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Published by Canongate, 2005.
Stories showing moral ambiguity have survived later editors, who might have been tempted to tidy up: Jacob who becomes Israel, yet deceives Esau, and then his blind father Isaac. Rebecca who offers Abraham water, but later assists her son Jacob in depriving Esau of his inheritance.
Monotheism is a natural consequence of a nomadic tribe, one among many, away from the civilized cities, wanting to be something unique. God as the most complex, conflicted character; we are made in his image, after all. There is an unmistakeable implication of codependence. Reverence is the discovery of the world as an allusion to God (Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel) - recognizing the glory of God is our redemption; and our redemption is presumably his.
Abraham pretends Sarah is his sister and offers her to Pharaoh (and tries it again with King of Philistines). Sarah lets Abraham sleep with a servant girl to get more sons. Lot's daughters get him drunk and seduce him...
Original flood story found in clay tablets in Ur, Mesopotamia. Already a 1000 years old when Abraham left the area. Ziusudara told by the sun-god to build a ship - takes his livestock, not all beasts. Lands in Bahrain, low island in gulf (even Genesis states flood only 20ft deep, so how did they land on a mountain?) Founded Ur.
Assyrian version - built from reeds, proofed in pitch, as in New English.
Chapter 1 has male and female created together, chapter 2 has man created from clay, and woman only later as a companion.
The issues relate to predestination and determinism, to free will and to original sin. Was the Fall inevitable, that is, determined? Evolutionary psychologists argue that what we do, for good or evil, is fixed by our selfish genes, which, by acting on their own, have shaped our evolutionary past, even if humans can transcend the urging of their genes. We have eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and we have free will. If men did not have the choice, how could they freely serve god by eschewing evil? This dichotomizing, between body and soul, determinism and free will, gene and organism, lies deep within our Judaeo-Christian tradition, so deep that it seems natural, inevitable... Freedom is implicit in the nature of living processes, so that the concept of free will, with all the paradoxes it brings in its train, is a part not of our biological, but of our problematic religious inheritance, as children of the Book.
Throughout their history, the Jewish people have conceived of the "desert generation" as a lost, transitional generation, rootless and lacking identity and faith, a generation tossed in the "chasm" between past and future, consumed by anxiety regarding its destiny... During those years, the lines of its "national character" were drawn through the crucible of slavery and "victimhood" and the ensuing phenomenal propensity for redemption and rejuvenation. Moreover, a complex pattern of contradictory emotions was formed: pride, indeed arrogance, over being "the chosen people", tempered by a sense of having been banished, even cursed - the price of such mysterious chosenness; comfort and security in the knowledge of being the people of Yahweh, tempered by a fear of that same invisible and fickle God, Himself seemingly buffeted by internal storms rife with contradiction: and a taste for wandering, branded on the consciousness during the wandering in the desert, tempered by an intense longing for a "promised land" where - and only where - existence could at last be merged with identity, and a zest for living could be freed.
Wandering always gives rise to new ideas and abstract thought. Gradually searching and longing affect the dormant consciousness of this people that for generations had been subjugated, tethered to physical distress and hardship, and become unified. Searching and longing leave a unique mark on this people, reflected in its ideological motivation, its penchant for the abstract and talent at keeping an entire reality alive in its imagination, its aspirations and yearnings and, above all, its ability to be revitalized by the power of a dream, to use a dream to rise above real affliction.
The Promised Land, not the land that was promsised, or a land of promise... This eternal promise carries with it the hope of growth and a potential for almost limitless freedom of thought and flexibilty of perspective, regarding things that have become fossilized in their definitions. However, it is inevitably tainted by the "curse of the eternal", a latent, deep-seated sense of inability to ever achieve fulfilment, and a concomitant inability to address fundamental questions of identity, of belonging to a place or of that place's permanent borders, vis a vis its neighbours.
Ruth was not a Jew, but a Moabite. Her mother in law was Naomi. Became great grandmother of David, one of the few tiny hints of racial tolerance in the Old Testament...
Esther - Martin Luther wished it had never been written, both Christians and Jews have questioned its place in the Bible. She was Queen to Xerxes. Horrible story! Hamam, the king's advisor, is stung by her father's lack of respect, plans to massacre all the Jews. Instead of Esther just saving her people by appealing to the King, Hamam gets hanged on his own gallows, and the Jews rise up and massacre their enemies instead. Then they party, hence festival of Purim...
Samuel 1 - 16:18. David as a young man is valiant, prudent, artistic, comely. Starts off so well, with Goliath, playing the harp and singing. Kindles love in hearts of others, but does not appear to emanate love to another. Compare Samson who was said to love Delilah, similarly Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel.
Michal betrays her father Saul to save him - he later seizes her from her devoted husband as a prize, to add to his harem, and shuns her.
He has people killed for him, rather than getting his own hands bloody. Good politics, of course...
David spots Bathsheba bathing from a rooftop. He sends for her, lies with her, she conceives. He orders husband Uriah back from the war, so pregnancy can be attributed to him; but he refuses, so David orders him to be placed in the frontline, and he is killed.
Abishag - a fair virgin, sent to David in his feeble old age. Despite her charms, "the king knew her not". Jewish joke says that on returning home, she says "Now I know the difference between 'It was an honour' and 'It was a pleasure'"
Absalom, David's son, rebels against him at Hebron, loses battle and is killed.
Adonijah is next in line, but Bathsheba takes advantage of David's weakness to have her son Solomon crowned king. When Adonijah tries to marry Abishag (tantamount to claiming the throne, as she was a consort of David), he is sentenced to death.
Chronicles is a retrospective attempt to leave out all the gossip and scandal in Jewish history!
Many quotes: the price of wisdom is above rubies; the lord gave, the lord hath taken away, blessed be the name of the lord; I know that my redeemer cometh...
THEODICY - can one have faith in the goodness of an omnipotent creator who is apparently responsible for creating evil?
Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar and Elihu as the most irritating characters in all literature (and Job tells them so). Inane facile platitudes. "Patience of Job" as described in letter of Thomas should rather read "Defiance of Job". He refuses to disengage his intelligence, be a hypocrite, or give up his case. Classic existentialist hero.
When god finally comes clean, instead of answering Job's charges of injustice, God devotes 129 verses to a magnificently irrelevant and bombastic speech about his own abilities and accomplishments. Boasts about his impressive creations Behemoth and Leviathan. Fails to restore servants and children to life, just replaces them. Subversive - we would dearly like to see God going "to and fro in the earth" as Satan does, and we desire justice more than we admire tyranny.
William Blake plate X shows how despair also comes from isolation - other figures distance themselves, turn away. God's response: creation in its entirety. Don't trouble me with reason, what you need to know is there in the art and mystery of it all. Love it, and fear it.
Job - Benjamin Prado
Like Kafka or Beckett, instead of compassion for the man whose life is collapsing, the world becomes yet more hostile, friends feel disgust not pity.
Psalm 40 U2 version!
About 900. He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he that ruleth his spirit, than he that taketh a city. Embodiment of culture, striving to be righteous, continuity of generations, never acts rashly, socially conscious, modest. Last chapter extols importance of a good wife!
No mention of god or religion. Written by Solomon, of the 700 wives and 300 concubines. Taken by early Christians to be allergorical, about the sinful church, responding to Christ the bridegroom. Or the human soul itself? Jung's anima, complementary female self? Echo of ancient marriage songs eg Mesopotamian, fragmentary, abrupt end. The metaphors heap up, the lovers become a whole world, rich and strange, a celebration of everything.
Salvation as fruit of life of discipline, faith and work. Implacably exacting - merely looking with lust in your heart is a sin. Stron stance against the rich (eye of the needle). Compassion - "For I was hungered, and ye gave me ... I was thirst, and ye gave me drink - inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of thine my brethren, ye have done it unto me."
In the end, the figure of Christ [possesses] the violence of resistance - challenges the grey orgy???? of cynicism, irony, daily brutality, compromise, conformity, the glorification of the self through the classfication of the masses, the hatred of all diversity, the theological bitterness??? in the absence of religion.
The humanity of Christ is driven by an interior force, a longing for knowledge, and will to assert that knowledge without fear.
This is THE Gospel, in all its terribleness, its wonder, reading it produces contradictory emotions, in part because the book itself born out of conflict and struggle. At the time of writing, Christianity repellent to most Jews, split between Paul (Christ came to set Jews free from the bonds of Torah law) and Peter (Jewish law as symbols of lives dedicated to god still to be valued). In Matthew, attempt made to unify - Jesus quotes scripture, even as he does things contrary to mainstream Judaism: "Think not that I am come to destroy the law... I am not come to destroy but to fulfill." But it is the Jewish mob who demand his crucifixion, with terrible consequences in Europe for centuries.
In Matthew, Jesus attacks conventional security eg wealth, force. He even uses as the rock for his Church a man, Peter, who denied him at the last. THere is not to be a new legalism, because none of us will be blameless, we will all need grace.
The tale of the Virgin birth is absent from Mark, because Matthew wants to show Jesus fulfilling the Messianic prophecies. Yet in the end, it is the Gentiles who recognize him, and he tells his followers to go into the ends of the earth, teaching all people.
The first, the shortest. Events come rushing one after the other. Scenes of deep tragedy are virtually skipped over. Jesus seems so alone - even his disciples seem persistently ignorant, at one point grabbing hold of him thinking he is "beside himself". He tells people who witness miracles to tell noone but they run to the towns to tell stories. He disowns his own mother. Christ as victim of humanity's lack of imagination, hammered to the cross by mails of creative??? vapidity.
Mark's Christ gives us something to aspire to, rather than revere. Concentrating on his perfection keeps us on our knees, gazing up. Now what Christ had in mind. As humans we are forever held to the ground by the gravity of our mediocrity - through his example, as a liberator, he gives our imagination the freedom to fly.
Gospel means good news, yet written at time of destruction of Temple, and full of despair, treachery, death. But offers hope to bad CHristians - the 12 chosen apostles were witness to all the miracles yet still struggled to understand, and in the end abandoned Jesus.
Every day honest men and women awake to misery, restlessness, doubt, even torture... we forget that things were always so... We are in the great nation founded on Christian inclusiveness, forgiveness and tolerance... an inconceivably wasteful ant colony of Darwinian fascism, the crassest, most materialistic monster the world has ever witnessed. But the power of the saviour's friendship remains available to each unworthy one of us. Through the layers of comfort we can make a decision that will make us happier and the world much better.
Finest writer, probably the only non-Jewish writer of a book in the Bible, Greek speaking Syrian who knew Paul.
Zaccharias mute for 9 months, a time of retreat so that God can overcome his scepticism and get through to him.
Luke has unique stories - Good Samaritan, Prodigal Son.
Textual analysis suggests John is quite different from other Gospels. Matthew and Luke repeat large chunks of Mark, and also share another unknown source.
Good Samaritan not so much about hypocrisy - the priest and the Levite were not simply callous, but forbidden by their codes from coming to the aid of a stranger who might be a source of religious pollution (Samaritans had same codes). Compassion must overcome codes.
Prodigal son even more profound - the father rushes to forgive the son before he can say a word. Such compassionate forgiveness frees the son from the burden of guilt, avoids defensiveness, gives the strength to confess it. The ethics and circumstances justice of forgiveness are not discussed. Without such compassion we are all imprisoned.
Luke 12:51 "Do you think I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division". So reading the Bible only increases the number of questions. Luke is the hardest Gospel to accept, does the least to hide the price. "If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me" (9:23)
Faith as "suicide of reason" says Nietzsche. "For whoever would save his life for my sake, he will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake he will save it." (19:24) Yet knowing that eternal life is your reward, how can Christian morality be anything other than fundamentally selfish?
Different chronology cf first 3 ("synoptic") Gospels eg scourging of Temple early on. Most poetic, famous lines eg "God so loved the world", "Rise, take up your bed and walk", "He that is without sin", "The poor always ye have with you", "In my father's house are many mansions". Some of the metaphors just too obscure! Jesus' listeners often baffled.
At other times pushy, somewhat dislikeable. Likes to remind people how he is the son of God, Sone of Man, Messiah etc. Not the shortest gospel but contains unique stories eg wedding feast at Cana, raising of Lazarus. Moves v quickly, and the threat to Jesus' life already revealed by chapter 5, the betrayal by Judas alluded to in chapter 6. Shakespearean inevitability!
At the end, John acknowledges his economy, "and there also many other things which Jesus did... the world itself could not contain the books that should be written" - like a fairytale. It can be said that Jesus reveals only that he is the revealer; for John this is what matters most - "the truth shall make you free" [8:32] By reading his gospel we may in some way - emotionally, aesthetically, intellectually, spiritually - be liberated.
John, unique among the Gospels claims to have witnessed Jesus' life and death. Makes him out to be a charismatic radical, turns water into wine, drives the money changers from the temple, raises Lazarus from the dead. Meanwhile speaks in cryptic parables. The mystery in John is not just whether Jesus is a messenger from God or not, but also the intricacies of Jesus' life.