Category: Bible Study

Categories
Bible Study Genesis Old Testament Tanakh

Abraham & Isaac

Once upon a time, in the Bible, God and Abraham were having a conversation. God was explaining how he needed to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, and Abraham was explaining how he shouldn’t do it.

It’s the afternoon, we’ll say, and there is a beautiful sunset, and God and Abraham are standing on a small rise that looks out over a wide plain, and down towards Sodom. This image would hold some significance for Abraham. He has been promised, on multiple occasions, that God will make of him a Great Nation. He has asked Abraham to count the stars in the sky. He has asked him to number the grains of sand. He has shown him wide vistas and said, “This is all for you and your descendants.” All of these are approximations of the legacy Abraham will leave behind. God has asked Abraham to count the stars and number the grains of sand, but at the point of this conversation, this bargaining with God, Abraham has only one child, a boy, Ishmael, whom he fathered with his wife’s handmaid, Hagar. Also, during this conversation, Abraham is 100 years old and his wife, Sarah, is 90.

Earlier in the day, when God appeared to Abraham as three visitors, God tells Abraham that within the year, Sarah will have given birth to a son. Sarah, overhearing this, laughs a little, laughs the quiet part out loud, because, as she says, “I am past childbearing age, and my husband is very old. Am I to have this great pleasure?” But God insists, and tells Abraham that there is a child on the way, and he will be named Isaac.

God then, in need of a listening ear, maybe, or just in the way sometimes God gets lonely (he calls out plaintively for Adam and Eve when they have hidden themselves, and their nakedness, from him) and needs companionship, reveals the plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. The sins in these cities are too great, God says. Something has to be done, God says. Raze it all and salt the earth. Abraham argues, though, that if there are 50 righteous people in Sodom, that it should be spared. That if there are 45 righteous people, that it should be spared. And we go to 40, and then 30, and then 20, and then 10. And God says, “For the sake of 10 righteous people, I will not destroy it.”

Abraham, who has lied twice about his wife being his sister (which is not technically a lie since she is his half-sister) so as to avoid any kind of punishment or murdering because of how beautiful his wife is, has the audacity to question God, and even chide God a little: “Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” This has to sting a little, because, actually, yes, God did, at one point in his history, kill the righteous with the wicked when he flooded the whole earth to punish mankind. God is at his most human in the Hebrew Bible.

Sarah does have a baby, a boy, and she does name him Isaac, which means “laughter” or “he laughs.” It’s a bit of a joke, reminding Sarah that she laughed at the idea of ever having a child of her own. But Sarah also describes Isaac this way: “God has brought me laughter, and everyone who hears about this will laugh with me.”

(How important are Bible citations to you? I’m running through this essay without them because I think they can be interruptive. But if you need ’em, let me know.)

Like most family stories, this one is messy. We’re not even really going to touch on the whole Ishmael of it all, but there’s Ishmael, Abraham’s son, whom Sarah wants banished after the birth of Isaac. All of Sarah’s attention, and all of Abraham’s attention, is on Isaac. (This is a little exaggerated. When Abraham is told by God that Sarah is going to bear a son, Abraham says, “If only Ishmael would live before You!” — in a sense, saying, “I am perfectly happy having Ishmael as my heir. I don’t need another. But God insists, the way God do.)

The most important thing to know about Isaac is that he will soon become entirely a product of trauma. We can read these stories and look for nuggets of hidden truths and Biblical understanding; but we can also just read these stories as stories. Here is a family, here is a terrible request, and on the other side there isn’t a family any longer.

God calls to Abraham, and Abraham says, “Here I am.” God tells Abraham, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”

And, again, the messiness of the family dynamics ring so true, even to modern ears. God himself ignores Ishmael, and calls Isaac Abraham’s only son. Sons do not fair well in the Hebrew Bible, especially first-born sons. Cain and Abel couldn’t work it out. Ishmael is not considered Abraham’s heir, but Isaac is. Isaac’s sons, Jacob and Esau, are also at odds with each other. Then we get to Joseph and no one likes him. This denial of Ishmael will have consequences later.

God calls to Abraham, tells him to offer his son as a burnt sacrifice, and Abraham sets off the next morning. There is no bargaining this time with God. Why? There is no countering or arguing; no demand for an explanation as to how, exactly, Abraham is going to establish a strong line when one son is banished and the other is dead.

Religious scholars and a certain type of church-y person will say that the story of the Binding of Isaac is about Abraham’s absolute trust in God, and Abraham’s willingness to do anything asked of him. And it might be about that — but this is not a God one should worship. This is cruelty. Sarah says, “God has brought me laughter, and everyone who hears about this will laugh with me.” God says, “Ritually murder your son on a mountain for me.”

A common refrain I have is that the Bible is not the Word of God. The Bible is a composition of a variety of writings, each with a political agenda. I have to remind myself of that when I read about Isaac, or poor Job, or Jephthah and Jephthah’s daughter (more on them in a bit). They describe a certain kind of relationship God has, but it may not be described accurately. In the Hebrew Bible, God says that to show your willingness to follow him, you must sacrifice your son. In the New Testament, Jesus will say to the Rich Young Man, “Sell all your things to follow me.” Of those two sacrifices, one is more moral than the other, at least in my mind.

The sacrificial party is Abraham, Isaac, and two of Abraham’s men. They walk for three days, and we have no idea what they talked about. How much does anyone know on this walk? What is on Abraham’s heart each step that takes him closer to Moriah?

On the third day, Abraham stops and tells his two men to wait for him: “Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you.”

Let’s talk about the word the word “we” is doing here. For those who want to argue that Abraham knew all along that God wasn’t really going to make him sacrifice Isaac, they’ll point to how Abraham says “we will worship” and “we will come back to you.” Why say we, they ask, if Abraham knew he was going to kill his son and return alone.

(An ogre and a child are walking into the woods. The child looks to the ogre and says “Gee, it sure is awfully dark out here and i’m getting scared.” And the ogre says back to the child, “You think you’re scared? I have to walk out of here alone!”)

But it could also be a small lie, this “we” there and “we” back — and Abraham has told small lies before for self-protection. If he said, “We’re going to worship, and then I’ll come back,” he would have to answer some uncomfortable questions and risk being stopped in his divine mission. “We” is a polite fiction to grease the wheels of worship.

This next part in the story is also worth a little digging:

“Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. So the two of them walked on together.”

Sacrifices must be pure. They must be unmarked and unblemished. Abraham lets Isaac carry the wood, but not the knife, and not the fire, because if Isaac were to nick himself, or singe his skin, he would no longer be a Good Offering to God.

Sacrifices are also usually from the first-born of the flock. And Isaac is the second-born son. Why doesn’t God ask for Ishmael? And here we enter into a debate between Islam and Judaism and I, a white Baptist, am just the person to tell you about it.

Some Muslims believe that it actually was Ishmael whom Abraham was supposed to sacrifice. There’s a lot of quibbling about the phrase “take thy only son.” Some Muslim scholars say that Ishmael is the only one that could ever have been an “only son” because he was an only son for 14 years, until the birth of Isaac. And Isaac would never have the experience of being an only son, since he is the second born.

The midrash on this story captures some of this uncertainty. Here is a record of the “full” conversation:

God: Take your son
Ibrahaim: I’ve got two sons
God: Your only son.
Ibrahaim: Each son is an only son to his mother.
God: The one whom you love.
Ibrahim: But I love both of them.
God: Ishaq.

(This actually sounds more like the Abraham we know from the Sodom and Gomorrah story.)

In the Bible, Isaac only speaks to his father once. “Father! The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” And Abraham answers, “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.”

Things move quickly from this point. Abraham builds an altar, lays the wood, binds his son Isaac, and lays him on the sacrificial table.

A father is about to murder his only son. Because a deity said to.

The fact that Abraham doesn’t, in fact, sacrifice his son — an angel stops Abraham and sends a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Just as Abraham said God would. “God himself will provide the lamb, my son.”

(There is a LOT of Christian symbolism that can be read into this story — a father sacrificing his only begotten son; a son carrying the wood that he’s to be sacrificed on — but it’s not actually present in the story. This is a Jewish story about a Jewish event. Those Jews who split from Judaism to become Christians would know these Torah stories by memory, and these would, of course, influence the writings of the gospel. But again: the Hebrew Bible isn’t Christian, it’s co-opted.)

Abraham is blessed for his faithfulness — which, again, is often preached as the main message of this story: God may ask you to do the impossible, but he will be with you the whole time. I still don’t care so much for that as a spiritual take-away. There must be other ways for us to demonstrate love and devotion to God (or the Universe or the Sacred Mystery or whatever you are or are not calling the ineffable).

Abraham and Isaac never speak to each other again in the Hebrew Bible. In fact, there’s this curious passage towards the end of this story: “So Abraham returned to his young men, and they arose and went together to Beer-sheba; and Abraham lived at Beer-sheba.”

This event is utterly destabilizing for Isaac. There’s this detail, about how Isaac marries Rebekah in his mother’s tent, and that Rebekah “became his wife, and he loved her; and Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death.” (Gen 24:67) When we see him next, he is an old man, blind, and maybe or maybe not aware that his younger son, Jacob, is heisting the birthright from Esau. Isaac is passive and sad and seemingly cut off from any action — which is what you’d expect from someone who is nearly murdered by his father.

So much care and attention is given to Abraham’s faith and faithfulness. So little is said about what this must have been like for Isaac. “Somewhere there must be more love.”

Categories
Belief Bible Study Finding Ghosts God Purgatory Seeking Souls

Souls, Purgatory, and Ghosts (with an explanation of Plumber Porn as a chaser)

SOULS

Do you have a soul?

We have to start with what a soul is, which should be easy, it’s only four letters, but the thing is, it’s not easy, even if it were three letters. We don’t have a unilateral definition of the soul.

We don’t know where the soul “lives” in the body. We don’t know if the soul is separate from our earthly experiences. All we have is a hopeful maybe.

In the Bible, the first mention of a soul actually comes right at the beginning: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” (Gen 1:1-2)

(I love this passage from Anne Sexton’s poem, “The Earth”:

God loafs around heaven,
without a shape
but He would like to smoke His cigar
or bite His fingernails
and so forth.)

The Bible is a translated work. The Hebrew Bible is written in Hebrew; the New Testament in Greek. Sometimes we know pretty exactly what a phrase means; the translation is easy. But In Gen 1:2, we have this phrase, “formless and void” — tohu wabohu/תֹ֙הוּ֙ וָבֹ֔הוּ in transliterated Hebrew. Only that’s not quite the right phrase. It’s one of those untranslatable terms that we get the sense of, but not the meaning of. Tohu, for instance, can mean “desert, emptiness, nothing.” But it can also mean “vanity” (which is how the prophet Isaiah uses it) — similar to how we use the term “shallow” as both a measurement of physical depth and personal/intellectual depth. The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are already complicated enough in their original languages; what we’re getting, as modern English readers, is just a lot of fingers-crossed guesses. It’s one of the reasons why my personal theology is not very Bible-based.

That “wind from God” — or “Ruach Elohim” in the Orthodox Jewish Bible, or “the Spirit of God” in King James — is God’s soul, per your good friend Mike Bevel. Or God’s breath. It depends on how you conceive of God. For a lot of Christians, God is wholly spirit, and without a soul, so it’s his spirit that hovers over the waters. I’m okay with a God with a soul, and like this imagery more. The Bible was made for people, not people for the Bible.

(I also prefer the verb “brooding” rather than “hovering,” which might be a better translation of the Hebrew verb rachaph/מְרַחֶ֖פֶת anyway. It gets at the genderfulness of God, who is all genders and no genders and all sexualities and no sexualities. Here God is, brooding over the waters, like a hen with her chicks.)

In Genesis 2, we get an account of a soul entering a body when God breaths the breath of life into adam — the name of the first man, yes, but also the Hebrew word for earth. God has fashioned a man — Adam — out of the earth — adam — and he then breathes his ruach — his Divine Breath — into that earth. And the earth becomes flesh. And the earth was flesh.

I think we have souls. I think we call it consciousness when we’re not interested in/compelled by any sort of spiritual direction. We might call it memory. But I think there is something — some awareness, some sense of “me”-ness — that exists in, well, everything. Which makes me a Shinto Baptist, I guess, so let’s go wake up some books and bid goodbye to those that do not bring us joy oh look we can start with these books on the Vietnam war I was sure I was going to read but then that manic phase passed and they do not bring me joy.

I think we all have souls. Something of this experience that we’re all having on this planet is immortal and mutable and keeps going. In our current physical bodies? We’ll get to that, but my sneak-peek answer for you is no, it won’t be in physical bodies.

The question of a soul, and its use, has been a religious irritation for as long as we have conceived of an afterlife. Especially if your conception of the afterlife has a Good Section and a Bad Section. We know our literal physical bodies age, and fail, and die, and decompose. So the physical body can’t be what is judged. (Except, of course, for those sects who believe in a full-on full-body resurrection where we are all returned to the bodies we’ve always had and there are some questions about that that’ll get to later in this piece.) We also became pretty aware that people have personalities, and ways of doing things that sometimes accord with the status quo, and sometimes do not, and what causes that other than our souls? So souls become the metaphor of our holiness (or lack of holiness), and some souls are judged to be good souls, and go to Heaven (everyone is going to Heaven, by the way); and some souls are bad souls and they are sent to Hell. (I don’t believe in Hell and I barely believe in Heaven.)

More than anything, I am ego-bound to my experiences. I have a great deal of earthly attachment. And I desperately want to keep going. I do not want death to be the end of me, and my experiences. I am working on calming my mind to the idea that these years given to me to see and feel and love and hurt and dream and fail and succeed and just be alive to all of the mystery are finite. And that once I die, that is it. And maybe in death that purpose will become clear, why I had to be here, and why my life had to go the way it went. (I am not complaining about my life, to be clear. It is my own, my own, my own; and, like, say, a novel by Dickens or Tolstoy, could it use some editing? Absolutely; but I have no idea what to cut.) But truthfully, even in the very moment of typing this sentence — in every letter — there is this mini-hope that everything doesn’t end forever with my death. That it will be something akin to falling asleep and then, waking. And some period of time has passed, maybe just a few minutes or a few millennia, but to me it would be only a blink.

I want Zach to be there, when I…what? Resurrect? Yes, because I love him, and he makes sense of the world for me when I am not always able. I want all the people I love to be near me. I just don’t know where that “here” is. Christianity, as an example, has this concept of heaven which sounds interminable. As Mark Twain describes it in “Letters from the Earth,” in which Satan travels the planet and sends dispatches back to the other angels:

“In man’s heaven everybody sings! The man who did not sing on earth sings there; the man who could not sing on earth is able to do it there. The universal singing is not casual, not occasional, not relieved by intervals of quiet; it goes on, all day long, and every day, during a stretch of twelve hours. And everybody stays; whereas in the earth the place would be empty in two hours. The singing is of hymns alone. Nay, it is of one hymn alone. The words are always the same, in number they are only about a dozen, there is no rhyme, there is no poetry: ‘Hosannah, hosannah, hosannah, Lord God of Sabaoth, ‘rah! ‘rah! ‘rah! siss! — boom! … a-a-ah!’

“Meantime, every person is playing on a harp — those millions and millions! — whereas not more than twenty in the thousand of them could play an instrument in the earth, or ever wanted to.

“Consider the deafening hurricane of sound — millions and millions of voices screaming at once and millions and millions of harps gritting their teeth at the same time! I ask you: is it hideous, is it odious, is it horrible?

“Consider further: it is a praise service; a service of compliment, of flattery, of adulation! Do you ask who it is that is willing to endure this strange compliment, this insane compliment; and who not only endures it, but likes it, enjoys it, requires if, commands it? Hold your breath!

“It is God! This race’s god, I mean. He sits on his throne, attended by his four and twenty elders and some other dignitaries pertaining to his court, and looks out over his miles and miles of tempestuous worshipers, and smiles, and purrs, and nods his satisfaction northward, eastward, southward; as quaint and nave a spectacle as has yet been imagined in this universe, I take it.”

For those who believe in a bodily resurrection — and it’s a popular bit of theology — there are a host of uncomfortable questions that really highlight our society’s centering of abelism and whatever “normal” means. Bodily resurrection means you, in your body, with your soul, are resurrected to live with God in wherever heaven is. It’s boring to focus too much on the possibility of this — through God, anything is possible — but it’s useful to think about the mechanics of bodily resurrection.

I watched a YouTube video from the “Sex Stories with Wyoh Lee” channel about a young man named Carson Tueller who is (a) gay; (b) former Mormon; and (c) a quadrapalegic due to an accident on a trampoline and when will we finally realize that trampolines are dangerous death-traps and the only reason every person hasn’t broken their neck on one is that there are two reasons: (1) not everyone has access to a trampoline, Baruch Hashem; and (2) each person has been assigned an angel to catch you when you fuck up a flip, but sometimes that angel isn’t good at its job, like when I’m asked to change the toner in the printer.

Carson Tueller speaks about relearning his body and his life and his sexuality post-Mormonism and post-neck trauma. His experience of the erotic and the sensual is mapped differently than someone who is not either/both of those things. He has had to re-learn the world. And, because of the nature of his accident, he has had to make peace with accepting that this is his life: in a wheelchair, essentially paralyzed from the chest down.

How is he resurrected, if we’re going to believe in resurrection? Is he resurrected “whole”? Then what does that say about the time he has spent becoming comfortable in his current body? Would everyone wheelchair bound be resurrected in whole bodies? Doesn’t that just value only a certain type of experience? Don’t we miss out, in our collective consciousness, this unique perspective? And we can ask this about blind people, and the deaf community, and autistic folks, and those of us on that spectrum.

Would my mental illness be “cured” in my resurrected body? I actually hope not. The Mike Bevel you interact with — either here, online, or in person — is a Mike Bevel entirely informed by my mental illness. And it’s uncomfortable, sometimes, and scary, and lonely, and utterly baffling. But it is also all me. Mike Bevel without mental illness is not Mike Bevel. He’s some other Mike, who may or may not be just as lovely as I am. Maybe lovelier. But that Mike Bevel is not ::this:: Mike Bevel.

“If your eye gets poked out in this life, will it be waiting up in heaven with your wife?” — Crash Test Dummies, “God Shuffled His Feet.”

This idea of heaven isn’t super appealing to me as a Christian.

But I do believe there is a “next” after this life. It just won’t be anything we can understand now. If we are disintegrated down to a pile of atoms, each of those atoms (the average body, by the way, has seven billion billion billion atoms in it) could go on to become a part of something else, and each one of those “something elses” will carry the entirety of our experiences with it. Maybe. We will die and we will know, or we will die and cease asking.

There are many kinds of Christians out there. My kind is the kind that doesn’t know what happens next, doesn’t necessarily believe in the blood atonement of Christ, but thinks we’re here to help each other get to the end with as much grace, dignity, and love as we can.

PURGATORY

Purgatory was invented by late-12th-century Christians. You won’t find a mention of the word “purgatory” in either the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Bible. It doesn’t show up in any extra-Biblical texts, nor do the Gnostics write about it.

Purgatory is this liminal space between Hell and Heaven where some Christians — primarily Catholics, but also some Anglicans, Lutherans, and Methodists — believe that souls go to, in a sense, finish getting it right. Yeats tells us that faeries are “fallen angels who were not good enough to be saved, nor bad enough to be lost.”

Anne Sexton uses this bit of country folklore as the heading to her poem, “The Fallen Angels”:

“Who are they?”
“Fallen angels who were not good enough to be saved,
nor bad enough to be lost” say the peasantry.

They come on to my clean
sheet of paper and leave a Rorschach blot.
They do not do this to be mean,
they do it to give me a sign
they want me, as Aubrey Beardsley once said,
to shove it around till something comes.
Clumsy as I am,
I do it.
For I am like them –
both saved and lost,
tumbling downward like Humpty Dumpty
off the alphabet.

Each morning I push them off my bed
and when they get in the salad
rolling in it like a dog,
I pick each one out
just the way my daughter
picks out the anchovies.
In May they dance on the jonquils,
wearing out their toes,
laughing like fish.
In November, the dread month,
they suck the childhood out of the berries
and turn them sour and inedible.

Yet they keep me company.
They wiggle up life.
They pass out their magic
like Assorted Lifesavers.
They go with me to the dentist
and protect me form the drill.
At the same time,
they go to class with me
and lie to my students.

O fallen angel,
the companion within me,
whisper something holy
before you pinch me
into the grave.

I write a lot about the Bible(s), and scripture, and what things might or might not mean, but I do not think that the Bible is infallible (and I especially do not think I am infallible — take everything I write to you with the largest salt-lick you can find). And I do not think a relationship with scripture is required at all to be worthwhile or needed in the Family of God. So much of the Bible seems to be an explanation for an explanation that has mopped a believer into a corner. Purgatory is one of those explanations.

We have a Christian theology that says Heaven is a reward for good behavior on earth, and Hell is the punishment for bad behavior. And then, like Job, someone says, “Why?” And this why is, “Why isn’t there sort of a middle place, like Arizona, where you go if you weren’t super bad, but could have been a little more gooder?” And voila, we get this concept of Purgatory, where souls go to improve their test scores.

But Purgatory is dependent on the idea of Heaven and Hell being actual places that actually exist. It’s an explanation to make reason and logic out of ineffable things. We see this a lot in the writings of the early Church Fathers, and, I would argue, in some of the gospels. Specifically, I’m thinking about the Gospel of John and how he alone of the evangelists argues that Christ was present at the very beginning of everything. And this argument is necessary because the question “Why?” came up again: “Why would the patriarchs — Abraham, Isaac, Jacob — be saved if they did not have an encounter with Christ, pre- or post-crucifixion?” And the answer is: they did, because “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)

Matthew and Luke do a little bit of ret-conning, too; they both start their gospels with genealogies proving a continuous line from Adam through the Patriarchs and King David. Matthew and Luke also both contain a version of the Divine Birth Narrative. Mark, the oldest of the gospels, doesn’t start with Christ’s genealogy at all. Mark just starts with, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” It’s as if Matthew and Luke felt like they need to fill in some of the gaps Mark, in his enthusiasm to rant on and on about demons, left out. Why is Jesus called the Son of God in Mark? Because his birth was foretold by God, which Matthew and Luke include. And John, the last of the gospels in the New Testament to be written*, decides he needs to answer the question of ::when:: exactly Christ came into being. (An argument that continues to this day in many churches and denominations is: was Jesus a man who became divine, was he a divine who became man, or was he both? Did Jesus exist before his birth in some form or other, or was the Jesus Event (which the writer Jack Miles calls “a crisis in the life of God”) the first time the idea of Jesus is made manifest?)

(* I’ll make this point a lot in my writings about the Bible: there are more books of the Bible, and more gospels, and books of wisdom, and psalms, and prayers, than are contained in the Bible we currently use. The New Testament we have is ::entirely:: a political document that is interested in establishing and maintaining orthodoxy and the power structure to protect that orthodoxy. Books of the Bible that did not seem to follow the idea of Peter being the “rock” upon which Christ’s church was to be built/maintained/governed were sidelined as heresies. The strength of your testimony about Christ was based on your proximity to the actual Christ Event itself.)

The Bible is weakest when it seeks to reaffirm orthodox thinking and moves away from the mysterious and ineffable.

(I recorded some of my thoughts about this topic while I was cleaning the kitchen and I had a section about the relative smartness of the Israelites putting their god in Heaven, a non-tangible place, as opposed to the Greeks, who put their gods on Mount Olympus, because, “People can climb Mount Olympus, can’t they? That exists? (You should probably make sure that exists.)” And it does exist, and it’s 9,573 feet tall.)

Purgatory is also a challenging concept because no one agrees on when Heaven happens. Do we die and immediately go to Heaven? (Or Purgatory, or Hell?) Or do we die, there’s a period where we’re just dead, and then we’re resurrected in some form or other, to await a judgment of some kind that sends us to Heaven, Purgatory, or Hell? The more we try to make human sense of Whatever Happens Next, the more we muddy the water, and find ourselves tired and disgusted with the whole process. We maybe aren’t meant to figure any of this out.

What I know for sure is that, if there is a heaven, even if you’re a little bit Hitler, you are going to go there. Universal Salvation. There is no unredeemable sin in my theology. We do cause suffering, and we suffer in turn, and that could be what Hell or Purgatory is: knowing that we were never as kind as we could have been, as loving as was necessary, or as giving as is expected of us, and we spend our time coming to some sort of peace with that — fully loving our fully human selves but also recognizing and accepting responsibility for the suffering we have caused.

(I also don’t believe that the crucifixion was necessary as a mechanism for Christ’s divine grace. I frankly find it repugnant that we empower political murder with salvation. And I think it’s ::especially:: suspect how much meaning white people get from a brown-skinned Middle Eastern man being murdered by the state. It empowers capital punishment and violence. There is a LOT we need to consider if we are going to profess a Theology of Crucifixion.)

Related to Purgatory, we also have Limbo, brought to us by the Catholic Church, and it is bonkers. Hell has four quadrants — or, rather, had, but I’m getting ahead of myself — Hell of the Damned, Purgatory, Limbo of the Fathers or Patriarchs, and Limbo of the Infants. Limbo of Infants was set aside for babies who died before they could be baptized. Limbo was a part of Catholic doctrine for several hundred — if not a couple thousand — years. Until 2007 when Pope John Paul II said, “[shrug]” about Limbo and wrote, “The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die without Being Baptized.” Infants prior to 2007, who were assumed to be in Limbo, could be prayed out of Limbo by the prayers of the faithful. After 2007, John Paul II said, “Well, we sure hope those babies are saved, but we are no longer preaching that babies are sent to Limbo, which no longer exists.” Popes can do these kinds of things.

What happened to the babies who were in Limbo, the day after John Paul II published “The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die without Being Baptized.” Better yet, what happened to those parents who were offered the comfort of Limbo for their child; and a mechanism, prayer, for getting their child out of Limbo? In a sense, where did their babies go? Where did that faith and fear and belief and hope go, the paltry hope though it was, that is in Limbo? I think this would only cause me deep despair.

Religion is weakest when it offers answers, rather than comfort. It is useless to us because those answers can, and do, become obsolete. They can also lead us to dogmatic practices that minimize the human in favor of the ritual. In Mark 3:4, Jesus asks, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?” The point of the Sabbath is to reacquaint ourselves with God. Do we do this by following the rules of Shabbat or do we do this by being God in the world?

(And we’re leaning dangerously close to anti-Semitism here. Much of the New Testament is an answer or a counter to Judaism, and positions itself as the continuation of God’s word. But the Jews, rightfully, believe they have the complete word and they will follow the rules prescribed by the Torah. We, as Christians, have to be careful in how we make assertions about our theology, because theology is not a one-size-fits-all philosophy and our religion stands on the back of another religion.)

The reason I do not necessarily believe at least in Hell and Purgatory is that it goes against my conception of God as all-loving. And if we look at Crucifixion Theology and Resurrection Theology, we have to ask ourselves: if Jesus was willing to offer his body and his blood, in the form of bread and wine, to Peter, who would deny him three times, and to Judas, who had ::already betrayed him::, then what need do we have of Hell? Why Purgatory? If Christ is a Salvation Event in our history, he is a salvation event for all. (And the reason he’s even seen as a Salvation Event is because some nutter came up with this idea of Original Sin that we need to be purged of, so we take this Christ Event, attached Blood Atonement to it, and Bob’s your uncle. Only I don’t believe in Original Sin. I don’t think I, or you, or the worst person you know needs to justify themselves to God, needs to prove that they washed off Original Sin, are ever not invited and included at the Table of God. Original Sin was an early attempt to explain the existence of Evil in the world. And it’s not a good explanation at that.)

GHOSTS

[from the recording, in an embarrassed tone] “Oh, man, I believe in them.“

I know I probably shouldn’t, and it drives my husband crazy that I do. (Except he has also Seen Things — or, rather, ::not:: seen things, but seen doors open or close and once he felt a cat jump up on his bed when there were no cats to jump so what about ::that::, Science?) I don’t know what they are. They might be the souls of people who are hanging around earth for some reason. They were initially understood as a kind of supernatural creature that could take the shape of someone. So, in Hamlet, the ghost of Hamlet’s father isn’t Hamlet’s father’s soul returned as a ghost; it’s a shape-shifting entity called a ghost that is now in the shape of Hamlet’s father.

I think I saw a ghost at the beach, but she wasn’t aware of me at all. It was almost as if I were watching a memory happen. Ghosts seem metaphysical, and supernatural, now, only because we can’t explain the “why” of them. “Why do they wear clothes?” Zach asks. “With what are they making footstep noises?” Maybe in the future, a less-rapey Neil deGrasse Tyson-type will figure the “why” out about ghosts and then they’ll just be something else scientific we now know. Maybe science is just magic that we know the rules to.

(Bonus Content from the Tapes: Mike on Plumber Porn: “I have a theory that there is probably more Plumber Porn for heterosexuals than for homosexuals because Plumber Porn is for men who look like pudgy dads and just want to be able to stay in the industry for a little while longer, and also too for the men watching who want to see someone who has lived their fitness journey.” This whole thing came about because I find it weird in fantasy novels where something magical happens and people are amazed — like a wizard does a wizardy thing and people lose their minds and I wonder, “But why? They’re wizards. They do magic.” Like, if I called a plumber to fix my pipes I’m not going to be amazed that a plumber fixed my pipes. That’s what plumbers do. At least, plumbers not in porn. Which brings me to my Theory of Plumbers in Porn.)

A quick wrap-up:

Souls: Yes
Purgatory: No
Ghosts: Yes

Categories
Belief Bible Study Gospels John Luke Mark Matthew New Testament Parables

In Which I Don’t Write Very Coherently About Fig Trees, But At Least Try My Best

A sentence you’ll read when you Google “figs and wasps” is in a caption to a photo of a wasp and a fig: “A female fig wasp descends through the ostiole into the center of the fig plant’s syconium.” This is all clearly a private matter and none of our business but it is my responsibility to tell you that when you eat a fig, you’re also eating a wasp. Or at least wasp eggs. Maybe it’s wasp larva. The point is, I didn’t read much of the article; I’m a headlines kinda guy.

(By the way this article that I didn’t read, and you shouldn’t either, tries to bright-side dead wasps in figs and I want to say to this article, “You don’t have to work this hard on a losing battle. Rest.”)

(ALICE WALKER INTERLUDE: “for two who slipped away almost entirely”

for two who
slipped away
almost
entirely:
my “part” Cherokee
great-grandmother
Tallulah
(Grandmama Lula)
on my mother’s side
about whom
only one
agreed-upon
thing
is known:
her hair was so long
she could sit on it:

And my white (Anglo-Irish)
great-great-grandfather
on my father’s side
nameless
(Walker, perhaps?)
whose only remembered act
is that he raped
a child;
my great-great-grandmother,
who bore his son,
my great-grandfather,
when she was eleven.

Rest in peace.
The meaning of your lives
is still
unfolding.

Rest in peace.
In me
the meaning of your lives
is still
unfolding.

Rest in peace, in me.
The meaning of your lives
is still
unfolding.

Rest. In me
the meaning of your lives
is still
unfolding.

Rest. In peace
in me
the meaning of our lives
is still
unfolding.

Rest.)

Jesus curses a fig tree in the gospels of Mark (“May no one ever eat fruit from you again”) and Matthew (“May no fruit ever come from you again!”). In Luke, Jesus doesn’t curse a fig tree, but he tells a parable about a fig tree. And in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (a Gnostic text about, well, just what it says), there’s no fig story, but a similar curse: “O evil, ungodly, and foolish one, what hurt did the pools and the waters do thee? behold, now also thou shalt be withered like a tree, and shalt not bear leaves, neither root, nor fruit.” (IGoT III.2)

(Orthodox Christianity — your Catholics, Protestants, and the like — will claim that we don’t know much about Jesus’s childhood. But that’s because they refuse to recognize extrabiblical texts, like the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which cover a lot of that stuff.)

Let’s unpack just a little bit of history. The Hebrew Bible — what Christians call the Old Testament but shouldn’t, because it’s anti-Semitic — was written by Jews for Jews to compile their history and catalog the rules, rites, and rituals necessary to worship YHWH. (Eventually I’ll stop reminding you about this — that the Tanakh is non-Christian — but not yet.)

There are messianic passages in the Hebrew Bible. The concept of a messiah originates in Judaism. For the Jews, the messiah was prophesied to be a Jewish king from the line of David, who would come to battle all of Israel’s enemies and establish the Messianic Age. He would come as a warrior.

By the time of Jesus, there are some Jews who are anxious about the messiah, who doesn’t seem to be on any sort of schedule, and they’re not sure what’s going to happen. But they are desperately looking for a messiah. Those Jews will eventually find Jesus (who is also Jewish), and proclaim him as the messiah. They will work backwards from many of the prophecies in the Tanakh to show how Jesus checks all the boxes for messiahship. They’re done looking.

Here is a list of Jewish messiah claimants:

Jesus of Nazareth
Simon bar Kokhba
Moses of Crete
Ishak ben Ya’kub Obadiah Abu ‘Isa al-Isfahani
David Alroy
Moses of Botarel
Asher Lämmlein (a German, which feels complicated)
David Reubeni
Sabbatai Zevi
Jacob Querido
Miguel Cardoso
Löbele Prossnitz
Jacob Joseph Frank
Yosef yitzchak Schneersohn
Menachem Mendel Schneerson

There’s a long list of Christian messiah claimants, too, but I only want to talk about David Shayler, an MI5 agent and whistle-blower born in 1965. He’s a 9/11 Truther who sees David Icke — who believes there are lizard people living amongst us — as “the John the Baptist to my Christ.” He is currently living part-time as a woman named Delores Kane in an environmental squat situation. His claim to the role of messiah comes from interpreting the engravings on the Rod of Aaron, the staff carried by Moses’s older brother, which Shayler claims are an anagram of “David Shayler, Righteous King.”

Some 1st century messianic Jews picked Jesus as their Chosen One. These Jews had grown disillusioned with Judaism as it was then practiced, and wrote about Jesus as someone who also wanted to see the end of Jerusalem as a political and religious power. Jesus spends a lot of time breaking sabbath rules, disrespecting the synagogue, and angrily overturning tables because of what he sees as the dissolution of holiness and a shocking lack of compassion and empathy. One uncomfortable thing that Christians should grapple with, but don’t, is how anti-Jewish the New Testament is. We of course have to acknowledge that Jesus himself was Jewish; but he then spends most of his ministry as an iconoclast of Judaism. Christianity wants to say, “Hey, Jews, we found the messiah!” And Jews want the U.S. to stop enabling Nazis and to remind Christians that no, actually, the messiah has NOT been found, we’re still waiting, YOU’RE still waiting, and your Jesus seems nice, we’re aware of his work, but we’re not convinced, please stop making a big deal out of Hannukah, it’s weird for all of us.

(But what about Matthew 5:17, you might ask? That’s where Jesus says, “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.” And we have some options in how we read this. Some fundamentalist Christians love this passage because it allows them to hate gays, since Jesus isn’t coming to overturn the Levitical Laws. They’re not giving up shrimp and mixed fibers, but that’s for another time. Some Christian theologians see this as Jesus actually justifying his current destructive behavior, because for Jesus the law isn’t Leviticus and 613 mitzvot to be followed by rote. He’s here to fulfill God’s law, which is a radical political message of: care for everyone, feed everyone, sell all your things, and follow me.)

(Am I ever going to write about this g/d fig tree?)

Another very quick bit of history that you may or may not know: Mark is the oldest Gospel we have in the canonical Bible. Mark is not the oldest writing in the canonical Bible; those would be the letters of Paul. If you’re at all interested in Biblical stuff, not necessarily as a source of theology, but to look at the development of a literary tradition, I ::highly:: recommend Marcus Borg’s Evolution of the Word, which sets the books of the New Testament in the order we’re pretty sure they were written in. Matthew is next, then Luke. And we’re pretty sure that Matthew and Luke had a copy of Mark that they used for reference when writing their own gospels. John is the youngest gospel, and it’s weird, and John probably had all three Synoptic Gospels (theologian talk for Mark, Matthew, and Luke), but also was enrolled in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop so he’s really just mostly doing his own thing.

Mark and Matthew tell the story of the fig tree as an event that Jesus participated in: Jesus is hungry, he sees a fig tree in leaf, thinks, “A snack!” and then finds out that it’s not the season for figs; that there are no figs to be et; and so he curses the fig tree.

(One time, Zach and I were in D.C., and I had waited too long to tell Zach that I was hungry, so I’m already not in a Great Space, mentally, and we get to this place with an overwhelming menu and I start crying a little and say, plaintively, to Zach: “I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO EAT.”)

For Mark, it’s a multi-day story. One day, he curses a fig tree. He then goes to Jerusalem where he enters the temple and throws out the merchants and money lenders. The next day, as they’re passing that same fig tree, Peter says, “Oh hey, look at how cursed that fig tree is.” And Jesus goes on to be inscrutable the way he can be inscrutable when he starts parable-ing: “Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and if you do not doubt in your heart, but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you.” (Mark 11:23)

Matthew doesn’t have the table-turning interlude. Jesus curses the fig tree, the fig tree is cursed, and afterwards he says a similar nonsensical thing: “Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only will you do what has been done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, ‘Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ it will be done.”

Literally no person in the history of time has moved a mountain via prayer.

So how do we understand this story? Is it literal? Is it metaphorical? And my answer to you, beloveds, is it’s probably both.

(I have a complicated theology about who Jesus is, and how he is separate from the Christ Event. I do think a man named Jesus existed, and probably caused a lot of disruption. I think he is an expression of the Christ idea ::in that time::. I think the Christ Event has happened over and over again, way before humans even appeared on earth, way before even the earth itself was entirely formed. The universe is 14 billion years old; we have no right to believe that the Christ Event only happened once, and hasn’t continued happening again and again.)

Was Jesus hungry? He would have to be. He is human. He is not in a profession. They’re not making money and relying on people extending kindness and generosity to them. In fact, Mark and Matthew explicitly tell us that Jesus was hungry. Did he curse a fig tree? No doubt. I have, on many occasions, cursed six things before breakfast.

Did the curse work?

This is where we get into metaphor and parable. Christian theologians see Jesus cursing the fig tree as a symbolic curse on Jerusalem and its religious structure. The temple appears as a tree with leaves, that looks like it has fruit to nourish. But actually, the temple is not producing good fruit.

(I want to acknowledge outright, again, the anti-Semitic nature of the Christian narrative. This story is one of violence against Judaism. One of the toughest parts of my faith — besides all of it — is reconciling Jesus’s messages of social justice with this subtext of: “The Jews are wrong.”)

Mormonism is interesting to examine at this point. As Christianity is a splinter of Jewish belief, Mormonism is a splinter of Christian belief. And, as Christianity has its own holy book that relies on Jewish texts for support, Mormonism has its holy book, which relies on the Christian gospels to supplement its claims. In some ways, we’re living in a time much like Jesus would have been living in, with religious confusion abounding and new spiritual ideas trying to gain ground in the marketplace. There’s this concept that, the further back in time you go, the closer you get to the True Christianity, or the True Judaism. But the fact is, the further back you go, it’s all becomes a kaleidoscopic confusion instead of a coherent worldview.

Categories
Belief Bible Study God Job Old Testament Ruth Tanakh

“Your God Shall Be My God”: The Book of Ruth

In many ways, The Book of Ruth is a gentle echo of The Book of Job. In Job, we witness a righteous man destroyed for a wager who remains unwavering in his faith right up until he asks, “But why?”

(They patch things up in the end, God and Job, and he gets a new family with new children. What’s interesting — and I wish I had thought to write about this when I wrote about Job earlier — is that we don’t know anything about Job’s wife. She has one line: “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die.” And after her big speech, that’s the last we see/hear of her. Is she the mother of the new family? Why was she — or, even better, was she — saved from the wager? Did she die too? Did she leave Job? Ocean so full of questions.)

The Book of Ruth is also about a life interrupted by Divine Intervention. It’s Job with a happier ending, but the same unsettling questions about how we interact with God, and how God can interact with us.

(It’s also often used by feminist, queer, and queer-friendly theologians as an example of a loving same-sex relationship, or, at least, Women Getting Strength from Women. I am not going to focus so much on the lesbianism in this story, if there is any, which I’m not entirely sold on, but boy do I recognize and feel deeply that hunger for representation, especially in a text that is so often used to call me, and people like me, an abomination worthy of destruction. Your reading of Ruth as a queer text is valid. Your reading of Ruth as a feminist text is valid. I see you and love you. Misquoting Jesus: “We were not made for the Bible, but the Bible was made for us.” Do with it whatever brings you comfort, including ignoring it.)

(My theology is best represented by this piece attributed to the Sufi mystic Rumi:
Come, come, whoever you are.
Wanderer,
worshiper,
lover of leaving.
It doesn’t matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times.
Come.
Come yet again.
Come.)

Ruth is a Jewish text. Written for Jews, by Jews. At its heart, one of its central questions is: who gets to be a Jew, and how? (Christians are interested in the Book of Ruth because it’s used as proof of Jesus’s lineage through King David. In general, Christians are only interested in the parts of the Hebrew Bible that confirm the Jesus Event. That’s also a gross overstatement on my part and I will no doubt be taken to task for that position but heavy is the head that speaks the truth.)

Ruth 1:1 starts out with, “In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land, and a certain man of Bethlehem in Judah went to live in the country of Moab, he and his wife and two sons.”

Two questions immediately sprang up for rabbis in the first millennium CE:

1) Why would God strike the Jews with a famine?

2) Why would “a certain man” (who we’ll later learn is named Elimelech) flee to live in Moab?

The Ruth Rabbah (רות רבה) is a midrashic interpretation of the events of the Book of Ruth. And for midrash, we can essentially think of it as a way of filling in the gaps. Rabbis would read the Tanakh, and when they came to a “why” question not answered in the text, they would reason themselves to an answer. (It’s how any of us tell a story, anyway, isn’t it? When we get to a why we can’t answer, we will sometimes just make shit up. We’re a storytelling people, more than a logical people.)

The Ruth Rabbah tells us this quick story to answer Question 1: “At that time God said: ‘My children are stubborn. To destroy them is impossible. To return them to Egypt is impossible. I cannot exchange them for another nation. What, then can I do? I must make them suffer and cleanse them with famine.'”

It’s the astonishingly frank reasoning of a sociopath. “I can’t kill them all. I can’t give them back. I didn’t keep the receipt, and it’s not like I can get a new people. I’ll starve them.”

The Ruth Rabbah also tells us why “a certain man” (Elimelech) would flee: “Elimelech was among the great scholars and patrons of the nation, and when the years of famine came, he said: ‘Now all of Israel will come to my door, each with his box (to collect money).’ He stood up and ran away from them.”

So, Elimelech, his wife, Naomi, and his two sons, go to Moab.

Moab is an interesting place for these Jews to go. From yesterday, when we talked about Lot and his daughters, we learned that the eldest daughter bore her father, Lot, a son named Moab, who founds the city of Moab. The younger daughter bore her father a son named Amon. And if we jump to Deuteronomy 23:4-5 for a sec, we learn this: “They should not come into the congregation of God, neither Moabite nor Amonite, even the tenth generation should not enter into the congregation of God, forever, because they did not greet you with bread and water on the way when you left Egypt.”

Once upon a time, Moses and God freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. They wandered in the desert for 40 years. They didn’t make a lot of friends. (They did make a golden calf and boy did that really chap God’s hide but I digress.) And it’s a lovely bit of irony that the Moabites and Amonites would be inhospitable to the Israelites. Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, in part, because of the cries to heaven of a young woman burned to death (or stung to death — the stories vary) for feeding a starving man. Moab and Amon are born because Lot and his daughters flee Sodom. Time is a flat circle.

Elimelech, Naomi, and their sons Mahlon and Chilion, are now in Moab, and Elimelech promptly dies, leaving Ruth with the kids. The boys took Moabite wives, Mahlon marrying a woman named Ruth; Chilion marrying a woman, Ruth’s sister, Orpah. (By the way, you guys know that Oprah’s actual given first name is Orpah? But so many people pronounced it wrong that she just decided, “Fuck it, I’m Oprah now.”)

The boys then die, too. So Naomi is left a widow with no children, and her daughters-in-law are left widowed, also with no children.

In Job, Job is punished as part of a wager. He has done nothing wrong. In the Ruth story, Elimelech dies probably as punishment for abandoning his people in their time of need. And the sons, Mahlon and Chilion, died because they took Moabite women as wives. (By the way, Ruth and Orpah aren’t just any Moabite women; they’re the daughters of Eglon, king of Moab.) But death isn’t much of a punishment for the dead person. They’re dead. (Oh boy, is someone going to ask me about death and resurrection?) Naomi seems to be the one suffering the brunt here. She is alone, unprotected in a strange and hostile city, with two daughters, now, to care for.

Naomi learns that the famine in Judah has passed. She wants to go home. She tells her daughters-in-law to return to their own homes, and wishes them new husbands and children, adding, “May the Lord deal kindly with you, as you have dealt with the dead and with me.” Naomi says that “the hand of the Lord has turned against me.”

And still, in one of the most beautiful passages in the Hebrew Bible, Ruth says:

“Do not press me to leave you
or to turn back from following you!
Where you go, I will go;
where you lodge, I will lodge;
your people shall be my people,
and your God my God.
Where you die, I will die—
there will I be buried.
May the Lord do thus and so to me,
and more as well,
if even death parts me from you!”

Ruth converts, in that moment, if not ceremonially, and not ritualistically, (God spends a LOT of time with the Israelites explaining exactly how everything needs to be done, like a fussy gay wedding planner*) at least emotionally, to Judaism, and to Naomi. She will worship Naomi’s God. She will be of Naomi’s people.

(* Like, for serious, God gets in the weeds about incense in the Book of Exodus. “I like this smell, and this smell, and I will smite you dead if you even think about bringing in THIS smell.” And as a lover of candles and incense, I’m #TeamGod on this.)

It’s curious/interesting that Ruth’s husband, Mahlon, didn’t seek to convert his wife. As a Moabite, Ruth would not have worship YHWH, the God of the Israelites; her chief diety would be Chemosh*, possibly a fish god. (There are a LOT of fish gods in the ancient past.) While YHWH claims to be the only god, there were p l e n t y of Mesopotamian deities with cults and followers. And in this moment of love, and maybe desperation, Ruth says, “I choose your life.”

(* One of the things we know about King Solomon, world’s biggest non-genius — splitting a baby in half? That’s your solution? — is he had MANY wives. Many wives from many regions who all brought their own religious traditions with them, and their own gods and rituals and rites. The worship of Chemosh was part of Solomon’s kingdom until Josiah comes along and abolishes this religious plurality.)

And this conversion is, for me, the heart of this story. It’s a suggestion of acceptance at a time when the Jews were still very insular. And, read from a Christian point of view, it also speaks to the universal nature of God — that anyone, even a Moabite, can be welcomed.

But a question for me, also at the heart of this story, is about Naomi, who feels that God has turned against her. Who will later change her name to Mara, which means “bitter” (Naomi, by the way, means “pleasant”). Who will tell others that “the Lord has dealt harshly with me, and the Almighty has brought calamity upon me.” Did God actually turn his hand against her, or does she feel, in the middle of all this tragedy and chaos, as if that is what is happening? Is she blaming herself for something that is not her fault, which is something women have been taught to do since literally the invention of humans.

It’s the same question we leave with after the Book of Job, too: has God forsaken me, or am I only a pawn? (A rabbi I talked to about Naomi said, “G-d does not forsake anyone.” Which is comforting, if untrue, because we see in Deuteronomy 31:17 that God actually does forsake people because he tells us he will forsake them: “My anger will be kindled against them in that day. I will forsake them and hide my face from them; they will become easy prey, and many terrible troubles will come upon them. In that day they will say, ‘Have not these troubles come upon us because our God is not in our midst?'” When people tell you who they are, believe them. FROM OPRAH. Everything is connected.)

What’s powerful in this story is that even though Naomi is forsaken by God, Ruth does not leave her side. “Where you go, I will go.”

Categories
Belief Bible Study Genesis Old Testament Tanakh

Lot & His Daughters, or, Hospitality Gone Terribly Wrong

There are Bible stories that aren’t in the Bible, and it occurs to me right now that I could spend a lot of time not writing at all about Lot and his daughters and just talk about how the Bible came to be, well, The Bible. Another time perhaps. Just know that there are more gospels in existence than you may be aware of, and there are extra-Biblical writings that fill in the gaps to a lot of the stories.

For instance.

The rule in Sodom was, “Whosoever giveth bread to a poor person shall be burnt at the stake.” That’s not in the Bible, but in the writings of the Rabbi Rashi, a Talmudic and Tanakhic commentator, who lived in France in the 11th century. (The Talmud is a collection of Jewish scholarship on the Tanakh. The Tanakh is essentially what Christians call the Old Testament, but which we should probably get in the habit of calling the Hebrew Bible.)

Rashi continues: Plotit*, the daughter of Lot, who was married to a prominent Sodomite**, saw a man so poor and so hungry that he was unable even to stand. Feeling sorry for him, each day she would give him a little food she had saved on her way to the water well.

(* Lot’s daughters, and his wife, are not named in the Bible. In the Book of Jasher, which doesn’t exist, but did, because it’s quoted in the Bible and in other texts at the time, Lot has four daughters and no sons. Two of his daughters were married; two were betrothed. Lot’s wife is named Irit.)

(** Not what you’re thinking, gang. This is a reference to someone living in the town of Sodom. Was he gay as pants? The midrash is silent on this.)

People in Sodom soon found themselves wondering how this man, poor and hungry near to death, was not, in fact, dying. Maybe their hope was: he’ll starve to death and we won’t have to worry about not feeding him. Maybe that’s also our hope when we see panhandlers. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.

Then, the discovery: that the man wasn’t starving any longer, that Plotit had been secretly feeding him, and for her generosity, she was burned at the stake. Before she died, she cried to heaven: “Master of the World, carry out justice on my behalf!”*

(* In some stories, it’s fire. In others, she’s tied to a tree, drenched in honey, and left to be stung to death by bees. In some stories, JFK is shot by a lone gunman. In other stories, there’s a cabal. There is always more than one story to any one story.)

In the Bible, we need a bit of a prologue before we launch back into the Lot story. There is a man named Abraham. He is 100 years old. He has a wife, named Sarah. She is 90. One day, God appears to Abraham in the form of three men. (“IT’S THE TRINITY!” fundamentalist Christians will say and (a) of all, no, it isn’t; this is a Jewish text. Also, too, the Holy Spirit isn’t necessarily a man. In fact, in Gnostic tradition, the third part of the trinity, the Holy Spirit, is feminine, and possibly God’s wife.)

God has come to Abraham for two reasons: (1) To remind Abraham that his wife Sarah will bear him a son, to be named Isaac; and (2) To investigate Sodom and Gomorrah. “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know.” (Gen 18:20)

(There’s a wonderful moment in this story where Sarah overhears the visitors when one says that she will have a baby within the year. She laughs — because, again, she’s 90 and her husband is 100. She says, “After I am worn out and my lord is old, will I now have this pleasure?” And God says to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh?” And Sarah, in a very human moment, feels embarrassed at being caught laughing at a visitor and says, “I did not laugh.” And God, ever the one to have the last word, says, “You totally did.” This is in Genesis 18:1-15.)

We’re getting to Lot and his daughters. But there’s a little more scene setting. We have to go back to the midrash, because this outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah confused rabbinical scholars.

Why, they wondered, was the singular feminine “her cry” (הַכְּצַעֲקָתָהּ) used instead of the expected (and masculine) “their cry” (הַכְּצַעֲקָתָם)? (The feminine is entirely erased in English translations, using the neuter “the outcry.”)

And now we can begin to introduce Lot, his daughters, and his wife back into the point of it all.

The early interpreters of the Torah said, “‘Her cry’ is the cry of Plotit, crying to God for justice. He heard it, and he came down to Earth to investigate.” Modern scholars might argue that Sodom and Gomorrah are sister cities, and the “her cry” means the city’s own cries for justice. Modern scholars say a lot of things.

God sends two angels — oh boy. I’ll deal real quick-like with angels, but maybe I’ll write about angels fully another time because they are complicated and weird. Often, where the word “angel” appears in the Bible, it really means “messenger.” These were human(ish?) people, with no wings. But sometimes angels mean supernatural beings in extraordinary shapes and that’s not what these angels are, who appear with God before Abraham. In fact, the text is pretty opaque as to whether or not the three visitors to God are all one person (“TRINITY!” NO NO NO. We’ve been OVER THIS.) or if it’s God, and two friends.

Anyway. God sends two angels to Sodom to check things out, and destroy both Sodom and Gomorrah if necessary. (I’m leaving out the whole marvelous bargaining scene between Abraham and God where Abraham says, “But what if there are 50 righteous people?” And God says, “Then I’ll back off.” And Abraham, maybe aware of the reputation of Sodom and Gomorrah, says, “Well, but maybe 40?” And God says, “For 40? Sure.” And Abraham bargains all the way down to 10 righteous people. Keep that number in mind.)

Someone else may ask me to write about homosexuality and the Bible, and I will, even though it makes me tired. When the angels arrive, they meet Lot, who is “at the gate.” He’s a businessman/ambassador, essentially, but he’s also New In Town. (“Excuse me, I am homeless, I am gay, I have AIDS, I’m new in town.”) The Sodomites, who already aren’t known for their stunning hospitality, are also a little frustrated about this out-of-town upstart who has risen pretty high in the heirarchy of Sodom. When Lot ushers the two visiting angels into his home (btw, Lot has no idea that they are angels), “the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both young and old, all the people to the last man, surrounded the house; and they called to Lot, ‘Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, so that we may know them.'”

To “know” someone in the Bible is essentially to fuck them. Just like “feet” in the Bible are almost always a euphemism for dick. Look, I didn’t write the Bible. We’ll talk more about feet, btw, when we get to the Book of Ruth.

And this is where your fundamentalist/literalist/asshole jerks will start with their anti-gay nonsense. What I want to ask you all to do, just for the moment, is say, “Fine.” Say, “The Bible hates homosexuals and homosexuality.” (It doesn’t.) IT DOESN’T MATTER NOW. The Hebrew Bible was not written for us — and that “us” is doing a lot of heavy lifting because I mean “Christians” and “Modern people” mostly. This is how things were in the Olden Timey Days, but cultures grow. Don’t let a book written by people who WOULDN’T LET WOMEN SIT ON COUCHES IF THEY WERE ON THEIR PERIOD dictate your relationship with whatever god you have. (Please don’t recommend “The Red Tent” to me that book is terrible.)

The Sodomites want to sodomite, and Lot wants to be a good host and not allow his guests to be effed in the bee by “all the people to the last man” (which I find hard to believe because I know a LOT of people who won’t leave their house in the evening because once you’ve taken off your daytime toga and put on your nighttime toga you are IN for the DAY) and so he does what any host would do.

He says: “Look, I have two daughters who have not known a man; let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please; only do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof.” (Gen 19:8)

What do we, as believers — as Christians and Jews — do with this? The Bible is silent in a lot of places where it sure would be nice to have a few additional lines of dialogue. In the Binding of Isaac, it would be nice to know if Abraham and Isaac talked at all on the way back down the mountain, and what did they talk about, and did ANYONE say, “That was…that was weird, right? What we just did? You, my father, trying to slaughter me, your son?” And here, in the Lot story, we don’t hear from the daughters about this bargain.

Scholars of the Ancient Middle East will make a lot out of this idea of the importance of hospitality. And I’m not saying that that’s not valid; I’m just saying that it still isn’t comforting to me, a person in the 21st century. I cannot imagine at any point offering my beloved Little Baby Fosco, Jasper St Jasper (International Cat of Mystery), or Peter the Wicked to my neighbors to rape instead of my guests. (They’re the closest we have to daughters and ugh, you know what’s exhausting? People who get irritated when childless folk call their pets their children. IT’S NOT FOR YOU, PEOPLE WITH CHILDREN.)

And that’s what you want to know, right? How could God allow this? How is Lot a righteous man in the eyes of God if he’s willing to debase his daughters and actively participate in their sexual assault by, again, “all the people to the last man.”

Beloveds, I can’t answer that.

In many ways, as Believers, specifically Christian believers (because I’m not Jewish and cannot speak for the Jews but I do know some Yiddish and my husband is a Jew so: I mean, I layed it all out for you), we need to separate the Bible from our faith. The Bible captures a system of belief of a very specific time, and a very specific place, and of a very specific people, who are nothing like us. The Bible is filled with stories of extraordinary violence — violence committed by man against man, and violence committed by God against people. But it also has the Gospels (for Christians). And it has messages about radical justice for the poor, and the broken, and the lonely. Ultimately, the Bible is a book, and it can be your book, and you can take from it what is meaningful to you and you can ABSOLUTELY leave the rest out, especially if it’s toxic and hurtful to you.

Lot’s daughter, with her dying breath, called out for justice — at least in the midrash. And it’s our difficult task, when we read these passages, to decide if she got justice or not.

The angels, by the way, rescue Lot, his wife, and his two daughters. (Remember, though, that in some stories Lot has four daughters.) Lot tries to convince the two men who are betrothed to his unmarried daughters to come with them, too, but they decline, because they think Lot is joking. God wasn’t able to find his 10 righteous people. He barely found four.

The angels tell Lot and his family to run as far as they can, lest they be consumed by God’s destruction. They also, like a good fairy tale, tell them not to look back.

Imagine. You are fleeing your home. You are fleeing your life. Something extraordinarily violent and horrible and utterly destructive is happening to your city where maybe you had friends. Maybe you had a favorite place to watch the sunset while eating figs. Maybe one of your daughters, or cats, or whoever, is left behind.

You’d look back, right? You couldn’t help but look back. Looking back is such a normal human impulse. It’s even a loving impulse. And Lot’s wife looks back, because. And is immediately turned into a pillar of salt. And maybe that, too, is like a fairy tale, like when Bluebeard’s wife uses the key she’s not supposed to use to open the closet she’s never supposed to open.

There’s a rock formation near the Sanctuary of Agioss Lot, near the Dead Sea, venerated as Lot’s wife as a pillar of salt.

(The end of Lot and his daughters is bonkers. They flee to a town called Zoar, but, for reasons never explained in the Bible, decide they can’t really stay in Zoar. So they flee to a cave in the mountains and Lot’s daughters get Lot drunk, because they want children, and biological clocks, and dad’s right here, and it’s all deeply upsetting, especially if, like me, you’re a Victorian prude about father/daughter incest, and if you’re not, you might enjoy a book called The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison, but please never talk to me about it, I’m very busy. Each daughter fucks the dad, and they both get pregnant [yay?] and that’s the Biblical explanation for the Moabites, because the eldest living daughter had a child named Moab, and the Ammonites, because the younger living daughter has a son named Ammon. We’ll talk a lot about Moabites when we get to the Book of Ruth.)