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Shadowy differences
May. 19th, 2018 10:39 am
That thing in 2 Samuel 12 where David either kills people horribly or sets them to work is repeated at 1 Chronicles 20:3, where the NASB has: "He brought out the people who were in it, and cut them with saws and with sharp instruments and with axes," and the NRSV has: "He brought out the people who were in it, and set them to work with saws and iron picks and axes." Here, oddly, the NRSV does have a footnote, on "set them to work", not just raising the possibility of the horrible reading of 2 Samuel 12:31 but matter-of-factly taking it for granted--it says: "Compare 2 Sam 12.31: Heb and he sawed." Well then.
If this were not the time of everything happening at once, I would probably be doing more comparing of the stories in Samuel with those told in Chronicles--this is the first time in the bible (not counting the two accounts of creation) that the same stories are re-told. A couple of things that strike me offhand are that Chronicles omits the Goliath story and has David explain God's killing Uzzah the Hittite for touching the ark to keep it from falling off a cart by saying that God had said that only the Levites should have anything to do with the ark; in Samuel, God is just plainly being a jerk and David is mad at him about it. Anyway, I am tentatively planning to go back to the beginning of the read-the-bible-in-a-year program a month earlier every year so that over the next twelve years (!) I'll have gotten to every part of the bible in the mid-winter downtime.
The thing I keep meaning to say something about is what would these days be called the "settler" ideology of the bible as opposed to the ideology of indigeneity: (1) The Hebrews are not from the land given to them by God, and God instructs them to commit genocide to make it theirs; (2) All peoples that adopt the mythology of the bible erase their own myths of indigeneity; to "believe" in the bible means to trace your origins ultimately to a place (NB that this place is Eden, not "the Holy Land"!) which is lost to history and which is basically irrelevant to what you are personally or culturally (except insofar as you take the expulsion from Eden as one of the constitutive moments in the human condition generally). (This may speak to why there's none more Scots than the Scots abroad: the Scots abroad can trace their "origins" to Scotland in a way the Scots in Scotland can't.) But this is probably one of those things (like how murdering once makes you a murderer but speeding once doesn't make you a speeder) that I keep meaning to say something about but don't really have anything more to say about beyond the basic idea, although it's an idea that is tied up in the problem of the Hebrews'/Israelites'/Jews' relations to others that is an issue that will come around again and again. (E.g., I am struck again in Chronicles by the multiculturality of David's band of merry men.)
Yesterday I saw what I suppose was the first chestnut-sided warbler I've ever identified. My Audubon field guide says of the chestnut-sided warbler: "This attractive bird was rare in the days of Audubon and Wilson, who seldom saw it and knew little about its habits. It has increased tremendously as abandoned pastures in the northern states have grown up in dense thickets, a vast new habitat unavailable when the land was clothed in virgin forest."
Currently at Havelock: 11.8, light rain.
If this were not the time of everything happening at once, I would probably be doing more comparing of the stories in Samuel with those told in Chronicles--this is the first time in the bible (not counting the two accounts of creation) that the same stories are re-told. A couple of things that strike me offhand are that Chronicles omits the Goliath story and has David explain God's killing Uzzah the Hittite for touching the ark to keep it from falling off a cart by saying that God had said that only the Levites should have anything to do with the ark; in Samuel, God is just plainly being a jerk and David is mad at him about it. Anyway, I am tentatively planning to go back to the beginning of the read-the-bible-in-a-year program a month earlier every year so that over the next twelve years (!) I'll have gotten to every part of the bible in the mid-winter downtime.
The thing I keep meaning to say something about is what would these days be called the "settler" ideology of the bible as opposed to the ideology of indigeneity: (1) The Hebrews are not from the land given to them by God, and God instructs them to commit genocide to make it theirs; (2) All peoples that adopt the mythology of the bible erase their own myths of indigeneity; to "believe" in the bible means to trace your origins ultimately to a place (NB that this place is Eden, not "the Holy Land"!) which is lost to history and which is basically irrelevant to what you are personally or culturally (except insofar as you take the expulsion from Eden as one of the constitutive moments in the human condition generally). (This may speak to why there's none more Scots than the Scots abroad: the Scots abroad can trace their "origins" to Scotland in a way the Scots in Scotland can't.) But this is probably one of those things (like how murdering once makes you a murderer but speeding once doesn't make you a speeder) that I keep meaning to say something about but don't really have anything more to say about beyond the basic idea, although it's an idea that is tied up in the problem of the Hebrews'/Israelites'/Jews' relations to others that is an issue that will come around again and again. (E.g., I am struck again in Chronicles by the multiculturality of David's band of merry men.)
Yesterday I saw what I suppose was the first chestnut-sided warbler I've ever identified. My Audubon field guide says of the chestnut-sided warbler: "This attractive bird was rare in the days of Audubon and Wilson, who seldom saw it and knew little about its habits. It has increased tremendously as abandoned pastures in the northern states have grown up in dense thickets, a vast new habitat unavailable when the land was clothed in virgin forest."
Currently at Havelock: 11.8, light rain.
