Jean Simmons

I just read that actress Jean Simmons has passed away at the age of 80.

Yes, I thought she was a hottie on Spartacus and Elmer Gantry. But it's her later work that made more of an impression on me. I remember her as the person who read the Bible passages on Mysteries of the Bible---in a dramatic, eerie sort of way. And then there's her classic line on an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where she played someone who conducted a political witch-hunt: "I've brought down bigger men than you, Picard!"

R.I.P., Jean Simmons.

UPDATE: I hope this link works. Jean Simmons interrogates Picard, who gives an eloquent speech on civil liberties. If it doesn't work, you can search for the title on YouTube. Enjoy!

Lessons in Humanity: Habeas Corpus

Just, Yet Unjust

1. In Ancient Israelite Religion, I read Abraham Malamat’s “A Forerunner of Biblical Prophecy: The Mari Documents.” Mari was a city in Mesopotamia, and its documents date to the first half of the second millennium B.C.E.

Some things that stand out to me in Malamat’s discussion of Mari prophecy:

Like the biblical prophets, the Mari prophets were concerned about social justice. A prophetic passage exhorts the king, “When a wronged man or woman cries out to you, stand and let his/her case be judged” (36). A letter offers a tangible example of the king executing justice, when he delivers a woman from kidnappers after her companion (at the instruction of the god Dagan) appeals to him for assistance.

Unlike the Bible, however, the Mari prophets usually don’t rebuke the king or the people; rather, they’re often nationalistic and optimistic.

Yet, not all prophets of Mari were professionals, so one can’t say that all of them were going with what benefitted their pocket-books when they made their prophecies. There were professional prophets, and there were lay prophets.

Malamat also makes this point about how Mari tested prophets, as opposed to biblical criteria for whether prophets are true or false: In contrast [to Mari], in Israel the prophetic word, whether accepted or rejected by the king or the people, is never subjected to corroboration by cultic means; it is simply vindicated by the test of fulfillment (47). Mari’s techniques for verification included seeking omens through divination and “sending the hem of the garment and the lock of hair of the prophesier” (47).

2. Last night and today, I read quite a few essays in Matitiahu Tsevat’s The Meaning of the Book of Job and Other Biblical Studies. One essay I read was “God and the Gods in Assembly.” In Psalms 58 and 82, God judges the gods who tolerate or favor the wicked. Although many (perhaps even Jesus in John 8:34-35) have interpreted the “gods” as unjust human judges, Tsevat appears to see them as the actual gods of the nations. After all, does not Deuteronomy 32:8ff. say that the Most High apportioned the Gentile nations to the gods, while reserving Israel for YHWH?

It’s interesting that Tsevat has this essay in his book, considering that his essay on Job says that God in his whirlwind speeches denies that he engages in just retribution (see Vegetarians Start to Eat Meat, God Discusses Justice with Job). Essentially, Psalms 58 and 82 accuse the gods of the other nations of the same things that Job attributes to the true God: of tolerating (and thereby encouraging) wickedness. The message of so much of the Bible, however, is that God judges the wicked.

Why’s the world as screwed up as it is? Could it be that so many nations are ruled by unjust gods? Apocalyptic literature makes this point. The angel Michael, after all, had to contend with the princes of Persia and Greece in order to reach Daniel (Daniel 10:13, 20). Are there unjust spiritual powers behind earthly rulers?

Could this have been Pat Robertson’s point about Haiti? I’m not sure if the Haitian slaves believed they were making a deal with the devil, but (assuming the folklore is even true, which is disputed) could they have made one with an evil spiritual force? Maybe God didn’t cause the earthquake. In the Book of Job, after God allows Satan to do with Job as he pleases, a wind kills Job’s sons and daughters while they are eating and drinking (Job 1:18-19). Can Satan cause natural disasters like tornadoes, perhaps even earthquakes? When people make a deal with an evil spiritual force, are they inviting any mayhem that such a force may cause, for its twisted pleasure? And that’s not to mention the factors behind Haiti’s poverty that clearly flow from injustice, the sorts of things that Psalms 58 and 82 criticize: political corruption, a mal-distribution of wealth, etc.

There’s a lot of discussion about whether or not Israel was more just than other ancient Near Eastern nations. As we saw in (1), Mari had a concept of justice. The idea of allowing the poor to glean is found in Egyptian sources. Hammurapi talked about defending the poor from their oppressors. Other ancient Near Eastern countries were more egalitarian than Israel in their inheritance laws, allowing women to inherit property, even when their father had sons. Moving into Greece, Zeus was viewed as a god of justice.

Yet, I read a good post by Lawson Stone yesterday, Day 308: Post Modern Bronze Age. Here’s how he characterizes economic life under the great kings of the Late Bronze Age:

The end of the Bronze Age in the 13th century B.C. was arguably the most catastrophic event of antiquity. It was a perfect storm. The culture was highly urbanized, based on trade in luxury goods by wealthy ruling elites who controlled all the economic resources of the region primarily with the goal of extracting resources with little concern for local economies and cultures. It was a global culture as the 4 or 5 principal “Great Kings” of the Late Bronze Age (1550-1200 BC) all maintained contact with each other and with their lackeys all over the eastern Mediterranean. These urbanites and the economy they depended on lived off of agricultural produce increasingly imported from subject nations, where it was raised by a shrinking peasant population forced to feed growing but non-producing urban bureaucratic centers with an increasing appetite for imported luxury goods but no concern for local economies, local cultures and local lives.

In the midst of this imperialistic exploitation, “terrorists” such as the Shasu, the Apiru, and other bandits spread their mayhem. Eventually, the oppressive societies weakened as the paper-tigers that they were.

Lawson Stone views the society that the Torah promoted as a refreshing contrast:

But the Old Testament’s vision of freehold agrarianism, local self-sustaining economies whose basic production serves the local needs, never exceeding the carrying capacity of the land, which is cherished and used kindly as a gift of God, a constrained and compassionate use of animals, limits on lending at interest, limitation of trade to surpluses, not staples, selection of leadership from persons most embodying the community’s core values, with families defended by a shared ethos of purity, integrity, memory and relatedness, all united under the concept of a covenant with one righteous and holy God to whose law even rulers and kings submit…these are arguably among the most transformative ideas about human civilization ever proposed.

Could Psalms 58 and 82 have a point that the gods ruling the other nations were unjust, oppressive, and exploitative, whereas the God of the Israelites was a God of compassion and humility? Or were the kings of the Late Bronze Age betraying the principles of their religion, as the Bible accuses Israelite society of doing? Or was their religion a rubber-stamp or a justification for oppression? When that happens, maybe there’s not much of a difference between worshipping the true God falsely, and being guided by an unjust false god.

Ghost Whisperer, John and Jack on Faith

I’m having trouble sleeping, so here’s one of my insomniac posts! Here are some items:

1. I watched the Ghost Whisperer for the first time last night. Jennifer Love Hewitt plays Melinda, a lady who can see dead people and helps them to find closure before they go to the other side. In the process, she helps people. I enjoyed the episodes that I watched, but I’m not sure if I want to bind myself to the show, by recording every single episode that comes on. With Ion (PAX), there are three episodes on each day, and that can really accumulate on my DVR!

2. Rachel Held Evans had a post a few days ago, Dear John, Why do you find it so easy to believe? In it, she discusses a conversation on an episode of LOST between two of the main characters: Jack Shepherd and John Locke. Jack is a man of science, and John is a man of faith. That plays out in that Jack wants to do everything possible to get the plane-crash survivors off the island, whereas John thinks they should stay. For John Locke, the survivors are on the island for a reason. Locke also believes that the island is a place “where miracles happen,” since, on it, he was healed of his paralysis. In Jack and John’s conversation, John asks Jack why he finds it so difficult to believe, and Jack retorts, “Why do you find it do easy?” Rachel and her commenters talk about whom they identify with: Jack or John.

If I identify with anyone, it’s Ben Linus, who asked Jacob “What about me?” and got “What about you?” See my post, Ideas about Jacob and his Adversary (LOST), if you’re interested in the details! But Rachel’s post got me thinking about why John is the way he is, and why Jack is the way he is. John Locke had nothing before he came to the island. His father had used then rejected him. His girlfriend dumped him. John looked for love in a commune, which turned out to be a front for the marijuana industry. When he came to the island, he finally had a sense of purpose. And the island healed him. For once, he felt loved and important.

Jack’s a little more difficult for me to analyze. Jack witnessed a miracle before he came to the island. As a surgeon, he thought he knew that a lady would never walk again, but she ended up dancing at her wedding…with Jack! You’d like for this to be a fairy-tale ending, but it’s not, for the relationship goes south, and she and Jack split up. John Locke desperately craves love and wants there to be a happy ending, so his response to a miracle is faith. But Jack is cynical, perhaps because his own encounter with the supernatural had an unhappy ending, and he wondered if there was any purpose at all. And perhaps he carries this cynicism into a desire to stick with cold, hard facts, from a cold, often harsh world. But he still tries to help people in this cold world. For Jack, there’s no God looking out for people, so it’s up to him to come up with the answers as the leader—through his own wits. Eventually, that’s a heavy burden for him to carry.

A God Is Born, Hebrew Persecutes Egyptian Persecutes Hebrew

1. I read Thorkild Jacobsen’s “The Graven Image” in Ancient Israelite Religion. Jacobsen discusses the sorts of issues that are in my post, Did Second Isaiah Misunderstand Idolatry?; Greek Sodom and Gomorrah Story (which is not to say that he cites me, for he wrote his essay before there even was an Internet): ancient Near Eastern texts equate the god with the statue, yet they mean that the god inhabited the statue. It’s like the process of transubstantiation during mass. Catholics believe that the wafer becomes Jesus; similarly, ancient Near Easterners thought their idol became the god it represents.

I was a little thrown by this statement that Jacobsen makes on page 28: In sum, then, the ritual has turned the clock back, thus nullifying all human work, and has prepared for a birth in heaven of the god in question by sympathetic magic on earth. It greets the newborn god the next morning, entreats him to come down from heaven, and escorts him to his temple, where he is enthroned.

Jacobsen is referring to texts from the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods, which encompass the first half of the first millennium B.C.E. The texts describe the creation and animation of an idol. Is Jacobsen saying that a god is born in heaven whenever an idol is made? That would make little sense, for Marduk was said to have created the heavens and the earth, so he was around before idols. Or is Jacobsen saying that the ritual commemorates the birth of the god, since he says that it has “turned the clock back”?

2. I read Matitiahu Tsevat’s “Hagar and the Birth of Ishmael” in The Meaning of the Book of Job and Other Studies. On pages 69-70, Tsevat draws a parallel between God paying heed to Hagar’s abuse by Sarah in Genesis 16, and God’s recognition of the Israelites’ suffering at the hands of Egypt in Exodus. The irony is that Hagar was an Egyptian. Sarah, a Hebrew, oppressed Hagar, an Egyptian slave-girl. Later, the Egyptians oppressed the Hebrew slaves.

At one of the graduate schools that I attended, a professor of mine pointed that out, but I wasn’t sure where she was going with it. I was hoping for a deep theological point, but she just told me it was a literary device. The lesson Tsevat draws from it is that God has compassion on all of his creatures (Psalm 145:9), Jew and Gentile. I wondered if the lesson was “What goes around, comes around.”

The story of Hagar has long been meaningful to me. Here was a woman who was mistreated by God’s church at the time, Abraham and Sarah. She was an outsider. Hagar’s bad experience was partly her fault, for she was looking at Sarah with contempt because she (Hagar) could conceive and Sarah could not, but that may have been Hagar’s attempt as a powerless person to exert some power, for once in her life. But God took notice of Hagar and promised to bless her offspring. (This is important, according to Tsevat, because, under ancient Near Eastern law, Hagar’s son belonged to Sarah, since Hagar bore him for Sarah; yet, the Bible says Ishmael is Hagar’s!) Hagar was outside of God’s trajectory of promise, for God’s plans were for Isaac’s offspring. But God took notice of this outsider. He told her to return to Sarah, and she did so, only not as a powerless slave. She was a person God had seen, someone armed with the realization that God had a plan for her life.

Vegetarians Start to Eat Meat, God Discusses Justice with Job

1. I’ll be reading one essay of Ancient Israelite Religion every day (except Saturday), until I decide to read more. Today, the essay I read was William W. Hallo’s “The Origins of the Sacrificial Cult: New Evidence from Mesopotamia and Israel.” Hallo refers to a Sumerian story about the crown prince Lugalbanda, of Uruk (see Lugalbanda in the Cave).

On one of his campaigns, Lugalbanda is left for dead in a cave, with little food. The plants aren’t fit to eat, so Lugalbanda becomes carnivorous by necessity. He lures an auroch (a kind of cattle) and two goats through cakes, and he binds them. He’s hesitant to wield his cutting-tools against his prey, but a dream from Za(n)qara (the god of dreams) instructs him on how to slaughter them. He follows the instructions to the letter, and (in Hallo’s words) “goes them one better—significantly better” (9). He shares his meat with the four greatest deities of the Sumerian pantheon. The sweet savor rises to the gods like incense, as they consume the best part of the meat. And Lugalbanda recovers from his illness.

Hallo compares this story with Genesis: humans were made vegetarian, but God allowed them to eat meat after the flood. Hallo’s view (if I understand it correctly) seems to be that the sacrificial system served to legitimize the consumption of meat. Israelites wanted or needed to eat it, but they were leery about shedding blood, so sharing their meat with the gods allowed them to eat it without qualms.

But the commonality between Lugalbanda and the Bible is that both present humans as initially vegetarian, until they were allowed to eat meat (which gods/God did anyway).

2. I started Matitiahu Tsevat’s The Meaning of the Book of Job and Other Biblical Studies. Today, I read “The Meaning of the Book of Job.”

Essentially, Tsevat argues that the Book of Job says God doesn’t consistently reward the righteous and punish the wicked, so people should be righteous because it’s good, not to receive a reward. I already knew that Job complained about this in his speeches, but Tsevat’s essay was helpful because he referred to places in God’s speech from the whirlwind touching on reward and punishment. For Tsevat, God addressed Job’s complaint head-on.

Here are some examples, and the translation is whatever Tsevat is using:

40:11-14: “Give free scope to your raging anger. Seeing anyone haughty, bring him low; seeing anyone haughty, abase him and tread down the wicked in their tracks. Conceal them alike in the earth, wrap their faces in concealment. Then I, too, will acknowledge that your right-hand is all-prevailing.”

38:12-13, 15: “Have you ever in your life commanded the morning, have you directed the dawn to its place to take hold of the skirts of the earth so that the wicked are shaken out of it, so that light is withheld from the wicked, and their uplifted arm is broken.”

Tsevat interprets these passages to mean that Job can’t punish the wicked, and it’s not God’s general policy to do so, either. For Tsevat, 38:12-13, 15 doesn’t describe what God does, for the morning doesn’t hurt the wicked; rather, the sun shines on the just and unjust alike.

38:25-27 is also pretty telling: “Who has cleft a channel for the rain flood or a way for the thunder cloud to cause rain on land where no man is, on a desert where no people live to satiate waste and desolate terrain and to sprout fresh grass?” As Tsevat points out, the Hebrew Bible often treats rain or the withholding of it as a tool God uses for reward and punishment (see Deuteronomy 28:24, or the Elijah story). But God tells Job in 38:25-27 that God sends rain where there are no people. It’s almost as if God or nature is blind to what humans do, or maybe the lesson here is that God doesn’t consider humans to be the center of the universe!

I checked the MacArthur Study Bible and the Nelson Study Bible, and they have an interesting take on Job 38:12-13, 15, the passage about morning. Nelson says that God here is responding to Job’s complaint in 24:13-17 that God allows the wicked to do their evil deeds at night. For MacArthur and Nelson, God’s response is that he sends the morning to interrupt and expose the wicked, to shine the light on their activities. That’s tempting to accept, but 38:15 says that light is withheld from the wicked.

I’m not sure what to do with Tsevat’s proposal. I always understood God to be saying to Job that Job can’t do all the things God does, for God is superior. That would imply that passages such as 38:12-15 and 40:11-14 affirm the existence of a moral order in the universe. That would be consistent with Job 1, in which God places a hedge around Job for his protection, presumably because of Job’s righteousness. But God can make exceptions to his moral order, as when he tests people, so Job’s friends were wrong to assume that Job was suffering on account of his sin.

At the same time, I like Tsevat’s proposal because it takes seriously Job’s speeches about the existence of injustice in the world, as when Job observes that there are wicked people who die in a state of peace, prosperity, and contentment (Job 21). Can we interpret God to say that he’s just in his whirlwind speeches, thereby sweeping Job’s observations under the rug, as if they’re invalid? But if God is saying that he doesn’t rule the world according to a moral order, that allows Job’s observations to stand. We don’t have to be like Job’s friends, who try to subordinate reality to their belief that God is just.

Conclusion of Song and Story

I'm at the library right now, and I'm writing my post here because I just finished Steven Weitzman's Song and Story in Biblical Narrative, and I want to return it right after I finish this post.

If I had it to do all over again, I'd read Weitzman's conclusion before going through the body of his book. I found myself wondering what his point was. Now that I finished the book and read his conclusion, I'm able to piece parts of his book under his main points, except for one.

The "one" is this: Weitzman said that modern scholars often approach biblical poetry with their own thoughts about what poetry is and should be. He states on page 126: "We thus found that biblical scholars are in fact imposing their own literary culture onto the Bible when they interpret its mixing of story and song as a mixing of reason and emotion, of objectivity and subjectivity, or of the sublime and the mundane." I don't remember much of this discussion.

But his point that Deuteronomy 31 is like the seventh century B.C.E. Words of Ahiqar, in that both present a teacher instructing and chastising his pupils? Yes, I remember that from the body. And Weitzman also argued that, as the Pentateuch became revered, there emerged a felt need to insert songs into the biblical narrative, or to connect Psalms with a biblical story. Why? Because Exodus 15 was a song that commented on Exodus 14: the Israelites sang after the crossing of the Red Sea. So why not imitate the Pentateuch by inserting songs into a story?

Pieces of Weitzman's book make sense to me now that I know he was making that argument. His discussion of the prayer of Hanna being in different locations in various manuscripts may indicate that it was inserted into the story (perhaps in the first century C.E., the approximate date of Qumran manuscripts), as opposed to being part of it at the outset. Weitzman refers to the rabbinic statement that Hezekiah didn't become the ultimate Messiah for the reason that he did not thank God after God had delivered Jerusalem from Assyria: there's a sense among those ancient reverers of the text that a song should have followed the story. And we see that songs were inserted into the story when the Greek-speaking Jews applied their hands to the Bible. In the Greek version of Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego sing a long Psalm while they're in the furnace, but this song is absent from the Masoretic Text.

In the end-notes, Weitzman offers evidence for his argument that the emphasis on incorporating song into narrative occurred in imitation of Exodus 15. Ecclesiastes Rabbah 1:9 and Revelation 15:3 both highlight the importance of the Song of Moses. As I look at the body of the text, Weitzman also refers to Philo (first century C.E.), who urged singing in imitation of the Israelites at the Exodus. Weitzman states, "All this indicates that songs such as Exodus 15 were perceived by early canon-conscious readers not only as events in Israel's past but as behavioral models for the present and future as well" (171).

This may be why Weitzman dicusses deutero-canonical books such as Tobit and Judith: they reflect an attempt in the Second Temple Period to incorporate song into story, in tales that imitate those of the Bible. So the Second Temple Period was a time in which incorporating song into story was a focus. But does Weitzman believe that songs were put into the biblical narrative in the Second Temple Period? He may have addressed this question, but I don't remember his answer.

I said in a previous post that Weitzman usually approaches the songs and the stories synchronically, as if they're interdependent. This differs from what many scholars do: they view the poems as earlier than the prose. Actually, what I said is only partially true. There are times when Weitzman takes this approach. With the Book of Jonah, for example, he views Jonah's prayer in Jonah 2 as integrated with the larger plot. It's giving us irony, he maintains, for Jonah asks to be delivered and thanks God for his mercy, even though we'll read later in the story that he doesn't want God to show the same sort of mercy to the Ninevites.

But there are times when Weitzman acknowledges contradictions between the prose and the poetry, or when he believes that the poem was inserted into the story. I was especially intrigued by his discussion of Pseudo-Philo (first century C.E.), which actually tries to harmonize the prose and the poetry in certain biblical stories. For example, the Song of Deborah refers to stars fighting against Sisera (Judges 5:20), but that's not in the narrative. Bib. Ant. 31:1 of Pseudo-Philo, therefore, presents Deborah saying in the heat of battle, "I see the stars...prepared to fight along with you."

This was a good book, now that I understand it. But I must move on to the next book!

Martin Luther King's Workfare Proposal

I read more of Steven Weitzman’s Song and Story in Biblical Narrative. On pages 66-67, Weitzman compares Hanna’s song after the birth of Samuel (I Samuel 2:1-10) with Mary’s Magnificat in Luke 1:46-55. Actually, he brings other things into the discussion as well, such as the narratives about Samuel’s birth and that of John the Baptist (Luke 1). Weitzman states: In both texts, pious wives miraculously conceive future saviors who will initiate a new stage in Israel’s history by delivering it from its troubles and preparing for God’s kingdom…[T]he Magnificat helps link Jesus’ birth to a similar moment in the history of biblical Israel, the miraculous birth of Samuel.

An Anchor Bible Dictionary article by Walter Bruegemann helped me understand the relationship between Hannah’s prayer and the rest of the Hannah story, or at least he offered me a way to look at the situation. Hannah talks about the deliverance of the poor from oppression, and, in a sense, Samuel helped to accomplish that later in his life: he defeated the Philistines who were oppressing Israel, and he ruled as a just judge (though his sons were bad).

As to whether or not Jesus fulfilled such expectations, I wrestle with this problem in my posts, A False Hope? and A Community Called Atonement. In the latter post, I state the following:

Years ago, when I read the Gospel of Luke, I noticed its hope that the Messiah would soon come and vindicate the poor. What I thought that meant was that Jesus viewed his kingdom as imminent (Albert Schweitzer style): he was assuring the poor that their liberation was nigh, for he’d soon come and set up a kingdom that would topple the rich and powerful while exalting the lowly. As a believer, I had a problem with such an interpretation, since that didn’t happen. Two thousand years later, the rich and powerful are still oppressing the poor and the lowly. But, in my mind, that was the best reading of the text.

Part of me considered another proposal, however: Perhaps Luke’s Jesus expects the poor to find their relief and exaltation in the church. In Luke’s other work, Acts, the disciples hold their goods in common (Acts 2:44; 4:32), and deacons help the poor widows (Acts 6). Indeed, the church was a place where the poor could be fed, where the first put themselves last so that the last could be first.

Unfortunately, churches are not always places where the poor can find relief. But the call is still there for the church to be like God’s kingdom—concerned for the poor.

I looked through an interesting article today on Martin Luther King’s economic views: Dr. Martin Luther King’s Economics: Through Jobs, Freedom. As I watched Tom Brokaw’s documentary on Martin Luther King, Jr., I thought to myself, “Okay, so King opposed poverty. But what did he propose as a solution? Government handouts?” It turns out that he wanted the government to create jobs for as many people as possible—jobs that would enhance the social good. Those who still couldn’t find jobs would receive a guaranteed annual income, which they would use to pump money into the economy. King was still sensitive to the government spending within its means, however. In the article, I didn’t exactly see him comment on deficit spending (though the article calls him “Keynesian” for his demand-side emphasis), but he did believe that defense spending and the Vietnam War were taking money away from programs that could help the poor. That seems to imply that the government only had so much and needed to spend it on what was truly important.

I thought about biblical views on poverty. At times, my impression is that the Bible supports throwing money at the poor through almsgiving, and, in a sense, it does. But it also promotes work (I Thessalonians 4:11; II Thessalonians 3:10-12) and supporting the truly needy (I Timothy 5). That’s not to say that we should be judgmental. The last thing we should tell the Haitians is “Get a job!” But the agenda of helping the poor should be to help them move into a position of economic self-sufficiency. But there are also times when it’s a matter of helping people who cannot help themselves.

I’m not going to comment on King’s economic proposals. There are arguments “pro” and “con.” Right now, it doesn’t look like President Obama’s stimulus is working in ending the recession, but is that a condemnation the government employing people and giving them money to spend, or of the way that Obama has gone about it? That’s debated.

But King at some point felt a need to focus on poverty rather than race alone. I see that as a call for concern on my part, however I may choose to express it.