Census for the Temple, God’s Speeches in Job, Tabernacle Replacing the Intermediary, Creation and Providence, Baffled by Ghost Whisperer

1.  In Ancient Israelite Religion, I read Carol Meyer’s “David as Temple Builder.”  On page 368, she offers the possibility that David conducted his census to see if he had enough Israelites for corvee labor, which would be for the construction of the temple.  The corvee labor wouldn’t be permanent but would conscript Israelites on a temporary and interim basis, whereas the permanent labor force would consist of non-Israelites.  II Samuel 20:24 refers to a superintendent over the labor force in David’s administration, which Meyers says was probably for temple construction.  She doesn’t believe that the census was for the “augmentation of the military” because Joab and the army opposed it.

If that’s what II Samuel 24 is saying, I wonder what the significance of the altar site at the end of the story would be.  David conducts a census to see if he has enough people to build the temple.  God responds in anger, and David appeases God by setting up an altar in the place that the temple will occupy.  What would the point be here, if Meyers is correct?

2.  In Reading Between Texts, I read Ellen F. Davis’ “Job and Jacob: The Integrity of Faith.”   This was actually an enjoyable essay because it was wrestling with God’s speeches in the Book of Job.  According to Davis, God’s speeches are responding to Job’s assertion that the world should operate according to predictable justice.  God’s response was that the world is bigger than Job and humanity, and that God freely loves people and places, without regard for strict justice.  At the end of the Book, Davis notes, Job actually enjoys his children rather than trying to protect them by appeasing God with sacrifices, as he did at the book’s beginning.  My impression is that Davis ties Jacob into all this because Jacob learned to subsume his ego into a larger purpose, in marked contrast to his earlier selfishness.

I’m not sure what to say about this.  God may freely love the wicked, and that’s why he allows them to persecute and impoverish other people, as Job complains.  Is God showing kindness to the wicked to lead them to repentance?  But how will they repent, if they sense no bad consequences to their actions?  And, if God loves freely, why does he allow natural evil, which Job experienced? 

I think Davis’ thoughts about Job’s changing attitude towards his children as a result of his experiences and encounter with God is a potentially profound point.  But, if the speeches mean what she says, then I’m not entirely satisfied with them, notwithstanding their good points.

3.  In Theodore Mullen’s Ethnic Myths and Pentateuchal Foundations, a footnote on page 259 stood out to me.  Mullen says that, before the construction of the Tabernacle, God communicated with the Israelites via a messenger, Moses.  But the Tabernacle was God’s dwelling place, so it nullified the need for an intermediary figure.  Why have an intermediary, when God is present in Israel’s midst?

I thought about the Golden Calf story as I read this.  The Israelites made the Golden Calf because Moses was absent.  Their leader and intemediary with God was gone, so they made the Calf to fill that void.  In light of that, what would the significance be of God later dwelling in Israel’s midst?

Plus, did the Tabernacle obviate the need for an intermediary between God and Israel?  Some have interpreted Israel’s request for an intermediary as an explanation for the existence of the prophetic office.  The prophetic office existed alongside the Tabernacle.  I wonder what to do with that.

4.  In The Middle Platonists, on page 158, John Dillon refers to Philo’s connection of creation with providence.  What do I mean by this?  Elements of Greek philosophy had problems with the notion that God created the cosmos, preferring to assert that God has eternally sustained his cosmos rather than creating it at a specific point in time.  Philo responds that a denial of creation is a denial of divine providence, for God cares for the cosmos because it’s his handiwork, and “there can be no common bond of interest…between a non-creator and what he has not created.”

But, if my understanding is correct, Philo doesn’t believe that God directly created the cosmos, for he maintains that the Logos did so.  I wonder if Philo addresses the ramifications of a semi-god creating the cosmos to his defense of God as creator.

5.  I’ve been watching Ghost Whisperer.  You know, Ghost Whisperer puzzles me in the same manner as Touched by an Angel.  When I watch Touched by an Angel, I’m baffled that no males are hitting on Monica, for she is so hot!  Similarly, why don’t the male characters on Ghost Whisperer line up to hit on Jennifer Love Hewitt?  It makes no sense!

I realize this post has more questions than answers.  But I’m hungry right now—for food and for Lost.  See you tomorrow!

Roots 3: Two Mentalities, Adopting Another Heritage, Clinging to a Dream

Ordinarily, I write my Black History Month thoughts after I’ve finished my academic readings. But, today, I’m taking a different course of action, for I want to communicate my thoughts while they’re fresh in my mind.

I just watched the third episode of Roots. This episode is noteworthy because it highlights two themes that will appear continuously in the rest of the series. The second theme will also appear in Roots: The Next Generation.

1. The first theme involves a conflict between two mentalities. In one mentality, the African slave holds on to his heritage. He looks back on his African background as a time when he was important, and, despite attempts by his white captors to break his spirit and to make him feel inferior, he tries to see himself in light of his African roots. And he desires freedom.

In the other mentality, the slave tries to adapt to slavery. She’s seen that the white man can hurt her and her people, so she doesn’t strive for freedom. Rather, she seeks to make a good life for herself within the confines of slavery. Freedom looks unattainable, or at least difficult to achieve, so she sticks with slavery, as much as she may hate it.

In Episode 3, Kunta exemplifies the first mentality: he clings to his African heritage and wants to be free. Even when he finally abandons his dream of freedom so that he can stay with his wife, Belle, he tries to teach his daughter, Kizzy, not to regard herself as a slave, but to see herself in light of her noble African roots.

Kunta’s wife, Belle, exemplifies the second mentality: she experienced pain when she helped her previous husband escape, so, by now, she has abandoned all hope for freedom. Although she admires the pride and tenacity that Kunta gets from his African heritage, she wishes that he’d forget about that “African talk.” She hopes to make a better life for herself and her loved ones within the confines of slavery. In Episode 4, however, we will see that hope shattered, when her daughter, Kizzy, is taken away from her parents.

One would be tempted to think that Belle has her attitude because she herself was not an immigrant from Africa (as far as I know); rather, her roots were in America, so she identified more with American culture than that of Africa. There’s probably a lot of truth to that, but it’s not a universal explanation for why slaves adopted the second mentality. Before Kunta married Belle, he was in love with Fanta, who was also from Africa. She came with Kunta on the same slave ship. When Kunta tries to convince her to run away with him so they can go to the North and get freedom, she refuses. She wants to make the most of her life as a slave. While Kunta still has not embraced his English name of “Toby,” Fanta has resigned herself to being “Maggie” for the rest of her life.

For the rest of the Roots miniseries (except, perhaps, the very last episode), we will encounter these two attitudes. Kizzy will be like her father, embracing her African heritage and desiring freedom. That will be why she can’t be in a relationship with the slave, Sam Bennett (played by Richard Roundtree): he grovels to the white man to get whatever scraps he can. He views freedom as unrealistic, so he doesn’t dream that big. Sam has the second mindset, whereas Kizzy has the first. As Kizzy says to her son about Sam, “He’s not like us.”

Kizzy’s son, Chicken George (played by Ben Vereen), sometimes has the second mindset, but he’s mostly inclined to the first one. He loves his father, his white slave master who raped his mother, Kizzy. Chicken George and his father bond over their common interest in chicken-fighting. But, even though he feels that he can have a reasonably good life on the plantation, he wants freedom.

I’m not sure how these mindsets will play out among Chicken George’s children, if they even do. In Roots: The Next Generation, slavery is gone, so the desire for freedom from slavery is a non-issue (even though the African-Americans still contend with racism and discrimination). But I have an interesting observation, which brings me to the second theme.

2. Episode 3 of Roots is the first one that ends with an adult telling a child or infant about her African heritage. Kunta talks to baby Kizzy about her African heritage and family so that she won’t regard herself as a slave. On subsequent episodes of Roots, and especially in Roots: The Next Generation, we will see this over and over again: the adult will tell the child or infant that he or she is a descendant of Kunta Kinte, the African.

What’s interesting is this: even people who aren’t descended from Kunta Kinte will give the speech tracing the child’s ancestry back to him! When Alex Haley is a baby, his grandfather takes him outside to lift him up to the moon, declaring that God is the only one greater than him. This is an African custom, one that Kunta’s father performed for Kunta when he was a baby. What’s ironic is that the grandfather was not descended from Kunta, yet he especially feels a need to honor Kunta.

When Alex Haley is an adult, his father, Simon, tries to remind him that he’s a descendant of Chicken George, Kizzy, and Kunta Kinte. “I can’t carry these people!”, Alex exclaims to his father. But Simon himself is not a descendant of Kunta. Alex’s mother was, and she has died by that episode of Roots: The Next Generation, and Simon has since remarried. By Roots: The Next Generation, there’s no longer a dichotomy between the African-Americans who cling to the African heritage of Kunta Kinte, and those who do not. Rather, all of them preserve Kunta Kinte in their memory, even those not descended from him, who marry into his family.

Some may say that Alex Haley was being sloppy: The entire miniseries was about Kunta Kinte and his descendants, so Alex tried to make everything about them, even when that didn’t make much sense. But I’d like to think that something deeper is going on, that there’s something profound about people embracing a heritage that is not their own and passing it on to their children and grandchildren.

I have one more point. Kunta and Kizzy all dreamed of freedom, but they never attained it. They were like the saints of Hebrews 11, who had faith in a promise, yet never actually experienced its fulfillment in their lives. Yet, Kunta and Kizzy kept on fighting, and, if they couldn’t be free themselves, then they committed themselves to teaching their offspring not to view themselves as slaves. Ultimately, their work paid off, for Chicken George obtained his freedom. And, even if Kunta’s attempts to run away failed, his descendants still regarded him highly for his tenacious desire to be free.

There are times when tenacity pays off, as we see in the movie, Men of Honor: Carl Brashear desired to be a Navy diver, and he clung to his dream, regardless of the obstacles he faced (i.e., racism, a jerk instructor, an amputated leg). And his dream was realized. But there are times when people cling to their dreams with nothing to show for it. Or is that entirely the case, for at least Kunta and Kizzie passed on the same tenacity and self-esteem to their offspring, and that bore fruit at various points in time.

So Sarah Reads Her Palm, Obama’s Still in the Game

I haven’t done a political post in a while, so here we go! My first point will be conservative. My second will be liberal.

1. So Sarah Palin reads notes off of her palm. Big deal! If I could read a word off my palm and deliver an eloquent, articulate commentary (as she did), then I’d say I’m doing pretty good!

2. A few days ago, Barack Obama said that the health care bill might fail. But here’s why I admire him: he’s not giving up on the issue! He’s not doing what Bill Clinton did: the health care bill died, so he abandoned the issue and tried to become more conservative. President Obama is reaching across party lines to do something about America’s health care problems. It’s probably more than a political issue for him, since he’s said on more than one occasion that, while his mom was dying in the hospital, she had to haggle with her health insurance provider to get coverage for her medical care.

I hope that President Obama fights for conservative ideas—tort reform, no abortion funding, conscience provisions, competition along state lines (or at least taking measures to break up the state-by-state monopolies that health insurance companies have). He talked about these ideas in his speech to Congress about health care, but some of them died in the Congress. I hope that he commits to them, while pushing for other ways to bring down the cost of health care.

Roots 2, Yahwistic Midianites, Good or Bad Wilderness Experience, This Land Is Your Land, Mochos

1.  Today, for Black History Month, I watched the second episode of Roots.  In it, the African Kunta Kinte has arrived to America on a slave ship, and he’s purchased by Mr. Reynolds, who’s played by Lorne Greene of Bonanza fame.  Kunta runs away, but he’s recaptured by Mr. Ames, who supervises the slaves on Mr. Reynolds’ plantation.  In what’s probably the most famous scene from the miniseries, Mr. Ames has Kunta whipped until Kunta says that his name is Toby—the name that Mr. Reynolds gave to Kunta. 

One thing that stood out to me was that Kunta could’ve been bought by the same guy who purchased Kunta’s love from Africa, Fanta.  But the guy lost in the auction to Reynolds.  Would Kunta have been happier with Fanta?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  Had he been with Fanta at the outset, he wouldn’t have gotten his foot cup off for running away to meet her.  But, even if he were with Fanta on the other guy’s farm, his master would’ve still had power over the lives of the couple.  The master could sleep with Fanta anytime he wished, regardless of what Kunta thought about it.  And he could also take away any children that Kunta and Fanta had. 

I did a little reading on the guy who played Mr. Ames, Vic Morrow.  He looked familiar to me, plus I liked how Mr. Ames acknowledged the humanity of the African slaves.  Unfortunately, however, that insight didn’t lead him to treat them better, but rather worse, for he (in contrast to more educated whites, such as Reynolds and his physician brother) believed that slaves had to be made, not born, implying that he didn’t deem slavery to be part of the natural order.  Reynolds and his brother, by contrast, held that Africans were naturally suited for slavery.  But Ames was far from being an abolitionist, mind you!  Because he thought that slaves had to be made, he tried to break their spirit and take away their hopes, so that they’d view slavery as their only option for the rest of their lives.  As Charlton Heston said to Pharaoh Sethi in the Ten Commandments, “You strip them of hope and faith, all because they are of another race, another creed.” 

Sadly, Vic Morrow died at a young age.  He’s also known as the white racist from the 1983 Twilight Zone movie, who became an African-American pursued by the Ku Klux Klan, and a Jew hunted by the Nazis.  He died on the set for that movie, while playing a Vietnamese man who was about to be killed by American soldiers.  A helicopter crashed on top of him.

2.  In Ancient Israelite Religion, I read Moshe Weinfeld’s “The Tribal League at Sinai.”  Weinfeld argues that there was YHWH worship among Midianite/Qenite tribes.  Egyptian toponymic lists substantiate this.  And Weinfeld argues that the relationship between Moses and Jethro (which, for him, was “the kernal out of which grew the whole epic of the exodus and Sinai”) was historical, for why would a pious Israel make up a story of Jethro eating a meal with Aaron and the elders before YHWH, or of Jethro coming up with Israel’s judicial system, had these things not been true?

Weinfeld also talks about excavations at Timnah, which include a Midianite shrine on top of a mutilated statue of the Egyptian goddess Hathor, as well as a copper snake like that made by Moses in Numbers 21:4-9.  Notwithstanding the snake, Weinfeld also states that aniconism was practiced by “nomadic tribes in the wilderness of Sinai and southern Palestine and seems to have persisted down to the time of the Nabateans in the third to the second century B.C.E.” (310).

I’m not entirely clear what Weinfeld’s thesis is, but part of it seems to be that the Midianites played a role in the development of Israelite Yahwism.  I wonder if anyone has argued that it was vice-versa: that Moses or Israel contributed to the development of Midianite Yahwism.  Exodus 18 presents Jethro acknowledging the superiority of the LORD after hearing about the Exodus!

3.  In Reading Between Texts, I read Deborah Krause’s “A Blessing Cursed: The Prophets Prayer for Barren Womb and Dry Breasts in Hosea 9.”  In Hosea 9:14, the prophet asks the LORD to give Israel a barren womb and dry breasts.  A prophet ordinarily intercedes for Israel by asking God to show her mercy, but this one does the opposite.  Israel believes that her blessings are from another god, and the LORD wants her to realize that they are from him, through drastic means, if necessary.

What struck me as I read this article was Hosea 9’s reference to Baal-Peor, the Numbers 25 incident in which Israelite males forsook the LORD to pursue Midianite and Moabite babes.  I was surprised to see that in Hosea 9 because I thought Hosea romanticized the wilderness, much like Jeremiah, who, in Jeremiah 2:2, presents Israel devotedly following God into the desert.  In Hosea 2:14ff., God says he will speak alluringly to Israel in the wilderness and she will sing to him, as she did after her departure from Egypt.  In Hosea 13:5, God says that he knew Israel in the wilderness, a place of drought, but she has forgotten him in her prosperity. 

There could be different authors of Hosea here—one romanticizing the wilderness days, and another viewing them as a time of apostacy.  Or maybe there’s a single author who views Israel’s wilderness experience as a time of good and bad, or at least as better than what came later (namely, Israel forgetting God in her prosperity).

4.  On page 245 of Ethnic Myths and Pentateuchal Foundations, Theodore Mullen states that the Jubilee law in the Torah (the return of sold land to its original owner every fifty years) may have been designed after the exile, to speak to people who viewed themselves as Israelites returning from foreign captivity.  (Remember that Mullen doesn’t believe that the returned exiles were necessarily connected with the Israelites who left Palestine about a century before—see Men of Honor, Direction of Languages, the Spies Did WHAT?, Something to Conserve).   For Mullen, the message of the Jubilee law may have been that the Promised Land belongs to the Israelites, not the people who took it over when the Israelites were exiled.  For Mullen (if my impression is correct), the Pentateuch’s emphasis on the land belonging to the Israelites was part of an attempt to create a people, with its own land. 

5.  In The Middle Platonists, John Dillon refers to Iamblichus’ Life of Pythagoras (14), which states that Pythagoras spent time in Palestine consorting with “the descendants of Mochos the prophet and philosopher” (143).  Iamblichus was a third-fourth century Neo-Platonist philosopher, but Dillon speculates that his work may contain an earlier legend about Pythagoras.  In the first century C.E., the Hellenistic Jew Philo of Alexandria asserted that Greek philosophers got their stuff from Moses.  Could he have based this in part on a story about Pythagoras learning from the Palestinian descendants of Mochos, or Moses?  And where did this legend come from?  Iamblichus wasn’t a Jew or a Christian, so why would he make up a story glorifying Moses, if Mochus was Moses?  Would he be trying to promote good interfaith relations, or appealing to Jews and Christians to accept his philosophy because it was ultimately from their own sage?

Roots 1, Original?, Go with Ethics, Patience

1.  Today, for Black History Month, I watched volume 1 of Roots.  On this episode, we meet Kunta Kinte (played by Lavar Burton), the African ancestor of Alex Haley.  He is abducted and put on a slave ship, which is run by a devoutly Christian captain (played by Ed Asner), who struggles over his job.  Lavar Burton was nominated for an Emmy for his portrayal of Kunta, and Asner received an Emmy.  O.J. Simpson also played in this episode, long before he had his legal problems.  And you also see Ralph Waite from the Waltons, only he’s nothing like John Walton, Sr. on this show!

What stands out to me is that the African people were proud—and I don’t mean that in a bad sense.  They valued hunting, manhood, survival, tenacity, and defending their tribe, family, and loved ones.  Yet, Kunta’s tribe often tried to tame men’s pride by reminding them that Allah was the only thing greater than them.  It must’ve been extremely difficult for them to be treated as less-than-human by slave-masters, and to be up against a culture (white Europeans and Americans) that they didn’t have the resources to defeat.  That’s the basis for a major theme in the entire Roots miniseries, which includes Roots: The Next Generation: Kunta’s descendants tried to remember who they were.  People around them told them that they were inferior; but Kunta’s descendants looked back to the time when Africans were chiefs.

As I think more about the movie Amistad (which I watched yesterday—see Amistad, I Kings 13), I realize that the “noble savage” idea is big in Hollywood.  On Amistad, the African leader Cinque came from a place where chiefs were honored and could not be displaced.  He had a hard time understanding America, where an ex-President such as John Quincy Adams could be regarded as a joke.  Cinque’s culture also didn’t have a word for “should,” for people in his tribe either did or didn’t do something; there was no “should” about it!  Consequently, Cinque didn’t get John Quincy Adams’ vague deliberations about the legal process (even though Cinque asked pointed legal questions).  “This man has more questions than answers—are you sure he can help us?”, Cinque asked his translator about Adams.

Adams probably looked down on Cinque’s tribe, while simultaneously regarding it with a sense of romanticism. It would be nice if America respected her chiefs, Adams may have thought, but with advancement came cynicism, a mistrust of power.  That’s why Martin Van Buren said that independent courts were so important!  Adams also drew from Cinque’s regard for his ancestors, using that concept to evoke the memory of America’s forefathers in his speech to the Supreme Court.  But he may have still regarded Cinque’s religious ideas as quaint, while Adams was using them for a more sophisticated purpose.

I’m not sure where to go from here.  I too see values in the African tribal system, and I think it would be nice if we imitated some of them.  But I’m also a product of American culture, which is jaded and cynical.

2.  In Ancient Israelite Religion, I read David Noel Freedman’s “‘Who Is Like Thee Among the Gods?’ The Religion of Ancient Israel.”  On page 329, Freedman says that Moses existed.  He states that YHWH as “redeemer of a new people from bondage in Egypt is clearly new,” as is God lacking a consort, and the prohibition of images of the deity.  For Freedman, Moses was the originator of such Yahwism. 

I thought about Deuteronomy 4:34, in which God asks if any god has taken one nation out of another.  The implied answer is “no.”  For the author of that passage, an Exodus was a unique concept that ancient Israelite religion held.  Amos 9:7 may offer a slightly different viewpoint, however, for it says that the LORD brought the Philistines out of Caphtor and the Syrians from Kir, after mentioning Israel’s Exodus from Egypt.  But I’m not sure if that’s totally parallel to the Exodus, for were the Philistines a separate people-group from the other Caphtorites, as the Hebrews were a separate people-group in Egypt?  Or were they Caphtorites who decided to ship out for greener pastures?

I’ll toss my Theodore Mullen reading into this section.  On page 210 of Ethnic Myths and Pentateuchal Foundations, Mullen refers to attempts to offer a “comparative study of aniconism in the ancient Near East.”  He cites T.N.D. Mettinger’s No Graven Image? Israelite Aniconism and Its Ancient Near Eastern Context, which I have not read.  Did other ancient Near Eastern nations besides Israel have aniconism, on some level, or in certain contexts?

The origin of Israel’s aniconism is debated.  Mullen refers to a scholar who said that Israel was reacting against Canaanite idolatry.  A professor I met in Israel attributed the prohibition of metal images to the dearth of metal in the ancient Near East at a certain period.  The region lacked metal, so it needed all it can get.  So they decided to save some by not using it to make images.  Many would prefer a deeper theological explanation, but perhaps that came after the practical motivation for the commandment.  I don’t know!

3.  In Reading Between Texts, I read Jan Granowski’s “Jehoiachin at the King’s Table: A Reading of the Ending of the Second Book of Kings.”  At the end of II Kings, exiled Judahite king Jehoiachin was lifted up, got to eat with the Babylonian king, and received an allowance (II Kings 25:27-30).  Is this a positive indicator that God has remembered exiled Israel and will bring her captivity to an end?  Or is it a negative account of Jehoiachin’s humiliation before the Babylonian king?  Granowski offers a mixed reading.  But this is another example of how hard it can be to read the Bible.  We’re not always told in the biblical text whether an event or a character is right or wrong, good or bad.  I guess all we can do is to try our best.  As Augustine said, if our interpretation leads us to love God and neighbor, then it’s a good interpretation.

That dovetails into my comment on John Dillon’s The Middle Platonists.  On page 121, Dillon contrasts two perspectives on where to begin in the study of philosophy.  Aristotle and the Stoics said new philosophy students should first learn how to conduct logical arguments.  Antiochus, however, said that they should start with ethics, so that they know the goal of philosophy.  I think both reason and ethics are important, but I somewhat prefer Antiochus’ approach.  I like for education to have a point, one being to help us to become better people.  Moreover, reason and argument can be used to support all sorts of weird ideas.  One can argue that there’s no meaning in the universe, but what am I supposed to do with such an idea?  I’d like for philosophy to be about feeding the soul, not just engaging in logical gymnastics.

4.  At Latin mass this morning, the homily was kind of boring.  We had political priest, and he was telling us how we can become better Christians during Lent.  My dad would call this “bootstrap religion,” the type that focuses on our performance, as opposed to relying on God to sanctify us. 

Political priest was telling us that we should have patience, for impatience is a big problem that he encounters in confessionals.  I thought about this because I’ve had a lot of seething rage over the past week.  I just now came out of it, but I’m afraid someone will upset my delicate emotional applecart. 

For there to be patience, does there have to be hope?  Many have defined patience as waiting for good to come, rather than demanding it right here and right now.  And, while I definitely want things right here and right now, my problem with patience is that I don’t know if good things will come in the future—if people, places, and things will get better.  I tend to live in the past and get into a pit of bitterness on account of it.  But I also become discouraged because I wonder if things will get better.  On what basis should I believe that they will?  And will they stay better? 

Amistad, I Kings 13

1.  Today, for Black History Month, I watched Amistad, a 1997 Steven Spielberg film.  For background, see here.  It’s about West Africans in the nineteenth century, who killed their captors on a slave ship and stood trial for their deed. 

I watched it today because I don’t do any homework on Saturdays, so I could read the sub-titles without having to look up from my homework every minute.

And I wasn’t just reading the English translations of the African Mende language.  I also put the movie on closed-caption so I could follow the legal arguments.

When I first watched the movie over a decade ago, I didn’t really understand what was going on.  Who were the slaves on the slave-ship Amistad, the people who took over the ship after killing the Spaniards who ran it?  Were they from Cuba, or were they from West Africa?  It turns out that I was right to be confused, for that was a big point of debate.  If they were from Cuba, as argued the prosecutors, then they were slaves; if they were from Africa, as the defense maintained, then they technically were not slaves, since Britain had banned the slave trade.  As free people, they could legally rise against people attempting to kidnap them.

John Quincy Adams was an interesting character, and Anthony Hopkins definitely deserved his Academy Award for the role.  Here was a washed-up ex-President, who wondered if he had really accomplished anything when he was in power.  He dabbled in abolitionism and closely followed the Amistad case, even encouraging the defense to learn the story of the West Africans.  Yet, he took a while before he committed himself to represent them.  He drew from the wisdom and experience of one of the Africans, Cinque.  Yet, he said that he didn’t care if there was a Civil War over the slavery question, which shows that he sometimes saw issues in terms of the big picture, rather than how they affect the individuals involved (i.e., the families who’d lose loved ones in war).  So he tended to zoom in and out in his interaction with issues, sometimes focusing on the stories of individuals, and sometimes concentrating on the big picture, which includes national ideas, the type of country we are, etc.

I also liked the British captain because he successfully answered the smart-aleck prosecutor (a bully), who, along with Secretary of State John Forsyth, was trying to argue that there really wasn’t a secret fortress for the illegal slave trade.  When the captain destroyed it at the end of the movie, he sent a message to Forsyth: You are right—the slave fortress does not exist! 

Moreover, political theory went through my mind.  What is the natural state of human beings: slavery or freedom?  Southern politician John C. Calhoun (also the Vice-President under John Quincy Adams) wrote that slavery has existed for millennia.  He even appealed to Eden to support his position, perhaps implying that Adam and Eve were God’s slaves.  And, although Calhoun didn’t mention this, even Cingue’s African tribe had slavery (or, as it called them, workers), for people became slaves through war or debt.  Yet, as John Quincy Adams contended, so many people struggle to be free.  There’s something unfair about people having to work without enjoying the fruit of their labor. 

The irony at the end of the movie was sad: Cinque got to go back home to Africa, but he found his tribe engaged in its own civil war, and he never saw his family again.  Human nature exists everywhere, for good and for bad.  We desire to be free, and we are right to do so, but there’s also a need to serve, to think of others besides ourselves.  Otherwise, people get hurt, and we find ourselves enslaved to our own base desires.

2.  For my weekly quiet time, I studied I Kings 13.  A man of God (called Iddo by the rabbis—see II Chronicles 9:29) challenges King Jeroboam of Northern Israel.  Jeroboam has set up a sanctuary with a golden calf and non-Levites as priests—all “no-no”s in the eyes of God.  Iddo says that King Josiah will one day defile the sanctuary, and he gives Jeroboam a sign that he’s speaking God’s message: the altar collapses, and dust spills on the ground (when, as John MacArthur notes, the ashes are supposed to be dumped in a clean place—see Leviticus 4:12; 6:10-11).  When Jeroboam orders that Iddo be seized, his hand withers.  Jeroboam then asks Iddo to request from the LORD his (Iddo’s) God that Jeroboam’s hand be restored, and Iddo does so.  Jeroboam invites Iddo to a meal, but Iddo declines, for YHWH has commanded him not to eat or drink on his mission, and to leave by a different route from which he came.  Iddo is to convey God’s disgust with Jeroboam’s reign and sanctuary.

A prophet then invites Iddo to a meal.  This prophet is said to be from Samaria in II Kings 23:18, yet he lives in Bethel, which is in the tribe of Benjamin.  Perhaps he moved to Bethel to be near a seat of power, to get favor with Jeroboam.  The prophet tells Iddo that an angel revealed to him that Iddo can now eat on his mission.  God must have changed his mind!  So Iddo goes to the prophet’s place for dinner, and God tells the prophet that God’s not pleased!  Iddo leaves and is killed by a lion, but the lion touches neither Iddo’s corpse nor his donkey, nor (for that matter) the people passing by.  The lion has done his mission for God, and that’s it!  The prophet buries Iddo and asks that his own bones be buried alongside him.  After Jeroboam hears of all this, he continues his sinful practices.  He has heard that God will stand by his word, even to the harm of the person who carried it; yet, Jeroboam does not repent.

Iddo should have stuck with his mission, even though the prophet told him that an angel was allowing Iddo to eat.  There was a purpose behind God’s commands to Iddo: to convey God’s displeasure at Jeroboam, his sanctuary, and Northern Israel.  Why would God be so flippant as to change his mind on that?  There are times when God changes his mind, but that’s often in response to people’s repentance.  When God changes his mind, it’s not flippant, but it’s in accord with a standard of righteousness.  And, if Iddo was wondering if God had changed his mind, he should’ve asked God, or waited for God to tell him if God had a change of plans.

What particularly interested me in this weekly quiet time was Josephus’ rendition of the story, which is found in Antiquities 8:9.  According to Josephus, after Iddo (or, as Josephus calls him, Jadon) had died, the false prophet was trying to convince Jeroboam that God hadn’t caused his hand to wither and the altar to collapse.  Those things had natural causes, he said!  Jeroboam’s hand withered because it was tired from supporting all those sacrifices; once it got some rest, it was restored.  And the altar collapsed because it was new and burdened with a bunch of sacrifices, so it couldn’t support all that weight!  It interested me to see naturalistic explanations for seemingly supernatural phenomena in an ancient source, but I shouldn’t be too surprised, for I learned in a class that de-mythologization was a practice in the ancient world. 

A Damper on Reagan’s Birthday

Today is Reagan’s birthday.  Did Ronald Reagan rape a woman in the 1950’s?  This has bothered me over the past few years.  Kitty Kelly says that he did in her unauthorized biography of Nancy Reagan.  Here is Kelly’s story, as well as a quote from the lady who alleged rape in 1991, Selene Walters:

KELLEY CLAIMS: Reagan met starlet Selene Walters in a Hollywood nightclub in the cart) 1950s. Although I was on a date,” she quotes Walters as saying, “Ronnie kept whispering in my ear, ‘I’d like to call you. How can I get in touch with you?’ ” Hoping that Reagan, then president of the Screen Actors Guild, could boost her career, Walters gave him her address and was surprised when he came calling at 3 A.M. “He pushed his way inside and said he just had to see me. He forced me on the couch…and said, ‘Let’s just get to know each other.’ It was the most pitched battle I’ve ever had, and suddenly in a matter of seconds I lost…. They call it date rape today….”

SELENE WALTERS SAYS: Kelley’s account of his late-night visit is essentially accurate, although he never forced his way into her apartment. “I opened the door. Then it was the battle of the couch. I was fighting him. I didn’t want him to make love to me. He’s a very big man, and he just had his way. Date rape? No, God, no, that’s [Kelley's] phrase. I didn’t have a chance to have a date with him.” Walters says she bears Reagan no ill will, and has even voted for him: “I don’t think he meant to harm me.”

ALSO WORTH NOTING: Walters, who writes a column in Spotlight Casting Magazine and lives with her third husband, a CPA, in an apartment in Beverly Hills, hopes to find a publisher for a book she has written about her Hollywood experiences.

See here.

Granted, Kitty Kelly makes a lot of goofy claims, as the link above indicates.  But what about that of Selene Walters?

Reagan’s response was this, according to Slate magazine (see here): The weekend the book was released, a reporter asked Reagan for a comment about it as he entered church. “I don’t think a church would be the proper place to use the word I would have to use in discussing that,” he said.

Jackie Robinson Story, Ancient Israelite Seals, Jezebel’s Make-Up, Embrace the Experience, Stoics on the Afterlife

I’m a little disappointed because my American Experience Reagan DVD isn’t playing on my DVD Player.  So I tried it on my computer, and it played, but it was bad in certain areas.  I then went to PBS’s web-site to watch the documentary there and tried to view it on Windows.  It was playing, then it stopped for some reason, plus I couldn’t fast-foward.  So I tried to watch it on Quicktime, and I could fast-forward it there, but there was no picture.  I really don’t want to mess with my DVD right now.  I think part of the problem is that the innermost circle may be damaged.  The problem’s not the rest of the DVD, because that has no scratches—or at least the scratches are too small to make any difference.

I’ll still comment on Reagan tomorrow for Reagan’s birthday, which my blog recognizes as a holiday.  I just won’t be celebrating it as I planned.

I’m going to be brief with this post.  I’m hungry.  I’m angry.  And this Emergen-C I’m drinking makes me have to go to the bathroom a lot.  But here I go!

1.  Today, for Black History Month, I saw The Jackie Robinson Story, a 1950 movie that starred Jackie Robinson as himself.    Jackie Robinson was the first African-American Major League baseball player.  Ruby Dee was also on it.  I said in my post a while back, America, Christianity’s Nutritional Value, that I never saw Ruby Dee play a young person.  In The Stand and Roots: the Next Generation and America, and even on an episode of Promised Land, she was old (but at least she had black hair on Promised Land).  Well, today’s a first, for she was young in the Jackie Robinson Story, and, boy, she looked good!

One of the interactions on the movie eerily reminded me of a childhood experience, but I’m not going to share that because people may misunderstand me.  What I will comment on is how the baseball team’s manager (or whoever he was) told Jackie not to fight back against those who verbally abuse him on account of his race, but to prove himself on the ball-field.  After Jackie did that, however, the manager told him that he can now fight back: he can go to Washington and make a difference, promoting justice and equality.  He had a platform.

That teaches me that there’s a time, a place, and a proper manner for fighting back.

2.  In Ancient Israelite Religion, I read N. Avigad’s “The Contribution of Israelite Seals to an Understanding of Israelite Religion and Society.”  People back then signed their names with seals.  And many of the names are Yahwistic—they have some form of YHWH in them.  Avigad says on pages 196-197, “The worship of foreign gods, of which the Israelite people are so often accused by the prophets, was apparently not so deeply rooted and widespread as to affect their personal names.” 

But Avigad states that such was the case during the divided kingdom, when there was a northern kingdom of Israel and a southern kingdom of Judah.  In the times of David, however, there are names with “Baal” in them.  I’m not sure if Avigad is basing this on seals, or on the biblical text, but he cites biblical names: Eshbaal, Jerubaal, Meribaal, etc.  According to Avigad, “Baal” in these cases referred to YHWH, since “Baal” can mean a lord, which YHWH was in his relationship with Israel.  Avigad also states that eighth century Samarian (Northern Israelite) ostraca have “Baal” names. 

I’m not sure what to make of this.  Was ancient Israel idolatrous or not?  That seems to be the debate among scholars.  There are female figurines that appear to represent goddesses or at least to function for a cultic purpose.  Yet, ostraca and seals are largely Yahwistic. 

3.  In Reading Between Texts, I read Francisco O. Garcea-Treto’s “The Fall of the House: A Carnivalesque Reading of 2 Kings 9 and 10.”  I’m just going to call this author “GT” for short.  On page 171, GT discusses the question of why Jezebel painted her face to go out and meet Jehu.  One explanation is that she was trying to seduce him—to capitalize on her sexual charms, presumably to save her own life.  Another is that regal women appearing in public wanted to look good.

4.  I didn’t get much read of Theodore Mullen’s Ethnic Myths and Pentateuchal Foundations, but I got to page 200!  Nothing sticks out to me, so I’ll open the book up to a random page and pick something.  On page 199, Mullen mentions Exodus 20:19, in which the Israelites request that Moses be God’s spokesmen out of fear that a direct encounter with God will lead to their deaths.  That idea somewhat puzzles me.  Yes, God says that no one can see him and live (Exodus 33:20), but there are times when people survive an encounter with God, even though they’re surprised that they’ve done so (Genesis 32:30; Judges 13:22).  It’s good that they’re humble, though!

On another note, the movie Moses, starring Ben Kingsley, has a good scene in which the Israelites receive the Ten Commandments directly from God.  A fierce wind blows over them, and young and old recite a commandment, which God is revealing to their spirit.  Moses encourages them to embrace God, but they’re uncomfortable with the experience, so they ask Moses to be God’s spokesman.

5.  In John Dillon’s The Middle Platonists, Dillon talks about beliefs on immortality.  On page 100, he discusses a dispute among Stoics:

Cleanthes believed that the souls of all men survived until the ecpyrosis [which, for Stoics, is the consumption of the cosmos], while Chrysippus held that only the souls of the wise did so.  Those of the ‘foolish’ (i.e. all others) lasted ‘for some certain time’, while the souls of irrational animals perished immediately…Zeno himself seems to have thought that the soul held together for some time after death, but finally dispersed…In contrast to this, the normal Platonic belief would be in a process of purgation which brought in even the worst—or perhaps all but the very worst, if we follow the Phaedo myth—ultimately to a place among the stars.

This reminds me of various things.  On Christy, a little boy asked the devout Miss Alice if his dead dog is in heaven.  The agnostic doctor whispered to her, “Tell him what he wants to hear!”, and she replied that she’ll tell him the truth.  She quoted Ecclesiastes 3:21, which says that the spirit of man goes upward, whereas the spirit of the beast goes downward to the earth.  That seems to imply “no.”  Yet, she went on to quote I Corinthians 2:9, which says that eye has not seen nor ear heard the things that God’s prepared for those who love him.  From this, Miss Alice concluded that there’s a possibility that the dog’s in heaven.

Then there are debates on universalism: is hell a place of permanent punishment, or of temporary correction?  Plus, the statement that Plato envisions people finding a place among the stars reminds me of Daniel 12:3, which says that those who lead people to righteousness will be as the stars forever.  Could Daniel reflect Plato’s strand of Greek philosophy, although—unlike Plato—Daniel 12:3 says that people will be as stars, meaning they’re not literal stars (if that’s what “a place among the stars” means for Plato)?  If liberal scholars are correct, then Daniel 12 was written during the Hellenistic period, when Jews had some exposure to Greek philosophy.

More on King, Mixed Israelite Religion, Misunderstood Jeroboam?, Egyptian Motifs, Fate

1.  Today, for Black History Month, I watched two movies.  The first was Kennedy, a 1983 miniseries that starred Martin Sheen as President John F. Kennedy.  (No, he didn’t remind me of President Bartlett on this movie, for he used a thick Bostonian accent, which Bartlett didn’t have.)  The second was Boycott, a 2001 movie about the Montgomery bus boycotts, led by Martin Luther King, Jr.  Jeffrey Wright (whom I know from Lady in the Water and W) played King.  The lady playing Coretta (Carmen Ejogo) was hot, and she and Wright got married after working on this movie.

What’s interesting to me is this: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (a major figure in Kennedy) believed that King was part of a Communist plot, yet King’s movement is now a part of America’s heritage, representing America’s values of freedom and liberty.  Hoover thought that King was a troublemaker stirring up race wars.  Yet, there are times when disruption may be necessary, when injustice must be challenged.

King was committed to doing so non-violently, and that led to conflict between him and other African-American leaders.  And non-violence was a tall order.  That’s what I got out of the movie, Boycott.   Bayard Rustin (who, like Stanley Levison, was an ex-Communist) counseled King on non-violence.  When Rustin first met King and saw King with a gun in his pants shortly after his house had been firebombed, he asked King if he truly believed that non-violence worked.  King had to take a hard look at himself.  I’m not sure if a person should take non-violence that far—to the point of not protecting one’s family.  But loving one’s enemies is a noble idea, which King tried to put into practice as he challenged evil.

King has often been criticized as a theological liberal.  Maybe he was.  But he said something, which I heard on the miniseries King and twice on the movie Boycott: if his movement is wrong, then Jesus Christ was a dreamer, and did not come to earth.  What’s he saying here?  That the effectiveness of non-violence in ending evil shows that Jesus was divine and knew what he was talking about?  That God was on the side of the Civil Rights Movement?  It may have been rhetoric.  But non-violence takes a lot of faith, especially when a person is being attacked and threatened with death. 

2.  In Ancient Israelite Religion, I read John Holladay’s “Religion in Israel and Judah Under the Monarchy.”  Two points that stick out to me are these: According to Holladay, the government-sponsored cults were largely aniconic, meaning they didn’t use images of people or animals.  They obeyed the commandment against images!  This includes the site in Dan, which Jeroboam built.  This, even though the Hebrew Bible depicts the Israelite monarchies as blatantly idolatrous.  In my opinion, what has survived at Dan may not have icons, but foreigners could’ve taken the calf-idol because it was made of a precious metal, gold, and that’s why it wasn’t found.  So perhaps I Kings 12 is accurate on Jeroboam constructing an idol.

In an endnote on page 291, Holladay argues that Israelite female figurines were cult objects, not children’s playthings or talismans used to assist in childbirth.  His reason is that they resemble cult artifacts in Philistia and Phoenicia.  Those who contend that they were dolls may believe that ancient Israel by-and-large worshipped YHWH alone.  I don’t entirely know Jeffrey Tigay’s position on the female figurines, but he is a scholar who views ancient Israel as largely monotheistic (see Tigay and Khirbet Qieyafa?, Judges and Intertextuality, Is Mullen a Minimalist?).

Holladay resembles Tigay because he thinks that the official cult was aniconic—that it was doing what the Bible believes is the “right thing,” even if the Bible doesn’t give it much credit.  Yet, Holladay maintains that the popular cult included idols.  Holladay sees a parallel with Japan, where people adopt a variety of religious practices.  The Israelites could have been Yahwistic, while also relying on other gods and goddesses to get them through life’s struggles.

3.  In Reading Between Texts, I read Stuart Lasine’s “Reading Jeroboam’s Intentions: Intertextuality, Rhetoric, and History in 1 Kings 12.” 

 Lasine addresses the issue of Jeroboam’s golden calves.  (This issue again!)  In the ancient Near East, the calf was the god’s throne, on which the god stood.  Plenty of scholars have argued, therefore, that I Kings 12 misunderstands what Jeroboam was doing: Jeroboam wasn’t telling the people to worship the golden calves, as if they were divine, such scholars argue.  Rather, the calves were God’s throne when he visited the sanctuary, much like the mercy seat over the Ark of the Covenant.

But Lasine refers to the possibility that Israelites without such insight could’ve resort to fetishism, treating the calves themselves as a divine sort of object.  After all, the bronze serpent that Moses made to demonstrate God’s power (Numbers 21) became an object of idolatry, which was why Hezekiah destroyed it (II Kings 18:14). 

This reminds me of the movie Moses, which starred Burt Lancaster.   Aaron emphatically denies that the golden calf is God, but he tells the Israelites that it’s a symbol of the people.  Yet, before you know it, the Israelites are dancing around the calf and treating it as a magical sort of object.

What was wrong with fetishism?  Do superstitions influence people to take their focus off of God, to assume that someone else is in control of events?

4.  On page 157 of Ethnic Myths and Pentateuchal Foundations, Theodore Mullen talks about motifs in the Joseph story.  He mentions two Egyptian tales: The Tale of Two Brothers (thirteenth century B.C.E.) and the story of Sinuhe (twentieth century B.C.E.).

In the Tale of Two Brothers, we meet Batu and his brother, Anpu.  Anpu’s wife makes advances on Batu, but Batu refuses.  She then accuses Batu of making advances on her.  Consequently, Anpu wants to kill Batu, who runs away.  There are then a series of fantastic details, which you can read about here and here.  But the motif of a wife making advances on someone who refuses, then turning around and accusing him of attempted rape appears also in the Joseph story (Genesis 39). 

In the Story of Sinuhe, Sinuhe is an important official in the government of the Pharaoh, but he’s afraid after he hears treasonous remarks about the Pharaoh’s recent death.  So he flees to Canaan and gains the favor of a chief there, becoming his son-in-law and raising little chiefs.  Sinuhe grows old in Canaan and gets opportunities to prove his courage (which helps him because of his cowardice in fleeing years before).  But he desires to return to Egypt, his homeland.  The Pharaoh welcomes Sinuhe when he goes back home.

We see this in the Joseph story: Joseph goes to a foreign country and becomes an important official, marrying into the royal house.  But he wants his bones to be placed in Canaan, the Promised Land, his true home. 

Mullen says that the authors of the Joseph stories were probably only familiar with the “stock” genres of their day.  In my opinion, his implication is that they did not borrow directly from the Egyptian tales, so the Joseph story is not old.  Mullen then makes the point that the Joseph story’s account of a foreigner prospering in the court of the king resembles Daniel 1-6, which is (at the earliest) exilic.  Mullen once again appears to promote an exilic date (or later) for the Pentateuch’s stories.

I agree that the authors of the Joseph story may not have directly borrowed from these Egyptian tales.  The Joseph story shares details with them, but there are also sharp differences.  Maybe concepts such as exile from home or bad women were common in those days.  Moreover, for those who believe that the Joseph story is historical, such things can happen in real life, not just in art! 

But I don’t think we can dogmatically assert that the Joseph story is exilic because it resembles Daniel 1-6, when its motifs existed long before the Daniel story.  Yet, Mullen may do well to ask: When would those motifs become relevant to the Israelites?  The bad woman idea could fit a lot of contexts, but the notion of being away from one’s home could speak especially to Jews in exile.

5.  In Middle Platonists, on page 84, John Dillon talks about Chrysippus’ (third century B.C.E.) view on fate, which is Stoic.  For Chrysippus, we just think that we have free will and that things happen to us by chance, for we don’t see the chain of causes that God sees.  I’m not entirely sure what this means.  It reminds me somewhat of Jonathan Edwards’ idea that our choices had to have been caused by something, which pushes us to decide one way and not another (meaning there’s no true free will).  I’m not absolute on this, but I do think that who we are influences what we do, and that who we are has been shaped by what’s happened to us. 

Or is Chryssipus saying a God’s-eye perspective would reveal a beautiful web of causes leading to our choices and the things we consider coincidence?

J. Edgar Hoover, The Issue Behind Balaam, Tekoan Blackmail, More than Politics, The Dyad and the World Soul

1.  Today, for Black History Month, I watched King, a three-part 1978 miniseries about Martin Luther King, Jr.  It starred Paul Winfield, whom I’ve loved in such shows as Touched by an Angel and Star Trek: The Next Generation (the episode “Darmok”).  Ossie Davis (whom I know from The Stand and Promised Land) did an excellent job as King’s crusty father, Martin, Sr.  Members of King’s family also played in the miniseries; King’s daughter Yolanda, for instance, played Rosa Parks.  And there were important historical figures who played themselves—such as Ramsey Clark, Lyndon Johnson’s Attorney General.

The movie got me thinking about J. Edgar Hoover, the legendary FBI director who opposed King.  Hoover believed that one of King’s trusted advisors, Stanley Levison, was a Communist.  On the movie, Attorney General Robert Kennedy advises King to fire Levison so that the civil rights agenda could move forward, but King is reluctant because Levison is a friend and has offered valuable advice and services to his movement.  Kennedy says that the evidence against Levison is pretty damning, but, a few scenes later, a civil rights worker says that Levison was never a Communist. 

Who’s right?  When I watched the movie Good Night and Good Luck, I heard that not every accusation McCarthy made was correct (at least according to the movie).  McCarthy accused Edward R. Murrow of being a member of the Communist Industrial Workers of the World (or something like that), a charge that Murrow denied.  And there were times when rumor or hearsay played a role in people getting labelled as Communists.  So I wanted to know the basis for the FBI’s accusation of Levison.  The wikipedia article (see Stanley Levison) said that Levison was a member of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) during the 1950’s, but he left it in 1957, which was before he assisted King.  Because wikipedia is not always reliable, I did a search for a more reputable source, and I found an informative article from the Atlantic:  The FBI and Martin Luther King – The Atlantic (July/August 2002).  The article details the basis for Hoover’s claim that Levison assisted the CPUSA before he helped King, so Hoover wasn’t pulling his concern out of thin air.

The movie depicts J. Edgar Hoover as a racist, someone from the old school who believed that African-Americans should be cooks and chauffeurs.  There may be documentation out there that such was the case, for articles turned up after I googled “J. Edgar Hoover racist.”   But, in my own reading, I’ve gotten the opposite impression, or at least I saw another side to the controversial FBI man.  Years ago, I read J. Edgar Hoover’s 1958 book, Masters of Deceit, which was about the Communist movement in the United States.  Hoover had a chapter on minorities.  I expected him to argue that the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) was a Communist front, but that’s not what I found.  Actually, Hoover spoke highly of the NAACP, particularly its efforts to keep Communists from its ranks. 

That picture of Hoover was seconded when I read Thurgood Marshall’s depiction of the man (see Thurgood Marshall on J. Edgar Hoover).  Marshall was the lawyer who won the 1954 Brown vs. the Board of Education Supreme Court decision, which declared public school segregation unconstitutional, and he was also the first African-American Supreme Court justice.  Marshall states that he and Hoover shared a common concern about Communist attempts to infiltrate the NAACP, and he also denied that Hoover was a racist.  Maybe racism was not a major reason for Hoover’s opposition to King, but it was rooted in Hoover’s fear that the Communist Party would promote racial discord to undermine America.

Was Hoover’s concern legitimate?  In his mind, it was.  I think he was well-intentioned.  But I think that discrimination and treating people as second-class citizens on account of their race were more important problems, which King did well to fight.

2.  In Ancient Israelite Religion, I read Jo Ann Hackett’s “Religious Traditions in Israelite Transjordan.”  Hackett focuses on Balaam.  According to Hackett, P (the priest) portrays Balaam quite negatively, for Numbers 31:15-16 ties him to the incident at Baal-Peor, in which Israelite males turned from God to appease hot Midianite women.  According to P, the women got the idea to seduce the Israelites from Balaam.  But other stories about Balaam are more positive.  In Numbers 22-24, Balaam blesses Israel rather than cursing her. 

What’s going on here?  For Hackett, the story in Joshua 22 is a significant piece of the puzzle.  There, the Israelites on the western side of the Jordan are upset at those on the eastern side (the Transjordan) because they’ve built themselves an altar, which is a “no-no” because the LORD only wants one altar, the one on the western side.  Leading the charge against the eastern Israelites is the priest Phinehas, who’s loved by the LORD because he violently ended an Israelite’s apostacy with a Midianite hottie in Numbers 25.  But Phinehas and the western Israelites learn that their eastern brothers were intending no harm: the easterners were building an altar, not for sacrifice, but rather to testify that they’re Israelites too, even though they live in a location away from most of the Israelites (the ones on the West).  The western Israelites then cease and desist from their mission to destroy their eastern brothers, accepting their explanation and acknowledging them as part of the fold.

According to Hackett, the eighth century Deir ‘Alla inscription from Ammon (see The Ammonite Balaam Story) indicates that there was at least one cult in the Transjordan that viewed Balaam as a prophet.  The priest opposed that for various reasons, one being that he didn’t think that the Transjordan was part of the Promised Land (Hackett cites Numbers 32:7; 33:53; and Genesis 17:8).  His negative Balaam story reflects his opposition towards the Transjordanian cult.  But there were also inclusive voices, such as the one who wrote Joshua 22, and they “wanted to incorporate the eastern tribes into the fold of Yahwism” (130).  An inclusive voice wrote a story that was more positive about Balaam.  

So, for Hackett, the negative and positive Balaam stories are actually about the cult in the Transjordan, which is relevant to the question of the eastern Israelites’ legitimacy as Israelites.

3.  In Reading Between Texts, I read Patricia Willey’s “The Importunate Woman of Tekoa and How She Got Her Way.”  Willey looks at two stories: II Samuel 12, in which Nathan confronts David over his affair with Bath-sheba, and II Samuel 14, in which a woman from Tekoa (at Joab’s instigation) tells a parable to get David to acknowledge his estranged son, Absalom.  Her parable is a fictitious case in which her son killed his brother (as Absalom did) and is being pursued by avengers of blood.  The Tekoan woman asks David to protect her son’s life.

 For Willey, the Tekoan woman gets David to take back Absalom by using the phrase “this thing” (II Samuel 14:3, 13, 15, 20), a phrase also used in the context of David’s murder of Uriah (II Samuel 11:11, 25, 27—though that’s actually “the thing”; 12:6, 14).  Willey says that “Evidentally Joab knows what he has and how he can use it” (127).  Is Willey’s point that Joab is trying to blackmail David through the woman of Tekoa?  Is Joab saying to David, “Do my wish, for I have something I can use against you!”

4.   In Theodore Mullen’s Ethnic Myths and Pentateuchal Foundations, Mullen quotes D.J.A. Clines, who says that the Pentateuch portrays a movement towards a goal: land, descendants, and a divine-human relationship (128).  I like what Mullen says: “The nature of Israel’s identity as an ethnic group…is defined in part by the ways in which the ‘primary history’ as a whole resolves the issues associated with the nature of the divine/human relationship.”

As I’ve read Mullen regurgitate the creation and patriarchal stories, I’ve wondered how he fits the stories’ details (e.g., sibling rivalry, divine providence) into what he believes is the historical context of their authors or compilers: Israel’s exilic and post-exilic periods.  Actually, not every detail of the story has to convey a political point.  In part, the stories are about wrestling with the divine-human relationship, which is an important aspect of Israel’s ethnic identity.  The Aeneid also makes a political point, but it has stories with characters and lessons.  National epics are like that, including our own.

5.  In John Dillon’s The Middle Platonists (page 26), Dillon discusses Xenocrates (fourth century B.C.E.) and the Middle Platonist Plutarch (first century C.E.) on the Monad, the Dyad, and the World Soul.  The Monad appears to be God (or something like that), whereas the Dyad is matter.  But Xenocrates appears to associate the Dyad with the World Soul, which orders the cosmos.  But how can that be, when Xenocrates says that the Indefinite Dyad is “an evil and disorderly principle.”  Enter Plutarch, who was influenced by Xenocrates.  He says that the World Soul is “formed from the Monad and Dyad, and so is not itself the Dyad.”  I wonder, though, if the association of the Dyad with the World Soul led to identifying the Dyad as the Demiurge, the creator, as Neo-Platonists later did (see Men of Honor II, A Long Journey, Complacency, ANE Tales and Genesis 2-3, Dyad).