asher553 | Entries tagged with bible

'Behold, I have set before you today life and good, and death and evil ...'
[Deut. 30:15]

טו רְאֵ֨ה נָתַ֤תִּי לְפָנֶ֨יךָ֙ הַיּ֔וֹם אֶת־הַֽחַיִּ֖ים וְאֶת־הַטּ֑וֹב וְאֶת־הַמָּ֖וֶת וְאֶת־הָרָֽע:

Notice that the verse does not say "life and death, good and evil", as if these were two different pairs of contrasting opposites. No, it is "life and good" on one side, "death and evil" on the other. It is the same choice.

This is the Torah's powerful affirmation that life is good, and we are commanded to choose it.

--

Dennis Prager on Deut. 30:19: "The commandment to choose life over death must have struck many readers throughout history as strange: If given the choice between life and death, who would choose death?"

But choosing life over death is a conscious choice. Prager notes that "the desire to have children has been regarded as a given", yet in fact it's a choice that "fewer and fewer people are making."

Even choosing life for oneself is a conscious decision, in a day when powerful interests want to persuade us of the attractiveness of stepping across to the other side - with the express goal of decreasing the population.

To value human life is an affirmative choice, and a duty to the Creator in Whose image we are created.

Torah. This week we're reading Ki Tisa (beginning at Exodus 30:11), which begins with the command for the Israelites to contribute half a shekel each for the Sanctuary, and continues with the sin of the golden calf and the breaking of the first set of the Tablets. Back in 2016, I was inspired by this Parasha to take a count of some Jewish schoolchildren in Uganda.

Scripture. In the 929 Project's chapter-by-chapter cycle, we are at II Samuel 18, where King David must deal with the rebellion by his son Absalom. Absalom is finally found - tangled by his luxuriant locks in a terebinth tree - and killed; but now it is Joab who faces a sticky situation. Miriam Gedweiser: 'When informed that Absalom is hanging in a tree, Job asks the messenger, incredulously, “Why didn’t you kill him then and there?” For Joab, it is as if the King’s impossible request to “deal gently” has simply not registered. The text has Joab’s interlocutor explicitly cite the king’s order, however, to highlight the conscious choice Joab is making. ...'

Books. I am finally close to finishing my re-read of the wonderful and deservedly classic fantasy novel 'The Last Unicorn' by Peter S. Beagle. My good friend Michael Weingrad wrote an erudite review of The Last Unicorn (free to read with registration). I'm going to have a few thoughts of my own once I've finished.

LIFE. My Hebrew birthday, 5 Shvat, fell last Friday, and on the civil calendar it's tomorrow: I'm turning 60 years old. This means that, even by the most optimistic estimates, I have already lived at least half the time allotted to me in this world. I find this fact a little sobering, but by no means depressing; rather, I feel energized. ("Concentrates the mind" and all that.)

HOUSING. The now-former roommate has cleared out the last of her belongings, and I now have the place - and the rent payment - all to myself. I've had a couple of responses to my posting that haven't quite worked out for one reason or another; here's hoping the coming week will bring success.

SCRIPTURE. In these troubled and uncertain times, I've found it helpful to renew my commitment to studying the Bible. This week's Torah reading includes the climactic moments of the Exodus from Egypt, with the pillar of fire and of smoke and the splitting of the sea. We've had pandemics, bugs in our food, blood diseases, and the destruction of livestock, crops, and progeny ... it all sounds eerily familiar.

In the broader Hebrew Scriptures, the 929 Project covers I Samuel 24, where King Saul takes a rest break in a cave, unknowingly coming within striking distance of David and his men who are hiding there. What I love about the Saul / David narrative is how carefully David walks the moral tightrope of asserting his claim against a monarch who has lost the mandate of Heaven - yet still respecting the person of Saul, and the office, and the nation, and ultimately G-d.

On the 929 web portal, the Spanish-language lesson (by Salomon Michan Mercado) following the English reading points to the inscription on men's restrooms - 'caballeros' - as a reminder that like a knight holding the reins of his horse, the human soul has the power to control our animal instincts.

Anyway, I'm going to grab the reins of my life and move ahead ... or go back to tilting at windmills, as the case may be.

LINKS
https://www.929.org.il/lang/en/today
https://soundcloud.com/929-bible/JPS_Audio_Bible_I_Samuel_Chapter_24_read_by_Jonathan_Roumie
https://soundcloud.com/salomon-michan/quien-lleva-las-riendas-en-tu

VAYAQHEL

The Sabbath is a time of mindfulness and non-attachment. Even the building of the Sanctuary was halted for it.

Steinsaltz commentary points out that the sanctity of the Sabbath "is not overridden by the construction of the Tabernacle" and in fact this is where we derive the laws of melakhoth forbidden on the Sabbath.

The note on 35:3 also states that "lighting a fire was easy even in biblical times, not very different from igniting one nowadays." This is a rebuttal against the claim advanced by the Reform folks that "back then, lighting a fire took a lot of work, so that's why it was forbidden" and thus rationalizing a relaxation of the rule in the age of matches and lighters.

In fact, all of the forms of productive work forbidden on the Sabbath are, at their core, transformations of the world; and this is certainly true of fire as well. (Bronowski devotes a whole essay, 'The Hidden Structure', to this theme.) It has nothing to do with how much or how little physical effort is involved.

If you look at the practical details of the Sabbath restrictions, they are focused precisely on the things that we routinely do to change the world. The Sabbath calls on us to practice non-attachment by refraining from creative actions, and just let the world be.

GENESIS 13: SEEING THE LAND.

Abram and Lot ascend from Egypt, returning to the southern part of the Land of Israel, the Negev. Strife breaks out between their respective households, and Abram proposes that they separate. "The language in which he addresses Lot is clear, firm, and polite." (Alter)

Lot takes what he sees to be the better territory - "all the plain of the Jordan, a lush, fertile area large enough for his flocks and herds." (Steinsaltz on v. 11.) Following this, God promises the Land of Israel to Abram - and also promises progeny.

The text reports Lot's choice of land from Lot's own point of view. "And Lot raised his eyes and saw the whole plain of the Jordan, saw that it was well-watered, before the Lord's destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, like the Garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt ...". (Alter's translation.) That's a striking, and very ambivalent, pair of similes there.

Lot sees the physical terrain, but not the moral terrain. Verse 13 tells us that "the people of Sodom were very evil offenders against the Lord." And this is a good place to point out the importance of sight and attention in the Bible.

In the very next verse, the Creator tells Abram, "Raise your eyes and look from the place where you are ... for all the land you see, to you I will give it and to your seed forever." Both men "raised their eyes", but only Abram did so under God's instruction. Where Lot looked, he saw abundance; where Abram looked, he saw potential, as revealed by the Divine voice. And along with the promise of the land comes God's other promise to Abram: that the land will be filled with his children's children.

Crossposts: https://asher63.livejournal.com/809454.html

As we've seen, the Hebrew word used for the cataclysm of Noah's time does not actually mean "flood" but rather "confusion". In fact, the event is a systematic undoing of the original work of creation. Grumet on 7:23: "Notice what is being erased and the order in which it is happening: human, animal, crawling creatures, and birds."

It's also noteworthy that the text refers to the pairs of animals as "ish v'ishto" (7:3) - generally translated as "each with its mate", but it literally means "man and wife", echoing Adam and Eve. In no other place in the Bible is the phrase "ish v'ishto" used in reference to animals.

Here, also, we get the first usage of calendrical dates in the Bible (7:11, 8:4, 8:13-14) - and in fact, the ONLY calendar dates in the Book of Genesis. The more you think about this, the weirder it gets: because at this point there are only eight human beings alive on the planet, and they're shut up inside a wooden box, with the skies obscured by rain and clouds, so they can't observe the sun, moon, and stars. And didn't Genesis tell us back in 1:14 that G-d set the celestial bodies "for signs for the fixed times, for days and for years"?

"Ironically it is G-d, for Whom time is meaningless, Who keeps track of time in the absence of the functioning of the luminaries." (Grumet)

Crossposts: https://asher63.livejournal.com/795130.html

Mankind has descended into violence and barbarism, and the Creator decides it's time for a reboot.

Chapter 6 opens with a description of the lawless violence that has engulfed the world. There's also a reference to the "Nephilim", whose exact identity remains a mystery.

One thing that's striking about the Flood narrative is the amount of detail, in the measurements of the Ark and especially in the chronology of the Flood itself. (And we have to assume that the information in the text represents Divine revelation, as it must have been impossible for Noah to keep track of months and days when the sky was obscured.)

Incidentally, the word for the Flood used in the text, [mabul], doesn't mean simply a flood of water, it means destruction.

I want to zoom in on verse 2. "The sons of the mighty [bnei ha-elohim] saw the daughters of man ..." Now this is tricky to translate, because "elohim" can mean either "God" or "mighty ones", but it's clearly used in the second sense here.

Also notice that this verse very subtly echoes the refrain of 1:4, etc., "... and God [Elohim] saw that it was good," only here of course it's in a negative sense.

Now the next part of the verse is often translated in English as "... [they] saw that the daughters of man were fair (or, "beutiful", etc.)", but the word that's actually used [tovoth] simply means "good". And in fact that's how the Artscroll edition renders it, and I think it's the most straightforward understanding of the verse. The daughters of man may have been beautiful or not, but they carried themselves with decency and dignity - they were *morally* good.

And it was this goodness that the corrupt, powerful men saw in them - and they despised them for it.

Crossposts: https://asher63.livejournal.com/785691.html

GENESIS 05: GENERATIONS OF MAN - NAMES AND NUMBERS

The first thing we notice about Chapter 5 of Genesis is the prominence of both genealogy and chronology. While the seven generations of Cain's male progeny were listed in a couple of verses (4:17 - 18), the ten generations from Adam to Noah (by way of Seth) are treated in longer, more formulaic fashion. Also, for the first time in the Bible, we're seeing chronologies: each man's lifetime is broken down into years before and after fatherhood, and fnally (and redundantly) the total lifespan. The wording is identical in each case, except for Enoch, who mysteriously "walked with G-d" but did not die, "for G-d took him."

(Incidentally, the wording of "Enoch walked with G-d" is repeated identically with reference to Noah a few verses later.)

The lifespans of the early generations are clearly fantastical relative to our own experience. Most commentaries simply pass by the numbers with a shrug of the shoulders, but it might be worth wondering if there is some symbolism hidden in these numbers. I am not talking about gematria (Hebrew numerology) because I'm not convinced that this idea was prevalent in Biblical times. But it is certainly true that Biblical man understood the process of reckoning with numbers; as I've already observed, there are a great many numbers in the Bible, beginning with the counting of the days in the Creation narrative. It would have been impossible to keep a calendar - a theme we'll return to again shortly - without mastering the theory and practice of multiplication, for instance.

Speaking of multiples, the final verse of this chapter (5:32) reports the first multiple birth in the Bible: Shem, Ham, and Japheth, who were born in the same year to the same woman (Noah is not recorded as having a second wife or concubine) and so must have been triplets. (Or conceivably, twins separated by less than a year from a single birth.) As we saw earlier, this woman is held by tradition to have been Na'amah, the daughter of Lemech and Zillah and a descendent of Cain.

It's also worth noting that Noah becomes a father late in life, relatively speaking, compared to his ancestors. At 500 years old, he is past middle age (500/950 = 10/19) when he begets his three sons.

You can't help noticing that the names of Seth's descendents often parallel the names of the line of Cain. I haven't the time or space to devote to a full treatment of this subject, but Zvi Grumet has a very interesting take, in which the descendents of Seth try to avert the curse placed on Cain's descendents (pp. 72-73). The meanings of the Hebrew names take on symbolic importance in Grumet's interpretation. I recommend getting Grumet's book to read the details.

GENESIS 04 - 05: CHILDREN OF CAIN

LEMEKH'S BOAST

In 4:8, Cain kills his brother Abel. The Creator confronts Cain and sentences him to be "a vagrant and a wanderer on the earth" (4:10). Cain fears for his life and begs for mercy, and is given a distinguishing mark "so that none that meet him might kill him."

The descendents of the exiled Cain are named in short order in 4:17. We learn nothing about their lives until we get to Lemekh, whose words to his two wives are recorded in 4:23-24:

"I have slain a man for wounding me, and a lad for bruising me. For sevenfold is Cain avenged, and Lemekh seventy-seven."

The passage is cryptic and difficult to translate, and other interpretations exist. But I think the most straightforward - and also the most disturbing - is simply that he is boasting about his willingness to kill. "Perhaps, then, what Lamech is saying (quite barbarically) is that not only has he killed a man for wounding him, he has not hesitated to kill a mere boy for hurting him." (Alter)

Prager agrees: "Lamech boasts that if any man touches him, he will kill seventy-seven of his opponent's men in retaliation. This type of unbalanced retribution was the norm in all societies."

Notice the connection with Cain: man has taken God's mercy and perverted it into a literal license to kill. The result is society's descent into barbarism. Is it any wonder the Creator is angry?

CAIN'S SONS AND DAUGHTERS

The line of Cain disappear from the text, seemingly without trace. We do not know whether they intermarried with the descendents of Seth (chapter 5). What is interesting, though, is that Lemekh's wives Adah and Zillah are the first women mentioned by name after Eve, and Zillah and her daughter Na'amah are the first mother/daughter pair identified in the Bible. And there is a Rabbinic tradition that Na'amah was the wife of Noah.

THE NAMING OF NOAH

The text ties the name Noah - [noach] in Hebrew - to the verb [nachem], which incidentally has two meanings, both of which are in play here. Usually [nachem] means to comfort or to console, and that's how it is explained as relating to Noah's name. But also, and much less commonly, it can mean "to regret", and it is also used in that sense here, when the Creator is described as having "regretted" making man.

But the whole explanation is a little strange, beause the guy's name isn't [nachem], it's [noach]. The word supplied as an explanation is a near but imperfect match for the name it's supposed to explain. So where does [noach] come from? You guessed it - the name [noach] derives from our old friend, the verbal root [nachah] meaning rest and enjoyment.

So in fact, Noah's name not only promises comfort - it also hearkens back to Adam's restful state in the Garden of Eden, and before that, the Creator's rest on the first Sabbath.

Crossposts: https://asher63.livejournal.com/775231.html

The first recorded conversation in the Bible neither involves nor concerns a man, and therefore almost passes the Alison Bechdel test. Why did Eve speak to the serpent? Maybe because it spoke to her.

Why does the serpent tempt Eve? Because it can.

People sometimes ask why the serpent, specifically, had a motivation to cause man’s fall. But I think this is the wrong question. What the text actually tells us, the very first thing it tells us about the serpent, is this: “The serpent was the most cunning of all the beasts of the field.” This answers the question, Why could the serpent, specifically, cause man’s fall? Nowhere does the text ask why the serpent wanted to, because we’ve already been told that – in 1:28.

What the text tells us is that the serpent was unique in its capabilities; it does not say that the serpent was unique in its motives. I think the serpent’s motive was shared among all the animals: resentment towards man for man’s having been given dominion over all other life forms. (Steinsaltz on 3:1: "Perhaps it sought to usurp man's position atop the hierarchy in the Garden of Eden.")

All the animals had the motive, but only the serpent had the method; all had the intent, but the serpent alone had the capability.

This, then, is the first instance of envy and jealousy in the Bible, even before the well-known brothers whom we’ll meet in the next chapter. And it is also of the same theme: rather than wanting to better itself and improve its own standing, the serpent wants to bring the other guy down. This is the nature of envy and it’s an all too common human weakness.

Venturing just a little bit into symbol, we might take the snake – and, in my reading, the putative rebelliousness of the animal kingdom generally – as a metaphor for how our lower nature, our animal instincts, will often use rationalization to get us to do things we know we shouldn’t do.

*

“He named her Life [chava]” – as Steinsaltz drily observes, he could have called her a lot of things at that moment. But he didn’t. He named her Life.

“- because she was the mother of all life.” I think the verb here [hayetah] really wants to be translated as “had become” – “she had become the mother of all life.” And indeed that’s exactly how Steinsaltz reads the later verse, “the man had known his wife”.

So, what is really going on here? I think she must have been already pregnant, and perhaps she told the man her wonderful secret right then and there. And now, suddenly, the fruit, the fall, the curse – none of that matters now, because they are about to bring a new human life into the world.