Deut. 5-10 - so far, so good

The readings - Days 60-61 - Deuteronomy 5-10

So Deuteronomy is progressing...

I'm in an interesting position, because I can't think of a time over the last 60 days when I've felt less motivated to actually make a new post.

It's not because I'm not enjoying the book itself, mind you, because I am, but it's mostly just because so far the book has consisted of nothing but recap from Moses to Israel, so apart from the occasional minor discrepancy between the original account and Moses' retelling, there's just not a lot of new ground to cover.

Deut 1-4 - Wait... what?

The readings - Days 58-59 - Deuteronomy 1-4

I hope I don't jinx it by speaking too soon or anything, but Deuteronomy's not half bad... But yeah, I know I'm done 4 of 34 chapters, so a lot can still happen.

It's got a different... feel... about it than Numbers or Leviticus had. It's somehow (so far) more conversational and less "all-business". We get a four-chapter re-cap to open the book, but it doesn't feel like you're just re-reading things you've already read, because it's Moses speaking. He's telling the Israelites' story back to them. And fair enough, considering how, unlike the preceding two books, this one starts after they're already done their time in the wilderness. He's speaking to the brand new generation that's finally allowed to go in to the Promised Land, with the exception of Caleb and Joshua.

The question of authorship in the Bible has rarely interested me, really. I usually just find it a distraction, and rarely actually contributes to any deeper understanding of the text itself.

Num 26-30 - In which I compare Van Halen to God

The readings - Days 53-54 - Numbers 26-30

Funny how when I fall behind in posting about Numbers, it tends to correspond with the times when Numbers decides to completely abandon narrative and story and revert back to that which earned it its name...

I swear it's not on purpose - it just happens that way.

Anyway, on days 53 and 54, Numbers did just that, and we're back with *drum roll* another census!

Sure, traditionally it was Moses, but I say the author(s) of most of Numbers were these guys...

Num. 18-22 - On keeping clean, fetching water and talking to donkeys

The readings - Days 50-51 - Numbers 18-22

Well, I'm only just reaching the two-thirds mark of Numbers, and I have to say, it's not so bad. Don't get me wrong, it started off with an almost unbelievable lack of pace, but this has been several sustained chapters of actual story - something I wasn't expecting at all.

It also turns out that I did know some stories from Numbers, I just didn't know they were from Numbers. Huh.

That said, however, there are still some dry bits, but even those tend to not be so bad. 18 starts off with, shades of Leviticus, instructions for priests as far as their duties, roles and dinner portions following sacrifices, but what struck me about this was not any of the particulars, but rather the downright casual approach to the concept of "unclean" demonstrated throughout.

Num 14-17 - "I don't want to go -- YOU CAN'T STOP ME!!!"

The readings - Days 48 & 49 - Numbers 14-17

When we last left the Israelites, they had sent a team of spies into the Promised Land. They saw an awesome spot in general, but one that was occupied by people who clearly appreciated what an awesome spot they had and had built up some pretty solid defenses, etc.

Which, and I believe I'm quoting the original Hebrew here, sucked.

Num. 11-13 - On oases and annoyances

The readings - Day 47 - Numbers 11-13

Well, it's been a long road, but it's finally happened. Ladies and gentlemen, we have narrative!! (Insert Price is Right or Wheel of Fortune winning music here now...)

And almost immediately we get a sort of sense as to maybe why the day-to-day episodes of Israel were less important than precisely where they set up their tents in camp.

Long story short: they're still incredibly annoying, collectively.

Lev. 22-27 - on jubilation, priests and prophets

The readings - Days 39-41 - Leviticus 22-27

Yes, I'm behind. No, I'm not catching up today. Yes, I'm over it. 

The final chapters of Leviticus, by and large, fall into the same category of the rest of the book - rules and laws, particularly concerning the spiritual/religious matters for the new and burgeoning nation of Israel. So far, the book has been, not to put too fine a point on it, dry.

There were two things that leapt off the page at me, however, in these final passages. The first is the fact that Moses is even part of this book at all, and the second is the concept of the Jubilee.

Lev 18-21 - Good, bad and ugly

The readings - Day 38 - Leviticus (18) 19-21

So, you rightly ask, what's with the (18) up there?

Well, it turns out that when I was doing yesterday's post I completely forgot about chapter 18. Not one for the easily blushed, that one. It's also quite socially problematic, because here's where we get the first explicit proscription against homosexuality. Well, specifically, homosexual sex. That sounds redundant... Is "homosex" a word? Is it offensive? It's easier to say, but that tends not to matter in cases like this...

Anyway, the problem here (as I see it) is that not only is it explicit, but we as a society generally accept just about every other sex statute (sextute?) listed here - don't sleep with your parents, your cousins, your sisters/brothers, don't marry a woman and her sister/mother, don't have sex with animals, whether you're a man or a woman. These are all things that we as a society - secular or religious - more or less agree on.

Lev. 5-10 - all dressed up and nowhere to go but the slaughterhouse

The readings - Days 33-34 - Leviticus 5-7, 8-10

Leviticus is hard enough to read, but five months (and counting) of moderate-to-severe sleep deprivation makes it impossible some nights. Last night was one of those, so here we are with two days in one post again.

Chapter five starts us off with a discussion about guilt offerings, in fairly significant detail. There's a lot of clean/unclean talk, as tends to be expected and presented as typical in the Old Testament discussions of law and order.

What's less typical, and I don't quite know why, is the fact that despite attempts by people who don't know any better (as well as by some people who ought to ) to portray the Old Testament as ruthlessly legalistic in every way, and to counterpoint the "everyone dies no matter what" picture with the "merciful-God-of-the-New-Testament" idea, this whole chunk of text begins with the depiction of a sliding scale of justice that flies in the face of the typically presented Old Testament view.

Lev. 1-4 - Well, that explains that...

The readings - day 32 - Leviticus 1-4

Remember yesterday? When I said something about Exodus really not having much of an ending?

I'm not so sure it actually ended... Based on the "beginning" of Leviticus (how many books really begin with the word "Then" anyway?) I've actually got several questions about how these book divisions really came about. I know that the chapter/verse splits were arbitrary and done much later, and I know that the way the text was actually recorded was very different (ALTHOUGHWITHNOREALEVIDENCETHATANYOFTHETEXTSTHATCAMEDOWNTOUSTODAYWEREACTUALAUTOGRAPHEDMANUSCRIPTSITSHARDTOSAYWHETHERTHEALLCAPSANDNOPUNCTUATIONPHENOMENONWASHOWTHEORIGINALTEXTWASLAIDOUTEITHERITCOULDJUSTASEASILYHAVEBEENALATERINNOVATIONLIKETHECHAPTERANDVERSEDIVISIONSALTHOUGHTHATRAISESAQUESTIONOFWHYANYONEWOULDTAKEAPASSAGEWITHSPACESANDPUNCTUATIONANDTURNITINTOAJUMBLEDMESSOFLETTERSTHATAREREALLYHARDTOREADBUTIDIGRESS)

Ex. 33-35 - making up

The readings - Day 29 - Exodus 33-35

I had a fair number of expectations going in to this project, but needing to set aside the reading for a while until I stopped laughing was, if I'm honest, not on my list.

Then I started Exodus, chapter 33. Specifically, I arrived at verse 3.

1 Then the LORD spoke to Moses, "Depart, go up from here, you and the people whom you have brought up from the land of Egypt, to the land of which I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, saying, 'To your descendants I will give it.' 2 "I will send an angel before you and I will drive out the Canaanite, the Amorite, the Hittite, the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite. 3 "Go up to a land flowing with milk and honey; for I will not go up in your midst, because you are an obstinate people, and I might destroy you on the way."

 That is how annoying the Israelites are. God doesn't trust Himself not to just destroy them all out of sheer frustration before He's carried out His own plan for them.

Amazing.

Turns out, the Israelites didn't find it all that funny, which I suppose is to their credit - they knew, sort of, what they'd done by this point, and seem to have had the glimmer of understanding regarding just how they'd manage to survive in the desert without a constant supply of food materializing in front of them every morning.

Luckily, here's another example of the sort of unique relationship featured in the Old Testament. Moses is in such a close relationship with God that the two regularly speak "as friends" according to the text.

From this relationship we get Moses directly interceding and changing God's mind, convincing Him to continue to be a physical presence with the Israelites,

I recently was involved in a discussion on Facebook about God, the existence of God, the ridiculousness of some attempts at disproving that existence and other things, when someone piped up with a series of random, unrelated and blatantly wrong points he felt it necessary to make, starting with the notion that the relational aspect of the Christian faith was a later innovation and wasn't actually part of the Bible.

As this passage, and the vast majority of the rest of scripture as well, proves, this is mercifully not the case.

Ex. 25-32 - settling

The readings - Days 25-28 - Exodus 25-32

As it turns out, this wasn't a half-bad section to fall a bit behind on, post-wise. I'm glad that I managed to keep up with the readings every day, though, because slogging through these eight chapters in one go could bog a fella down.

Taken all together, and viewed from a bit of a more distanced perspective, this is a cool chunk of text.

Ex. 22-24 - someones vs. somethings.

The readings - Day 25 - Exodus 22-24

This will be a comparatively short post tonight, because A) it's late, B) I'm not likely to get much sleep anyway and C) lists of laws are, for the most part, pretty dry stuff.

A few of them did stand out, however.

First off, despite what Christopher Hitchens would have had you believe, many (most, in fact) of these laws make perfect sense, and are both equitable and benevolent, despite being from The Bible.

Ex. 19-21 - woman, mountain... it's all the... same?

The readings - Day 24 - Exodus 19-21

Well, it had to happen. I'm not sure that I realized it started this early, but I guess we are halfway through Exodus now, so the law had to come in at some point.

We were all having such a nice time, too, what with our adultery, idol-collecting, mass murder, etc, etc...

Oddly enough (or maybe not even remotely oddly...) before we actually get codified law, we get an example of very bizarre interpretation of law by a judge (Moses, in this case).

Ex. 16-18 - Makin' it RAIN! (only, awesomely enough, not)

The readings - Day 23 - Exodus 16-18

I firmly believe that there is something inherent about the ability of the Bible to stand up to translation. I think that the whole point, from the very beginning with God's promise to bless the entire world through Abraham's descendants, was that there should be no impediment to people's relating to God, and translation is a huge part of that. I think it's right that the Bible should be read in English, Spanish, Farsi, Japanese, Cree and everything else, because I think God's bigger than language differences and linguistic quibbles.

Ex. 13-15 - "...But what have you done for us lately?"

The readings - Day 22 - Exodus 13-15

Remember that thing about the main characters (heroes, sometimes) of the Bible often being so human it hurts just to hear about them? And how that tends to fly in the face of the weird theory that the Bible was written by the people (or their descendants) who "star" in it so that they'll gain something from it?

Yeah, that really starts to pick up here in Exodus. In Genesis, we had flip-flopping, faithless, gutless and/or shameful behaviour on an individual level, because that's the level that, by and large, Genesis worked on. Now that we're in Exodus and we've zoomed out to a more corporate, societal level, we start to get a handle on just how old that axiom about mob mentality ("to determine the overall intelligence of a large group of people, take the IQ of the stupidest people in that group and divide by the number of people present") might be.

Ex. 10-12

The readings - Day 21 - Exodus 10-12

This is a hard chunk of scripture to get through. Not that it's not a good read - if it were a Neil Gaiman novel, there'd be no problem, and it'd be captivating stuff. The problem is that God's still at His "I've made sure he'll say no, now go to the Pharaoh and tell him if he says 'no' you'll do _____" thing, which bugs me - not that that matters particularly, I know...

There are other things that I find somewhat interesting about the interaction between God and Pharaoh (through Moses and Aaron), but this thing with God seemingly forcing Pharaoh to keep Israel in Egypt...

Although now that I think about it, hardening Pharaoh's heart isn't precisely the same as forcing him to say no. It does make it more likely that he will, though. Or, at least, it makes it less likely that he'll feel compassion for the Israelites' plight and have that be the reason for their release.

However, there are loads of other reasons why Pharaoh could have (and probably should have) relented far, far earlier than he did. Even his servants thought so, and eventually actually summon the nerve (or just overflow with exasperation) enough to flat out tell him to let Israel go because this whole thing is destroying Egypt. They're right, of course, but Pharaoh will have none of it, so it comes down to one of the most painful-to-read passages in the Bible, best summed up in a single, horrifying line:

30 Pharaoh arose in the night, he and all his servants and all the Egyptians, and there was a great cry in Egypt, for there was no home where there was not someone dead.

So, 430 years after Joseph welcomes the other sons of Israel to Egypt, they leave in the wake of horror, death and incredible destruction.

Ex. 7-9: Moses' school of witchcraft and wizardry

The readings - Day 20 - Exodus 7-9

You know what I find weird? How many people think that being Christian automatically precludes belief in ghosts, aliens, the paranormal, the occult, witchcraft and all those other things. Well actually, it's not that people think that that confuses me, but rather that people think that because so many Christians will tell them things like it.

Even if I didn't think it was just a waste of time to protest things like Harry Potter or Ouija Boards, and that all that ends up happening is you look a bit silly and are somewhat less likely to be taken seriously next time around, I sort of see it as a sign that Christians who rail against the existence of actual magic and powerful, non-Godly supernatural forces haven't really been paying attention to the Old Testament.

Ex. 4-6 - Moses: the shy murderer

The readings - Day 19 - Exodus 4-6

Rightly or wrongly, there's a certain type of image that pops into your head when you hear about a guy whose on the run, being hunted down for killing a man as vengeance for an injustice.

Being so shy that you become a distinct irritant to the Creator of patience Himself usually doesn't fit in to this picture...

Ex. 1-3 - Zooming out

The readings - Day 18 - Exodus 1-3

Nowhere in the Bible is it as easy to trick yourself into thinking that a cover-to-cover read might just be full of smooth transitions as going from Genesis to Exodus. (Maybe between the Samuels, Kings and Chronicles - we'll find out in a couple of months, I guess...)

But for all the carry-over from Genesis 50 to Exodus 1, there are some fairly significant shifts that happen in these chapters that mark Exodus as an entirely different entity than Genesis.

"Zooming out" is a pun I couldn't resist, but it also just fits with what's going on at the very beginning of the book. In Genesis, one main, overarching theme could be described as God's relationship with people: Adam, Cain, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob...

Exodus seems to be setting itself up, in a very clever way, as a story of God's relationship with a people: the people of Israel. By starting the book with a recap of the basic genealogy of Jacob, the author draws a direct line, without actually tracing direct lines, as it were, from the individual God-human relationships of Genesis to the corporate God-human relationship that will become the theme of... well, the rest of the Bible, really.