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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.

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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.)

Categories
Belief Bible Study Job Old Testament Tanakh

“An Infinity of Silence”: The Book of Job

One of my favorite passages in the entire Bible is Job 42:3: “Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.”

Job is apologizing to God, after God has spent several chapters How-Even-Dare-You?’ing Job, because Job had the audacity to ask God a question. And that question is Why?

“Why is almost always troublesome.” — Barbara Brenner, Hemi: A Mule

Job is a righteous man. He’s so righteous that he gets name-checked by the prophet Ezekiel: “The word of the Lord came to me: Mortal, when a land sins against me by acting faithlessly, and I stretch out my hand against it, and break its staff of bread and send famine upon it, and cut off from it human beings and animals, even if Noah, Daniel, and Job, these three, were in it, they would save only their own lives by their righteousness, says the Lord God.” (Ez. 14:14)

(HERESY BREAK: Marcionism: Marcion of Sinope is often included in writings about the Gnostics, but he’s really more Gnostic-adjacent. Gnosticism in a pinch: God is a secret and only those who can work it out will discover the Kingdom. I’ll write more about gnosticism another time. The Marcion Heresy is this: the God (YHWH) of the Hebrew Bible/(Old Testament) is a completely different god than the God of the New Testament. So, it’s pretty anti-Semitic because Marcion is essentially arguing that Jews worship an unloving, vengeful god, and that YHWH would not be able to produce someone like Jesus. For Marcionites, God/Jesus have always existed, and have always been good; and YHWH was a false god who governed by fear and retribution. Again, it’s anti-Semitic. But also, the God of the Hebrew Bible is often cranky. Like in that passage above? Anyway, though Marcion was labeled a heretic, and his teachings dismissed as heretical, Marcion was also the first person to put together a proto-version of the New Testament. So, we hate him because he’s a heretic, but we owe a debt to him, because he who publishes first wins.)

Job is such a righteous man that God boasts about his righteousness to Satan. “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil.” (Job 1-8) And Satan counters with, “What does Job have to be frightened of? His life is nothing but blessings.” Actually, why am I trying to re-write the dialogue: “Does Job fear God for nothing? Have you not put a fence around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But stretch out your hand now, and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face.” (Job 1:9-11)

And God says, “Deal.” And then tells Satan that he has full rein on everything of Job’s except Job himself. (One thing to be VERY clear about here: This is not the Satan of Christianity. Satan is functioning as God’s opposing counsel.)

Job loses his seven sons and his seven daughters. He loses all his livestock. His servants are murdered. And Job’s response is to rend his robe, shave his head, fall to the ground, and worship God.

(There’s a story that originates with Elie Wiesel: Jews in a concentration camp put God on trial. There’s a prosecutor, and a defense, and the case is laid out over several days, and God is found guilty. He is pronounced guilty by this group of Jews who are in a Nazi concentration camp of crimes against creation and humankind. And then, after an “infinity of silence,” a rabbi looks at the sky and says, “It’s time for evening prayers.”)

The Book of Job is told as a parable or fable. It has that kind of cadence to it. In Job 1, we’re told, “One day the heavenly beings came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them. The Lord said to Satan, ‘Where have you come from?’ Satan answered the Lord, ‘From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it. The Lord said to Satan, ‘Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil.’”

Job 2 starts almost exactly the same way, except this time when God says, “Have you considered my servant Job,” he adds, “He still persists in his integrity, although you incited me against him, to destroy him for no reason.” (Job 2:3)

What you do, as a reader of this story, with God sort of shifting blame and responsibility off of himself and onto Satan is your own precious journey and know I love you so much. I think it’s fucked.

This time Satan says, “But stretch out your hand now and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face.” And God, again, says, “Deal.” But he tells Satan that he cannot kill Job. He can only make his physical being unbearable. (“Though his bark cannot be lost/Yet it shall be tempest-tossed.” — Macbeth, 1.3)

And Satan throws everything at Job. He strikes him with boils. His wife, who I VERY MUCH identify with, says, “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die.” (Job 2:9) And Job, who I do not identify with much in this moment, says, “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” (Job 2:10)

(There’s a counter-echo here, even if it’s only faint, of Abraham’s bargaining with God about Sodom and Gomorrah: “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?” (Gen 18:25) And it’s all an interesting confluence with the Ezekiel section from above. God will protect the righteous — but you have to be absoLUTELY righteous.)

We talked about evil yesterday, and the Book of Job is definitely part of that conversation. When Job dares to ask God, “But why did you do this all to me?” it’s a legit question, and one that God doesn’t answer. Instead, God berates and belittles Job, says, “Where were you when I was making the universe?” and never at any point explains why Job had to suffer (because of a bet), or what divine justice can even be like from such a mercurial deity.

All Job knows to do in the end is to apologize. “Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.” He’s left the way I often leave Zach when we argue: bewildered, confused, and still not sure what he did “wrong.” (Nothing, by the way. He usually has done absolutely nothing wrong and I just have one emotional setting and it’s ALL OF IT.)

And, after an infinity of silence, we say our evening prayer.

Categories
Bible Study Finding New Testament Seeking Uncategorized

“See what large letters I make”: The Humanness of Paul

There’s Paul, the alleged homophobe, yes, and his writing is often weaponized against gay people, I get it, but Paul also describes himself as an expectant mother and queerness is everywhere if you just look for it. (Galatians 4:19)

Towards the end of Galatians, after yelling about circumcision, and faith over works, and fornication, and then some more about circumcision (Paul yells a LOT in Galatians), there’s this heartbreaking human moment from Paul.

Paul interrupts his letter/harangue to say, “See what large letters I make when I am writing in my own hand.” (Galatians 6:11) And it’s an admission of vulnerability that out of the blue completely humanizes Paul, at least for me, a gay man who has to work a little extra hard at loving Paul. (It can also be argued that Paul is referring to emphasis, rather than literal larger letters. But that doesn’t work out for me. Paul relied on a variety of amanuenses to write his letters, and rarely wrote them himself; and you’d think that if he were pointing out an emphasis it would have been earlier. The consensus is that Paul’s eyesight was affected in some way — some argue by the experience on the road to Damascus — and that he had trouble seeing.)

The first time Zach & I went to Amsterdam, we went to the Van Gogh museum. And there was a painting that was almost too perfectly Van Gogh; like, too sunflowers? Too something. But then I saw this red border painted around the edges of the canvas. And the painting went from being sort of a too-perfect approximation/facsimile of a Van Gogh to being, all of a sudden, very human. I can’t explain it better. This thick line of red spoke to the artist’s presence more than the entire painting did.

And that’s what Paul’s weak eyes do for me. Snap this lofty, semi-fictional, grumpy, foreskin-obsessed weirdo into a human shape with human frailties. “See what large letters I make when I am writing in my own hand.” And what makes it even more poignant, in my mind, is that Paul feels the body as a betrayal all throughout his letters. The body is a curse and a temple and such a source of erotic confusion for him. To have his eyes failing, too, it’s all almost too much.