1. I’ve been a little negligent lately in honoring the dead. Congressman Jack Murtha passed away recently, and I just learned that former Congressman Charlie Wilson has died as well. Both were Democrats.
Regarding Murtha, I was against him because I was pro-Bush, and Murtha was criticizing the Iraq War. I had issues with that, so I was glad that the media were uncovering stories about Murtha’s corrupt relationship with defense contractors, in which he funneled government money to them when he was receiving money from a PAC that they paid off (see Rep. John Murtha, Iraq war critic, dies at 77). As a rabid Republican, I was pleased whenever Democrats were discredited. But I’m tired of playing those partisan games nowadays, of hammering one party over every conceivable scandal, while ignoring the scandals of my own party (or blaming them on a liberal smear machine). Yes, Murtha may have done some crooked things, but he also deserves credit. He served his country in Vietnam, and his criticism of the Iraq War was damaging precisely because of the respect that he had in Washington. People criticize him for saying that U.S. Marines slaughtered Iraqi civilians in cold blood, and maybe that was an exaggeration. But he came to speak out against the horrors of war. Did he depart some from his customary hawkishness?
I talked about Charlie Wilson in my post, Charlie Wilson’s War. Charlie Wilson was a boozing, womanizing Congressman, and he had no illusions that he was a saint. Yet, he resolved to help the Afghan people resist Soviet tyranny, and he succeeded in his endeavor. When I watched the interviews with the real Charlie Wilson in the Special Features of my Charlie Wilson’s War DVD, my impression of Charlie Wilson was that he came across as an approachable guy, an ordinary person who did extraordinary things. On the movie, the characters were glib and smooth, as characters in Aaron Sorkin’s work usually are, but the real Charlie Wilson looked like a guy I could talk to.
Jack Murtha and Charlie Wilson had their flaws and their heroism, as do many of us. May they rest in peace.
2. Today, for Black History Month, I watched Antwone Fisher. Denzel Washington was on it. I’ll be watching a lot of Denzel for Black History Month. The Great Debaters will be taping on my DVR tonight. I’ll watch Malcom X at some point, along with Glory. Maybe I’ll see Hurricane, or maybe not. But I’ll be seeing a lot of Denzel, and that’s fine with me! Like Charlie Wilson, he has that approachable, everyday man quality, combined with a masculine sense of gravitas.
Antwone Fisher is about a young naval officer who’s wrestling with the demons of his childhood: being given up by his mom, enduring physical abuse from a Christian foster mother who felt inferior because she was black, sexual abuse at a young age, the death of a close friend who got shot while holding up a convenience store, etc. In the end, he finally met his mom, who was ashamed that she’d given him up and had not made any effort to contact him. Antwone concluded that she was a deadbeat, but he found the warmth and acceptance that he’d always desired, from her extended family.
I like what wikipedia’s article on Antwone Fisher has to say. Its details differ slightly from what took place on the movie, but, in a sense, it’s better:
After the discharge from the Navy, Fisher joined the Federal Bureau of Prisons as a federal correctional officer, and after three years with the bureau, he began work as a security guard for Sony Pictures. It was here where Fisher decided to find his true family members. He contacted Annette Elkins, who turned out to be his aunt. Within months of this contact, Fisher met all of his family, including his mother Eva Mae. He learned that she had given birth to four other children who were all taken away as wards of the state. Fisher said after their meeting: “In the place inside me where the hurt of abandonment had been, now only compassion lived.”
I like the idea of a Sony security guard seeing his story become a big-time movie. And I love the fact that compassion for his mother replaced his sense of abandonment. I wish the movie had explored that a little more.
3. In Ancient Israelite Religion, I read J.J.M. Roberts’ “In Defense of the Monarchy: The Contribution of Israelite Kingship to Biblical Theology.” Roberts wrestled with the various biblical views on kingship, and he said that the anti-monarchy crowd consisted of high officials in the pre-monarchical regime and Israelites who were removed from the threat of the Ammonites and the Philistines. Those who were near those threats, however, wanted a king to protect them.
Roberts doesn’t really accept the popular scholarly theological approach to the monarchy. In this approach, the pre-monarchical state was true Yahwism, whereas the monarchy was Israel’s absorption of a foreign custom. But Roberts says that this is misguided, one reason being that Israel’s monarchy became the basis for Jewish and Christian belief in a Messiah, who would bring peace to the earth. But Roberts still acknowledges that the anti-monarchical viewpoint played a role in ancient Israelite religion: it kept the king in check, preventing him from becoming a proud and oppressive despot (whenever he listened to that viewpoint, that is!).
Some of Roberts’ footnotes were interesting. Roberts pointed out biblical references (Psalm 2:7; 89:27-28; 110:3; Isaiah 9:5) in which the king is described as divine, or as a son of God. He refers to scholarship that attributes this to Egyptian or Canaanite influence. Egypt believed that the king was a god on earth, whereas Canaanites maintained that their kings were adopted sons of God. I’m not sure what to do with that, personally. I can use such language for Jesus, but David and his descendants up to that point were men, with flaws. But they were representatives of God, carrying out his justice. And God equipped them with attributes that could help them rule well and justly—such as wisdom. So maybe they were divine, in a sense. But they still botched things up a lot!
4. In Reading Between Texts, I read David M. Gunn’s “Samson of Sorrows: An Isaianic Gloss on Judges 13-16.” Gunn disagrees with the popular scholarly portrayal of Samson as a muscle-bound, sexually-obsessed airhead, maintaining that Samson desired a genuine relationship with a woman and was destined to die for the benefit of his people. Throughout his essay, Gunn cites passages in Second Isaiah, particularly those about the Suffering Servant, who suffers for Israel in his mission for God. Often, Samson is like the Suffering Servant, but there also seem to be occasions when Gunn contrasts the two, when Samson isn’t entirely obedient or submissive.
An interesting point that Gunn makes is that Samson wasn’t entirely sure that he’d lose his strength if his hair were cut, so he wasn’t thoroughly dense when he told Delilah the secret of his strength, after she had tried to weaken him on previous occasions. According to Gunn, Samson realized that he’d crossed the line with other aspects of his Nazarite vow without negative consequence, so he didn’t entirely appreciate what would happen if his hair were cut. But he did wonder, or he was craving acceptance from Delilah.
Gunn also refers to an article in which he says that Saul suffered and died for Israel’s sin of requesting a monarch, for which Gunn received criticism from a professor of mine at Jewish Theological Seminary, Ed Greenstein. That’s an intriguing outlook. Saul’s always struck me as a tragic character.
Well, I’m done with Reading Between Texts! It was okay, but I thought it emphasized feminism more than I liked!
5. I also completed Theodore Mullen’s Ethnic Myths and Pentateuchal Foundations. Most likely, I’ll be starting another Mullen book tomorrow.
Mullen argues that Deuteronomy came before the Tetrateuch (Genesis-Numbers). In the fifth century B.C.E., Mullen contends, Deuteronomy served to centralize worship at Jerusalem and to highlight Israel’s identity as a covenant people. But Genesis-Numbers were added to supplement that theme (e.g., the covenant), to flesh it out.
A puzzling point that Mullen makes is that there came a point when Deuteronomy’s emphasis on Conquest no longer satisfactorily accounted for Israel’s entitlement to her land, for the Jewish inhabitants came to Palestine, not as conquerors, but as people who’d been conquered. That’s why the Tetrateuch offers other justifications: God’s promise to Abraham, God owns the Promised Land because he created the earth and can give it to whomever he pleases, etc. But, if Deuteronomy originated in the exilic and post-exilic periods, as I think Mullen is proposing, then what was the purpose of the Conquest theme within that context? Mullen talks as if a Conquest theme wouldn’t make sense within an exilic or post-exilic setting, yet that’s presumably the setting that he proposes for Deuteronomy.
So I’m confused. But maybe he tackles this in the next book of his that I will read, which concerns the Deuteromistic History (Joshua-II Kings). For Mullen, Deuteronomy was initially attached to the Deuteromistic History, but it became detached to become the tail-end of the Pentateuch.
6. In The Middle Platonists, on pages 165-178, John Dillon had some interesting stuff on Philo. I won’t cite the exact Philo references in this post, but I may do so in the comments, if a reader asks for a reference.
I often assumed that Philo’s model of creation was this: There’s a transcendent God, and there’s a Logos, who creates the cosmos. It turns out that things are a little more complex than that. Actually, in Philo’s thought, there’s God, and there’s wisdom, a female. Both of them produce two logoi: one is the creator and is called “God”; the other rules the earth and is called “Lord.”
But both of them are the means by which God created and rules, meaning God is still the creator and ruler. This may address my question in yesterday’s post, Census for the Temple, God’s Speeches in Job, Tabernacle Replaces the Intermediary, Creation and Providence, Baffled by Ghost Whisperer: How can Philo say that God loves his creation because it’s God’s handiwork, when Philo technically doesn’t believe that God was the creator, since the Logos was? Actually, God created through the Logos.
But Philo also says that God didn’t create everything. When God said in Genesis 1, “Let us make man in our image,” he was getting help from lower beings, maybe angels. He only did this in the creation of man, for he didn’t want to be blamed for the deficiencies of human nature, so he provided himself a way to pass the buck. For the rest of creation, however, he created alone, which means that he did so through his “God” logos.
Philo also believed that blood was part of the soul, which seems to coincide with the biblical view that life is in the blood (Genesis 9:4; Leviticus 17:11, 14; Deuteronomy 12:23). Or, actually, the rational part of the soul consisted of pneuma (spirit), whereas the lower parts (the irrational, nutritive, and sense-perceptive elements) had blood. Or, actually, the arteries were the seat of the rational part of the soul and had lots of pneuma but a little bit of blood, whereas the veins had lots of blood and were the seat of the lower, irrational parts of the soul (175-176).
On pages 177-178, Dillon says Philo held that the “evil man perishes after death, and has no personal immortality, a view which would after all accord with contemporary Platonist thinking.”
7. I’ll add 7 because I’m superstitious about the number 6. Have a nice day!