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Not sure what got me on to this today, but I finally discovered (here, by way of here) what the deal is with Onan not wanting to have kids for his dead older brother: by presumable custom, which becomes law spelled out in Deuteronomy, a first-born son to Onan and Tamar would inherit Er's double share of the inheritance from Judah due to him as Judah's first-born son. So having a son by Tamar would cut Onan's share of Judah's estate from 67% to 25%. (So you can say that Onan really is being a jerk, because he's behaving selfishly--except that these rules are, you know, I want to say really stupid, but at the very least not rules we would accept. (And this is something you find again and again in the bible: what you are supposed to accept as good and bad on terms internal to the narrative, and what good generic Christians actually do accept as good and bad, are not at all what we would take to be good and bad on the terms of, you know, actual morality.)) This also helps explain the significance of the whole first-born switcheroo between Perez and Zerah: Perez and Zerah are fighting to be entitled to the first-born's share of Er's first-born's share of Judah's estate, in addition to (presumably) a regular share of Judah's estate. Figuring out how things stand in the end is pretty complicated. Judah has three living sons: Shelah, Perez, and Zerah. Perez stands to inherit Er's first-born's share. But Tamar is not just Er's widow; she is also Onan's widow. Maybe this means that Perez stands to inherit Onan's share as well! Supposing that Er's share and Onan's share are readjusted with the birth of subsequent sons to Judah, then ultimately Er's share is about 33.3% and the shares of Onan, Shelah, Perez, and Zerah are each about 16.7%. If Perez inherits Onan's share as well as Er's share, then his combined shares add up to 2/3 of Judah's estate. So, by jumping out ahead of Zerah, Perez quadruples his own inheritance, and cuts Zerah's by three-quarters. And Tamar's subterfuge has cut Shelah's share from 100% to 16.7%.
Possibly, I imagine, this whole thing is a reductio ad absurdum of the rules of inheritance--even though they are codified later in the bible (but maybe not later in the bible's composition?) and come into play later still in Ruth. (And then Jesus is confronted with them by the Sadducees, who want to know whose wife a woman will be in the resurrection if seven brothers in turn marry her and die. The Sadducees are apparently kinda like Mormons like that.) What, if anything, this means for the significance of Ruth is something I'm going to have to put off. As it happens, I'm in the middle of the David stories now; I've just started 2 Samuel and Saul has just died. I must say, Saul comes off a lot better in the actual bible than he does in the children's bibles and Sunday school and whatnot, from which you learn that Saul is a crazy person who wants to kill David for no particular reason. The bible tells you that Saul is crazy because God makes him crazy, and that God is mad at Saul because God said to kill everyone and all the animals in Amalek but Saul and his guys kept the good animals and also the king. Samuel goes to tell Saul that God is real mad about this and then Samuel himself cuts the king of Amalek to pieces "in front of God", which sounds a lot like a human sacrifice if you ask me. [And once again thank Christ for dreamwidth's autosave cuz I just accidentally closed this tab.] (That's the second time that Samuel tells Saul God's mad at him, but possibly the first time God is actually mad at him. The first time Samuel tells Saul God's mad at him it's because Samuel was supposed to carry out a sacrifice but he didn't show up on time so Saul did it himself. Samuel tells him God will take away his kingdom for this. The fact that God later decides to take away Saul's kingdom for a different reason seems to tell you that Samuel was not actually speaking on behalf of God the first time.)
Here are the last couple of paragraphs of Howard's latest post (about Adam and Eve, hence the gender stuff):
Politics are grounded in an ethics of responsibility and accountability rather than an abuse of ethics to cover-up and hide, to be devious and celebrate deviousness. That requires offering your own narrative and interpretation of that narrative, framing and naming experience and thereby your own experience. It means making nurturing and empathy – traditional feminine values – as the core, rather than repression, hard-nosed discipline and patriarchy. The biblical tale begins with the latter, but with the message that it is up to humans to bring forth the former for otherwise the patriarchal God, Elohim, the God of power and domination, will never discover His other side, his mercy and that He is Adonai and not just Elohim. History is the vehicle for the education of both God and humanity. History is not reification but discovery and learning.
God is NOT the source of defining right and wrong. Males are NOT the source of defining right and wrong. Both have a history of failure. But both also have a history of learning from that failure and altering the framework through which they understand the world and act in and upon it. At Passover services the most interesting child is not the wise child who has learned all his lessons by heart, but the contrary child who raises questions about those lessons even as he mistakenly distances himself from the community in so doing. God begins by defining Himself as a strict disciplinarian, as a severe deliverer of tough love for His people, but discovers over and over again that tough love only leads to disarray and destruction rather than preservation and security.
Sometimes I feel like I have nothing to say about the bible that isn't actually Howard--case in point above (and also something he said earlier this week, about how today's political Christian conservatives want to institute a priestly Jewish state that never actually existed despite the efforts of some Jews to bring it about)--but he does continue to keep me from throwing up my hands about it all. If I recall correctly, which I may very well not, I once heard Howard claim that Judaism is a "living" religion and Christianity is not, but all that can keep me going on this is the faith that Christianity is a living religion as well--which is to say that the revelation of the divine in Christian forms does not end with Revelation, and in fact has barely even begun there.
Currently at Peterborough airport: 1, which is the high for the day so far. Today is the day after the great ice storm of 2018, in which ice falling off the CN Tower punched a hole through the roof of the dome, after one of the Royals' team buses had its windshield smashed by ice flying off their other team bus. My spring bulbs, which were already coming along very slowly, are now buried under six inches of ice and snow. And it's supposed to snow a bit more tomorrow night. I thought I'd have my turnip seeds in the ground by now. I'm getting pretty sure this shit ain't real. Also, for the third time this spring, within a day of snow being back on the ground, the purple finches returned to my feeder after being gone the whole time the snow was gone. Juncos came back this time, too, and at least a couple of pine siskins showed up for the first time this year.
Possibly, I imagine, this whole thing is a reductio ad absurdum of the rules of inheritance--even though they are codified later in the bible (but maybe not later in the bible's composition?) and come into play later still in Ruth. (And then Jesus is confronted with them by the Sadducees, who want to know whose wife a woman will be in the resurrection if seven brothers in turn marry her and die. The Sadducees are apparently kinda like Mormons like that.) What, if anything, this means for the significance of Ruth is something I'm going to have to put off. As it happens, I'm in the middle of the David stories now; I've just started 2 Samuel and Saul has just died. I must say, Saul comes off a lot better in the actual bible than he does in the children's bibles and Sunday school and whatnot, from which you learn that Saul is a crazy person who wants to kill David for no particular reason. The bible tells you that Saul is crazy because God makes him crazy, and that God is mad at Saul because God said to kill everyone and all the animals in Amalek but Saul and his guys kept the good animals and also the king. Samuel goes to tell Saul that God is real mad about this and then Samuel himself cuts the king of Amalek to pieces "in front of God", which sounds a lot like a human sacrifice if you ask me. [And once again thank Christ for dreamwidth's autosave cuz I just accidentally closed this tab.] (That's the second time that Samuel tells Saul God's mad at him, but possibly the first time God is actually mad at him. The first time Samuel tells Saul God's mad at him it's because Samuel was supposed to carry out a sacrifice but he didn't show up on time so Saul did it himself. Samuel tells him God will take away his kingdom for this. The fact that God later decides to take away Saul's kingdom for a different reason seems to tell you that Samuel was not actually speaking on behalf of God the first time.)
Here are the last couple of paragraphs of Howard's latest post (about Adam and Eve, hence the gender stuff):
Politics are grounded in an ethics of responsibility and accountability rather than an abuse of ethics to cover-up and hide, to be devious and celebrate deviousness. That requires offering your own narrative and interpretation of that narrative, framing and naming experience and thereby your own experience. It means making nurturing and empathy – traditional feminine values – as the core, rather than repression, hard-nosed discipline and patriarchy. The biblical tale begins with the latter, but with the message that it is up to humans to bring forth the former for otherwise the patriarchal God, Elohim, the God of power and domination, will never discover His other side, his mercy and that He is Adonai and not just Elohim. History is the vehicle for the education of both God and humanity. History is not reification but discovery and learning.
God is NOT the source of defining right and wrong. Males are NOT the source of defining right and wrong. Both have a history of failure. But both also have a history of learning from that failure and altering the framework through which they understand the world and act in and upon it. At Passover services the most interesting child is not the wise child who has learned all his lessons by heart, but the contrary child who raises questions about those lessons even as he mistakenly distances himself from the community in so doing. God begins by defining Himself as a strict disciplinarian, as a severe deliverer of tough love for His people, but discovers over and over again that tough love only leads to disarray and destruction rather than preservation and security.
Sometimes I feel like I have nothing to say about the bible that isn't actually Howard--case in point above (and also something he said earlier this week, about how today's political Christian conservatives want to institute a priestly Jewish state that never actually existed despite the efforts of some Jews to bring it about)--but he does continue to keep me from throwing up my hands about it all. If I recall correctly, which I may very well not, I once heard Howard claim that Judaism is a "living" religion and Christianity is not, but all that can keep me going on this is the faith that Christianity is a living religion as well--which is to say that the revelation of the divine in Christian forms does not end with Revelation, and in fact has barely even begun there.
Currently at Peterborough airport: 1, which is the high for the day so far. Today is the day after the great ice storm of 2018, in which ice falling off the CN Tower punched a hole through the roof of the dome, after one of the Royals' team buses had its windshield smashed by ice flying off their other team bus. My spring bulbs, which were already coming along very slowly, are now buried under six inches of ice and snow. And it's supposed to snow a bit more tomorrow night. I thought I'd have my turnip seeds in the ground by now. I'm getting pretty sure this shit ain't real. Also, for the third time this spring, within a day of snow being back on the ground, the purple finches returned to my feeder after being gone the whole time the snow was gone. Juncos came back this time, too, and at least a couple of pine siskins showed up for the first time this year.
