Posts
1. For Black History Month today, I watched Episode 5 of Roots. I want to correct some things that I said in my post, Roots 4, Song of Songs Fertility Ritual?, Dahood on Psalm 2, Athaliah the Heroine, Ammonius on Apollo. Please see that post for background information, particularly my comments under (1.).
I said that slavemaster Tom Moore was obsessively afraid of slave revolts. Although he talked about a slave revolt in Episode 4, he didn't bring up the topic again until after Nat Turner had launched his slave rebellion. So was he continually paranoid, or simply responding to a recent event?
I wondered if Missie Ann lost loved ones in the Civil War. I asked this because I was curious about whether or not she suffered on account for slavery, for she betrays her slave friend, Kizzy, in Episode 4. Was there justice? There's a scene in Episode 5 in which Missie Ann is old and doesn't remember Kizzy, and I thought she may have suffered as a result of the Civil War by the time of that scene. Actually, the scene occurred before the Civil War. So did Missie Ann suffer? Maybe not. She's like the people Job criticizes, who oppress others, yet prosper and live to a ripe old age. Personally, I'm a little surprised that old Missie Ann didn't remember Kizzy. She remembered her when she returned to her uncle's (who was actually her father) farm as a young woman, although she hadn't seen Kizzy since their childhood. But maybe old age can cause one's memory to deteriorate. And yet, doesn't Alzheimer's entail remembering the earlier events of one's life, not the later ones? In that case, she should've remembered Kizzy.
I said that Tom Moore didn't experience justice. He did suffer, though. He felt like people regarded him as a cracker, so he was continually trying to prove them wrong. And he accumulated a heavy gambling debt. Is that evening the scales? Not really. But it's something.
I said that I expected Chicken George to kill Tom, and I was surprised that he didn't. Actually, on Episode 5, he was about to do so, since Tom had stripped away his hope for freedom. But his mom, Kizzy, stopped him, telling George that Tom was his pappy. I wonder why Kizzy did that. I doubt that she had affection for Tom, for she regarded him as a "Tubob" who could not be trusted. Maybe she thought that Tom still deserved respect as George's father. I'd think that her primary motive was that she didn't want George to get in trouble for murder, but she didn't mention that (as far as I remember).
One thing that stood out to me today: the Southerners in the movie were excited about the Civil War! I've seen that in other movies. I have a miniseries, The Blue and the Gray, which I may or may not get to for Black History Month. But the Southerners there are elated when South Carolina secedes from the Union! On Queen, by contrast, the Southerners were afraid of the onset of war.
I've thought some about war in my reflections on Black History Month. In Amistad, John Quincy Adams says that the Supreme Court should decide in favor of the slaves, and, if that offends the South and precipitates another war, so be it; in his eyes, it would be the continuation of the American Revolution, a fight for freedom! In my post, Amistad, I Kings 13, I was slightly surprised that Adams didn't consider the negative impact of a war on Americans' lives.
In Glory, the free and educated black, Thomas, enthusiastically enlists in the black Civil War regiment. I wondered if he truly knew what he was getting himself into. I was rather surprised when most of the characters died at the end of the movie, as they lost the battle. In many movies that I see, a man goes off to war and returns as a hero, as he regains his social status with pats on the back. That's what I was expecting for so many of the characters on Glory. But the opposite happened. Their lives were cut short at a young age.
On Roots, Southerners are excited about war. They get to challenge and to beat those elitist, supercilious Yankees! It's like people preparing for a football game. "We will, we will rock you!" But war's not exactly like a football game, as much as we like to treat it as that, in war after war. Lives are lost, or dramatically changed. The Southerners on Queen recognized that, so they were afraid of the prospect of war.
2. In Ancient Israelite Religion, I read Norbert Lohfink's "The Cult Reform of Josiah of Judah: 2 Kings 22-23 as a Source for the History of Israelite Religion." In my post, Great Debaters, Feminism, Dahood, Dtr-What?, We're in Hades!, I discussed different views on the Deuteronomistic History (Joshua-II Kings). Martin Noth said that all of it was composed in exile, whereas later scholars said there was an initial stage written in the time of Josiah, and a later stage in the exilic period. Interestingly, Lohfink says that Wellhausen (who was before Noth, and formulated the Documentary Hypothesis for the Pentateuch) believed that the Deuteronomistic History had two stages. So scholars were actually returning to an older view when they rejected Noth's scenario.
Lohfink also explores the possibility that Josiah's reform was a nationalistic reaction against Assyria, which wanted to shove its customs down Judah's throat. Josiah was standing by traditional Judahite culture, to the exclusion of foreign elements. In this scenario, he was doing what Theodore Mullen claims, even if Mullen doesn't really believe in a historical Josiah, and sees him as a character devised to promote ethnic boundaries to exilic and post-exilic Israel, which was on the verge of losing its identity through assimilation. In the scenario that Lohfink discusses, a historical Josiah was trying to perform the same task---uphold national boundaries and prevent assimilation---centuries before the exile of the Jews.
Some have contended that Josiah had broad nationalistic ambitions. He challenges the imperialistic king of Egypt, for example, losing his life in the process (II Kings 23:29). Was he seeking to recreate the Davidic and Solomonic kingdoms, to restore Israel to her former glory? Was his religious reform a part of that? And is there a theological lesson here? God loved Josiah's religious reform, even if it had a nationalistic motivation. But God didn't exactly share Josiah's nationalistic ambitions, for he allowed Josiah to get killed by the king of Egypt. Often, so many of us seek glory in our religious pursuits, but God wants us to think beyond that.
3. In Psalms I: 1-50, Mitchell Dahood says that "the king was expected to receive the gift of immortality on the day of his coronation" (132). He refers to King Kirta of Ugaritic poetry, who was considered immortal because he was the son of El and Asherah. Here's a summary of his story. He experiences the loss of his family (like Job) and a debilitating disease, from which El saves him. But the story ends with his son attempting to take over the throne, so we're not told if Kirta dies or not.
Dahood is making these points in commenting on Psalm 21:5, which (in his translation) reads: "Life eternal he asked of you, you gave it to him; length of days, eternity, and everlasting." Does eternity mean forever and ever here, or merely a very long time, meaning the Psalmist is saying that the king will live long before his death? Or could the king's eternal life exist in the perpetuity of his dynasty?
In the Book of Daniel, foreign kings are told to "live forever" (Daniel 2:4; 3:9; 5:10; 6:6, 21). But they died! Were they being told literally to live forever, or did living forever mean something other than a life that does not end?
4. In my reading of Theodore Mullen's Narrative History and Ethnic Boundaries, particularly pages 93ff., I was unclear as to whether he believed that the Deuteronomistic Historian used old traditions to compose his history. Mullen seems to say "yes" and "no," but I may be misreading him. I can understand if he's saying "no," for, to him, the stories speak so appropriately to Israel's exilic and post-exilic period that it makes sense they were invented at that time. But could they have a historical kernel, even if the interpretation of that kernel is rooted in an ideology responding to the Jews' exile?
5. For my reading of John Dillon's The Middle Platonists, something on page 277 caught my eye: "The second [example of Albinus' scholastic method] is the ascent through those propositions that can be proved and demonstrated to propositions which are indemonstrable and immediate. The illustration for this process is the enquiry into the immortality of the soul in Phaedrus 245Cff."
Phaedrus is a Platonic dialogue, and you can see a summary of its arguments on the immortality of the soul here. I may not understand them entirely, but I wonder how much they're based on presuppositions and analogies. Plato says, for instance, that the soul is self-moving, so it's always been around. But why's he think that? Even if it's self-moving (and I'm not sure what that means, at the moment), why couldn't a creator have made it in a self-moving state, meaning it's self-moving and had a beginning? Plus, why couldn't it stop self-moving---at death?
Plato says that the soul is immortal because it's most like the divine. But do similarities in some areas have to entail similarities in all areas, in this case, immortality?
Here's a summary of the Opposites Argument:
Whatever has an opposite comes to be from its opposite; the cold from the warm, the weaker from the stronger, the sleeping from the waking. Between every pair of opposites there must always be two processes of transformation, e.g. cooling down and warming up, falling asleep and waking up. Living and dead are evidently opposites, and one of the processes between them, namely dying, is evident to us. We may infer that there is a second process by which living things and stuff come from dead things or stuff. This conclusion is taken (by a palpable equivocation on ‘the dead’) to mean that ‘the souls of the dead must be somewhere whence they can come back again’. An appendix argues that if the process from life to death were not matched by a process from death to life, then the original stock of living things would have been exhausted in the infinite past.
But, just because there are opposites in nature, why's that mean that everything has to have an opposite? So there's warm and cold. That doesn't mean a process from death to life has to exist just because there's a process from life to death.
Then there's the Argument from Knowledge:
Our ability to give the right answers in abstract discussions shows that we possess a kind of knowledge (of the Forms, as it happens) that we must have acquired before birth. It follows that ‘our souls existed apart from the body before they took on human form’. That they continue to exist after we die is said to follow by combining this proof with the Opposites Argument outlined above.
But how much is that due to our socialization? Plus, couldn't God have created our soul with knowledge of the Forms built in, meaning that our innate knowledge doesn't have to mean that our soul always existed, or forever will exist.
I've not read the dialogue, so maybe I'm missing stuff. But the summaries bring to my mind Dillon's comment that Plato tried to go from the proveable to the indemonstrable. I just wonder if his connection of those two things was rather tenuous.
