Laws for the Ger; Fully Forgiven?

1. Today, I read Jacob Milgrom’s introduction to his commentary, Leviticus 17-22. This commentary talks a lot about the Holiness Source (H) in Leviticus. Milgrom contrasts H with the Priestly Source (P), both of which are part of this biblical book. According to Milgrom, whereas P is concerned about the profanation of the sanctuary, H fears the profanation of the land, which can even be done by Gentiles. That is why H believes that the non-Israelite resident aliens should observe the “Thou shalt nots” of the Torah, whereas they’re not obligated to perform the “Thou shalts”: H doesn’t want resident aliens to profane the land by doing bad stuff.

I wonder to what extent Milgrom is right about the resident alien and the laws that he has to keep. Granted, when I do a search and see the Torah phrase that there shall be one law for the native Israelite and the resident alien, most often, the law being discussed is a “Thou shalt not”. That includes prohibitions on working on the Sabbath and holy days.

But there are some things that resident aliens don’t have to do, under the Torah. Under one law in the Pentateuch, they can eat carrion, whereas an Israelite cannot (Deuteronomy 14:21; contrast with Leviticus 17:15). Resident aliens only observe the Passover if they want to do so, and, in such a case, they must be circumcised (Exodus 12:48-49). Numbers 15:14 appears to say (if I’m reading it correctly) that a resident alien may offer a sacrifice, implying that he’s not mandated to do so. But, if the resident alien does something defiling, such as handle the ashes of the red heifer, or eat carrion, then he must practice the purification ritual (Leviticus 17:15; Numbers 19:10). What defiles, defiles, regardless of who does it, and so those who do the defiling are required to clean up their messes, whether they’re Israelites or resident aliens. That’s a “Thou shalt” that resident aliens must do!

I’m somewhat interested in the laws that apply to resident aliens, on account of something that Beverly Roberts Gaventa says in the HarperCollins Study Bible about Acts 15:20, in which James lays no more burden upon the Gentile Christians than to abstain from food offered to idols, fornication, strangled animals, and the consumption of blood. Gaventa states: “In Lev 17:8-18:30 these regulations govern both Israel and outsiders who live within Israel; thus, James proposes a law for gentile Christians in keeping with Mosaic law but without imposing circumcision…”

But, if James were basing his decision on the laws of the Torah that bound resident aliens, would that imply that he believed the Gentile Christians couldn’t work on the Sabbath, since resident aliens under the Torah were forbidden to do such? Or could James’ decision be based on something else, such as the Noachide laws that rabbis believed were binding on Gentiles? Those included a ban on idolatry (which perhaps could be extended to eating food offered to idols), fornication, and the consumption of blood.

2. In Midrash and Literature, I read James Kugel’s essay, “Two Introductions to Midrash”. The following passage on page 85 stood out to me:

And so one does atone, and search in one’s midst and in one’s past; and if, in spite of all effort, conditions do not improve, what conclusion is available other than that atonement has not been sufficient, or that sinners continue even now, undetected, or that past infractions have so accumulated as to cause God’s long-restrained wrath to run a lengthy course?

This is a rich quote. What it brought to my mind was how the Jews returned from exile at the decree of Cyrus, and yet, even then, Ezra remarked that they were still slaves to a foreign power, and he asked God for forgiveness (Ezra 9). But didn’t God already proclaim through Second Isaiah that Israel was forgiven during the exile, that her penalty is paid and she has received double for her sins (Isaiah 40:2)? Did God really forgive her? If so, why was she still enslaved?

Of course, during the time of Ezra, there were Jews who were engaging in a fresh sin: intermarriage with foreigners. Plus, in Nehemiah 5, we encounter rich Israelites who were exploiting and oppressing their fellow country-people. Maybe full restoration didn’t follow Israel because sin was still by her side. And yet, didn’t God promise that he’d take care of this problem when he restored Israel, by circumcising her heart (Deuteronomy 30:6), or giving her a new heart (Ezekiel 11:19-20; 36:26-27), or writing his laws upon her heart (Jeremiah 31:33)—however you want to phrase it?

Marriage; Sophistic Rabbis; Nikki Haley

I went to the library today to read some articles. The first one I read was by Geza Vermes, and it appeared in volume 1 of the Cambridge History of the Bible.

This was such a great article, but I’m too tired to go into detail about everything that I read in it. It talked about different Jewish views concerning divorce in the pre-70 period. Josephus advocated a position similar to that of Hillel and Akiva: that a man could divorce his wife if she displeased him. Philo, however, was more restrictive, like Jesus and Shammai.

I encountered the Qumran view that the Torah prohibits a man to have multiple wives. It says that God overlooked David’s polygamy because he didn’t have access to the law, which was in the ark of the covenant after the death of Joshua and Eliezer.

Then there were Jewish attempts to argue that Sarah was not Abraham’s half-sister, notwithstanding Genesis 20:12′s claim that she was. The problem was that such a union would violate Leviticus 18. And so Josephus, targumim, and rabbis said she was his niece, interpreting “sister” rather broadly. But Qumran had a problem even with that, for the Torah banned sex between an aunt and her nephew in Leviticus 18, and so the Qumranites concluded that an uncle/niece marriage was out-of-the-question as well. Consequently, Qumran may have held a position similar to what we find in a targum: that Sarah was Abraham’s cousin.

Again, this was a good article, with many decent topics for a blog. I recommend it!

I’ll tie together two of my other readings. I began G.A. Kennedy’s A New History of Classical Rhetoric, which I will read whenever I make it to the downtown public library. He referred to the Sophists, who tried to use logic to defy common sense—for example, to prove that injustice is better than justice. They were just playing games! But that reminds me of an article I read today in Study of Ancient Judaism 1, which quoted Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 17a’s statement that a good judge should be able to prove that a reptile is clean, even though the Torah says the opposite. A good Jewish judge sounds like he’d be a Sophist! Then there’s another statement in that article: according to Neusner, the Tannaitic rabbinic document Sifra tries to show the limits of logic, by demonstrating that the Torah doesn’t necessarily agree with what we would consider the logical conclusion. That sounds Sophistic, too, but it’s not playing games: it’s elevating revelation over reason.

I finished Writings and Speech in Israelite and Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy last night. I suppose that I have to find something to write about it, so I’ll open the book and pick a random passage. Okay, page 267 says that oracles and an inscription were made to justify the Assyrian king Esarhaddon’s rise to power. Yeah, many things come down to power, don’t they?

Speaking of which, there are elections tonight. In South Carolina, Nikki Haley may win the Republican nomination for South Carolina governor. She’s a Tea-Party favorite, and she has an interesting background. She is an Indian by race, and her parents were Sikhs. While she is a born-again Christian, she practices some Sikh rituals to honor her parents’ memory. And some in South Carolina have launched racist attacked against her. Remember: this was the state where John McCain lost in the 2000 G.O.P. primary for President due to rumors that he had an illegitimate African baby.

It would be great if Nikki Haley won in this state, for the same reason that it was awesome that Indian Republican Bobby Jindal became Governor of Louisiana, a state that nominated David Duke as the Republican gubernatorial candidate about a decade before. People get to progress, and be conservative.

But I hope that Nikki Haley didn’t have those affairs.

Layers

1. Michael Fox, Proverbs 1-9.

Scholars have debated about the social setting for the Book of Proverbs. Some argue that its mileau is the villages of ancient Israel, meaning that it contains folk wisdom. In support of this view, we see a lot in Proverbs about agriculture. Others contend that the palace is its mileau, for it talks about rulership and ways to make a good impression on the king.

For Fox, the Book of Proverbs has layers. He says that the palace incorporated folk wisdom into the book, and he acknowledges that part of Proverbs dates to the time of the first Israelite commonwealth, which predated the exile. But he also sees Aramaisms and awareness of Greek styles, and Fox views Proverbs 8 as a response to Greek philosophy. He also asserts that the Book of Proverbs draws from Jeremiah. And so, according to Fox, the latest strata of the Book of Proverbs dates to the Hellenistic Period.

2. Alberdina Houtman, Mishnah and Tosefta.

I finished this book today, and I finally got the meat of what this author believes! For Houtman, there were a lot of oral traditions, and so a group of rabbis decided to create a tight, official repository of those traditions, the Mishnah. But there were more conservative rabbis who didn’t care for the Mishnah, believing that it left out a lot of important oral traditions. And so they created the more comprehensive Tosefta. But the Tosefta didn’t catch on like the Mishnah did. That’s why it is rarely quoted in the Talmud.

3. Geoffrey Hartman, “The Struggle for the Text”, Midrash and Literature.

Hartman talks about Jacob’s encounter with the mysterious man in Genesis 32. Who was this mysterious man? One explanation is that he was Esau’s guardian angel. Although Jacob calls him Elohim, remember that Elohim can refer to a divine being, such as an angel (but does the plural, Elohim, ever refer to a single angel?). That’s why this mysterious man can’t stay until the morning. If he were God, he could do anything he wants.

And yet, there are reasons for seeing the mysterious man as God. He has the power to bless. He’s called Elohim.

For Hartman, there are layers in the text. And part of his point may be that midrash seeks to explain a text that is multi-layered, as a result of a process of composition and redaction. Midrash is seeking to iron out a text that is not that smooth!

Incidentally, when I worked at a Presbyterian church, the associate pastor was telling the children this story, and she said that people don’t know who the mysterious man was. She may have mentioned the idea that he was a water-demon, but I don’t remember. But her lesson for the children was that, even though we don’t understand everything, we can take comfort in the fact that God loves us.

Seventy Years; Fallible God of the Rabbis?; Mesopotamian ERA?; Joshua 24; New Church

From Sunday, June 6:

I went to the downtown library today to read articles for my comps. Consequently, I didn’t go to Latin mass this morning, but I visited a downtown Catholic church. Maybe I’ll go there next week—I don’t know! The sanctuary was beautiful and smelled nice, but the acoustics weren’t that good. The priest was talking a little about why God permits suffering, and I missed it because I couldn’t understand what he was saying! So I guess that this question must remain unresolved in my mind, for the time being.

Here are five items:

1. I read an article by Michael Fishbane entitled “Torah and Tradition”, and it appeared in the book, Tradition and Theology in the Old Testament. What interested me was Fishbane’s discussion of Israel’s seventy-year exile in the Hebrew Bible, which Jeremiah predicts in Jeremiah 25:11-12 and 29:10.

First of all, Fishbane notes that the concept of a seventy-year exile is not unique to Jeremiah. Isaiah 23:15-17 says that Tyre will have a seventy-year exile, and the concept also shows up in Neo-Assyrian annals.

Second, Fishbane argues that biblical authors apply the seventy years in different ways. One way was to start counting from the date that Jeremiah delivered the oracle: 605 B.C.E. Seventy years from that is 535 B.C.E., which is three years after Cyrus’ decree for the Jews to return to their land. According to Fishbane, this reckoning appears in II Chronicles 36:21-22, which affirms that Cyrus’ decree was the fulfillment of Jeremiah’s prophecy. So this view states that the Jews’ return to their land in response to Cyrus’ decree marked the end of the seventy years that Jeremiah predicted.

Another way of applying the seventy years was to start counting from 587/6 B.C.E., the date that the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem. Seventy years after this places us at 517/6 B.C.E. Fishbane maintains that Zechariah 1:12 holds this position, for the angel in that passage asks God about “these seventy years” in which God’s been angry with Judah. Fishbane seems to interpret that to mean that the seventy years are still going on during the time of this passage, a time after the Jews have returned to their land. Fishbane also notes that the rebuilding of the Jews’ altar occurred in 517/6 B.C.E., according to Ezra 6:15. Fishbane wonders if the author of Ezra is saying that the completion of the altar officially marked the end of Israel’s “exile”, or endurance of God’s punishment.

Then there’s Daniel 9, which takes the seventy years to be 490 years. Higher-critics say Daniel is claiming that Israel’s “exile”—or subjugation at the hands of the nations—will end in the time of the Maccabees. Then there are conservative Christians, many of whom hold that the 490 years ended with the first coming of Christ—though dispensationalists add the modifier that the last week will occur sometime in the future, as the Great Tribulation period that will precede Christ’s second coming.

2. I read a few chapters out of Judah Goldin’s Studies in Midrash and Related Literature. Pages 268-269 slightly confused me. Goldin is talking about how the rabbis disagreed over whether they should prioritize halakhah—the technicalities of Jewish law—or aggadah—legends and theological musings. The nuts-and-bolts of Jewish law are important, but aggadah is what inspires people and teaches them about God.

Goldin then cites Babylonian Talmud Baba Kamma 60b, which likens this dispute to two wives, an old one and a young one. The old one pulls out the man’s black hairs so that he’ll look older for her, whereas the young one pulls out his white hairs so he’ll appear younger. As a result, he ends up bald! He then realizes that he must make restitution for the fire that he caused. And the passage cites Scriptures in which God takes responsibility for the fire that consumed Zion.

What’s this saying? That God is responsible for the partisanship among halakhists and aggadists, which is leading them to downgrade each other and undermine Torah study? Is that implying that God is at fault?

3. I read Martha Roth’s essay, “Gender and Law: A Case Study from Ancient Mesopotamia”, which appears in Gender and Law in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East. She quotes the Middle Assyrian Laws, which at one point departs from the male-chauvinist common law of Mesopotamia. It states:

If a widow should enter into a man’s house, whatever she brings with her belongs to her (new) husband; and if a man should enter into a woman’s house, whatever he brings with him belongs to the woman.

That’s pretty egalitarian! At the same time, the Middle Assyrian Laws permit a man to punish his wife by whipping her, plucking out her hair, mutilating her ears, or striking her.

4. I read John Van Seters’ “Joshua 24 and the Problem of Tradition”, which appears in the book, In the Shelter of Elyon.

Van Seters dates this chapter to the exile. He doesn’t believe that it had a liturgical function because it recounts the history of ancient Israel. I’m not sure how he draws that conclusion.

But, for most of his case, he tries to tie Joshua 24 to themes that appear in exilic literature. Joshua 24′s idea that Israel served other gods in Egypt appears in Ezekiel. Its narration of Israel’s history from the time of Abraham through the Exodus shows up in Nehemiah. (Remember that Van Seters thinks that the Abraham story was added to the Exodus by the exilic Yahwist, as a prequel.) While Joshua 24 apparently drew from the Deuteronomist, it’s not Deuteronomistic, for it talks about the plagues, something that the Deuteronomist is pretty general about. So Van Seters concludes that Joshua 24 post-dates the Deuteronomist. He believes that the exile is the correct setting for Joshua 24, for that’s when the Israelites would face the temptation to worship other gods. Moreover, Van Seters sees in the chapter an acknowledgement of household instruction, which (for him) makes more sense during the exile, when the family unit was the Israelite chapel.

My impression is that Van Seters sees something pre-exilic in this chapter: the chapter presents Joshua conducting the covenant ceremony in Shechem, and Van Seters states that Shechem was an important site in ancient Israel. But the chapter itself, and its contents, are exilic. It only nods to a pre-exilic site!

This article interested me because it overlaps with my II Kings weekly quiet time. Yesterday, I read that there are scholars who believe that I Kings 20—a chapter about Syria’s invasion of Israel—relates not to Ben-Hadad the predecessor of Hazael, but rather Ben-Hadad the son of Hazael. The person arguing this said that the chapter doesn’t identify the king as Ahab, even though it does. But he may have meant that parts of the chapter are generic when talking about the king.

In any case, Van Seters appears to go with this view concerning I Kings 20—that it’s a story about what happened under Hazael’s son, who ruled after the time of Ahab. Van Seters dismisses the argument that Joshua 24 expresses concern about Israel worshipping gods “beyond the river” because the Syrians had invaded Israel and brought their religion with them.

5. In my church bulletin this morning, Eric Knapp says that Christians don’t need relics, for they have the living presence of Christ with them. I kind of like this: it accepts Christ’s presence as a given, without resorting to an evangelical or charismatic “God told me this” mentality. Rather, it acted as if we encounter Christ when we come to mass, hearing his word and partaking of the sacraments.

Vestigial Body Parts; Knowledge; John Wooden

1. Jerry Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, pages 55-62:

Coyne talks about vestigial body parts. These are body parts that remain in an animal in some form, yet they do not have the use that they had for the animal’s ancestor. For example, Coyne states that whales have “a vestigial pelvis and leg bones”, even though they don’t walk on land. For Coyne, this indicates that the whale has ancestors that did walk on land, and it is inheriting vestigial pelvis and leg bones from them.

Another example is the small wings of an ostrich. Ostriches don’t fly, so why do they have wings? For Coyne, the answer is that their ancestors did fly, and the ostriches are inheriting wings from their ancestors. But there are two important points that Coyne makes:

First of all, vestigial body parts are not necessarily useless. As Coyne points out, creationists argue that vestigial body parts perform an important function—even if we don’t yet know what that is—and so they must be the special creation of an intelligent designer, rather than some useless fluke that an animal inherited. But Coyne argues that vestigial body parts aren’t necessarily useless; rather, they don’t perform the function that they had for the animal’s ancestors. For example, an ostrich gets some use out of its wings: it uses them for balance, it displays them when it’s attacking you, etc. But it doesn’t use its wings for what wings are usually for: flying.

Second, Coyne attempts to explain why the ostrich has small wings. His answer is natural selection. On page 59, he states:

…flight is metabolically expensive, using up a lot of energy that could otherwise be diverted to reproduction. If you’re flying mainly to stay away from predators, but predators are often missing on islands, or if food is readily obtained on the ground, as it can be on islands (which often lack many trees), then why do you need fully functioning wings? In such a situation, birds with reduced wings would have a reproductive advantage, and natural selection could favor flightlessness. Also, wings are large appendages that are easily injured. If they’re unnecessary, you can avoid injury by reducing them. In both situations, selection would directly favor mutations that led to progressively smaller wings, resulting in an inability to fly.

Here, I’m puzzled, with the same question that baffled me when I wrote the post, Evolution with Purpose?, Lamentations Contradicts Jeremiah?, Ann Coulter Praises a Democrat, Bruce Cohen on Theodicy. If there’s a bird on an island with large wings, with which he can fly, would that characteristic inhibit his survival? Why would it? Granted, he doesn’t need large wings on the island, but how would his wings inhibit his survival? They’re unnecessary, not deadly. So why would the birds with large wings die off, to be replaced by mutated birds with small wings? This is where I’m confused.

2. I finished Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land last night. Then I read the wikipedia summary and saw that I didn’t follow the plot all that well. Oh well. I encountered some interesting discussions among the characters!

Here are two quotes that stood out to me. The first is on page 490. The second is on page 502.

“…The faith I was reared in didn’t require anybody to know anything. Just confess your sins and be saved, and there you were, safe in the arms of Jesus. A man could be too stupid to hit the floor with his hat…and yet he could be conclusively presumed to be one of God’s elect, guaranteed an eternity of bliss, because he had been ‘converted.’ He might or might not become a Bible student; even that wasn’t necessary…and he certainly didn’t have to know, or even try to know, anything else…”

I like the sound of this “Christianity”. Jesus loves me and will take me to a good afterlife, and that’s all I need to know.

Yet, it’s good to know something:

“But goodness alone is never enough. A hard, cold wisdom is required, too, for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom invariably accomplishes evil.”

So I need wisdom. I can get that from the Bible and other people. But I also feel that the Bible and other people can confuse me, too!

3. John Wooden passed on recently. He was a legendary UCLA basketball coach for many years, and he led his team through numerous victories and championships.

I first heard of him from my Grandpa Pate. My dad and I went to Grandpa Pate’s house, and Grandpa had a tape (or maybe it was a DVD) in which John Wooden was sharing his wisdom with an audience. It was touching to look at the audience, and to see a mother hoping that her son would get something from this wise old man!

One of Wooden’s gems that sticks in my mind is that we should be eager, not willing. That’s why I don’t use the word “willing” all that much! But, then, I get confused: was Jesus eager to go to the cross, or only willing? I think he was eager to save us, but he wasn’t looking forward to all the pain he would experience at his crucifixion.

I also liked the documentary of Wooden, which showed Wooden giving a stern lecture to this sportscaster I don’t like. This sportscaster was playing for UCLA at the time. I didn’t like him because he always defended the Lakers when they were playing the Indiana Pacers, in a season when the Pacers were actually pretty good. Plus, this sportscaster came across as cocky! But Wooden gave him a good lecture! Maybe Wooden—a Hoosier in terms of his roots—foresaw that this guy would trash the Pacers years down the road!

I found other things to like about John Wooden as I read articles about him. After his wife died, he visited her grave-site every month. He formed relationships with his players, teaching them to become better people, not just better basketball players. And he was devout. He didn’t drink or use profanity. Although my Grandpa defended Bob Knight one time, he said that Knight wasn’t in the same category of class as John Wooden!

I’m not much of a sports fan, but I’m a fan of great men. R.I.P., John Wooden.

II Kings 8

For my weekly quiet time today, I studied II Kings 8.

Hazael replaces Ben-Hadad as king of Syria. Essentially, Hazael soaks a blanket in water and places it over Ben-Hadad’s face, and Ben-Hadad dies. John MacArthur says that Hazael was suffocating Ben-Hadad. Josephus says that Hazael was using the wet blanket as a net, as he strangled the sick king. And, for some reason, the Jewish commentator Rashi contends that Hazael simply wanted to cool off Ben-Hadad.

Speaking for myself, I’ve read this passage to mean that Hazael suffocated and drowned Ben-Hadad, killing him that way.

Hazael was not the son of Ben-Hadad, but rather his servant. That means that Hazael was a usurper. On this, an Assyrian source agrees. The annals of the Assyrian king, Shalmanesar III, refer to Hazael as the son of a nobody. The reason that this Assyrian source is talking about Hazael is that the Assyrian king invaded much of Syria, but couldn’t take Damascus. Hazael managed to defend it successfully, on more than one occasion.

When Ben-Hadad becomes sick in II Kings 8, he sends Hazael to Elisha with gifts, to inquire of the prophet whether or not Ben-Hadad would recover. The Intervarsity Press Bible Background Commentary says that Ben-Hadad was doing more than seeking Elisha’s forecast of the future; rather, Ben-Hadad was trying to bribe Elisha into putting in a good work for him before God, so that God would heal him! Whether Ben-Hadad was inquiring or requesting healing, it’s interesting how a prophet of the God of Israel has so much clout in Syria, a non-Israelite country! This may be partly because people in the ancient Near East respected the power of any god, even one from another nation. But I’d like to think that Naaman had an effect in his homeland of Syria: that Naaman told the Syrians he knew about how the God of Israel had healed him of his skin disease, and so the Syrians began to respect the Israelite God. The Syrians continued to worship their own gods, but they recognized the power of the LORD.

Did Elisha instruct Hazael to lie to Ben-Hadad? In v 10, Elisha tells Hazael that he is to say to Ben-Hadad that he (Ben-Hadad) will live, even though, in actuality, Ben-Hadad will die. The Septuagint and Josephus essentially take this at face value: Elisha tells Hazael to mislead Ben-Hadad. Maybe they figured that Elisha wanted Ben-Hadad to die happy, or (conversely) that he desired for Ben-Hadad’s last moments be miserable. Hazael told Ben-Hadad that he would recover, and the next day he killed him! Elisha’s message of recovery may have lifted Ben-hadad up and given him hope, but it was a great fall to Ben-Hadad emotionally when Hazael was suffocating, drowning, or strangling him! Did Elisha seek to punish Ben-Hadad for his invasions of Israel (I Kings 20; II Kings 6-7)? Ben-Hadad had made Israel feel insecure: was it now Ben-Hadad’s turn to experience what he had inflicted on others?

In the fourth century C.E., we see an attempt to argue that Elisha was not telling Hazael to lie. Ephrem the Syrian states that Elisha was instructing Hazael to speak the truth to Ben-Hadad: Ben-Hadad would recover from his illness! The problem for Ben-Hadad was that, even though he would recover, Hazael would kill him the next day! So Elisha wasn’t lying when he conveyed to Ben-Hadad that he (Ben-Hadad) would recover. This is the explanation that’s adopted by John Gill, John MacArthur, and others.

In the Masoretic Text, the ketiv and the qere are different. The ketiv presents Elisha telling Hazael to inform Ben-Hadad that “You will surely not live.” That would mean that Elisha wanted Hazael to tell Ben-Hadad the truth, and that Hazael disregarded Elisha’s instruction when he told Ben-Hadad that he would surely recover. The qere, what was read in synagogues, went with the view that Elisha desired for Hazael to tell Ben-Hadad that he would recover.

Hazael was a humble servant (although there are commentators who act as if his humility was fake!). When Elisha tells Hazael with sadness that he (Hazael) will become king of Syria and will ruthlessly persecute Israel, Hazael asks Elisha how he can say that about him, a dog? Hazael doesn’t believe that he’s important enough to commit atrocities! But Hazael returns to Ben-Hadad and kills him. He has started on the path of evil. Did Elisha put Hazael on this path through the power of suggestion, or did Elisha simply foresee that Hazael would follow it? Elisha was saddened by the thought that Hazael would hurt Israel. Yet, when God told Elijah to anoint Hazael as king, God predicted that Hazael would kill many Israelites, presumably as judgment for their sins (I Kings 19:15-17). Was Elisha putting Hazael onto the dark path, making Hazael the sort of person who would be an effective instrument of judgment in the hands of the Almighty?

Banished Enlil; Can Pay; Canon; Prophet; Divorce; Cultural Evangelicalism; Republican Blanche

1. Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land, page 453:

In this book, Mike, the man from Mars, starts a new religion. The religion holds that “all living creatures are collectively God”, and he and his disciples are the only “self-aware gods” around. The religion also permits sexual freedom among members, which becomes a topic of discussion in the book. But, according to Jubal, the gods of all sorts of religions had their sexual peccadilloes, so Mike isn’t out-of-line to conclude that being divine grants him sexual freedom!

That reminds me of something I read yesterday, in an essay by Tikva Frymer-Kensky. There are two Sumerian myths about the love affair between the god Enlil, and the goddess Ninlil. In one, Enlil does what he’s supposed to do and asks Ninlil’s mother for Ninlil’s hand. In the other, Enlil has sex with Ninlil, without asking Ninlil’s mother. Ninlil is judged by a large court of gods, who decree (according to the translation Tikva is using) that “the sex offender Enlil will leave the town”. Ninlil follows Enlil into banishment.

So I guess that the Sumerian pantheon had its own Adam Walsh Act!

2. Alberdina Houtmann, Mishnah and Tosefta, page 182:

Houtman says that, according to the Mishnah, an Israelite debtor can pay his cancelled debts if he wants to do so, as long as the creditor has done his part and cancelled the debt.

3. Donald Redford, “Scribe and Speaker”, in Writings and Speech in Israelites and Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy, pages 216-217:

The words of the ancestors [in ancient Egypt] were deemed worthy of inscripturation under the following circumstances: (1) The content displayed foresight and perspicacity. (2) The ancestor in question was not anonymous but known by name; his name continued to be pronounced on account of his works. (3) His words were “good,” that is to say, they met standards of genre expectation, numinosity, style, and aesthetics…Behind these standards lurks a need to ascribe and authenticate authorship, which in any other society might have fostered the growth of a canon…but the notion of an external, graded scale against which a writing was to be measured for spiritual content is not reflected in ancient Egyptian thought. Texts might be copied and embellished, but they were not interpreted and made coherent.

I’m not entirely clear about what Redford is saying. In the next paragraph, he talks about texts that were preserved for religious purposes. For the ancient Egyptians, Redford states, these texts communicated the will of the gods, yet they weren’t considered to be an unalterable and complete tradition—a received text, if you will. And yet, they were used in spells, and so one had to pronounce their contents correctly for the spells to work. There seems to be a liberal treatment of the text—one that doesn’t view the text as received, and which freely embellishes; and then there’s a conservative regard for it, which believes that one has to be faithful to the text for the spells to work.

I suppose that there are biblical parallels to this. As Michael Fishbane has noted, we can see evidence of scribal interpretation going on in the very pages of the Bible. The biblical text was obviously deemed to be authoritative, in some sense, since it was viewed as important enough to be interpreted. And yet it wasn’t considered to be overly rigid and inflexible, for scribes could insert their interpretations.

To confess my ignorance, I wonder how the books of the Bible became so authoritative. Was it because there were influential people who were able to propagate them, especially in the Second Temple Period? Maybe these influential people looked at these books and thought that they did a good job in explaining how Israel got into exile. Perhaps they deemed them to be good encapsulations of official ancient Israelite beliefs.

4. David L. Petersen, “Rethinking the Nature of Prophetic Literature”, in Prophecy and Prophets, pages 33-34:

Petersen appears to have some difficulty arriving at a definition of “prophet”. My impression is that he defines a prophet as someone who foretells the future. Attempts to define a prophet as a preacher of repentance don’t work, for Petersen, because not all prophets preached repentance. Elisha didn’t do so that much, nor did those whom the Hebrew Bible considers “false prophets”.

5. Victor Matthews, “Honor and Shame in Gender-Related Legal Situations in the Hebrew Bible”, in Gender and Law in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East, pages 110-111:

Deuteronomy 24:1-4 allows a man to divorce his wife if he finds something indecent in her. In Mishnah Gittin 9:10, the School of Hillel and the School of Shammai debated what this indecency was. Shammai viewed it as unchastity, whereas Hillel believed it was something that the wife did that displeased her husband. Hillel gives the example of the wife spoiling a man’s meal. Then Akiba weighs in, concluding from the biblical passage that a man can ditch his wife if he finds someone more attractive.

Matthews interprets Deuteronomy 24:1-4 in light of what ancient Near Eastern law say about divorce. In the Code of Hammurapi (LP) 138, a man can divorce his wife if she fails to bear him children, provided that he give her the equivalent of her marriage price and dowry. According to LP 141, a man can divorce his wife if she starts a business and neglects her duties as a wife; in this case, he doesn’t have to pay her. Middle Assyrian Law (MAL) 24 permits a man to divorce his wife if she leaves him to stay with another household. And MAL 37 says that a man can simply divorce his wife anytime he wants, and it’s his option to pay her a settlement.

I wish that the biblical law on divorce had some provision requiring the man to pay his wife a settlement when he put her away, since divorce was placing her in a vulnerable position. But maybe it assumed that she’d find another husband.

Matthews also discusses Deuteronomy 22, and here’s a post that I wrote a few years ago about that chapter: Divorce and Virginity in Deuteronomy 22. This book addresses the questions that I had when I wrote that post.

6. Lee Levine, Judaism and Hellenism in Antiquity, page 20:

The Dead Sea documents reveal a sect whose ideology and practices were heavily influenced by the larger Hellenistic world. Among the sect’s fundamental beliefs and practices—determinism, dualism, the solar calendar, communal property, angelology, celibacy, the desire to create a utopia, and many organizational patterns—most have little, if any, roots in earlier Jewish tradition. However, they are well attested in the Hellenistic and Eastern worlds of the third and second centuries B.C.E. Clearly, despite a conscious effort to isolate itself from both Jewish and non-Jewish societies, this sect was heavily influenced by ideas from the wider Hellenistic world to which it presumably had been exposed in its formative stages.

This makes me wonder to what extent the evangelical Christianity that I encounter in America is shaped by its culture. It may say that it’s shaped by the Bible, and, to a certain extent, it is. But there are things that it believes that I don’t find explicitly stated in the Bible. When I wrote about The Shack, I talked about the theodicy that God permits evil because he doesn’t want to violate people’s free-will, since God desires for people to love him freely, without coercion. But where’s that in the Bible? In God’s speeches to Job—in a book that expressly deals with theodicy—God doesn’t say anything that I can recall about human free will.

In some cases, an evangelical concept can be biblical, but the way that evangelicals express it is not. For example, evangelicals love the mantra that “Christianity is not a religion, but a relationship”. Indeed, the New Testament talks about believers having fellowship with God. The Old Testament is about God loving Israel, and the need for Israel to love God. And so the Bible promotes a love-relationship with God, even if it doesn’t use that term. But does the Bible say that Christianity—or the religion that the Hebrew Bible—is not a religion? Not really. It had rituals, a community, and a set of beliefs, so it was a religion.

Some evangelical concepts may not be explicitly stated in the Bible, but one can infer them. For example, evangelicals (like Tim Keller) like to say that we shouldn’t try to root our sense of self-worth in anything other than God’s love for us, since that can fail us. The Bible doesn’t state this explicitly—unless, perhaps, you want to interpret the passages about the futility of idols in this sense. But we do see times in the Bible when people root their sense of self-worth in things other than God, with disastrous results.

I think that Western concepts of freedom, relationship, and self-esteem shape the beliefs of American evangelicals. Some of those beliefs are reconcilable with the Bible. This was the attitude of Hellenistic Jews towards Greek philosophy: it could fit a biblical worldview, or clarify it somewhat. Then there were conservative sects, like the Qumran community, which unknowingly absorbed Hellenistic ideas. We’re all a part of our culture, whether we like it or not.

7. On Facebook, Felix pointed out that Rue McClanahan on Maude was the wife of the Conrad Baines character, a conservative Republican doctor. I think that Blanche on The Golden Girls was also a Republican. She certainly bragged about her father, “Big Daddy”, being one!