02/03/10

Exodus 21-24

In chapter 21, the Lord continues giving the law to the Israelites. The first set of passages deals with rules for servitude, buying and selling servants, both Hebrew and foreign. There are time limits, and obligations on the master, and some rights for the servants. There are laws then dealing with personal injuries, with special admonitions against attacking one's mother or father. There are limits imposed on the beating of slaves and servants, and recognition of the special condition of pregnancy. Also, provisions for dealing with injuries which occur, not because of direct attacks, but because of uncontrolled livestock.

Chapter 22 provides rules dealing with the protection of property, from livestock to silver. The second half deals with more societal interaction issues, including some forms of sexual sins. The NIV header for this section is "Social Responsibility" and while that's a bit broad and vague, it seems to fit. Among the stern warnings are not to "take advantage of a widow or an orphan."

In chapter 23, the first laws described address "justice and mercy." These are concerned with issues of false testimony and helping the wicked. The law condemns not only active wrongs, but passive wrong, as men are enjoined from either performing bad acts or refraining from good ones. The next section deals with specific rules for the Sabbath, followed by a section on the three annual festivals to God. The first is "the Feast of Unleavened Bread" or Passover. The next is "the Feast of Harvest," and then the "Feast of Ingathering."

After giving them these laws, the Lord tells them that he is sending an angel ahead of them to guard them along the way, and to bring them to the "place I have prepared." He tells them to listen to him and pay attention, not to rebel against him. He tells them that his angel will bring them into the promised land and, of the people currently inhabiting that land, that God will "wipe them out." He tells them that he will send terror and confusion in to every nation that the Israelites must fight, and that he will establish them from the Red Sea to the "Sea of the Philistines." The people who live there will be handed over or driven out. And he warns them that the worship of their gods "will certainly be a snare to you."

In chapter 24, God and the Israelites confirm their covenant. Moses builds an altar at the foot of Mount Sinai, with twelve stone pillars representing the twelve tribes of Israel. He sent young Israelite men who offered burned offerings and sacrificed young bulls as fellowship offerings to the Lord. Moses read "the Book of the Covenant" to the people, who responded that they would obey the Lord and do everything that the Lord had said. Moses then sprinkled blood from the sacrificed bulls on the people and said, "this is the blood of the covenant that the LORD has made with you in accordance with all these words." And the Lord called Moses on to the mountain to stay there, so God could give him stone tablets "with the law and commands I have written for their instruction." And Moses stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights as the flory of the LORD looked like a consuming fire on top of the mountain.

Thoughts, questions, issues

• Much, if not all, of the law handed down in these passages is simply expansion and commentary upon the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments said that "You shall not murder," but in these passages, he makes it clear that "thou shall not kill," which is the translation sometimes used to argue against capital punishment, is NOT what the commandment says.
• Chapter 21 is an expansion and commentary on Commandments five and six. The first half of chapter 22 is an expansion and commentary on Commandment eight, the second half of the chapter touches on commandments one, two and seven. Chpater 23 touches on the fourth and ninth.
• In one of the really jarring cultural dissonance passages, God contemplates men selling their daughters into servitude, and doesn't say, "DON'T" but gives rules for governing the practice.
• There are, however, what we would now think of as "workers rights." There are God-imposed time limits on servitude. Even more interesting is that after the time limit, the obligation rests on the owner, if the servant wants to stay, to keep and provide for him.
• Furthermore, in a polygamous society where brides are purchased and treated as chattel, God declares that men, in taking second wives, are not relieved of their responsibilities to provide for the first ones.
• God is a proponent of capital punishment.
• I've heard it said that "an eye for an eye" is from the code of Hammurabi and not the Bible so many times, that I had started believing it. Here's God, giving the law to the Israelites in Exodus 21:23-25 - "if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise."
• In chapter 23, God warns the people of Israel that the worship of the gods of the Canaanites "will certainly be a snare to you." Didn't that turn out to be the truth...
• Ex 24:4 - "Moses then wrote down everything the LORD had said." That strikes me as a very important line. This is internal evidence in favor of the proposition that the book of Exodus was (and, by logical extension, the books of Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy were) written down at the times at which the events described therein took place, rather than being handed down orally for generations as Genesis presumably was.
• Another term that echoes through to the New Testament covenant with Jesus - "this is the blood of the covenant."
• It seems likely that the Hebrew words translated as "forty days and forty nights" had some kind of figurative meaning other than 960 hours. Moses stayed on Sinai the same length of time that the Lord made it rain to cause the flood. It could be literal, I suppose, but I wonder if it didn't eupemistically mean "a really long time."
• A fire that burned without consuming is how Moses saw the bush when he was at Sinai earlier, and it's how the Israelites saw the top of the mountain this time.

Psalms 3

The notes for Psalm 3 say that it is a song of David when he fled from his son Absalom.


Thoughts, questions, issues

• The third psalm is the prayer or song or cry of a man who enemies surround him. "How are they increased that trouble me! many are they that rise up against me." But who nevertheless trusts in the Lord to help and protect him. "Thou, O LORD, art a shield for me...Salvation belongeth unto the LORD: thy blessing is upon thy people."
• Selah - סֶ֫לָה - To lift up, exalt

Lord, how are they increased that trouble me! many are they that rise up against me.

Many there be which say of my soul, There is no help for him in God. Selah.

But thou, O LORD, art a shield for me; my glory, and the lifter up of mine head.

I cried unto the LORD with my voice, and he heard me out of his holy hill. Selah.

I laid me down and slept; I awaked; for the LORD sustained me.

I will not be afraid of ten thousands of people, that have set themselves against me round about.

Arise, O LORD; save me, O my God: for thou hast smitten all mine enemies upon the cheek bone; thou hast broken the teeth of the ungodly.

Salvation belongeth unto the LORD: thy blessing is upon thy people. Selah.

1/27/10

Exodus 1-4

Exodus, chapter one, continues the story of the Hebrews in Egypt, right from where Genesis left off. The descendants of Jacob/Israel are prospering in Egypt. Eventually, Joseph and his brothers and that whole generation dies, "but the Israelites were fruitful and multiplied greatly and became exceedingly numerous, so that the land was filled with them." The Pharoah also died, and a king came to power in Egypt who didn't know Joseph, didn't remember what he had done to save Egypt, and saw the Israelites as a threat to the Egyptians. So he had slave masters put over the Hebrews, and they were used for forced labor. "But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread; so the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites and worked them ruthlessly."

Still seeing a threat, the king of Egypt, called the Hebrew midwives (Shiphrah and Puah) and told them that if a boy was being delivered, they were to kill it, and only let the girls live. The midwives "feared God" and did not do what the king instructed. When he asked them why, they told him that the Hebrew women were different than Egyptian women and had their babies before the midwives arrived. And God propered them and gave them families because of what they had done. The Pharoah, though, ordered all of his people that male Hebrew babies should be thrown in to the Nile.

In chapter two, a Levite woman gives birth to a son. She hid him, but when he reached three months, she could hide him no longer. She put him in a basket coated with tar and pitch and put it into the reeds along the bank of the Nile, with his sister watching at a distance to see what would happen to him. The basket was found by Pharoah's daughter, who had gone to the river to bathe, and she felt sorry for him. His sister asked Pharoah's daughter if she would like to fetch one of the Hebrew women to nurse him, and when she said yes, the boy's sister fetched his mother. Pharoah's daughter paid the woman to nurse the baby, and when he was older, she got him back and named him Moses.

When Moses was grown, he saw an Egyptian guard abusing a Hebrew. Looking about him, he killed the guard and buried him in the sand. The next day, seeing two Hebrews fighting, he asked one "why are you hitting your fellow Hebrew?" The man asked, in return, if he were going to kill him like he did the Egyptian. Moses feared for his life, and fled to Midian before Pharoah could kill him.

In Midian, he aided the seven daughters of a priest of Midian in drawing water from a well for their father's flock. When he heard what Moses has done, he invited him in to his home. Moses stayed and took the man's daughter Zipporah as a wife, with whom he had a son, Gershom. During his time in Midian, Pharoah died but the slavery of the Israelites continued. God heard their groaning and remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob.

In chapter three, Moses is tending the flock of his father-in-law Jethro on the far side of the desert when he sees a bush burning without being consumed on Horeb ("the mountain of God"). As he approached, God spoke to him from within the bush. God told him to remove his sandals and not to come any closer, as it was holy ground. He then told Moses that he was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and Moses hid his face. God told him that he had seen "the misery of my people in Egypt" and "heard them crying out because of their slave drivers." Moses wanted to know who he should say had sent him, and GOD replied, "I AM THAT I AM." So he was sending Moses to Pharoah to bring the the people of Israel out of Egypt. Moses resisted, offering excuses and reasons, to all of which God said "I will be with you."

In chapter four God offers Moses signs. First, he has him throw his staff to the ground, and turns it in to a serpent. He then told Moses to put his hand inside his cloak. When he withdrew it, it was white and leprous. He repeated the process and saw it back to normal. Moses continued to resist, saying that "I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue." When Moses asked God to send someone else, "the LORD's anger burned against Moses." Despite that, he acquiesced and chose Moses' brother Aaron to assist him.

Moses went back to his father-in-law Jethro and told him that we was going to go back to Egypt to see whether any of his people were still alive. Jethro told him to go and wished him well. Moses took his wife and sons and put them on a donkey and traveled to Egypt.

On the way, at an inn, the Lord "met him and sought to kill him." But Zipporah took a sharp stone and cut off her son's foreskin and tossed it at Moses' feet, saying, "surely, a bloody husband art thou to me." Then he let them go.

The LORD then went to Aaron and commanded him to meet Moses in the desert. So he went and met Moses on Mt. Sinai in Horeb, the "mountain of God" where Moses had earlier seen the burning bush. Moses told Aaron all that the Lord had said, and what their mission was. And they went and gathered together all of the elders of Israel. Aaron spoke and showed them all the signs that GOD had said, and the people believe, and worshipped GOD.

Thoughts, questions, issues

• Exodus is the second book in the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, the Torah. It follows the stories of the patriarchs from Genesis, which ended with Israel in Egypt. When Exodus opens, Israel is not longer a welcome visitor, but a captive people. Exodus is the story of how they are delivered from bondage in Egypt.
• I'm not sure what to make of the midwives. On the one hand, the king is concerned that the Israelis outnumber the Egyptians. On the other, there are two midwives for the Israelis, and they are named in the text. Are they meant to represent a large number of midwives? What is the significance, if any, of the names?
• In chapter 2, the man with the daughters is called Reuel. In chapter 3, the same man, unless I'm badly mis-reading something, is called Jethro.
• When GOD called Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, he went up to the mountain, bound his son, and raised the blade before God stopped him. When GOD called Moses to lead the Israelis out of Egypt, Moses begged him to find someone else. And even after seeing three miraculous signs, he still wants more.
• God names himself "I AM THAT I AM." One of the issues in philosophical debates is whether the universe requires a creator, a first cause, an uncaused cause. Logically, there is not effect without a cause, and everything we see is an effect. What is the cause?
  
  "I AM THAT I AM" (or "I AM WHO I AM" [NIV]) can certainly be read as a claim to being that uncaused cause.
• One thing that is unclear in this story is how, or how well, Moses and Aaron knew one another. We don't know at what age Moses went to live in the palace, whether Aaron was older or younger, how it was that Aaron wasn't killed during the Pharoah's purging of male Hebrew babies or whether there was any interaction between Moses living in Pharoah's house and Aaron living (presumably) in Hebrew slave quarters.
• I like the imagery of God "stretch[ing] out my hand over Egypt."
  
• Ex 4:24-26, the story of the meeting and conflict at the inn, and the circumcision of Moses' son(s), is one of those that I really have no context for. I don't understand who "the LORD" is, in this context, because surely, if the LORD had tried to kill Moses, well, Moses would have been killed. Nor is there any reason which strikes me as plausible for GOD to attempt to kill Moses who was on a mission which GOD had just given him. I can't see any reason that Zipporah would react by cutting of her son's foreskin. I don't understand why she calls him a "bloody husband" (though I can't help but wonder if that's the etymology of that particular piece of Bristish slang.) In short, it's a two-verse story that I find myself completely unequipped to deal with, which is probably why I quickly forgot it the last time I read the book.

Proverbs 16:1-16

So many of the lessons in the book of Proverbs use, at least figuratively, the idea of wealth, riches, gold and silver and jewels, as things that people want. And as rewards for good behavior. 16:16 is a verse in which that idea is used to make wisdom itself even more desirable.

How much better is it to get wisdom than gold; and to get understanding rather to be chosen than silver!