Exodus: Death… Now With 100% More Pillaging!

So if you’ve followed along this far, you know that God had just rained nine plagues down on Egypt because Pharaoh refused to let the Israelites go out into the wilderness to make sacrifices to him. Of course, throughout the plagues God was tinkering with Pharaoh’s brain to cause him to keep refusing permission, so God would have an excuse to inflict more plagues (or, as he called it, “multiply his wonders”). A philosophy that holds more in common with The Party from George Orwell’s 1984 than the loving God Christians claim to worship.

So now things are coming down to the climax of this grand farce. God tells Moses that there’s one more plague coming, and afterwards Pharaoh will finally be able to let them go. So to prepare, he should tell the Israelites to go “ask” the Egyptians for their gold and silver. And because the Egyptians are scared shitless of Moses and the plagues, they give up the treasure.

Then Moses goes in to see Pharaoh and deliver the superfluous warning of the coming plague. And that plague will be the death of the firstborn of every single household in Egypt, from the Pharaoh on down to the servants and prisoners and even the livestock. You know… the livestock who all died in an earlier plague… and then were killed in the plague of hail as well. Someone ought to look into these apparently regenerating livestock – we could be overlooking the solution to world hunger.

Of course, Pharaoh once again ignores the warning because God hardened his heart, and Moses leaves him “in a hot anger.” I don’t blame Moses for being mad; he knows these warnings and demands are a farce since Pharaoh has been denied the freedom to acquiesce to them, and being forced by Yahweh to go back over and over again to play out the same tragic puppet show must be really frustrating.

Next God gives some very specific orders about how the Israelites should protect themselves from having their firstborn killed. Every household is supposed to take an unblemished year old lamb (either goat or sheep), kill it, and mark their doorposts and lintels with the blood. Then they are to eat the lamb – all of it including the head and guts. And it must be roasted; not raw and not boiled. They are to have a side of unleavened bread and use bitter herbs. And anything that’s left over must be burned before morning. And they have to eat it with their belts fastened, their sandals on their feet, and their staffs in their hand. And they have to eat it quickly. This is the Passover, so named because while they’re having this little feast God will pass over their houses on his mission to kill all the firstborn of Egypt. And the reason for eating quickly while fully dressed is because God said after the firstborn were killed the Egyptians would kick them out of Egypt immediately.

Then they are given instructions that every year for the rest of time they are to celebrate the event by eating only unleavened bread for seven days. Anyone who doesn’t is supposed to be cut off from Israel. Oh yeah… and their slaves can partake of it as well. Here we are, the Israelites haven’t even been released from their own slavery and they’re already making statutes for stuff their slaves are allowed to do. Well, at least we know God and the Israelites have no issue with slavery, just with themselves being slaves.

So, all the instructions having been given, the appointed night comes and sure enough god kills all the firstborn.

“Ex 12:29 At midnight Yahweh struck down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the captive who was in the dungeon, an all the firstborn of the livestock.”

There are those regenerating livestock again. Some of them are being killed for the third time! Also interesting to note that the captives in the dungeon – you know, people who are explicitly not participating in the society that was oppressing the Israelites – were also punished.

Anyway, at this point Pharaoh summons Moses and Aaron, and he tells them to take their people and get the fuck out right now. So the Israelites depart with the gold and silver they plundered from the Egyptians. According to the Bible, there were six hundred thousand men, plus women and children (who aren’t numbered, since only the men are important in the Bible). So… let’s say between 1.5 and 2 million people. According to the Bible, they had lived in Egypt as a people for 430 years.

So then Yahweh gives Moses some additional instructions about the Passover feast. Foreigners and hired servants aren’t allowed to eat it unless they are circumcised. Slaves can eat it (after they are circumcised). It has to be eaten in one house, and no part of it can be taken outside. None of the lamb’s bones can be broken. He also instructs Moses that all the firstborn, whether humans or livestock, are to be consecrated (i.e. sacrificed) to him.

Moses passes on all the instructions to the Israelites, though he makes some alterations (are we supposed to assume that God told him all of these details and the Bible just didn’t bother to record that part of the conversation, or that Moses just made this shit up?).  For example: though all the firstborn supposedly belong to God, Moses tells the Israelites that a donkey can be redeemed (bought back) by substituting a lamb. But if you can’t afford the lamb, you have to break the donkey’s neck. The very next thing he says is that you redeem a child with a lamb as well, but nothing is said about what you do if you can’t afford the lamb. Do you have to break the child’s neck? He doesn’t say. I guess you just better make damn sure you can get a lamb somewhere.

So the Israelites set out from Egypt with God leading them on, appearing in the form of a pillar of smoke during the day and a column of fire by night. But instead of leading them directly toward Canaan (they would have to pass through Philistine lands, and God doesn’t want them deciding to go back to Egypt to avoid war with the Philistines), he leads them toward the Red Sea where he has them set up camp. Then:

“Ex 14:4 ‘And I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and he will pursue them [the Israelites], and I will get glory over Pharaoh and all his host, and the Egyptians shall know that I am Yahweh.’ And they did so.”

Oh… did you think he was done fucking with Pharaoh’s mind? Not at all! Pharaoh set out to pursue the Israelites because God once again took over his mind and forced him to do it. In fact, it’s repeated at least two more times in the story that God changed Pharaoh’s mind and forced him to pursue the Israelites. Apparently this fact is very important in the original text, but for some reason it was never part of my Sunday school lessons on Exodus. Possibly because it’s indefensible.

So Pharaoh gathers up his army and sets out after them. When the Israelites saw the army approaching, they got scared and started asking Moses why he’d dragged them out here into the wilderness if all they were going to get out of it was being killed by Pharaoh’s army. Moses responds that they should just trust that God will fight for them.

God then commands Moses to hold out his staff over the sea, and it will part for them so that the Israelites can cross. Now… we all have this image in our heads from things like the Charlton Heston movie The Ten Commandments where the sea leaps up at his command. What’s actually described is that God brings up a strong east wind that pushes the sea apart slowly over the course of an entire night. He (in the form of the pillar of fire/smoke) moves between the Israelites and the army in order to keep the Egyptians from attacking while this process is going on.

Then the Israelites begin to cross the sea. And once they’re across God gets out of the way so the Egyptians can pursue them. Now… I always thought even as a child that these Egyptians were pretty stupid. I mean, epically dumb on a level seen only in Congress. After all these plagues and with the sure knowledge that God will happily kill people by the cartloads, they then choose to follow the Israelites between these massive walls of water. Well, the Bible provides an answer to that stupidity.

“Ex 14:17 ‘And I will harden the hearts of the Egyptians so that they shall go in after them, and I will get glory over Pharaoh and all his host, his chariots, and his horsemen.’”

That’s right. The secret to the Egyptians’ stupidity turns out to be God. Because he thinks it brings him glory to take over their wills and march them like mindless little lemmings into an obviously suicidal situation.

So there we go. God marches the Egyptians into the sea. Then he sends them into a panic while he sends the water crashing back in on them. The Egyptian army and the Pharaoh all drown, and the Israelites are free. So they sing him a song, and the captivity in Egypt is over.

In the next post, we start the Israelites’ journey to Canaan. If we’re lucky we’ll get as far as the Mount Sinai and the Ten Commandments, but that depends how much commentary is needed along the way. Quite a bit actually happens between here and there, though it’s not all that dramatic so we don’t hear about it a lot.

Take care all!

Exodus: A Plethora of Plagues

Well, well, here we are again. Spent a lot of time in the last post railing on the parade of horrible storytelling, translation choices, and moral implications in what I was reading, and so didn’t get very far in the actual story. But today we start getting into the meat of the Exodus tale.

After securing Moses’ agreement to do his part in freeing the Israelites, God checks in with Moses’ brother Aaron and tells him to go out to meet Moses. So they meet up, and Moses explains the marching orders to his brother. Then they go and meet up with the elders of Israel and do their little magic show to convince them to go along.

Next stop is Pharaoh, to inform him that Yahweh has given orders that the Israelites are to go out into the wilderness for three days to worship him. Pharaoh is like “Who’s this Yahweh  character, and why should I care what he has to say?” Then he goes on to say that clearly the Israelites clearly have too much time on their hands if they’re worried about taking three days off to worship their god, so the solution is to give them more work to do. So he orders the overseers, who had previously supplied the Israelites with straw to use in making bricks, to tell the slaves to gather their own damn straw without lowering the brick quota at all. Then he had the Israelite foremen beaten when they couldn’t keep up with the work. The result was that the Israelites got pissed at Moses and Aaron for bringing the punishment on them.

So Moses turns around and whines to God about about how could he bring such evil on his people. And God basically says words to the effect of “Just you wait. I’m a total badass and I’m about to bust Pharaoh up something good. Then you guys will finally get the land of Canaan that I promised your ancestors. Go tell the Israelites that,” (except that in the Bible he takes a lot more words to say it). But the Israelites didn’t believe it because the Egyptians had crushed their spirits.

God then tells Moses to go back to Pharaoh to demand his people’s release again. Moses protests that if the Israelites won’t even believe him, how the hell will he convince Pharaoh? But God will hear nothing of it, and sends him anyway.

Next, totally out of the blue, the narrative is interrupted to spend about fifteen verses on the genealogy of Moses and Aaron. And when the text finally gets back to God sending Moses and Aaron to talk to Pharaoh we get this verse:

“Ex 7:1 And Yahweh said to Moses ‘See, I have made you like God to Pharaoh, and your brother shall be your prophet. 2 You shall speak all that I command you, and your brother Aaron shall tell Pharaoh to let the people of Israel go out of his land. 3 But I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and though I multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, 4 Pharaoh will not listen to you. Then I will lay my hand on Egypt and bring my host, my people the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great acts of Judgment.’”

Remember in my last post where I put up a verse in which God promised to take away Pharaoh’s ability to choose to let the Israelites go, and then punish him for not letting them go? Well, just in case you thought that verse was an anomaly, here we see that promise repeated again. And later, you will see him explicitly fulfill it.

Now, I’d like you to take a moment to think about the implications. When this God character feels he has a point to make, he is perfectly willing to fuck with people’s minds to change their thoughts and decisions. Ironically, I’ve often heard Christians claim that they can have absolute certainty because of God. But this tells us the exact opposite is true – a world that contains this God would be a world in which your thoughts and decisions can be arbitrarily changed at the whim of this deity. And what’s more, your holy book explicitly states that he does do this. And that he punishes people for the decisions that he forces them to make! This is an arbitrary, horrific, Orwellian nightmare of a world!

Speaking of Orwell, how many of you have read 1984? There’s a scene where the bad guy is explaining to the protagonist about how the most important thing in the world is power. He then goes on to say that it is by making people suffer that you demonstrate power, because they would wish to stop you from doing it and be unable to. Think about that as we go through the Exodus story, because it’s pretty much the same philosophy.

Back to the Bible: Moses and Aaron go back to the Pharaoh who demands that they prove they represent their god by performing a miracle. So Aaron throws down his staff and it becomes a snake. But Pharaoh’s magicians turn their own staffs into snakes to show that there’s nothing special about Aaron’s trick. And even though Aaron’s snake then eats theirs, the Pharaoh remains unconvinced.

Now we start getting into the plagues. God has Moses and Aaron confront Pharaoh in the morning when he goes down to the river and wave their staff over the Nile to turn it to blood. Which they do. And according to the text not only does all the water in the Nile turn to blood but so does all the water throughout Egypt “even in vessels of wood and in vessels of stone,” (Ex 7:19) But then the Pharaoh’s magicians “did the same by their secret arts’ (Ex 7:22), though how the hell they could turn all the water in Egypt into blood when all the water in Egypt was already blood is never really explained (because the author is a crap storyteller, as I may already have mentioned). So Pharaoh is unconvinced of Yahweh’s power and still refuses to let the Israelites go.

Seven days later, Yahweh orders Moses and Aaron to go tell Pharaoh that if he doesn’t let the people go, he will plague the land with frogs. The narrative then skips any mention of them actually talking to Pharaoh and/or him refusing to let the people go, jumping straight to God giving Aaron the order to commence the plague. So Aaron waves his staff about, plagues of frogs wash over the land, and then the Pharaoh’s magicians do the same thing again (how the hell did anyone tell the difference between Yahweh’s plague of frogs and the magicians’ plague of frogs?).

Pharaoh then calls in Moses and Aaron and tells them he’ll let the Israelites go make their sacrifices to God if they’ll plead with Yahweh to end the plague of frogs. So they plead with God, he kills all the frogs (leaving everyone to clean up mounds of rotting frog corpses), and Pharaoh immediately reneges on his word.

So Yahweh orders Moses to tell Aaron to strike the dust of the earth with his staff and turn it into gnats. Which he does. The magicians, who are able to turns vast quantities of water into blood and produces plagues of frogs, for some reason are unable to make gnats. So now they finally believe the plagues are from God because Moses and Aaron had a trick they didn’t. But Pharaoh still wouldn’t listen.

Next came the plague of flies. And now Pharaoh seems to be bending – he tries to negotiate with Moses and Aaron by saying the Israelites can take time off to make their sacrifices, they just aren’t allowed to leave Egypt to do it. Moses replies that their sacrifices are so repugnant to the Egyptian people that they’d be stoned to death if they did them where the Egyptians could see, so they really do need to leave Egypt to do them. Pharaoh acquiesces, Moses talks to God, and the plague of flies ends. Then the Pharaoh goes back on his word again. I’d say he’s being a dick and/or exceptionally thick, but recall that these constant refusals are the result of God “hardening his heart.”

So Yahweh sends Moses and Aaron to warn Pharaoh that he’s going to kill all the Egyptian livestock. Which he does, while sparing all the Israelite livestock. Of course, Pharaoh the meat puppet continues to play his role and refuse to let the Israelites go.

Next, Moses and Aaron are sent to Pharaoh with handfuls of soot from a kiln, which they throw up in the air and it spreads out over all of Egypt, causing everyone it touches to erupt into boils. After which:

“Ex 9:12 But Yahweh hardened the heart of Pharaoh, and he did not listen to them, as Yahweh had spoken to Moses.”

These repeated warnings and demands issued to Pharaoh have become a sad farce. A stupid, scripted little puppet play in which Yahweh sends Moses and Aaron to issue demands and punishments to a man whom Yahweh himself is preventing from complying. It’s both pathetic, and sick.

The next plague is hail, which somehow manages to kill Egyptian livestock in the fields despite the fact that all of the Egyptian livestock was summarily killed two plagues ago. And once again the sad farce of Pharaoh pleading with Moses to end the plague in exchange for letting the Israelites go sacrifice to Yahweh, followed by Pharaoh once more having his heart hardened and going back on the promise so Yahweh can punish him some more.

I can’t believe there are people who find this shit inspirational.

Eighth plague. Unheeded warning issued to Pharaoh, plague of locusts devour all the crops, Pharaoh pleads for plague to end, plague ends, Yahweh makes Pharaoh go back on his word yet again. Do you see yet why I found this book so depressing?

Ninth plague is darkness. Lather, rinse, repeat.

If you’re at all familiar with the story, you know what’s coming. If not, wait for tomorrow – I’ve typed long enough for today, and frankly it’s starting to get me down.

Exodus: Name Shame

We rejoin Moses as he’s tending his father-in-law Jethro’s flocks by the mountain of… wait… did I just say his father-in-law was named Jethro? Yep. But didn’t I say in the previous post that he’d married Reuel’s daughter? Yep. Hmmm… something doesn’t jibe here. Maybe I read the earlier passage wrong. So I went back and looked. Nope, it’s pretty clear that Moses’ father-in-law was Reuel. So what’s the deal?

Enter the internet. Turns out, Moses’ father-in-law is referred to in multiple places in the Bible, and by many different names. And nobody seems to agree on why. Some think the passages actually refer to different people, some think it’s the same guy with multiple names, some think that some references are names and others are titles, and some think it’s just the kind of errors that creep in when multiple oral tradition stories get cobbled together into written form by different authors.

I’m going with the error theory, myself. Because even if one of the other theories are correct, there’s no fucking way to tell from what I’ve read so far in the Bible. And that is an error in its own right.

Anyway, Moses is tending the father-in-law-of-many-names’ flocks on the mountain of Horeb. And “the angel of the LORD” appeared to him in the form of a flame burning in a bush without consuming it. So naturally Moses pauses to give this curious sight a gander. As he draws close, God announces himself to Moses and starts the conversation by telling him to take off his sandals because he’s on holy ground. Then he actually explains who he is, and Moses is scared.

God goes on to explain that he’s noticed how the Israelites are suffering in Egypt, and wants Moses to go lead them out of captivity into the lands he’d promised their ancestors. Moses immediately starts whining about who is he to do bring the children of Israel out of Egypt. When God assures him that he’ll be with him, Moses brings up his next complaint that when he talks to the Israelites, who should he tell them sent him? This results in the famous “I AM WHO I AM!” response. Followed by:

“Ex 3:15 God also said to Moses ‘Say this to the people of Israel, “The LORD of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.” This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.’”

Now, this struck me as pretty awkward. His name is “The LORD of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?” That’s a real mouthful. Not to mention kind of a stupid name. But then I remembered that the translation notes in the introduction said something about the meaning of seeing LORD in all caps like that. So I went back and reread it.

It turns out that the translators chose to substitute “the LORD” wherever the Hebrew text used God’s actual personal name YHWH (or as we might say it today ‘Yahweh’). Their excuse was basically that when ancient Hebrews read the text aloud they always substituted the Hebrew phrase “the lord” in place of the name because they believed Yahweh’s personal name was too holy to be spoken. This obfuscation takes place in a book that claims to be striving for the most literal possible translation of the text.

Yes, I said obfuscation. As in deceit. Sure, they explain in the Foreword that they’re making the substitution, but who reads or remembers Forewords? And really, even now that I’m fully conscious of it, there’s still a substantial difference in tone and impact between reading God declaring “I am the LORD,” instead of “I am Yahweh.” One is just a statement of identity, and the other is a claim to be the universal embodiment of authority. And there’s a lot of repetition of that phrase or something like it throughout the Exodus story. It’s a retelling of the text designed to hammer the reader over the head constantly with that declaration of authority – pure emotional manipulation. I think that throughout this section, when I quote the text I will reverse that substitution. So that passage above becomes

“Ex 3:15 God also said to Moses ‘Say this to the people of Israel, “Yahweh, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.” This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.’”

This translation also has the virtue of making sense. Incidentally, the true translation fits in with the theory that Yahweh was just one of many gods worshipped throughout the region at the time, and therefore a personal name was needed to differentiate him from the others. Just a thought.

So where was I? Oh yeah, God had just ordered Moses to tell the elders of Israel that Yahweh had sent him to lead them out of captivity. Moses complains that they won’t believe him, so God gives him some parlor tricks to persuade them. He gives him the trick of turning his staff into a snake, and another one where he can put his hand inside his cloak and when he pulls it out it will appear pale and sickly, then he puts it back in his cloak and it comes out looking normal again. Stuff that would get him laughed off a Vegas stage, but probably looked pretty impressive back then.

So now Moses has a couple miracles to work with, but he’s not done weaseling. He claims that he’s not a good speaker, and can’t persuade people. When Yahweh promises to give him the right words, that’s still not good enough and Moses asks him to send someone else. Yahweh gets pissed at the wrangling at this point, and tells Moses that he can use his brother Aaron to speak for him, but he still has to go and do the deeds.

At last, Moses agrees and goes to ask his father-in-law (still Jethro) for permission to go to Egypt and check on his relatives. Jethro readily agrees, and Moses sets off with his family. Now get this as Moses starts his journey:

“Ex 4:21 And Yahweh said to Moses ‘When you go back to Egypt, see that you do before Pharaoh all the miracles that I have put in your power. But I will harden his heart, so that he will not let the people go.’”

God then goes on to say that if Pharaoh will not let his people go (and remember, he’s just said that he will take away Pharaoh’s ability to choose to let them go), then God will kill his firstborn son. Free will? Fuck that noise! God has a point to make, and if that means he has to take away Pharaoh’s free will in order to justify raining down holy destruction and misery, then so be it!

Though I suppose it’s worth pointing out at this point that nowhere so far has the Bible said humans have free will at all. But it very clearly is saying here that God is quite willing to punish people harshly for shit that he himself makes them do!

OK, back to the story, because there’s more nonsense to come. So Moses has agreed to Yahweh’s demands, and has set out for Egypt with his family. The very next verse after God tell him he’ll kill Pharaoh’s firstborn, with absolutely no transition, explanation, or indication that God has any reason to be further upset with Moses, reads as follows:

“Ex 4:24 At a lodging place on the way Yahweh met him and sought to put him to death. 25 Then Zipporah [Moses’ wife] took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin and touched Moses’ feet with it and said ‘Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me!’ 26 So he let him alone. It was then that she said ‘A bridegroom of blood,’ because of the circumcision.”

Yeah… it makes exactly that much sense. I suppose you could take it to mean God was pissed that Moses hadn’t circumcised his sons yet, but this would be about as nonsensical a way as you could come up with to go about explaining it. Divinely inspired brilliance in writing yet again.

The sheer density of nonsense in these few passages has made it difficult to make much progress in the story today. Hopefully the next entry will move it forward some more – at the very least we’ll get Moses met up with his brother Aaron and into Egypt to begin the divine terror campaign!

Exodus: Let’s Meet Moses

So after fifteen posts, we’re finally done with the first book of the Bible. Incidentally, that’s 5% according to the reader app on my phone. And now we find ourselves at the beginning of Exodus, with the Israelites living in Egypt. At first, the situation is pretty good for them and they multiply rapidly.

But eventually a new Pharaoh comes on the scene, and he didn’t know Joseph and so doesn’t feel any particular obligation to his people. But he is afraid that there are getting to be so many of them that, if Egypt were to go to war with another people, the Israelites might join in on the other side and really mess things up for them. His solution is a campaign of oppression, because nothing says “don’t side with my enemies” like oppressing the fuck out of people.

He set overseers over them and worked them like slaves, making them build cities and work the fields. But the Israelites still found time to boink like bunnies, and kept making more babies faster than the Pharaoh liked. So then he told the Hebrew midwives to kill any boy babies the Hebrew women bore, but let the girl babies live. Surprise surprise, they didn’t comply with the order to kill their own people’s babies. When Pharaoh asked why not, their answer was basically “Hebrew women aren’t like your pansy-ass Egyptian women. They give birth before we even get there!” So Pharaoh ordered the Egyptians to kill Hebrew baby boys by throwing them into the Nile.

So one day a nameless Levite couple has a baby boy, and the mother tries to hide him from the Egyptians. After about 3 months she decides she can’t hide him anymore, so she puts him in a basket to stash him among the reeds by the river. She leaves his sister behind to watch and see what happens to him.

It happens that the Pharaoh’s daughter comes down to the river to bathe, and finds the baby. She realizes right away that it’s a Hebrew baby, but rather than follow her father’s order about killing it she decides to keep it. She sends the baby’s sister (not knowing that’s who it is) to find a Hebrew woman to act as nursemaid. So of course the baby’s mother ends up being the paid nursemaid to her own son, whom the Pharaoh’s daughter adopted and named Moses.

After Moses had grown up, he comes across an Egyptian man beating a Hebrew. And seeing as there’s nobody else around, he kills the Egyptian and hides his body in the sand. But the next day he comes across two other Hebrews fighting, and when he tries to break it up one of them says “Why? You gonna kill me like you killed that Egyptian guy?” So Moses realizes that people know about the murder, and flees Egypt to settle in the land of Midian. There, Moses helps out the priest Reuel’s daughters when some shepherds try to prevent them from watering their flock at a well, so Reuel takes him in and gives him his daughter Zipporah as a wife.

While Moses is away, the old Pharaoh dies and the Israelites are praying for release from their slavery. God hears them and remembers his covenant with Abraham (had he forgotten? And had he not noticed up until now that his people were enslaved? The wording sure makes it seem that way).

OK, that’s really all just backstory for when things get really interesting. Because Moses is about to get chosen by God to do some important shit. And we’ll get to that in my next post.

Genesis: Joseph and the Invention of Serfdom

Phew! The Joseph story seems to go on longer than it appears to have any right to. I keep expecting it to end, and then it doesn’t. It’s amazing how little of this stuff actually stuck in my mind from prior readings. I wonder how it is that God’s words aren’t so brilliant that, once read, they burn themselves indelibly in my mind as a continuous inspiration.

But to get back to the story, we last left off where Joseph had just revealed himself to his brothers. They, of course, were terrified that this guy (who’s effectively the lord of all of Egypt, plus the guy in charge of all the grain supplies in all the world) will have it in for them. But he reassures them that what they did to him was just God’s way of getting him to Egypt so that he could save scads of lives with his grain scheme, and therefore it was actually a good thing so he’s not mad at them. I think this may be the first explicit formulation of the “God is so good that even when bad shit happens it’s really something good that you just didn’t realize at the time” argument.

So after reassuring his brothers, Joseph tells them to go back to their father and tell him about how wonderful he’s doing. Also, they should all move to Egypt where he will use his position to make sure they get all the best land in Goshen. When Pharaoh hears about this, he goes one better and tells Joseph to also send wagons for them to use to transport their households back to Egypt, and donkeys laden with “all the best things of Egypt” as gifts.

So the brothers go home to tell Israel/Jacob about Joseph. At first he doesn’t believe, but the scads of gifts sway him and he packs up his household to travel to Egypt. On the way, God appears to him in “visions of the night” (dreams) to tell him not to be afraid to go into Egypt because he will make Israel into a great nation there and eventually bring them out.

Then there are about twenty mind-numbing verses dedicated to listing all of Jacob’s descendants who came with him from Canaan to Egypt. And as usual, while it’s occasionally mentioned that daughters exist, only the sons are named.

Jacob comes to Goshen, and Joseph goes out to meet him. Big tearful reunion. Then Joseph tells them to make sure people know they’re shepherds so they’ll be allowed to stay in Goshen because shepherds are an abomination to Egyptians. I wasn’t sure what the hell that was about, so I looked it up. Apparently the explanation is that since Egyptians considered shepherds outcasts, they wouldn’t want them coming any deeper into Egypt than they had to. Which suited Joseph just fine, since Goshen was pretty good pasture land anyway. Joseph then got a bunch of his family jobs tending to Pharaoh’s personal livestock. The whole family also got a free ration of food from the grain stores Joseph was running (God’s chosen people as immigrants living on the government dole!).

Meanwhile, the famine continued. Over the next years, Joseph bled the people of Egypt of all of their money in exchange for food (literally, the Bible says that all the money in all of Egypt and Canaan was paid to into Pharaoh’s house for food). Once all the money was gone, Joseph then had people give him their livestock to avoid starvation. Finally, when Pharaoh owned all the livestock and all the money, we get to this passage:

“Gen 47:18 And when that year was ended, they came and said to him ‘We will not hide from my lord that our money is all spent. The herds of livestock are our lord’s. There is nothing left in the sight of my lord but our bodies and our land. 19 Why should we die before your eyes, both we and our land? Buy us and our land for food, and we with our land will be servants to Pharaoh. And give us seed that we may live and not die, and that the land may not be desolate’ 20 So Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh, for all the Egyptians sold their fields, because the famine was severe in them. The land became Pharaoh’s. 21 As for the people, he made servants of them from one end of Egypt to the other.”

Did I say the Joseph story was about someone who was rewarded for behaving decently? Time for that retraction I mentioned in the previous post. OK, sure, he forgave his brothers and helped out his family. But in case you missed it, he just turned all the free landowners in all of Egypt into penniless, landless serfs! And he did it in exchange for the very food he was doling out to his own family for fucking free!

This is not insignificant douchebaggery. This is the impoverishment and enslavement of an entire people for personal gain (also, a part of the story that I don’t recall being taught in Sunday school). From a certain point of view, one could see the upcoming oppression of the Jews as just the Egyptians returning the fucking favor. Not that I’m saying it’s justified – propagation of your ancestors’ animosities is a shitty way to conduct a life and a society.

OK, so let’s get on to the end of the Joseph story (and with it, the book of Genesis).

So Joseph sets a statute that all the newly made serfs must pay a fifth of anything the land produces to Pharaoh (since they don’t really own any of it anyway). Years pass, and eventually it comes time for Israel/Jacob to die.

Jacob has Joseph bring his two sons to him, and declares that they should be considered as his own sons when it comes to their inheritance. He then gives them his blessing, and for no stated reason (and over Joseph’s objections) he places the younger one ahead of the older. Then Jacob calls in the rest of his sons to bless them as well. In doing so he strips Reuben of his firstborn status (for nailing with one of his concubines), and also demotes Simeon and Levi because of all the killing they did over Dinah’s rape. He elevates Judah to head of the pack (and, as we recall, Judah is kind of an asshole, so this doesn’t really speak all that well of Israel’s judgment). Anyhow, the descendants of each of the twelve brothers became the twelve tribes of Israel.

After giving his blessings, Jacob died. Then after a forty day embalming process (seriously?!) and seventy days of mourning, a huge procession took his body back to Canaan to bury him in the cave where Abraham had been buried. There’s a reiteration of the argument that the evil Joseph’s brothers did was really good, because God used it for good by bringing Joseph to Egypt to save all these lives (albeit in a vastly diminished quality of life, but that part isn’t mentioned in the argument).

Joseph lived to 110, and on his death bed made his brothers promise that when God took their people out of Egypt they would take his bones with them. Then he died, and Genesis is finally done.

So Genesis gets us from the creation of the world up through the establishment of the twelve tribes of Israel. Next we’ll get into Exodus, which will cover the Hebrews descent into slavery and oppression in Egypt, followed by invading Canaan to become enslavers and oppressors in their own right. Stay tuned!

Genesis: Dreaming Your Way to the Top

So after the weird aside with the sexual exploits of Judah and his children, the Bible brings us back to Joseph.

Remember that he had been sold to Potiphar, the captain of the Egyptian Pharaoh’s guard. And “the Lord was with Joseph,” so that he was successful at everything he did. Potiphar “saw that the Lord was with him,” and that everything he did succeeded, so he made Joseph the overseer of his entire household. But Potiphar’s wife tried to seduce him, and when he refused her repeated advances she claimed to her husband that he’d tried to seduce her (or rape her – the language is kinda flowery and vague). So Potiphar put Joseph in prison.

The prison overseer took a liking to Joseph (once more attributed to God’s intervention. Whatever happened to free will? Though I suppose to this point there has been no mention whatsoever made of the concept of free will, so there’s no reason yet to suppose it exists). So Joseph gets put in charge of the activities of all the other prisoners.

After he’d been there awhile the Pharaoh’s cupbearer and baker were put in prison for some unspecified offense. One night they both had troubling dreams, and in the morning Joseph noticed that they were kind of down. So he asked them about it.

“Gen 40:8 They said to him ‘We have had dreams, and there is no one to interpret them.’ And Joseph said to them ‘Do not interpretations belong to God? Please tell them to me.’”

So Joseph is making the claim to either have a power reserved for God, or to speak for God. So the two men tell him their dreams, and he interprets them to mean that the cupbearer will be returned to Pharaoh’s favor and get his job back, while the baker is going to be hanged. And he asks the cupbearer to mention him to Pharaoh once he’s restored to favor, so he can be set free.

Three days later the baker is hanged, and the cupbearer is restored to favor but forgets to mention Joseph to Pharaoh (I guess accurate predictions of life-altering future events were so common and trivial back then that folks could just forget about specific episodes). So Joseph languished in prison for another two years.

Then Pharaoh has a couple troubling and related dreams. In one he sees seven fat cows eaten by seven skinny cows. In the other, he sees seven healthy ears of grain consumed by seven withered ears of grain. So he starts asking around his advisors if anyone can interpret his dreams, but none of them know of anyone. But then his cupbearer finally remembers Joseph, and mentions him to Pharaoh.

Pharaoh has Joseph brought to him to have his dreams interpreted. Joseph basically says he can’t interpret dreams, but if Pharaoh tells him the dreams then God will interpret them through him (does this sound to anyone else like standard psychic/medium schlock?). So Pharaoh tells Joseph his dream, and Joseph responds that God sent the dreams and they mean that there will be seven years of great plenty, followed by seven years of famine. He then goes on to say that Pharaoh should appoint someone wise to manage their food stores, and order that a portion of the food from the good years should be set aside and stored so there will be something to eat during the lean years.

Well naturally, the Pharaoh decided that this stranger, fortune-teller, and prisoner must surely be the wisest man in all the land, and therefore should get the job. Not only that, he essentially made Joseph his second in command over the entire kingdom (kinda funny that I’ve never really considered before whether this was reasonable behavior – but then, I was a child when I was taught this story). And gave him a wife (the daughter of the high priest of On). This wife, in the seven years that followed, bore him two sons: Manasseh, and Ephraim.

So Joseph had vast amounts of grain saved up during the seven years of plenty that followed. At the end of those seven years the famine began, and when people came to Pharaoh begging for food he told them to go see Joseph.

“Gen 41:56 So when the famine had spread over all the land, Joseph opened all the storehouses and sold to the Egyptians, for the famine was severe in the land of Egypt. 57 Moreover, all the earth came to Egypt to Joseph to buy grain, because the famine was severe over all the earth.”

Fairly certain that “all the earth” is a gross exaggeration, though I suppose it might seem like a reasonable claim to an author ignorant of the true size of the earth and in how much of it people lived even back then. But to continue on… eventually Jacob (or Israel – he’s referred to by both names interchangeably in this story) hears that there’s grain for sale in Egypt. So he sends all of his sons except the youngest one Benjamin (the only one to share a mother with Joseph) to Egypt to buy some grain.

Joseph recognizes them when they arrive at the storehouse, but they don’t recognize him. So he decides to fuck with them a bit and accuses them of being spies. When they deny it, he has them thrown in prison (isn’t the abuse of absolute dictatorial power fun?). After a few days he comes to question them, and when they admit that they have another brother still back home, he tells them that the way they can prove themselves to be honest men is to return home and bring back their youngest brother.

Oh, and apparently most of this conversation takes place through an interpreter, as Joseph is pretending not to know his brothers’ language. But you don’t find this out until the end of the scene when it’s mentioned that Joseph is able to eavesdrop on his brothers’ conversations amongst themselves because they didn’t realize he could speak their language due to the presence of the interpreter. I have no way of judging the poetic merit of the script in the original Hebrew, but I can tell you this: failing to mention the interpreter and resultant linguistic deception until after the whole scene is almost over is crap storytelling.

Anyway, Joseph makes them leave one of their number, Simeon, as hostage against their return and sets the rest of them free. He sends them off with the grain they had purchased, and has one of his servants sneak the money they had paid for it back into their bags (embezzling from the Pharaoh’s coffers?).

They return home and tell Israel/Jacob what happened. He refuses to let Benjamin go back with them for fear that he might lose him (and seems to just write Simeon off as dead). Reuben offers to let Israel kill his own children if he fails to return with Benjamin, but for some odd reason the proposal to let Jacob kill some of his own grandkids to make up for losing a son doesn’t seem to hold much appeal (ya think?!). When they all discover their money is still in their bags, they’re scared that they might be accused of stealing it. So they don’t go back right away.

But eventually the grain starts to run out, and they have to consider going back to buy more. This time they manage to talk Israel into letting them take Benjamin with them, and Judah takes the responsibility for seeing that he is returned. Israel orders them to take presents to the man (Joseph), as well as the money that had been replaced in their packs after the previous trip.

This time when they meet Joseph and he sees that they have Benjamin with them, he has his steward instruct them to join him at his house. They try to give the steward the extra money that had been returned to them on the previous visit, but he tells them that their God had put the money in their packs and he had been paid. So even in a world where their God supposedly shows up and physically manifests to do impressive shit all the time, apparently it’s still OK to invent stuff that he did to give him credit for even when you know that an actual person was responsible.

But then, this part of the story is really about an elaborate prank Joseph is pulling on his dick brothers, so I suppose it doesn’t really matter much.

Anyway, there’s this big impressive meal with Joseph sitting at his table, the brothers sitting at theirs, and the Egyptians in the household sitting at yet a third (because eating with Hebrews is an abomination to Egyptians). Joseph shares the food from his table with his brothers, and Benjamin gets five times as much as the rest of them. Much merriment is had all around.

When the feast is over, Joseph instructs his steward to give them the food they came to buy, and to once again sneak the money they had paid back into their packs. But since he’s not done fucking with them yet, he also has his silver chalice snuck into Benjamin’s bags. Joseph waits a bit after they leave, then he sends the steward out to chase them down, arrest them and accuse them of stealing the chalice.

Of course the brothers are shocked, and invite the steward’s men to search their bags. And of course they find the chalice, and drag them all back to Joseph’s house where he informs them that he will be keeping Benjamin as a slave now. Now, since Judah had promised to take responsibility for Benjamin’s return, he takes Joseph aside for a word. And then he retells the whole fucking story of every goddamn thing that happened from the moment they first came to buy grain (forcing the reader’s eyes to glaze over for several verses), before finally getting to the point and offering to take Benjamin’s place in captivity.

Now, finally, Joseph can’t take it anymore and reveals his true identity to his brothers. And so there is a tearful reunion (slightly tinged by his brothers’ terror that the most powerful man in Egypt might have a grudge against them for the whole selling him into slavery thing).

OK… long story, and there’s still more to it, so I’m picking this as a good stopping point. The stuff that happens after this deserves its own posting, especially since I’ll be forced to partially retract my previous assertion that the Joseph story was about someone who behaved decently. Find out why, when we return!

Genesis: Technicolor Dream Coats

Hello again to anyone who’s reading, and welcome back to my little project of reading and commenting on the Bible.

I realize that, on a certain level, the style I’ve been adopting may be a little tedious. After all, I’m sorta recounting every story and not leaving out many details. Plus, I'm telling them in the order they appear rather than trying to group them into coherent narratives. And since the stories themselves are often tedious, poorly written, and/or nonsensical, some of that is going to bleed into recounting and commenting on them. But the reason I’m doing it is that the Sunday School version of the Bible story most of us get leaves so much out as to be almost entirely divorced from the actual text. So it’s a matter of giving context, and bringing out the details that ministers prefer to (for lack of a better word) hide when asking us to accept the Bible.

So that’s a little bit of what I’m thinking, and why you readers are being subjected to every single story I come across as I read. If it works for you, then by all means keep reading! If it doesn’t, comment and let me know if you’d prefer a different style.

Now back to the Bible. Today we start one of the most famous and well-loved stories of the Old Testament – possibly because it’s one of the very few in which someone behaves like a decent human being and is rewarded for it.

Israel (formerly Jacob) is now settled in Canaan once again with his 12 sons. One of them, Joseph, is his favorite, and Israel gave him a robe of many colors. Now, the Bible says he’s his favorite “because he was the child of his old age,” which seems inaccurate to me. Joseph was the first child born to him by Rachel. The last child whose birth was recorded (and therefore who best qualifies as “child of his old age”) was Benjamin, who Rachel died giving birth to. But maybe it’s just meant to suggest that when Israel was an old man, Joseph was the son who still hung around to help him out.

Anyhow, since Israel is apparently sufficiently unsubtle about Joseph being his favorite that all his other sons are aware of it (and since Joseph has a history of “making a bad report of them” – aka tattling), Joseph’s brothers are not his biggest fans. It doesn’t get any better when, at seventeen, he tells them about a dream he had in which they were all collecting sheaves of wheat, and all their sheaves came and bowed down to his (“Ha ha ha! Someday you’ll all be my bitches!”). Then he steps it up a notch with a dream in which the sun and moon and eleven stars all bowed before him (“Not only you, but mom and dad too!”). Young Joseph was kind of a brat.

A little while later the boys are out pasturing the flock near Shechem (remember that city where they killed all the men and stole all their livestock, women and children, then ran away for fear the neighbors might give them shit for it? Guess they’re feeling kind of ballsy after having gotten away with it). Isaac wants to know what they’re up to, so he sends his little favorite to go snitch on them. When Joseph arrives, he hears that his brothers aren’t there, but in some other town called Dothan.

When Joseph finally catches up with them, they decide that the way to deal with their snotty little bro is to kill him and dump him in a pit. Fine bunch of young men, aren’t they? But the oldest, Reuben, managed to convince them it would be better to leave him in a pit to die of exposure rather than just kill him, since somehow that would mean that his blood wasn’t really on their hands (apparently logic wasn’t a strong suit with them either). Though apparently Reuben’s real intent was to wait for his brothers to go away, then rescue Joseph when they weren’t looking. So good on him.

He didn’t get the chance, though. While the brothers were having lunch, they saw a caravan of Ishmaelites heading by. And Judah convinced the others that as long as they were getting rid of Joseph, they might as well get some profit out of it. So they sold him to the Ishmaelites as a slave, who in turn took him to Egypt and sold him to the captain of the Pharoah’s guard. The brothers then took Joseph’s pretty multicolored robe, slashed it up and spilled a goat’s blood on it, and gave it to Isaac with the story that Joseph had been killed and eaten by a wild animal. Then we get Israel’s reaction:

“Gen 37:35 All his sons and all his daughters rose up to comfort him, but he refused to be comforted and said ‘No, I shall go down to Sheol to my son, mourning.’ Thus his father wept for him.”

Now, I hadn’t actually encountered the word “Sheol” before coming across it reading the Bible, but I had heard from my Jewish friends that they don’t actually believe in Hell. So I was curious what this was about, and decided to look it up. The grossly simplified version is that it is the Jewish version of the land of the dead, where all the dead go regardless of their state of morality, piety, etcetera. The dead wait there in silence, mere shadows of their living selves and in more or less the spiritual/emotional state they were in at the end of their lives. Sheol is physically located deep underground, at the furthest possible distance from God in his heaven.

This is kind of a far cry from the Hell of Christian imaginings with all of its tortures and burnings, but neither is it anything like the Christian Heaven. It’s a completely different (and somewhat unpleasant) conception of an afterlife that reminds me more of the Greek Hades. And I have to wonder why it isn’t mentioned at all in the creation account, since it seems that any given person will spend a damn sight more of their existence hanging out in Sheol than they will spend on earth. Most of the descriptions I found in looking it up made only the sketchiest of references to the Bible as source material, which sort of implies most of the ideas about it aren’t actually contained in the Bible. You’d think it would be worth describing.

Maybe it gets some attention later on, since it seems to me it would be a pretty huge oversight in describing Biblical cosmology to leave it without description.

So after the brothers give their little tale to Israel, the Bible goes off on a weird little aside and kind of ignores the Joseph story for a bit. It diverts to tell the story of his brother Judah, who soon after selling his brother into slavery married a Canaanite woman (we don’t get her name because she’s a woman, though her father was named Shua). With her, he had three sons: Er, Onan, and Shelah in that order. Er grew up to marry a woman named Tamar. Now, I’m gonna give you a long quote here because what happens to Er and Onan is pretty fucked up and the wording is important. And this is not a story they tell much in Sunday school – again, never heard about it until I tried reading the Bible.

“Gen 38:6 And Judah took a wife for Er his firstbaorn, and her name was Tamar. 7 But Er, Judah’s firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord put him to death. 8 Then Judah said to Onan ‘Go into your brother’s wife and perform the duty of a brother-in-law to her, and raise up offspring for your brother’ 9 But Onan knew that the offspring would not be his. So whenever he went into his brother’s wife he would waste the semen on the ground so as not to give offspring to his brother. 10 And what he did was wicked in the sight of the Lord, and he put him to death also.”

That’s pretty fucked up, right? Aside from the irony of those Christians who want to ban books with graphic discussions of sex, I’m told that this passage is the Biblical basis for Christian proscriptions against masturbation.

Now… I know sex education is not a big Christian thing. So I’m going to share a little information that you may not have been exposed to: what was described in that passage was not masturbation. Onan was having sex with his brother’s widow, but pulling out before ejaculating in order to make sure she doesn’t get pregnant. He was doing this because, culturally, those children would have been considered his brother’s children, which would have entitled them to his brother’s (Er’s) portion of any inheritance from Judah. Whereas if Er had no heirs, that portion would belong to Onan. That was Onan’s crime – not spanking his monkey, but screwing his brother’s widow because he’s supposed to give his brother heirs, but deliberately refusing to impregnate her.

There’s been a lot of interesting research on masturbation in recent years. And that research pretty much concludes that it’s healthy and good. Aside from feeling pretty good, it’s associated with all kinds of medical and psychological benefits such as lowered stress, higher reported happiness, even lower prostate cancer rates. That’s right: it fucking prevents cancer and priests are demonizing it because they fail at reading comprehension! I mean, it would be a stupid prohibition even if the Bible actually said it, but this just means it’s doubly stupid.

By the way…in what way was Er wicked in God’s sight such that he deserved to die? Bible never says. Guess the author was too anxious to get to the coitus interruptus portion of the story to worry about giving credible explanations for what led to it.

Anyhow, to get back to the story. After Onan dies, Judah tells Tamar to go back to her father until his youngest son is old enough to give her Er’s babies. But since two of his sons have already died while married to her, Judah’s afraid to lose the third and so when Shelah grows up he doesn’t send him to fetch Tamar.

Sometime after Judah’s wife dies Tamar gets sick of waiting, so she disguises herself as a prostitute (by putting on a veil) and waits by the road where she knows Judah will be passing by. Judah sees her, and decides to hire her. They settle on a young goat as her payment, but since he doesn’t have one on him at the time he agrees to leave his signet ring, cord, and staff as collateral. So Judah does the deed with his daughter-in-law (thinking she’s a prostitute), and she gets pregnant. Later Judah sends a friend of his to deliver the goat to the “prostitute,” but of course she’s not there. And Judah decides not to pursue it because he’d be ashamed to be seen asking around and trying to track down a prostitute.

“Gen 38:24 About three months later Judah was told ‘Tamar your daughter-in-law has been immoral. Moreover, she is pregnant by immorality.’ And Judah said ‘Bring her out, and let her be burned.’”

Given that he’d sold his own brother into slavery, is it any real surprise that Judah is such a fucking hypocrite? Let her be burned? For having sex? From a guy who was out visiting prostitutes? Seriously?! And what kind of society does he live in where just some guy could give such an order and seriously expect it to be followed?

But anyhow, Tamar sent him the staff, signet, and cord he’d given her as collateral on the goat, with a note saying “I’m pregnant by the guy who owns this stuff. Recognize it?” Then he at least had the decency to realize he was a douche. But while he apparently let her live, nothing is ever said of him doing anything to make up for being such a jerk.

Tamar gave birth to twin boys. During the birth one of the babies reached out a hand first, and the midwife tied a scarlet thread around his hand to mark him as the firstborn, but then the hand drew back and the other twin was actually born first. I’m not sure if that’s medically possible – it’s not like the birth canal is a roomy place, and I’m fairly certain that once you’re far enough along to get a hand out into the air there’s no turning back.

Whew! Long post today! I hope it was at least interesting to read. Next one gets us back to the Joseph story.