all, if Jesse wouldn't bother presenting young David even to the chief prophet of Israel, how the hell is this anonymous servant going to have any clue whatsoever that David is a harper? But it could happen.

Ultimately, though, what's most significant is not that these accounts don't jive well but that they signify different things. The first is meant to legimitize the accession of King David on the basis that he was chosen by God's priesthood; the second, on the basis that he was chosen by the royal cabinet. 1 Samuel is a political campaign tool for King David and, just like political campaigns today, they tend to play fast and loose with the facts in order to broaden their coalitions. Just like Stephen Harper or George Bush want to reach out to the religious right and to big business at the same time, or the New Democrats want to ally themselves with environmentalists and unionists at the same time, so 1 Samuel wants to portray David as the friend of both the religious and seculars powers that be.

The Military Calling of God

The third pillar of the new David propaganda tool is the military, and it serves essentially the same function in a new context, though the details are somewhat more difficult to reconcile with the details of the first two stories. Of course, according to my hypothesis, the details aren't important: the main point is (or is supposed to be) that you should love David, because everyone else certainly does.

This time, David's calling occurs in the middle of a war, and it follows the traditional militarist understanding of divining God's will: i.e. military victory equals divine blessing. The Philistines have an enormous veteran soldier named Goliath, supposedly about ten feet tall (the NIV says "3 meters or 9 feet," which aren't exacty the same, so I've rounded up). Goliath wears thick bronze armour and carries a spear with an enormous 15-pound iron point. Goliath challenges the Israelites to single combat, with the victor being the winner of the war, but no one will fight him.

Enter David, who in this story must overcome far greater adversity than he did in the first two. David's elder brothers are in Saul's army already. David brings bread and cheese to his brothers in the army but they dismiss him, saying he has come because he wants to watch the fighting like a child. David decides to prove himself, or perhaps decides he wants a piece of the prize for killing Goliath - rumoured in verse 25 to be wealth, the king's daughter in marriage, and permanent freedom from taxes, which just goes to show you that the priorities in ancient Israel were pretty much the same as they are today.

Undeterred, David goes to Saul on his own initiative and offers to fight Goliath. Like Gideon's army, he makes himself even more vulnerable than you'd think would be militarily feasible - he wears no armour and carries only his sling. As we all know, David famously kills Goliath and then leads the Israelites in routing the Philistine army. Intrigued, Saul asks his general, named Abner, to find out who David is.

The fact that Saul doesn't actually know David, along with the fact that David is a mere shepherd at the beginning of chapter 17, are the key clues that we are dealing with a different story here - remember, in chapter 16 David became armour-bearer on the basis of his musical abilities, and Saul already knew him well before it came time to fight Goliath and the Philistines.

Rather than a coherent chronological account, what we're dealing with is the third of three different stories, possibly originating from different sources but certainly combined here in order to establish David's legitimacy as king of Israel - and, by extension, the similar legitimacy of David's descendants, we must assume.

David is chosen first by the priesthood, and second by the court, and finally by the military. It's not always clear which of these choices is more important, but we can guess - the military story gets a lot more space and time than the other two. It should be noted that all of these at least implicitly suggest that David's anointing was divinely inspired; rather, they just see the sources of that inspiration in different places. The first sees divine inspiration in a ritual of anointing, performed by God's chief prophet. The second sees it in the recognition of the existing political structures of authority. And the third sees it in military victory. Each major social institution in ancient Israel gets to choose the story of David's origins which best fits their own ideological perspective on the government, and everyone's a winner!

The Clash of Church and State, Part 2: 1 Samuel 13-15

2008-06-04T19:22:00.000-07:00

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

===========

First off, a note on why the New International Version can be hideously biased sometimes.

What's up with verse 13:1? The original Hebrew and early manuscripts in other languages are missing a word! Later Septaguint manuscripts say that "Saul was thirty years old when he became king, and he reigned over Israel forty-two years." But the older forms just say "Saul was years old." Naturally, the NIV translators assume God must have meant for that "thirty" to be in there and so they add it in anyways.

What follows, however, is even more inexcusable. The actual text of verse 13:1 says that Saul was ruler of Israel for "two years." Whoops! Acts 13:21 says that Saul was king of Israel for forty years. The NIV translators, laying aside even the slightest pretence of scholarly objectivity in favour of defending the supposed "inerrancy" of God's word, naturally inject an extra "forty" into 1 Samuel. Appallingly, the footnote doesn't even pretend otherwise: they freely admit that "Hebrew does not have forty-. So the solution is to turn "2" into "42"? That makes the Book of Acts wrong through imprecision, and the First Book of Samuel wrong through false inclusion.

What the fuck? Come on, NIV. I know it's important to believe in inerrancy if you're theologically conservative, but this is just bordering on open deception here. I'd curse the NIV further for it, but they're not the only ones playing fast and loose with God's "Word" - pretty much all English translations engage in some form of wild speculation coated in the garbs of "truth." This page offers further explanation. Thank God for the Jewish Tanakh, which actually translates the verse faithfully:

Saul was . . . years old when he became king, and he reigned over Israel two years. (Footnote: The number is lacking in the Heb. text; also, the precise context of the 'two years' is uncertain. The verse is lacking in the Septuagint.)

Thank you, Jewish scholars, for being honest about the Scriptures. A pity the Christians couldn't be as helpful.

===========

Saul is not a very competent king. For no apparent reason, he and his son Jonathan start a war with the Philistines using the remnants of the army they used to rout the Ammonites. Saul first demobilizes all but a much smaller, probably more mobile force of three thousand, then takes his new force and proclaims war on the Philistines. The Bible is a bit unclear on the nature of Israelite-Philistine relations at the beginning of the war. The Philistines appear to exercise hegemony over Israel, but on the other hand, it seems to be a fairly peaceful hegemony - like the U.S. and Canada, say, rather than the U.S. and Iraq. The Israelites have agreed with the Philistines not to train their own blacksmiths - but on the other hand, the Philistines are apparently happy to let the Israelites visit Philistine smiths for their metal-sharpening needs. The Bible helpfully even supplies a short price list, just in case anyone's thinking of going into the ancient smithing business and wants a standard for comparison.

Saul and Jonathan don't like this, though, and raid some Philistine outputs. The Philistines respond by mobilizing a massive army: three thousand chariots and "soldiers as numerous as the sand on the seashore." Given that Saul can mobilize 300 000 on a week's notice, this really ought not be critical - but it is, because he's just finished dismissing the main bulk of his armed forces. On the other hand, some Hebrew manuscripts say there's thirty thousand chariots, which is considerably more serious, though also quite implausible given that the largest chariot battle in the historical record, the 13th-century Battle of Kadesh, involved only 5000 chariots.

I've been hinting at tensions between church and state, so to speak, for some time now, and now matters come to a head. Saul summons Samuel to perform some good-luck sacrifices in the face of this new danger, but decides after a few days that Samuel isn't coming and conducts the sacrifices himself. Samuel is outraged, although Saul actually offers what seems like valid reasoning: he wanted to "seek the Lord's favour" before going into battle. This, Samuel declares, is not permitted. As a result, Saul's kingdom is going to collapse and at some point Samuel is going to come back, fire Saul, and anoint a new king. Essentially, this newly claimed power of hiring and firing kings is an attempt by Samuel to claw back a little bit of the power granted to the state and return it to the priesthood.

In the midst of his dispute with Samuel, Saul loses control of his army, most of which deserts, leaving him with only six hundred men. Undeterred and hoping - like all good crafty politicians - to re-win Israelite domestic opinion through a popular diversionary war, Saul organizes what's left into raiding parties and attacks the Philistines. His son Jonathan, alone except for his personal armor-bearer, sneaks out of the Israelite camp to attack the "uncircumcised fellows" of the Philistines all on their own. They challenge an outpost to single combat and kill about 20 men. In a very Joshua-ish moment, God inexplicably decides to bless Jonathan's boldness and strikes the Philistine army in a holy "panic," causing most of them to desert. Saul seizes the initiative and attacks, taking advantage of the confusion to win a key victory.

In the process, however, he's made the same foolish blunder as Jepthah and the non-Benjamite Israelite elders did way back in Judges. To ensure the loyalty of his troops, Saul promises to curse any who won't fast for the day and eat only in the evening, after the fighting is done. Jonathan and his armor bearer don't know this, of course, so stop to eat some honey on the way home. Some soldiers see him and tell him what he's done.

Jonathan isn't impressed, saying that "my father has made trouble for the country" and pointing out, quite logically in my opinion, that the army would have been much more effective in battle if the soldiers weren't faint with hunger. It gets worse: at the end of the day, the famished soldiers plunder livestock from the surrounding farms and eat them with the blood still in the flesh. This is a grave sin and Saul tries to make amends with God by building a new altar. When God refuses to answer Saul's demand for military advice, Saul realizes something has gone wrong and vows to kill whoever broke the fasting oath. He seems quite intent on carrying out this promise even when it's revealed to be his own son, but at the last moment, loyal soldiers grab Jonathan and carry him off to safety.

If we were to go by the yardstick of Joshua, in which God's will is made known through military success, then Saul is a very successful king. He fights "valiantly," the Bible says, against every one of the old enemies: the Moabites, the Ammonites, the Edomites, the Zobahites, the Philistines, and the Amalekites. But the author of 1 Samuel is less convinced, noting that the Israelites have received all the suffering that Samuel promised them so many years before: "all the days of Saul there was bitter war... and whenever Saul saw a mighty or brave man, he took him into his service."

This story is vague enough that one could draw two possible conclusions from it - either God has had mercy on Saul and blessed him despite not killing Jonathan the way he promised to (as demonstrated by Saul's continuing wars against Israel's enemies, according to the Joshua militarist yardstick), or, alternatively, God has withdrawn his blessing from Saul and left Israel to fight wars on its own (as demonstrated by the fact that God never does speak to Saul again after the Jonathan incident and none of these wars ever seem to lead to a moment's peace).

What follows, however, is considerably less ambiguous. Samuel makes one less effort to wrest control of the state back, this time in terms every Biblical reader should be familiar with by now: a holy war. Don't forget, this is the one exercise in which the priests and the military were once able to gain mutual benefit. The target this time is the Amalekites, and Samuel offers up the traditional Torah-style call for genocide: "attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys." Saul obediently mobilizes an army of 220 000, marches on Amalek, manages to break up an Amalekite-Kenite alliance, and easily defeats the Amalekites. He is, however, not capable of following through on orders (yet again): he lets his men keep "everything that was good," i.e. all the good livestock, and himself spares the life of King Agag of Amalek.

God has had enough and decides to fire Saul. For the task he chooses Samuel once again, and the latter walks up to Saul's camp. Saul offers the excuse that the living livestock that were taken are intended for a massive sacrifice to God, which Saul doesn't think is outside the instructions. Once again, Samuel says that Saul is not authorized to make those sacrifices - and, in any event, God doesn't want them! This is because "obedience is better than sacrifice." So much for the Levitican sacrificial order! What is the priesthood going to do? Samuel furiously sends Saul away, personally murders the captive king Agag, and never speaks to Saul again.

I said I liked Samuel before, but that was before he turned into chief warmonger. Still, the results are intriguing. Samuel has demolished the state structure he himself put in place, and in doing so he may also have done considerable damage to the legitimacy of the priesthood. After one last attempt at a good old-fashioned genocide, Samuel washes his hands of the king experiment and leaves Saul to continue his unending wars alone.

Why I Prefer Samuel to Moses: 1 Samuel 11-12

2008-06-03T18:50:00.000-07:00

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

The middle chapters of 1 Samuel are a somewhat confusing combination of the stories of Saul, who's coming into his own as military leader; and Samuel, who's nearing the end of his career as prophet.

First, the Ammonites invade Israel and besiege Jabesh Gilead, where, you may recall, the Israelites slaughtered their brethren and illegally abducted virgins way back in Judges 21. King Nahash offers a truce to the Israelites, on fairly brutal terms: each man must gouge out his right eye. The Jabesh Gileadites strike a bargain which makes you seriously question Nahash's intelligence: they will agree to gouge out their eyes, but only after they are allowed to send messengers to all of Israel explaining the situation, and then wait seven days to see if there's a response.

Saul learns about the siege while he's working his fields in Gibeah (an interesting moment, this - why is "king" Saul still doing his regular farming chores?). He takes two oxen, slices them into pieces, and sends all the pieces around Israel, with the warning that any clan that fails to send soldiers to help him fight the Ammonites is going to be cut apart just like the poor oxen. State coercion in the service of military conscription! It's an old story, although these days most countries don't use oxen as examples anymore. Literally killing the oxen to scare the people, which isn't quite as nice as the way the Chinese put it (killing the chicken to scare the monkeys) but evidently gets the job done. Saul raises an army of 330 000 - an astonishing figure which should be more than enough to make Israel the ancient Near Eastern equivalent of the United States, albeit without a thermonuclear reserve - and, in a daring night raid, ransacks the Ammonite camp. Saul and Samuel hold a grand celebration afterwards, which is used to reaffirm Saul as King of Israel.

Samuel is leaving, however. This is highly symbolic: as the power of the state rises, the status of the prophet declines. I kind of liked Samuel: he was honest, he had integrity, and he didn't appeal to the people through military victory (à la Judges, Joshua, or for that matter Saul), or through the economic bounty of the fabled Promised Land (à la Moses). He did anoint the state, though at least according to the narrative, he did so reluctantly (as did God). He delivers one final sermon in chapter 12 in which he prophecies that the Israelites will one day regret establishing the king, but by and large it's lacking the pessimistic ramblings that characterize the later chapters of Moses's swan song in Deuteronomy. He also doesn't kill people left and right, preferring persuasion to bloodshed. Of course, he doesn't have long lists of tedious laws to his name, which I guess is why Moses still trumps Samuel.

(Of course, the speech is still riddled with warnings about divine judgement and punishment - I think I've just been desensitized by Numbers and Deuteronomy.)

Two things are interesteing about Samuel's last speech, aside from what I've noticed above. First, there's an increasing level of tolerance, or even pragmatism, to the threats about divine punishment. Back in Joshua and the Torah, an enormous deal was made out of the seemingly minor sins of even individual Israelites (recall, in the first chapter of Joshua, a witch-hunt to locate just a single Israelite who'd taken unauthorized booty from a raid.) Now, Samuel is more serene than Moses and Joshua were, then. Here, Samuel acknowledges that all of Israel has done many evil deeds, not least among them creating a state. But that's okay, he says. They can still "serve the Lord with all your heart." God isn't going to reject the Israelites, because, Samuel reasons, they're God's people. (This God is much preferable to Moses's God, who on more than one occasion came perilously close to wiping out the entire nation in his uncontrolled rages.)

Second, although Samuel is effectively high priest and therefore still represents that elite institution, it's noteworthy here that he completely bypasses the usual political and social authority structures in delivering this speech. He is speaking to "all Israel." He is not speaking to the king; he is not even speaking to the elders. Obviously we must assume that not "all Israel" was really present at this speech, but whoever was, it doesn't appear to have been the king - Samuel devotes a lengthy section of the speech to criticism of the monarchy, but it's addressed to the people, not to those in power.

God the Joker: 1 Samuel 9-10

2008-06-02T22:58:00.000-07:00

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

Okay, I take it back. God wasn't bargaining completely in good faith. He personally directs Samuel in locating a complete bumbling idiot to become king of Israel.

The story of future King Saul gets off to a particularly ignoble beginning: Saul the Benjamite is off looking for some lost donkeys which belong to his father. On the advice of one of his servants, he goes to a prophet for advice, and of course the prophet turns out to be Samuel. This ridiculous notion of prophets as finding aids, which verse 9:9 seems to imply was common in ancient Israel, does a great disservice to the title "prophet" as it's later applied to the writers of the later books of the Old Testament. "Find my donkey" was apparently the ancient Near Eastern equivalent of "God, find my keys," and naturally prophets were available for this, just as direct prayer to God is available for much the same purpose today. Of course Samuel is God's prophet, so the donkeys are found.

Samuel, thanks to God, is expecting Saul, and promptly invites him into the dining hall for a great feast. The next day he sends Saul on a bizarre, intricately detailed treasure hunt involving Rachel's tomb at Zelzah, the great tree of Tabor, three goats, three loaves of bread, some winekins, and the Philistine outpost at Gibeah. Saul follows the instructions and, as his reward, gets to spend some time delivering prophecies at Gilgal.

In the meantime, Samuel summons all the tribes to meet at Benjamin, where he brings forward the tribe, then the clans, then the family of Saul. Saul, of course, has chickened out, being the dubious and incomptent leadership candidate that he is, and Samuel has to send men to find him "hiding among the baggage."

Once he's been found, Samuel proudly declares to the people, "Do you see the man the Lord has chosen? There is no one like him among all the people." This might be supposed to be a dramatic moment, although it really seems more sarcastic than anything. Indeed, is there no one so unqualified for kingship "among all the people"? Indeed, the people who know Saul best - the men of his hometown, Gibeah - mutter among themselves that "this fellow" won't able to "save us."

God Hates the State: 1 Samuel 7:1 - 8

2008-06-01T01:00:00.000-07:00

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

Ask a Christian for Biblical views on government, and you're not unlikely to hear some reference to Romans 13, especially - but not exclusively - if you're talking to an evangelical or a conservative (or a conservative evangelical, for that matter). That chapter is easily interpreted as conservative, fawning praise for state institutions, commanding obedience from we the loyal subjects - this is in fact a misinterpretation brought on once again by the atrocious numbering in Romans, but we'll get there in a few months). In the meantime, here's a considerably more pessimistic view of human government.

Samuel leads a popular uprising against the Philistines after the military and priesthood both demonstrably failed to "protect" the people, as they were supposed to, in the first several chapters of the book. The revolution is successful and Samuel symbolically plants boundary stones at the edge of Israelite territory. For some reason, the Amorites are still around, but there's no war with them during Samuel's lifetime.

Samuel plays the role of judge, like all the incompetent buffoons in Judges did, and by all accounts he's a good one, but the people are dissatisfied. They fret that if Samuel dies his sons might gain enough political support to become the new judges, and they don't like those sons - the Biblical writer says that they "turned aside after dishonest gain and accepted bribes and perverted justice." So we can add Samuel to the list of Biblical heroes who were also horribly failed fathers. Take that, Promise Keepers!

The elders come before Samuel in a closed-door meeting and tell him he needs to set things right by appointing a permanent "king" for Israel. A significant footnote: the word here apparently is the same one which is translated "judge," which actually means "ruler" according to the first footnote in Judges, so we have a strange wandering translation going on here as Biblical scholars try to impose upon the Bible some arbitrary distinctions between "judge," "ruler" and "king." At least in this case there's something to it: the elders specify that this new king will be like the ones that "all the other nations have."

This is intriguing because the Israelites have basically proposed the creation of a state. It's not particularly original for the time period in which the Biblical events are supposed to have happened, but it is interesting from the perspective of the Biblical account, because it's not a social order supposedly imposed by divine choice. In Genesis, we had a patrimonial family system which failed completely; then a priesthood was created in Exodus through Numbers, but it was supplanted by the military in Joshua; and then there was a system of temporary Judges, which was clearly a complete farce in terms of political stability or ethical integrity.

So far each of these systems has failed, but, perhaps predictably, God is not thrilled to learn that the Israelites want to create a permanent state. The problem, God reasons, is that the Israelites don't have faith in him: if they did, they wouldn't need a state. Moses, you may recall, prophecied that such a demand would be made eventually (he did this way back in Deuteronomy), and created some rules to make sure the kings would be righteous. Here, however, God is not at all pleased at the prospect of a king and not at all optimistic about the king's righteousness. He furiously orders Samuel to deliver an angry speech to the Israelites, one which is not at all like Romans 13, would warm the heart of any anarchist, but fails to impress the Israelites at all.

A king, Samuel tells the Israelites with "the words of the Lord" flowing from his mouth, will not serve God - in fact, quite the contrary, he will draw the people away from God. He will conscript the young men and turn them into foot soldiers, running before his chariots (probably the most vulnerable position, especially in early conscript armies which hadn't mastered phalanx-style formations); he will hire the young women as perfumers and cooks; he will take the best of the food and wine and give it to his bureaucrats and cronies; and the people will become "slaves" of the state. The king will even demand a tithe of his own - in an immensely significant passage, Samuel says that the king will demand one-tenth of the produce, which given the context of ancient Israelite society implies that the state is going to try to replace - or even become - god.

The people, however, don't have much faith in God, who, let's be honest, hasn't been all that good at custom-designing societies so far. (It pains me to admit that because I'm quite partial to the political criticism of 1 Samuel 8.) They say they don't care and they want a king to "be like all the other nations, with a king ot lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles."

In a stunning act of democratic good faith, God says that's okay with him. He seems to be withdrawing again, like he did in the late chapters of Genesis. The God of Numbers probably would have blown up the Israelite council of elders and buried their families alive.

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

2008-05-31T13:00:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2008-05-30T21:59:00.000-07:00

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.

Commas aren't Christian

2008-05-30T14:05:00.000-07:00

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.

Ruth as Pro-David Propaganda: Ruth 2-4

2008-05-29T19:05:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2008-05-28T16:51:00.000-07:00

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.

Speaking of which...

2008-05-26T18:05:00.000-07:00

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.

How many lives is democracy worth?

2008-05-26T17:36:00.000-07:00

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.

Power Corrupts: Final Reflections on Judges

2008-05-26T15:06:00.000-07:00

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.

Sex and War, Part 3: Judges 21

2008-05-25T14:28:00.000-07:00

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.

A Basic Profiteer's Guide to Christianity

2008-05-25T08:55:00.000-07:00

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 - à 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.

Sex and War, Part 2: Judges 20

2008-05-24T14:04:00.000-07:00

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.

Why I'm Looking Forward to November

2008-05-24T08:17:00.000-07:00

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.

The Church of the Orange Sky Condemns the New International Version

2008-05-24T03:19:00.000-07:00

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.

Today's Asinine Headline of the Day

2008-05-24T02:39:00.001-07:00

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.

Sex and War, Part 1: Judges 19

2008-05-23T12:46:00.000-07:00

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.

Priests and False Idols: Judges 17-18

2008-05-23T12:37:00.000-07:00

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.

Canada will deport war refugees, after all

2008-05-22T12:22:00.000-07:00

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.

Torture is Fun, Kids

2008-05-22T08:24:00.000-07:00

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.

Lessons in Free Market Economics; and, My Last Mac

2008-05-22T08:02:00.001-07:00

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.

The Influence of the Orange Sky Spreads

2008-05-21T12:36:00.000-07:00

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.

The Irrational Rage of the "Spirit of the Lord": Judges 14-15

2008-05-21T04:23:00.000-07:00

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.

Prelude to Samson: Judges 13

2008-05-20T22:26:00.000-07:00

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.

A Salute to Ronald Weinland

2008-05-19T19:56:00.000-07:00

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.

Public Service Announcement

2008-05-19T19:52:00.001-07:00

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.

Civil War Doesn't Take Much in Israel: Judges 12

2008-05-19T13:08:00.000-07:00

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.

Canada's Ridiculous New Abortion Debate, Part 2

2008-05-19T08:24:00.001-07:00

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.

Human Sacrifice for God: Judges 10-11

2008-05-18T05:19:00.000-07:00

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.

The Church of the Week...

2008-05-17T12:17:00.000-07:00

... 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

I say it here, it comes out there

2008-05-17T08:07:00.000-07:00

The Orange Sky led me to prophecy that there would be rapid and forceful reactions to California's decision to let people marry each other, and the Orange Sky was right!

Despite my recent cautionary comments (I use "despite" to maintain the pretence that my blog actually has some international sway on these issues), the religious right has not hesitated to demand that the California court ruling on marriage be nullified as quickly as possible. The Campaign for California Families (which ironically has very little to do with defending families), represented by Liberty Counsel (which equally ironically has very little to do with liberty), wants the court to stay its opinion and wait for the outcome of a referendum on the subject which could be held alongside the fall elections in November. (Under California law, such referenda are common.)

Well, that makes sense. Rather than (a) follow the current law, the Campaign and its lawyers want to (b) follow their speculation about what the law might be in several months' time. I think this is a fabulous idea. There's nothing like judging today's actions by tomorrow's laws. Incidentally, the chief counsel from Liberty is also a dean at Liberty University, which is the university run by the late Jerry Falwell. You know, the guy who blamed the September 11 attacks on "pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle." What the hell is with these people? I doubt most of them know any gay couples who want to marry anyways. Given that they gave up the battle for civil union rights and benefits long ago, this struggle has just become an increasingly petty effort to prevent people who love each other from referring to their relationship with the same word. I wonder if they realize how moronic they look.

Also as I predicted, the mortal terror of polygamy is rearing its head again, despite the fact that polygamy is a consistent Biblical position to take (as if that mattered to the religious right!) - see, for example, the National Review. I wish people would stop talking about this, because it's totally illogical. Even if the fact that recognizing the loving relationships among gay and lesbian people were to somehow strengthen the case for polygamy, which it doesn't on any logical grounds, it wouldn't matter. You can't deny human rights to Group A simply on the basis that it might harm our ability to deal with Group B. Group A's rights have to be recognized - or not recognized - on the basis of that group alone.

As I say every time gay marriage returns to the front page headlines, it's time to have the government stop "marrying" people. There is no compelling reason that the state should give anyone more than some of the benefits, obligations, etc. which would have been imposed by civil unions anyways, and also are granted through common-law marriage. Actually there is no compelling reason in my opinion that the state should be going around determining and legitimating any intimate relationships, but if it is, it certainly should go no farther than what I am suggesting here. I'm fine with the fact that people want to perform a social ritual declaring their desire to have a permanent relationship, but I don't think that we should be relying on the state to lend power to that ritual.

So, we should have only common-law marriages, at least from the perspective of the law. Other groups can perform marriage ceremonies, but without the present legal standing. If the lack of legal standing upsets people, this reveals their underlying dependence on the law to legitimate their activities - something which ought to be unnecessary, especially for Christians (after all, you don't really need the power of the state to prove the "absolute truth" of your morality, right?). People can read into marriage what they wish, and the conservative churches can continue to marry only those people they think "deserve" marriage (read: straight couples), while the rest of us live lives of our own choosing.

Speaking as a resident of territory controlled by the state of Canada, I can confirm to the residents of California what you'll probably also be told by residents of the territories controlled by the states of Massachusetts, the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, and South Africa: the sky hasn't fallen as a result of our having gay marriage. In fact, there appears to be pretty much just as many - or as few - gay and lesbian people here as there were before, and they still live pretty much just like you, or at least just like they were before.

To their credit, there are three denominations who have come out in open support of the Court's decision to strike down the ban on gay marriage - the United Church, the Episcopalians, and, of course, the Quakers. No surprise with that last one - they haven't really gotten along with the use of state power since, well, ever.

Divine "Punishments" for Ruffian Kings: Judges 9

2008-05-17T02:33:00.000-07:00

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

This story is bizarre and, I think, represents yet another stage in the decline of Israeli military society.

Gideon, who takes the new name Jerub-Baal to symbolize his defiant opposition to Baal, has a pile of sons, a bunch of whom live in Shechem. As soon as I read that sentence at the beginning of chapter 9, I knew there would be trouble, because Shechem last featured way back in Genesis when the sons of Israel, upset that the local prince's son was dating their sister, dishonoured their covenant with God by demanding the men of the town be circumcised, then rushing in and killing them all as they recovered and were "weakened" from the impromptu surgery.

This time, Gideon's son Abimelech arrives in Shechem. Abimelech is the son of one of Gideon's mistresses, not one of his wives, so he walks into Shechem and tells the people they would prefer the single rule of a single son of Gideon - in other words, him - rather than all 70 of the legitimate ones. Some of the people agree and give him 70 shekels of silver - the original 30 pieces of silver - drawn from Baal's temple treasury, and he uses the money to hire some bandits which the Bible charitably calls "reckless adventurers" (ha!). His crew attempts to murder all the other Gideonites, but one escapes: young son Jotham. Jotham conducts a public protest: he climbs up onto a hill and shouts to his fellow citizens, telling them a strange parable about trees and bushes, the upshot of which is that the people should rise up and get rid of Abimelech because he is evil. Having made his announcement, Jotham flees for his life.

Abimelech reigns as king for several years, then God "sends an evil spirit" to cause dissension in the land. (How literalists interest this strange phrasing I'm very curious to know.) Amidst the turmoil, a new challenger arrives, seemingly out of nowhere: Gaal son of Ebed (sounds very heroic). Gaal foments rebellion against Abimelech and his men take over Shechem while Abimelech is away. However, Abimelech, apparently an easily superior tactician, arrives with four companies of soldiers armed for a night raid, and after much bloody fighting, Gaal's group is driven away. The next day, the Shechemites go out to work in the fields, and while they're away, Abimelech takes some of his men and kills them.

Next, Abimelech besieges the temple of El-Berith, where the citizens have taken sanctuary. He and his men cut branches from trees, pile them up around the temple, and fire it, killing the thousand or so people hiding inside.

Abimelech moves on to besiege another rebellious town, Thebez, and he apparently intends to perform the same sort of massacre, but just as he's walking up to the tower to survey routes of access, a woman drops a rock on his head. Mortally wounded, he asks his servant to kill him so that at least he won't be killed by a woman. Once his army sees that he's fallen, they lift the siege and go home.

After this strangley disjointed story, the author of Judges concluded that this was how "God repaid the wickedness that Abimelech had done to his father by murdering his seventy brothers. God also made the men of Shechem pay for all their wickedness." This is a rather strange conclusion. A long series of seemingly chance events occur, and because most of the people involved are dead by the end, the natural conclusion is that God must have "punished" everyone?

I'll try and follow the twisted logic. Abimelech must be "punished" by God because usurps the power of the real brothers. The people must be "punished" for siding with him. Gaal must be "punished" for worshipping pagans. So, God "punishes" Gaal by having Abimelech kill him. Then God "punishes" the Shechemites by having Abimelech kill him. And finally, God completes the circle by "punishing" Abimelech, killing him.

Abimelech's death confirms my earlier suspicions about the story of Deborah not being particularly empowering. Being attacked by a woman is morally and socially disgraceful in Israel. Thus Abimelech is so shamed by being struck by a woman that he begs his aide to euthanize him so that, at the very least, he will have been killed by a man.

Most of Judges - and most remarks about Judges - seems to be focused on the evils of an anarchic society. But one could just as easily look at it another way: kings aren't very productive or useful either. Abimelech is the first of the kings in Judges - "king" apparently being a different title than "judge" - although even the "judges" weren't necessarily sound. Look at Gideon, for example. Pretty much everything in the Israelite society of Judges is evil and corrupted - and that which isn't, inevitably becomes so within a generation.

More from Schlafly

2008-05-16T18:08:00.000-07:00

Well, it wasn't quite as dramatic as the mass rejection of Brendan Nelson's half-assed racist attempt at "apologizing" to the Australian aboriginal peoples a couple of months ago, but I guess it's enough for the moment.

A couple days ago the Orange Sky awarded Phyllis Schlafly an honorary penis for her role in suppressing women's rights in America, to complement the honorary degree she's been given by Washington University for the same work. To their credit, about three-quarters of the graduating students and their families showed their irritation at this travesty by turning their backs while Schlafly was given her award. Even Fox News took notice of this. So did the vast majority of the faculty, according to these pictures. Good for them. I think at this point Washington University's reputation needs to be smeared as heavily as is ethically possible.

Okay, first of all, there's no way Schlafly deserves the award. Not least because she's devoted her life to fighting the movement that ensured her right to get the degree in the first place. If she accepts the Orange Sky's honorary penis, at least she'll continue to qualify to speak in the public sphere, something which by her own admission she as a woman should not be doing.

However, in this case most of the fault has to lie with the cluelessly pro-establishment leadership of Washington U. The conflagration over the Schlafly degree served to completely obscure the fact that they also gave an award to the equally unqualified Chris Mathews. As someone in the Feministing forums pointed out, "it's like the University decided to honor both Hitler and Bin Laden, and we only have the energy and resources to be pissed off about one." In an open letter, chancellor Mark Wrighton informed the Orange Sky that

Following the public announcement of the honorary degrees, many in the University community have called for the University to rescind that offer, stating that Mrs. Schlafly is associated with some views, opinions and statements that are inconsistent with the tolerant and inclusive values of the Washington University community. Personally, I do not endorse her views or opinions, and in many instances, I strongly disagree with them.

However, after further consultation with members of the University's Board of Trustees, the University has concluded that it will fulfill its commitment to award the degree to Mrs. Schlafly. I apologize for the anguish this decision has caused to many members of our community.

In bestowing this degree, the University is not endorsing Mrs. Schlafly's views or opinions; rather, it is recognizing an alumna of the University whose life and work have had a broad impact on American life and have sparked widespread debate and controversies that in many cases have helped people better formulate and articulate their own views about the values they hold.

Wow, what a stream of bullshit. We don't have to agree with Schlafly in order to honour her contribution? By that logic, we should be giving honorary degrees to bin Laden after all - and Hitler too, if he were still alive. I'll settle for "Zimbabwe Bob" Mugabe. After all, they too have had "a broad impact" on life here and especially in their own countries. Bravo, Mr. Wrighton. Even if this was a valid reason to give out honorary degrees, Schlafly certainly wouldn't deserve one. After all, by its very nature, the aim of reactionary conservative activism is to maintain the status quo. Schlafly's "impact" on American life is that she has left it pretty much as it was already.

On the one hand, I can see that Wrighton was placed in an awkward position - I'm prepared to accept that he himself really does dislike Schlafly's politics. It's hard to get that far as an academic otherwise. If so, however, the honorable thing to do would have been to resign. Unfortunately, most university administrators are too cowardly to stand on principle. I know mine certainly haven't.

I'm going to close this post with an inspirational message from Schlafly, who, strangely, thinks that her views are Christian ones. (Reason #1276923 why I will no longer qualify my own beliefs as Christian. As a pacifist and an anarchist, I will reluctantly yield that particular field to those who are neither.)

Says Schlafly:

"They are a bunch of bitter women," she said of her detractors. "It was 25 years ago that we buried the Equal Rights Amendment and they are still whining about it."

Her suggestion to them?

"Get a life. Move on. Try to do something with your life."

...

"They probably have taken women's studies courses which say that women have been oppressed and discriminated against in this society, which is ridiculous," she said. "American women are the most fortunate class of people who ever lived on the face of the Earth."

...

Schlafly responds by simply saying that college students these days have too much time on their hands.

"If they make a scene, they just make themselves look ridiculous," Schlafly said. "It doesn't bother me. I'm not going to let a bunch of tacky women ruin my day."

You're absolutely right. There's no such thing as discrimination in America, and spouses certainly are never forced to have sex against their will, and women certainly should not have equal rights. It's God's will, after all!

Gideon and the Dangers of Militarism: Judges 6-8

2008-05-16T04:07:00.000-07:00

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

Pretty much everyone in Canada must have seen a Gideons Bible of some sort at one point or another. If not, just visit a hotel - most of them still have Gideon Bibles, I think. I couldn't remember Gideon at all in the Bible before and I'm not sure what I was expecting to find this time, but it wasn't this, certainly. The Gideon of Judges doesn't seem like a particularly fine role model for a charity that gives out free Bibles, but I suppose they can choose whichever inspirational idol they wish.

The Israelites start worshipping pagan gods again, and so they get raided by the Midianites - yet another group which was supposed to have been massacred earlier, and has now returned from the dead. Initially, many of the Israelites manage to escape death or captivity by making fortifications in the mountains, but their crops are repeatedly returned. So, once again, the Israelites turn to the Lord and repent.

God sends an angel to Gideon, who at the time is threshing wheat in a winepress. (This is yet another example of God choosing people of low birth and social status as his emissaries, which is what makes the hereditary institutions created within the priesthood seem even more unusual.) Gideon asks some very valid and pointed questions of the angel: If God is with the Israelites (as the angel at once proclaims), why are they repeatedly subjugated by foreigners? And if this is a turning point in that sorry history, why should God begin by turning to an obscure family of the Manasseh tribe? He demands a sign, and then, in a stunning move, actually turns around and walks away, apparently to prepare some food for the angel. Gideon returns, and God sets his lunch on fire. This is apparently enough to convince Gideon.

Gideon begins honourably, taking some servants and cutting down his father's altar to Baal. In a midnight ceremony, they hastily build a new altar and sacrifice a bull. The townspeople are confused when they get up in the morning to see the results of God's little black op, but the culprit is soon identified. (The Bible doesn't say how or who investigates.) Gideon's father Joash is told by the townsmen that the young man must be surrendered for execution. Joash takes his son's side - a stunning move for someone who owned the destroyed pagan altar - and suggests Baal himself should do the killing, if any killing is to be done. Gideon then summons the armies of Israel to battle, though before going on campaign, he demands two more miracles from God, solely for his personal private use: one that God will keep his fleece dry from dew overnight, and another that God will let only his fleece get wet with due overnight.

Gideon's assembled army eventually totals 32 000 soldiers, and God decides on a gratuitous miracle, just to prove his might: he tells Gideon there are "too many" soldiers now, and they dismiss 22 000 who admitted to being fearful. Ten thousand is still too many, God complains, so they weed out another 9700 who drink water the wrong way (depending on the translation, which way is the wrong way and which way is the right way may differ!). Gideon takes the 300 and raids the Midianite camp; the enemies of Israel flee in terror.

The story of Gideon is once again a brief resurgence of Israelite militarism, carried out under the cloak of divine blessing. This is true right to the end, where Israel concludes from Gideon's success in battle that he ought to be their ruler (to his credit, he refuses) and he subsequently gains considerable wealth and privilege from his war exploits (including enough wives to produce no less than seventy sons!) Nevertheless, the story ends on a more ambivalent note: Gideon suggests that his battle prowess does not actually qualify him to rule Israel, and, like Cincinnatus in Roman mythology, after saving the nation he simply returned home. On the other hand, before doing so, he asks for a handsome retirement gift from the Israelite assembly: twenty kilograms of gold, along with assorted other plunder from the Midianite wars. At today's gold prices, Gideon has been paid the equivalent of $600 000 in plunder, plus all the girls he gets as wives and concubines.

Despite the apparent renewal of Israelite militarism, there are a couple of dark moments in the story which I think illustrate the potential excesses of Gideon's new militarism, so that the ultimate conclusion of the story is fairly ambiguous so far as combat goes. Gideon may annihilate the initial Midianite army with God's assistance, but he carries on afterwards with great success - and, significantly, without any more references to the divine.

First, Gideon murders two Midianite kings, Zebah and Zalmunna, after a long chase from the battlefields in Israel. They are captured and brought before him well after the Midianites have been reduced beyond any chance of resistance, and decides to execute them in vengeance for the deaths of Israelites. This is not a legal procedure nor one ordered by God. He strikes them down and then snatches some "ornaments" from them and from their camels, which he pockets for himself. Even Gideon's own son refuses to take part in this execution, though the Bible claims this is because of fearful youth.

Second, and perhaps more significantly, this story is the first by my count to see Israelites slaughter other Israelites in battle (with the exception of Moses' ritual bloodbath following the golden calf episode, if that can be considered a battle). During the unsanctioned pursuit of the defeated Midianites, Gideon and his men demand food from two towns: Succoth and Peniel. These are significant places: Peniel is where Jacob wrestled with God and became Israel, and Succoth is where Jacob-Israel first lived after his reconciliation with his brother Esau.

Gideon isn't particularly concerned about the historical significance. The two towns refuse him food and, outraged, he vows revenge. After the execution of the Midianite kings, Gideon's forces return and sack the towns. What happens at Succoth is unclear - Gideon's force gathers desert thorns and briers and then, depending on your translation, either "tramples," "teaches," or "punishes" the men of Succoth. What happens at Peniel is more explicit, however: the Gideonites swarm the town, tear down its defences, and kill all the men in the city. This seems like considerably more than an overreaction for the refusal of food. Obviously this was not an act of charity, but it's also not clear what law has been violated. The right to sustenance and supplies from the civilian population, taken through force if necessary, is one that has been claimed by military forces in varying ways for thousands of years. But that right is not found in the Israelite laws given by God - according to those laws, only the priests, the poor, and foreigners have such a right. Gideon is arrogating to his military forces powers and rights never bestowed upon them by God.

Gideon's sin deepens in the following section when he takes all of the gold paid to him in tribute by the other Israelites - gold, not incidentally, which comes largely from gold earrings plundered from pagans slain in battle - and makes an "ephod" out of it. What exactly an ephod is remains unclear, but the Gideon ephod is turned into an altar at which the Israelites worship and "prostitute themselves." God may have called Gideon's military into being, but he turns its back on Gideon as that very military then engages in some of the customary excesses one might expect from a strongly militarist culture.

Little by little by little...

2008-05-15T18:55:00.000-07:00

Today the Supreme Court of California de facto legalized gay marriage by overturning the "pro family" ban on such marriages. The decision by the court is an interesting read, if you have the time. The court accepted a similar argument to one that the Church of the Orange Sky has been making for some time now - that sexual orientation, like race, is not a relevant factor in determining an individual's right to marry a person of their choice. In the court's eyes, this is derived indirectly from the fact that orientation, like race or gender, cannot be used as a basis to deny a legal right.

(And in California, thanks to pro-family people in the past, the right to marry is a fundamental constitutional right. I'll bet they wish they had a chance for a do-over on that...)

Naturally, supporters of civil rights greeted the news quite happily and apparently there was already long lines forming for marriage certificates, partially in excitement and partially in the fear that the legislature may find a way to overturn this decision over the next few weeks. Because the decision just came down today, many of the "pro-family" organizations haven't prepared detailed responses. I searched in vain for an angry denunciation on the website of Focus on the Family and didn't see one.

(Another tangent: drop the "pro-family" bullshit. Gay people have "families" too. Being "pro-family" in this case usually means being "anti-family," i.e. anti-recognizing-that-gay-people-have-families-too.)

The Associated Press does have an incomplete list of immediate responses which shows that people are pretty much falling along predictable party lines. The White House denounces it as judicial activism (that old chestnut again), James Dobson says it's an "outrage," Randy Thomasson says it's a "disaster," and plaintiff Robin Tyler says it's "about love," which I have to believe it is, in her case. The people in question, particularly those on the opposition side who think it's "judicial activism" but also those on the winning side, are obviously gifted by a divine power of discernment I don't have, despite my close connection to the Orange Sky - they've been able to form their own judgements on the issue so rapidly that it's obvious they haven't even had time to read the decision from the court. That's very impressive.

Firstly, well done to all the human rights organizations in California who were part of this fight. I hope you enjoy your victory.

Secondly, I sure as hell hope the religious conservative backlash to this isn't going to be too strong, though I fear it will be. Opponents really ought to consider that "social tradition," which was the chief argument addressed by government lawyers as well as by "pro-family" organizations, really shouldn't have much in the way of legal standing. And rightly so!

Look at the sad state of legal arguments that so often fall back on such an argument. Intriguingly, much the same position was advanced way back in 1948, when the same court ruled on an inter-racial marriage ban in Perez v. Sharp, and came to a decision on the same narrow division (4 to 3) as it did in today's verdict. With that judgement the California Supreme Court became the first 20th century court to overturn an anti-miscegenation law, as they were then known; it took until 1967 for the Supreme Court of the United States to agree, when it freed a Virginia couple convicted of living together as part of its judgement in Loving v. Virginia.

Tradition was also invoked, with much the same result, in R. v. Knowles ex parte Somerset in 1772, when the British courts effectively paved the way for the abolition of slavery; and in Wedderburn v. Knight in 1777, when the Scottish courts concurred. (Those with a literary bent may be interested to know that Knight's successful case was prepared by Samuel Johnson and James Boswell.) That's not to say it never works - for example, it was basically accepted by the U.S. Supreme Court in Dred Scott v. Sandford for example, when that court agreed to uphold the institution of slavery in 1857. In part this galvanized the growth of the Republican Party, which, despite its present racist politics, was actually originally formed as a progressive anti-slavery party.

Over the next few days look for angry responses from conservative religious groups claiming we must return to the traditional family and, inevitably, intimating that this will one day pave the way for polygamy politics.

Let's try and disentangle that one for a moment too. Religious conservatives want us to ban gay marriage, which is clearly not Biblical (whatever you think about the issue, we have to agree that those who wrote the Hebrew Bible, in particular, would have been shocked by the prospect of two men marrying one another); in part because they also want to keep banning polygamous marriage or at least concubinage, which clearly is Biblical (again, whatever you think of the issue, the Hebrew laws in their original form obviously included provisions for multiple marriages).

The inconsistencies continue. They no longer favour the ban on inter-racial marriages, which was once Biblical (though arguably this ban was lifted by the prophets or at least by the New Testament), nor are they in favour of banning divorces, which would also be Biblical (the Old Testament didn't ban divorce, but Jesus did, or at least severely restricted it, depending on which gospel you assign the most primacy to). They also don't support inheriting wives of dead brothers (Biblical), stealing and then raping and marrying prisoners of war (also Biblical), required marriage to victims of rape (you guessed it... still Biblical!), or forced marriages of two employees imposed as part of the regular employer-employee relationship (also Biblical, though with a bit of modern re-interpretation). They oppose prostitution, which is Biblical (at least until 1 Corinthians 6). They are in favour of banning sex outside of marriage, which is not a Biblical position to take; and opposed to lesbianism, which isn't mentioned in the Bible at all, except in Paul's sarcastic rant in Romans 1-2, which, given the extent of the hyperbole, I seriously doubt he meant us to take literally.

So sometimes they side with the Old Testament, sometimes they side with the New Testament, and sometimes they don't side with any Testament at all. This leads me to believe that the Bible is actually completely irrelevant to the "pro-family" organizations, despite the fact that they invariably claim to be conservative and Christian.

More Honorary Degree Lunacy

2008-05-15T18:13:00.001-07:00

Procrasinator's Link of the Day: First, a housekeeping note: there have been a disturbing number of people linking to this blog from Salt Lake City ever since I published links to the Mormon documents at Wikileaks. Does this mean the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is about to drop the heavy end of the hammer on the Church of the Orange Sky? I sure hope not. My god is bigger than your god, but I don't think she does copyright litigation. In my defence I haven't actually published or distributed any copyrighted material myself. The fault lies with the copyright violators at Wikileaks.

In other news, recently I suggested that Phyllis Schlafly might perhaps not deserve the honorary degree she's being given by Washington University for her lifetime of work in suppressing women's rights. Some media muttering about this issue led someone to point out that the University of Massachusetts once gave Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, whom one of my professors humorously refers to as "Zimbabwe Bob," an honorary doctorate too. A doctorate of laws, in fact. Now the University in question is considering whether to revoke the honorary degree.

Can you revoke a university degree? If so, what's the point of giving an honorary one in the first place?

Yet another reason not to give out honorary degrees: the person might turn into a dictator.

In related news, I've just discovered a really cool site, Feministing.com. At the moment, the recent news on the site is a summary that would seem to suggest - though they don't say so explicitly - that, at least in Georgia, you can legally rape a woman as long as you've had sex with her at least once consensually. This beats even Schlafly's pathetically half-assed "rape can't happen in the marriage bed" compromise position. At present Georgian precedent also allows the defendant to claim, in his defence, that the victim had shaved her pubic hair and was not a virgin.

Women Get to Kill, Too: Judges 4-5

2008-05-15T17:46:00.000-07:00

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

Ehud dies and without a proper father figure, the Israelites return to their evil-doing ways. The lord therefore permits them to be enslaved by a Canaanite king named Jabin, and his chief general, Sisera. Sisera's forces are numerically impressive - among other things, he has no less than 900 chariots - and they "cruelly oppress the Israelites" for 20 years.

God's next judge is a woman named Deborah - actually, she's the wife of a judge named Lappidoth, but in a truly bizarre twist, God doesn't talk about Lappidoth very much at all. Deborah "holds court" under a palm tree, of all places (we veered from Jewish into Buddhist mythology for a moment there). She summons Barak from the Naphtali and orders him to raise 10 000 soldiers and fight Sisera's forces for all Israel.

Eventually Barak does this and forces battle with Sisera, in which the Lord sides with Israel and gives them a resounding victory. (Actually, I think 10 000 men could hold their own against 900 chariots even without divine assistance, provided they were well trained with their spears, but that's another matter). Sisera loses his chariot in the battle and flees alone, eventually reaching the Kenites and seeking aid from Jael.

This section is also fascinating because, once again, it's another woman: Jael is the wife of Heber, who, like Lappidoth, doesn't feature in this story as more than a name on the page. Jael gives Sisera water and rest. In theory this was a pretty important social custom in the ancient Middle East, and it would be grossly immoral for Jael to let harm come to Sisera while under her roof. But this time goes quite differently: Jael waits until Sisera has fallen asleep, then takes a tent peg and hammers it through his skull. Deborah and Barak eventually track down Sisera's corpse and sing a celebratory song, after which Israel has 40 years of peace.

Once again we have a captivating story with some grisly elements, like the tent peg-through-the-head scene. And there are elements of the song that are rather disturbing as well. After cheering Sisera's death in cheerful poetic fashion:

At her feet he sank,
he fell; there he lay.
At her feet he sank, he fell;
where he sank, there he fell - dead.

Actually, it seems a trifle repetitive. But what follows seems stranger; the final verse is about Sisera's mother anxiously waiting for her son to return and deluding herself about his violent fate.

This story is interesting because it seems to thoroughly subvert Israel's gender order. Deborah, not her husband, delivers the word of the Lord. At one point, when Barak seems reluctant to go into battle, Deborah taunts him by saying that she will lead the forces herself, but because she does, God will let it be known that "the Lord will hand Sisera over to a woman." That the honour is being stolen by her specifically as a woman broadens the insult from Barak to all of the other male leaders under him. Eventually, the sole survivor - Sisera - is also murdered in bloody fashion by a woman acting without any guidance from her husband.

On the one hand, this implicates women in Israelite militarism. On the other, I have to wonder, given the underlying sexism of the Old Testament, what the real purpose of this passage is. I could easily interpret this as an isolated but emancipating story about women leading Israel. However, I have to wonder whether the symbolic purpose of the original authors was to emphasize just how far into sin the country had fallen. The priesthood has failed; the military generals have failed; the men in general have failed; and now, finally, it falls to the women to do the job all the others should have been doing. Fortunately for the future of Israel, the faith of marginalized women seems stronger than anyone else's. But there is no lasting social change here; it may be simply that Deborah performs a masculine role for a while in the absence of qualified men. Obviously the Israelites see no reason to respond to this episode by adjusting the way gender determines social relations in their society, because women fall out of the narrative again after chapter 5.

Still, the overarching theme of Judges is that the Israelites are utterly incapable of organizing or maintaining their society along morally righteous lines. The story is somewhat positive, even if the limit of its emancipation of Deborah and to some extent Jael is that in the absence of qualified men they are able to perform traditionally masculine roles as prophet of God and slayer of pagans. But there is still an underlying implication that Israelite women would be capable of religious leadership, but have only now been called on to fulfill that role.

This leads to some interesting implications for the treatment of women in churches today. God doesn't seem to mind that Israel is being led by a woman - indeed, he seems to approve. Should we take that as a model for today? The alternative, which presumably sexist churches would have to cling to, is that for some inexplicable reason only Deborah is qualified to play a traditionally masculine role and now that that sorry episode is done with, we can return to proper patriarchy. But the androcentric social order being returned to here in Judges is a demonstrable failure - indeed, that inevitable and dismal failure of the system is the entire point of the Book of Judges - and presumably this behooves us to consider alternative forms of social organization.

Fun Times with Mormons

2008-05-14T19:26:00.000-07:00

Procrastinator's Link of the Day: WikiLeaks, a massive online repository of leaked documents from governments, banks and churches all over the world. It's basically Wikipedia combined with the New York Times - a publicly compiled and edited collection of illegal documents. I remember the group that was trying to get this together a couple of years ago, wondering whether there would be enough people willing to risk their careers to keep such a site operational. There was - the site is actually completely flooded on a constant basis. You can get anything here - in the recent past the site has defied publishing bans in various countries, leaked U.S. military instructions on violating the Geneva Conventions, and revealed all kinds of corruption schemes. At some point propagandists may figure out how to use the site for their own nefarious purposes but in the meantime it seems to be just pissing them off.

Naturally this earns considerable indignation from those who feel they have a right to preserve secrets from the public. Unfortunately for them, Wikileaks is also one of the latest examples of Internet data that seemingly exists beyond the rule of law. Like the AACS encryption keys to HD DVD and Blu Ray discs, which were released onto a few geek sites last year, then exploded into an internationally recognized story literally overnight after a horrifically mismanaged attempt by the Licensing Authority to suppress the key turned into a challenge for bandwidth and power between the Authority's legal staff and ten million geeks, activists, and libertarians. The result was predictably one-sided.

Wikileaks had its own trial by fire a few months ago when it posted some corruption-related documents from a Swiss bank, Julius Bear, and as a result was "taken offline" by order of a U.S. court. Its wikileaks.org URL was vacated. Wikileaks then revealed a dizzying array of international mirrors, linking to an equally byzantine global network of servers run by anonymous techs. Two weeks after Wikileaks was supposed to have been "killed," the judge ordered its main site brought back online, admitting that the U.S. judicial system wasn't actually capable of suppressing the site. So now Wikileaks is back to pleasing journalists and enraging bureaucrats.

Normally, all of this might seem dull to everyone who isn't either (a) a political scientist with a specialization in government secrecy, or (b) a conspiracy theorist, or perhaps (c) both, but in this case a few recent arrivals on the site are relevant to the Church of the Orange Sky.

Here, for example, is a "Female Beauty Manual" produced by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. It starts with a lengthy "questionnaire" about "what you want in a man," and it goes rapidly downhill from there. "Downhill" like off a cliff. Most of the book is devoted to advice on your clothing and appearance, which, it explains, are essential because if you don't look as pretty as you can you aren't going to meet and marry the best man possible. Starting on p. 53, there are some asinine lists of what "a girl" should know about "mature femininity," which apparently amounts to being a happy, pleasant being without a care in the world, largely because she lacks the intelligence to have such cares. (Men, by contrast, are strong and respectable authority figures, enterprising, firm but still compassionate, and so on and so forth. The usual, basically.) Basically this is a tame version of Cosmo written for Mormon girls.

Somewhat more fun from other perspectives, if also very dry in places, is the 200-page Church Handbook of Instructions, also Mormon. It's apparently intended for possession only by various "presidencies" and "high counsilors" and other authorities within the church. Interesting sections includes those on transsexuals (this is bad, naturally), homosexuality (ditto), living arrangements for missionaries, and so on, but I have to say it was less exciting than I'd hoped.

The LDS, naturally, is fighting like hell to get these documents off the Internet, though if they think they're going to succeed against Wikileaks, I have to think it's not going to work very well for them. They've also started going after websites who host links to the material in question, so I sincerely hope this won't be the last post on Jesus Drives an SUV. If it is, at least we'll have gone out standing in opposition to the tyranny of those who would seek to end the free exchange of knowledge.

An even more frighteningly litigious group, which is far more infamous for defending its doubtful "copyright" claims to all manner of its religious truth, is also in trouble with Wikileaks - a group I'll call the Church of Shmientology. Awesomely, when the lawyers for this group threatened Wikileaks, the latter publicly declared it would retaliate by publishing thousands more pages in secret documents. You can search for them yourself on the site, but evidently some of them describe human and galactic history for as much as the last four quadrillion years. This church is probably one of a very limited number who make converts sign contracts rather than, say, baptism certificates, and Wikileaks has a copy of one of the contracts too. I'm not sure who their Scientology source, but evidently it's a good one. Probably someone associated with Operation Chanology.

Bush Gives Up Golf to Honour Iraq War Dead

2008-05-14T13:09:00.000-07:00

I really wish that headline was a joke. It certainly sounds like one.

Bush recently said he's stopped playing golf because he wants to show the families of soldiers killed in Iraq that he stands "in solidarity" with them in their grief.

For this reason it would be inappropriate "to see the commander-in-chief playing golf."

Who writes this President's lines? Seriously.

And of course, even something so mind-numbingly banal wouldn't be complete without a little white lie. Bush says that he stopped playing golf after learning of the death of UN official Sergio de Mello - in fact, he says, he was pulled off the course to be told the news, and vowed never to return to the golf course until the war was over.

Problem is, he last played golf on October 13, 2003. De Mello died in mid-August. Unless the U.S. government has taken to bringing news dispatches back from Iraq via rowboat, it seems unlikely there'd be such a delay.

Speaking of Gender and Marriage...

2008-05-14T04:34:00.000-07:00

Test question

Please select the answer which best describes the following passage:

Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

(A.) Fucking right

(B.) Wait... why isn't that a law already?

(C.) Wow, that's a really "dumb idea."

If you answered (C.) to the above, the University of Washington is interested in granting you an honorary degree for your services to the cause of patriarchy.

Link goes to an interview with arch-anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly, a woman so androcentrist that what she really deserves from Washington U is an honorary penis. The text is from the Equal Rights Amendment, the American constitutional amendment which would grant full legal equality to men and women in the U.S., if it hadn't been rejected every year it was proposed since 1920. Schlafly has spent a good chunk of her long political career opposing the amendment, which, in her words, "was a dumb idea in the first place."

The interview also contains a few other nuggets from Schlafly, who apparently believes that once women have married, they're not allowed to refuse sex to their husbands - and if they do, their husbands are allowed to "rape" them. I use quotation marks because Schlafly says it isn't rape at all, and that getting married is equivalent to giving consent in perpetuity.

In a way I suppose it's not surprising that women of the religious right like Schlafly oppose the Equal Rights Amendment - it was, after all, first proposed by a Quaker activist, and the political views of Quakers and conservative Christians usually go together like water and oil.

The Church of the Orange Sky calls upon all universities to forestall this ludicrous and demeaning practice of granting "honourary degrees." It is a holdover from medieval simony and should be treated as such.

A Spanking Good Time

2008-05-14T04:00:00.000-07:00

Holy fucking Christ, I don't even know where to begin on this one. I'm only sorry I'm late to the party - other bloggers found out about this a year or so ago. Let's start with a quiz: who do you think is speaking in the following passage:

I'm not kidding, I felt my stomach drop when I saw my ****** bring out a heavy belt. It is one of those old ones that came with a silver buckle and had a name stamped on it. He doesn't wear it much anymore because it is to heavy for style today. I only got seven, which I have to admit I thought was lenient although I was howling the whole time. I don't get a discipline often and it is amazing how quickly I forget how much it hurts--just a blinding pain. You would think this is the end of the story wouldn't you? Well, you're wrong, when I mess up, I make sure I do it right.

If you guessed "rebellious teenaged son," you'd be wrong. This is a woman speaking about her husband.

A few years ago, back when I was writing at Notes from the Abattoir, I told the strange story of an online Christian sex toys store. Today it's time to move on to the story of Christian S&M (or is it theologically rationalized domestic violence? Or just complete and utter fucking stupidity? I can't tell).

Arguably the Christian domestic discipline movement may be summarized by this $14 thong, the front of which reads "this side for loving" and the back, "this side for spanking." I think I want to cry.

What really disturbs me here is not that couples are engaging in certain practices of ritual dominance and submission. This is present in plenty of non-religious contexts as well, and while I don't find it particularly appealing myself, as a general rule I really don't care all that much about what two consenting persons decide to do with their time. A couple things are really troublesome about the Christian domestic discipline movement to me, however, despite the above - one of which is that it comes at least within striking distance (ha ha) of legitimizing male domestic violence, and the other of which is that God is called on to defend this. (Naturally this is so, because evangelicals call on God to legitimize damn near everything.)

My fairly usual sprinkling of profanity above has probably done more than enough to communicate my own particular biases and prejudices on this subject, but nevertheless, I'm going to try in this entry to let the men and women in this lifestyle speak for themselves as much as possible before saying something myself. I admit I doubt anyone who practices this lifestyle is ever actually going to read this blog, but from time to time people have a strange way of showing up here after I cite their blogs (there's probably some sort of automated tracking software for this purpose, but if so I'm ignorant of it).

Forms of Discipline

First, and in all fairness, it would be inappropriate to summarize this as "wife-beating," or even "wife-spanking," since in the words of participants, it is a general pattern of wifely submission, of which physical discipline is only one part:

Domestic discipline is not spanking. A domestic discpline relationship begins when a couple decides that one partner will maintain a leadership role. For us, this means a married couple with the husband in that role. We also believe that DD means that the "head" will utlize discipline when necessary. What form that discipline will take is determined by each couple. Most couples who use domestic discipline will include spanking, but some do not.

here

Most commonly, the husband is expected to "discipline" his wife for some perceived failure to follow the rules.

Occasionally, of course, the woman "fails" to understand what she has done wrong, but is expected to submit to discipline anyways, in order to reinforce the authority of the husband. This female blogger explains:

We even had one time where we really were not on the same page. He insisted on spanking and I didnt agree the spanking was deserved, but I didn't argue in order to show him that I really wanted him to be HOH. And on his side, he didnt' back down from what he believed to be the right thing. In the past if I would've even given a hint to disagreeing with him he would've backed off in order to not "force it" on me, but this time he stood firm. We never did figure out who was "right" that night, but we felt really good with the outcome.

In addition to the above, some practitioners advocate "maintenance discipline," sort of the physical equivalent to doing a general prayer of repentance once in a while for any sins you forgot to confess specifically. In the words of this blogger, for instance:

Maintenance Discipline involves regular spanking to maintain the woman's good behavior and attitude. A Maintenance Discipline spanking takes place outside of and separate from any disciplinary spanking that she may receive for specific misbehavior. Importantly, a Maintenance Discipline is also a regular event that takes place at the same interval of time, unlike a disciplinary spanking, which will only occur when the woman needs guidance and physical encouragement to behave properly. So a Maintenance Discipline might occur every day, or every week, or every month, depending on what the couple agree is necessary or depending on what the male HOH decides is necessary for the woman.

The blogger in question goes in in great detail, discussing various flows and interconnections of "masculine" and "feminine energy."

The Importance of Masculine Leadership and Feminine Submission

Men are the heads of household - the "HOH," in the lingo of the discipline movement - and thus a man is "not answerable to anyone except himself, the laws of the land and God."

The woman, by contrast, must submit, because she is not capable of sound judgement:

Women respond to emotional content, not rational content. Women filter out everything that is said or done to them through an emotional filter. This is an emotional filter, not a rational one. Every single thing that is said or done to a woman passes through her emotional filter. Every single experience she has is directed through her emotional filter so that she can extract what she considers to be significant meaning for herself.

Therefore, according to the same author, discipline is necessary to force important concepts through women's emotional blindness:

Spanking is an emotional experience for a woman. If you doubt that, you simply need to remember that spanking is intended to result in crying. The woman should be brought to tears whenever she is spanked by her HOH. Her crying indicates emotion. Intense emotion. This is why it is so important to spank a woman to tears whenever she is disciplined or punished. Because spanking her to tears gets her attention. It is necessary to spank a woman to tears so that rational content can be slipped past her emotional filters and inserted into her brain.

A second, similar perspective, states that

Spanking is effective because it is the backdoor to a woman's mind. A woman 's buttocks are the *ears* that she cannot stop up and refuse to listen. When coupled with a firm, but concerned voice, it can say things that will not be heard any other way.

Another blogger explains that women need to learn proper submission to their man, much, I suppose, as Christians must learn proper submission to God:

The secret to getting past a woman's resistance is much the same as for getting a motor vehicle through a stretch of mud on a back road. Keep going and do not get bogged down...

By nature, women test a man's resolve. It is only after he has proven himself capable of handling her that this attribute fades...

This is where *time* is paramount, because many women are aware that they can *outlast* a man's hand. As a result, one way of assuring a woman that the man is up to the task at hand is to have a suitable implement - commonly a paddle or hairbrush in the United States - already in hand. Not only does the visual effect convey the message that the utensil in hand will *win* over a woman's brain when applied to her bare buttocks, it also keeps the man from the awkward realization that his hand is inadequate to task at hand.

The emotional collapse of the woman should be tacitly palpable. There should be no doubt in her mind, or his, that *he* is in control. Despite politically correct rhetoric, there is security in the knowledge that the man is *in charge*. That singular fact of life explains why *domestic discipline* survived - even thrived under - the feminist onslaught.

The Role of God

According to the Christian Domestic Discipline blog,

First, God put men in charge. It is sexist; but it is also true. Despite reams of politically correct propaganda, God did make men a little brighter and a little stronger so that they could be in charge.

Second, He gave men a mechanism for maintaining order. Call it *domestic discipline*, *moderate restraint*, or *wife spanking*. Properly used, it will sufficiently stabilize the relationship between a man and woman so that they are able to raise viable children even in a turbulent age.

Third, both physically and psychologically, He designed women to accept the authority of men. As Leah pointed out, most of the time it is the WOMAN, rather than the man, who wants discipline in the home. When men are unable to provide that which the woman requires or unwilling to restrain their own behavior, women want out of the relationship in about the same percentage as request *domestic discipline*.

Some writers tend to legitimize discipline, and submission more generally, with the argument that the model of Christ shows us that he who submits is the one who benefits most from the relationship of dominant and submissive. Of course, if that were true, they would follow the writings of Jesus and Paul, which say that we should "submit to one another." Instaed, what's really involved here is a one-directional relationship, with wives submitting to husbands. This reduces the teachings of Jesus and at least some of Paul - that in serving one another we abolish repressive relations of power and thus are united in the kingdom of God - and restore repression in the form of the husband-woman relationship.

I think it's only fair to point out that there are differences in perspective here - another website, for example, claims that on their website, "You won't find the concept that God mandates or requires this lifestyle."

It would also be wrong to suggest that this phenomenon is simply a group of men plotting to write websites legitimating domestic abuse - actually, it's striking that many of the women writers - like Debbie and April, for example - say it was their idea to enter into this lifestyle. A few months ago, April complained on her blog that discipline had become inconsistent:

Where do my feelings and needs fall within his leadership though. Am I supposed to just stand back and be okay with the fact that something is spankable one day, but not the next time and it is the next time or three after that, but not the one after that. Am I supposed to be okay with me following our agreement to journal my behavior each day and having it ignored. Am I supposed to be a robot that is able to just flip a switch to the proper mindset whenever he decides the he finally has the time or energy to address a behavior even if it happened days ago? How am I supposed to respond when he thinks that a spanking will fix everything and reset things between us and there's no discussion involved?

What you are supposed to be is a free human being subject only to God. Christ told us to "decide for yourselves what is right" (Luke 12:57).

It's telling, in my opinion, that it's fairly difficult to find support for this sort of "domestic discipline" lifestyle even within the New Testament, whose ideas on gender are rather less progressive than those that are common today. In 1 Corinthians 7 Paul envisioned human beings, both men and women, as free moral agents who should enter into marriage only in mutual submission, and only if they had no other choice. Granted Paul himself seems to have been unmarried and not all that concerned about the subject of intra-marital affairs, but this is quite the opposite of a ringing endorsement of this rigid "discipline" and the resulting infantilization of women. You have to get into the more conservative books, like 1 Timothy, to get anywhere even close.

It grieves me that people value their integrity, freedom and humanity so little.

Spies and Assassins: Judges 3:7-31

2008-05-14T03:24:00.000-07:00

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

==========

Special Note: A Lesson in Translations. I know I'm giving away the ending a bit here, but there's an incident in this chapter where an evil king is killed by a sinister left-handed assassin. This gives me an opportunity to remark upon conservative efforts to censor the Bible - an incredibly ironic thing to do given their proposed "faithfulness" to the text. Judges 3:22 describes the death of the evil king with considerable detail, right down to the fact that the killer can't get his sword out because the king is so fat.

Then comes the interesting point. The NIV translation, for example, just stops at that point. Some other, apparently more faithful explanations, add the final component of the king's grisly demise: variously, "and the refuse came out" (NASB), "the dirt came out" (KJV), "the excrements of the belly came out" (Douay-Rheims English), and "it came out behind" (Darby, WEB). "Dirt" and "refuse" are euphemisms, of course, but even that (or maybe especially that) is way too crude for the NIV, so they just leave it out. It doesn't even merit a footnote!

==========

The third chapter of Judges gives us our first samples of the, well, judges. The Israelites start going to some Baal and the Asherahs concerts, just what they weren't supposed to do, and so God lets them be captured by the Aram Naharimites and held as subjects for eight years. Then they're liberated by Othniel, the nephew of Caleb who came up before.

That story's kind of boring, bereft of interesting details. Slightly better is Shamgar of Anath, who apparently led a rebellion against the Philistines. The details are bereft, except for one fascinating claim, which is that he personally slaughtered 600 of the Philistine soldiers using an oxgoad. Now an oxgoad is basically a long stick that use to poke oxen with, so basically, Shamgar is killing people by the hundreds using only a quarterstaff. It's a feat worthy of fantasy.

On another occasion, God lets the Moabites - who are still alive despite being wiped out in previous genocides - along with the Ammonites and Amalekites. King Eglon takes the City of Palms - that is, Jericho, which must have been rebuilt in the meantime, even though this was never mentioned and even though God explicitly ordered the Israelites never to do so. However, the Israelites repent and cry for mercy, and God raises up a new judge named Ehud the Benjamite.

Ehud is everything you want in a pre-medieval James Bond: suicide attacker, assassin, sharp wit, and impressive sneaking skills. He's even, according to the Bible, left-handed - a strange addition, but one I as a left-hander must appreciate! Ehud ties a sword to his thigh under his clothing and marches straight into Eglon's palace, declaring that he plans to present a tribute. Eglon's security guards fail to frisk Ehud, because they haven't yet received the appropriate guidelines from CATSA or the TSA. Ehud manages to get close to Eglon by announcing he has a secret message which must be delivered only to the king.

This is when things get really cool, and we see that the writer of Judges has a sharp wit, too. In a practice subsequently replicated by 3000 years of action film heroes, Ehud walks up to the king in his private chambers, solemnly announces "I have a message from God for you," draws his secret sword, and assassinates the king. With gloriously excessive language, Judges solemnly pronounces that poor Eglon is so fat that when he's stabbed his rolls of body fat close over the sword, so that Ehud can't pull it out again.

Fortunately, Ehud doesn't need the sword again; he just sneaks out and blows a trumpet once he's passed the gates. The servants don't come in to stop him; Judges's hilarious explanation for this failure on their part is that they assume Eglon wants privacy while he relieves himself!

Ehud isn't done - he leads an uprising which kills ten thousand Moabites and wins Israel its freedom for 80 years.

Other than being good fun stories, I'm not sure what to make of these early "judges." We haven't yet reached the hideous moral degeneracy of some of the following chapters. Even so, it's worth pointing that there isn't a lot of judging going on in Judges. This book lacks the proud, almost propagandistic militarism of Joshua, but God's will remains known largely - or even solely - through Israel's violent relations with neighbouring nations. Pessimism about the faith of the people - who without a permanent leadership are utterly incapable of anything other than pure evil and idol worship - is combined with the fall of the priestly and military institutions (something I noted earlier) to form an extremely negative view of anarchical society in God's promised land.

Taxes, Subsidies, and Road Use

2008-05-13T11:59:00.000-07:00

This policy paper was produced by the Environmental Studies Institute of the Church of the Orange Sky.

There's been a lot of grumbling in both the Canadian and American media lately about gas prices and gas taxes. I'm too tired to compile a long list but a simple Google search should suffice to inform you. In the U.S., the Democratic candidates sparred over some ridiculous notion of a few-months-long "gas tax holiday," and for once I agree totally with Obama - this idea is as dumb as a bag of hammers. (Not to mention it's McCain's idea, and Hillary just plagiarized it.) The obvious and fairly reasonable counter-argument, of course, is that many consumers really could use the money, even if it's only twenty or thirty bucks - reasonable, that is, unless you take into account the fact that gas companies really don't have much of an incentive to lower the price of gas as much as the government has lowered the gas tax, especially over a short-term period. Economist and columnist Paul Krugman explains.

In Canada the latest round of muttering from the punditry is in response to a leaked Liberal plan to introduce a federal tax on carbon emissions. Because no one likes new taxes, the wise pundits say while stroking their chins wisely, this is disastrous for the Liberal party. The fact that this tax proposal would actually not be targeting gas at the pump doesn't seem to have dissuaded anyone from wagging their finger at Dion, and to their credit, a few people (e.g. UBC professor Simon Donner) have pointed out the real positives of further measures - like tax inducements - to lower heating and transportation fuel use. This doesn't stop people from grumbling, though, probably because they're generally unhappy with the rising gas prices, and an easy target for their dissatisfaction is the one-third or so of the gas price that governments grab at the pump. Every time a politician mentions "fuel" and "taxes" in the same paragraph, they therefore end up with their face in the crosshairs.

Now, since I don't own a car, I'm not really personally affected if the government were just to raise gas taxes sky high tomorrow. Depending on how many bureaucrats you want to hire to oversee the program, you could even target the taxes more specifically - and realistically this wouldn't be a bad idea - by imposing enormous taxes on urban and suburban areas, but low taxes on rural areas. This would still have to be imposed by either the federal or provincial government, since municipalities can't afford to unilaterally raise taxes and lose competitiveness relative to other cities, but an agreement between all three levels of government would let some or most of the revenue shift to municipal governments - which in turn would help solve another perennial problem in Canadian politics, the under-funding of cities. All of this probably fails an Economics 101-level analysis, of course, because my knowledge of the effect of taxation is not good.

More to the point, though, the argument for all new taxes - as opposed to the McCain-style gas holiday silliness, which actually goes in the opposite direction - is that we need to reduce the amount of driving. This has got caught up in carbon politics, which is good except that a fairly high number of people don't seem to care all that much about carbon emissions. It therefore detracts from the broader problems of pollution, which for some reason we seem to have forgotten in recent years. This despite the fact that, for example, 500 to 1000 deaths are attributed to car pollution in Toronto alone, every year - plus lost work due to other air pollution problems, an enormous amount of time wasted in crowded driving conditions, a horrifically inefficient use of land necessitated by enormous parking lots, and so on.

Governments ponder silly little things like raising the gas tax by a couple of cents per litre or giving people a tax credit for use of public transit. The latter is kind of sort of good, but only applies to people who are basically willing to ride the bus all the time, since you're only eligible if you buy a monthly bus pass, and in virtually all cities, it's not worth buying such a pass unless you're riding the bus at least once or twice every day.

One day we'll develop and successfully introduce some very-low-emission vehicles which people will be happy with. To date, most of these have met with combined opposition from government and industry (even though some of them were developed within the industry, like GM's EV1), and the ZENN vehicle, developed in Canada, is actually being blocked from sale by the Conservative government. On the other hand, electric vehicles aren't really a fantastic solution - a nice one, but it would also mean we'd need a hell of a lot more power generation facilities, and most of those come with environmental problems of their own.

In the meantime, happily, we could consider the fact that there's already a zero-emission vehicle - the bicycle, which, for some inexplicable reason, doesn't have any tax incentives attached. Why the fuck is that? Why are there no tax incentives to ride bikes? They are smaller, in certain conditions at the moment they're actually faster (at 8:30 a.m. I could fairly easily get from my apartment to downtown faster on a bike than on a car), there's no pollution, and so on and so forth. Widespread bicycle riding might lower healthcare costs from obesity and related medical complications. The list goes on.

Perhaps there's simply an assumption that tax credits don't matter on bikes because they're already so cheap, which i suppose is true, although presumably the same argument really should apply to public transit passes, which don't cost all that much either.

People should be eligible for a tax credit on bikes - hypothetically, up to $500 on road bike purchases and $100 on mountain bike purchases, no more than once every three years. The difference in credits is because mountain bikes are often purchased for recreation purposes irrelevant to the current environmental plan, and less useful in the city anyways. I'd tell you to ask a bike messenger to confirm this, but if you took their characteristically insane advice, you'd probably end up touring the city on a fixed-gear with no brakes and no helmet, which would probably not be a net benefit to the average cyclist.

Helmets should be tax deductible, at least in those jurisdictions which require them by law, and so should money spent on parts and repairs for bikes, which, despite being fairly uncomplicated machines, do require regular maintenance for urban use. New tires and tubes in particular. Combine the credits and deductions and surely there's at least enough potential money to begin to compete with a minor and fairly useless adjustment to gas taxes, unless of course you waste gas driving an SUV or indulge in some comparable inanity.

Even if this actually had any impact, I have to admit I'm not sure whether society would benefit financially from a major shift towards more bike use. Lower congestion, lower pollution, and reduced wear and tear on public roads are beneficial. On the other hand, cyclists are about a dozen times more likely to get killed than car drivers, at least under current conditions, and even in collisions which would be minor in a car, cyclists are going to have real injuries. There are probably a list of other complications people could come up with too.

Suggestions that we need more bicycles in inner-city areas usually rouses great opposition from drivers, especially SUV drivers, who are not only far too often blissfully unaware that bikes are legally classified as vehicles but routinely complain about cyclists ignoring road laws.

Now, that's true, although 90% of the complaints on the subject are sheer hypocrisy. After all, how many car drivers rigidly follow every single road law, all the time? Including speed limits? Basically almost every motorist is willing to openly break road safetly laws, for their own convenience, under certain conditions. In that sense everyone has something in common.

Plus, anyone who's ridden a bike in urban areas for at least 50 hours or so, can probably give you at least a short list of times their lives have been endangered by criminally irresponsible idiot motorists performing blatantly illegal maneuvers - turning left into a bike, cutting in front of bikes to turn right, opening a car door in front of a bike, and various other forms of stupidity, which together account for a large percentage of collisions despite all the supposed recklessness of urban cyclists. The ludicrously high rate of people who can't be bothered to check for a cyclist before opening a car door leads to the seemingly ridiculously counter-intuitive fact that it's probably safer to ride straight down the middle of the road than along the side next to a line of parked vehicles (this is another common habit of the insane bike messengers).

Ultimately, putting more cyclists on the road isn't going to do a lot about those problems - drivers are still going to despise cyclists for breaking road laws at their own risk and getting away with things drivers couldn't, and cyclists are still going to despise drivers for breaking road laws at the cyclist's risk and endangering others' lives in the process.

At the end of the day, the relative cost of automobile and bicycle use means that tax credits are going to be a pretty minor point, but still...