dagblog - Comments for "Joseph's Pyramids and American Popular History"

Very thoughtful commentary.

CVille Dem — Sun, 15 Nov 2015 15:29:28 +0000

In reply to Thanks, Michael. Obviously, I

Very thoughtful commentary. Thank you. The idea that you propose, that the stories and rules provide a practical solution to these groups' problems of survival; make me feel more certain than ever that the bible was written and edited by ordinary people. If there truly was an all-knowing entity or God that was at least inspiring all this, it seems there might have been a fairer, less violent, more honest way of getting the message out. Certainly there is no evidence of any knowledge of the future, or even of basic integrity. A supposedly loving God playing deadly tricks on people, encouraging genocide, and having no problem with the concept of slavery, among other things, make it impossible for me to like, much less believe in that god

I know that all this is ancient history, and that people had a different way of processing the world around them, but shouldn't/couldn't the God they supposedly got their instructions from have been a little more enlightening?

I hope my thoughts haven't given you offense. I have struggled with this since my early 20's and am now 67. I do understand why no one wants to think that when they die that's it. But try as I might, I just can't fake faith. (A minister I spoke with on one of my many efforts to be a believer, suggested that I do just that -- fake it --, to "hedge my bets." I asked him if he didn't think God would know. I don't remember his response)

Sorry, I haven't had any time

Michael Wolraich — Wed, 11 Nov 2015 16:36:22 +0000

In reply to Thanks, Michael. Obviously, I

Sorry, I haven't had any time to respond this week, but it's an interesting answer, and I'm thinking about.

Thanks, Michael. Obviously, I

Doctor Cleveland — Tue, 10 Nov 2015 17:00:02 +0000

In reply to The Bible is indeed full of

Thanks, Michael. Obviously, I tend toward the mitigation side of the spectrum. I am not interested in killing every last Amalekite, including the children, and I am not going to take a command to ethnically cleanse at face value. But neither do I want to license myself to ignore every passage that happens to be inconvenient to me.

Taking a historical approach to the Bible provides two different tools to help with these difficult questions, putting those archaic passages in context without . First, it's important to think about the historical needs of the original audience. So, the Bible study group I recently joined is doing the Book of Revelations, which is not one of my favorite books in Scripture. But part of studying it, in my church, is asking what was happening to the early Christian communities in Asia Minor that Revelations is addressed to. It makes more sense that way.

One of the best examples of Old-Testament historical context I've ever heard was from the late Reverend Peter Gomes, talking about the anti-gay passages in Torah. Gomes placed those verses in the context of a small nation that desperately needed to maximize population, because they were sounded by warring enemies. That is a society that desperately needed to replace the people it kept losing to armed conflict, and was in danger of hitting the tipping point where they became so small that they might be wiped out completely. In that context, the Torah's emphasis on procreation above any other kind of sex makes worlds of sense. I'd add out that the do-not-lay-with-a-man-as-with-a-woman rule is of a piece with the requirement, which now seems abhorrent to us, to marry your dead brother's widow and have children with her if he died childless. None of us are excited about that rule any more, but it was once a command (although other, later rules conflict with it, because eventually population became a less life-and-death question).

The second tool is to view religion, both Christianity and Judaism, as evolving faiths rather than fixed and static. Yes, the Bible presents these faiths as fully formed from the get-go, but both the external evidence and the inconsistencies in the text suggest that Judaism (like Christianity) went through major changes even during the period described by the Bible.

So, the story of the Sacrifice of Isaac seems strange and barbaric on its own terms, but looks very different when you understand early Judaism as still in the process of separating itself from neighboring religions that may have featured real childhood sacrifice.

[Let me point out here that archeology occasionally confirms things that seem implausible in the Bible, just as it disproves or casts doubt on other things. If I were just reading the Old Testament and trying to sort out fact from fiction on my own, I would heavily discount the accusations that neighboring tribes sacrifice children. It sounds like crazy propaganda. But the archeological evidence, while hotly debated, suggests that child sacrifice may actually have happened the ancient Near East.]

Now, in that context, God's command that Abraham kill his son, followed by God's command to stop the sacrifice and use a ram instead, is a myth designed to move a culture away from an abhorrent practice, and it suddenly rockets into my top five Most Important Stories from Genesis.

The Bible is indeed full of

Michael Wolraich — Mon, 09 Nov 2015 04:51:52 +0000

In reply to Well, Michael, we have to

The Bible is indeed full of beauty and meaning, and the expulsion from Eden is one of the powerful themes in it. I love your interpretation of it.

And yet, the Bible is also full of ugliness and incoherence, especially the Old Testament. Heretics are stoned, or worse. Nations are slaughtered--what we now call genocide. God "hardens Pharaoh's heart" to make him refuse Moses and then punishes him for his refusal by massacring Egyptian civilians. Lot permits his daughters to be raped to protect his guests. Later, he sleeps with them (the daughters, not the guests). Noah condemns his son to generations of bondage for looking at his penis. Abraham pretends that Sarah is his sister to save his own skin, yet Pharaoh receives the punishment for unknowingly screwing Abraham's wife.

Even the garden of Eden story, beautiful as it is, is perverse. God deceives Abraham, telling him that the fruit of the tree of knowledge will kill him. The supposedly duplicitous snake tells Eve the truth, that the fruit will give her knowledge of good and evil. Yet, the snake is a notorious "beguiler" so despised that he is often interpreted as Satan, while God is, well, God.

I understand that one can interpret all these stories and commands in such a way as to make them beautiful and meaningful. Generations of Jewish scholars have devoted their lives to making sense of the all the weirdness in the Torah. This effort seems senseless to me. I value the beauty that I find in scripture but see no need to interpret the ugliness out of it--any more than I feel obliged to downplay the cruelty of Greek and Norse myths in order to keep them alive and relevant.

Doc, I'm not sure whether you personally feel impelled to mitigate the ugliness, incoherence, and factual discrepancies in the Bible, but many people do. Some double down on literalism and adjust their worldviews to fit the Bible, as you have eloquently described. Others interpret the Bible in a way that reflects their worldviews. Usually, it's a bit of both. These two approaches are not equivalent, and I have far more respect for the latter, but I do see both efforts as driven by the need to square a millennia-old text with a modern world that it no longer fits very well.

Right. Great post.

Oxy Mora — Sun, 08 Nov 2015 05:48:09 +0000

In reply to Yes. The Celts had chariots.

Right. Great post.

Well, Michael, we have to

Doctor Cleveland — Sun, 08 Nov 2015 05:47:24 +0000

In reply to Thank you for the thoughtful

Well, Michael, we have to interpret the Bible, one way or another. So we're left right where I was taught God put us: endowed with the intelligence to comprehend God's creation, but also limited and fallible so that we are never capable of full understanding. We are required to approach the Bible with both thoughtfulness and humility.

Where the moral lessons are depends on how you gloss it. Many readers will tell you that Adam's condemnation of Eve (she did give to me of the tree, and I ate) confirms the anti-feminist position of early Judaism. Certainly, medieval and Renaissance Christians trade heavily in the "Eve is the problem" rhetoric.

But I was taught to read that moment (by a Catholic priest, in religion class) as a sign of Adam's sinfulness. Having fallen from grace, he becomes estranged from the natural world, he becomes estranged from himself (suddenly ashamed of his nakedness), and not only estranged from his wife but unable to take responsibility for his actions. Blaming his sin on Eve is, I was taught, a cardinal sign of Adam's fallen state.

The Creation story in Genesis isn't science, and it isn't even consistent with itself. After the Creation story has gone on awhile, it actually starts over and gets retold differently. You can check on that for yourself.

On the other hand, the Adam and Eve story is a pretty explanation of the human role in nature. We use language in ways animals do not. We have been given stewardship over the world (not, as some people hold dominion to do whatever we like with the world, but the authority to be careful stewards). Our species does, in fact, control the fate of the other species and of the Earth; we are unique on this planet. And we are different from the other animals in that we have moral judgment: the Knowledge of Good and Evil really is the deciding factor. We are flawed, in spite of our intelligence, capable of choosing poorly. And we are in some distinct way slightly estranged from nature: we are always in a state of friction with our natural environment. I think the Adam and Eve stories get these key truths across in important ways.

Does the Bible say it's the

Doctor Cleveland — Sun, 08 Nov 2015 05:30:38 +0000

In reply to Do you believe the Bible is

Does the Bible say it's the Word of God? Where does it say that?

My Bible tells me (John, chapter 1), that Jesus himself is the Word of God, the logos.

Yes. The Celts had chariots.

Doctor Cleveland — Sun, 08 Nov 2015 05:28:59 +0000

In reply to The chariot question has been

Yes. The Celts had chariots. And they turn up in archeological digs on the Continent.

But the Irish Celts did not. You can't find any in Ireland.

Irish epic, like the Tain, insists that Cu Chulainn and the boys are tooling around Ulster in chariots. But there are no chariots to dig up in Ulster. Not even in the peat bogs which hold everything.

Maybe the Gaelic insistence on heroes in chariots is a very old cultural memory from before these particular Celts' ancestors migrated from mainland Europe to Ireland. Or maybe it's cross-contamination from Greco-Roman epic. I don't know enough to say.

The chariot question has been

Oxy Mora — Sun, 08 Nov 2015 05:24:50 +0000

In reply to Great blog, Doc, and

The chariot question has been driving me a little nuts.

The Celts had chariots and were used, e.g., in warfare against Caesar, and before. Caesar wrote about them. In continental Europe as well as in Yorkshire and Edinburgh, grave sites circa 2nd century BC have been excavated in which chariot parts were buried underneath the subject elite. So about 3rd century BC is the first evidence.

The ancient war chariots of Syria and Egypt of course far preceded those of the Celts. The Celtic chariot was more of an ox cart, chunky, as one might expect, but with spoke wheels. While the Egyptian chariots had spoke wheels, a bending and laminating---light and strong---system was used on the spokes.

According to Caesar the Celtic method of warfare was to charge right at the enemy and hurl javelins, disrupt the lines and eventually one warrior would jump down for hand to hand combat while the chariot driver would withdraw and wait it out. As I understand the Egyptian method, the driver would charge the enemy front lines, pull a 90, run along the front as the archer picked off victims.

Whether there was any chariot technology or concept transfer from the ancients in the mideast to the Iron age Celts in Europe and the isles is, as far as I can ascertain, not known. Celts used Greek iconography on their coins at the turn of the millenium and it included chariots---not sure what style.

Suffice it to say the Celts weren't running around the Isles in chariots any time after the Roman conquest.

Another element that

moat — Sat, 07 Nov 2015 20:27:39 +0000

In reply to Okay. Here goes. First of all

Another element that influenced religious thought in the 19th century was the discussion that came to a head regarding history and whether it had "laws" of progress and a telos. Hegel, for instance, embraced Spinoza's rejection of an anthropomorphic Divine Being who interfered with the unfolding of creation but insisted there was a designed format for human transformations. Some people have called Hegel's idea an eschatology without transcendence. Along side of this expression of humans becoming something over time, Darwin pops in with the brain melting realization that all natural beings became what they are now after many changes over time.

The straight forward equation of God = Nature, put forward by Spinoza and Descartes, now becomes complicated by new forms of interpretation of what is secular and divine. The rise of the hyper literalist is not only a reaction against the new forms but the expression of a new kind of doubt. Too much understanding of the world may undermine faith. That is a far cry from St. Anselm saying he needed faith to understand the world.

dagblog - Comments for "Joseph's Pyramids and American Popular History"

Very thoughtful commentary.

Sorry, I haven't had any time

Thanks, Michael. Obviously, I

The Bible is indeed full of

Right. Great post. ​

Well, Michael, we have to

Does the Bible say it's the

Yes. The Celts had chariots.

The chariot question has been

Another element that

Right. Great post.