Job 24-39 - God pays a visit...

The readings - Days 159-163 - Job 24-39

Job is a pretty great book, but it just got a whole lot better once I hit chapter 38.

You know those scenes in movies/TV shows where somebody (usually an underling of either a major superhero or a major supervillain) is ranting on and on about their superior only to eventually be confronted by their incredible bad-assness and look utterly, miserably foolish? Well, when that superior is God, it's a good show.

Judges 17-21 - The dregs

The readings - days 83 and 84 - Judges 17-21

I had a professor once named Ephraim. He remains the only man I've ever met (or really even heard of) by that name.

Not that many of the names Jacob gave to his sons has really caught on through the centuries, other than Joshua, Benjamin (I'm pretty sure that most Dans are actual Daniels, so that doesn't count) and the occasional Levi. You don't meet a lot of Manessehs or Naphtalis these days, and as much as I'd love to, I'm pretty sure I'll never meet anyone named Zebulun.

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.

Day 11 - Genesis 32-34

A weird thing happens at the beginning of chapter 32.

1 Now as Jacob went on his way, the angels of God met him. 2 Jacob said when he saw them,"This is God's camp." So he named that place Mahanaim.

Turns out that by this time, visits from/with angels are so common that, while they're still worth mentioning, they're really not that interesting any more...

Day 10 - Genesis 30-31

It's funny how, despite the penchant of certain sectors of Christian society to point to the Bible when it comes to figuring out issues of family and relationships, scripture is chock full of stuff that most people would scoff at, even if they were fans of the daytime talk shows that would be salivating to feature during Sweeps Week.

Strangely enough, it may be that people with family troubles should look to the Bible's famous families, although it may be more of a "look what these people got up to - feel better" type of approach rather than a "let's be more like them" thing. One can only hope.

Days 8 and 9 - Genesis 25-29

So, I'm not just cramming these two days' readings into one post because I know deep down that it's the only way I'll ever catch up and not lag hopelessly behind for ever more.

At least, not exclusively.

The chapter and verse divisions in the Bible are arbitrary enough. I'd look up when they were first introduced, but Wikipedia is down right now in protest of SOPA, so I'm out of luck. They're old though. Really old. Just not as old as the text itself, and that's important.

You can tell, even without Wikipedia's help, that they were fairly arbitrary, because every now and then you find a place where somebody just simply got it wrong. The ending of chapter 27 is one of those places, but more on that a little later.

Day 5 - Genesis 16-18

Names are interesting things in the Bible.

These days, apart from souvenir key chains and schmaltzy plaques/posters, people (North Americans, at any rate) don't really ascribe too much significance to names, but names – of people or places – tend to be incredibly important in the Bible, so much so that God Himself, now and then, lays down the law and throws a name out there, as a promise or a signifier of some larger plan.

Ishmael, for example. "God will hear." What a promise to a pregnant woman who has run away into the desert after being used in perhaps the most profound way, only to be reviled and, in all likelihood, severely beaten for her trouble.