Nothing a pair of scissors can't fix
Jan. 19th, 2018 06:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cincinnatus_c
On one hand, I feel like I ought to avoid feeling compelled to do this every day, because if I feel compelled to do it then I'll be forcing myself to do it when I don't want to and I'll feel bad if I don't. (This was a pretty serious problem when I started posting in this thing every day back on LJ, way back when.) On the other hand, I know that if I don't commit to doing it every day, there's a good chance I'll just stop doing it. (I definitely know that I had better commit to doing the readings every day, which, given the size of the selections, won't be too onerous even when I forget to do it until bedtime. It's easy to say, oh, I can do it tomorrow, but the trouble is you can say that tomorrow, too, until you've got enough piled up that it's going to take a whole free hour or afternoon or day, that never comes, to catch up.) It's like how I tried to use Lent as a device last year (and was planning to try again this year, although I'm not sure what this head start means for that). The thing about committing to something, which means committing to will or cajole or manipulate yourself into doing it even when you (no longer) feel like it, is that you stake some of your sense of self on it. You take pride in it. This ultimately goes to show why pride is, definitively, not itself a vice, but something that is a vice in its excess or deficiency. It strikes me just now actually that the virtue that is the mean--I don't usually think much of thinking of vices and virtues in this way of Aristotle's, but sometimes it's appropriate--might be called "self-respect". "Pride" seems like a vice because it's on the excessive side of self-respect, but being a little on the excessive side can maybe be a good thing. Meanwhile I might say the deficiency side is called "shame" (or maybe "humility", but the opposite of humility is maybe something more toward boastfulness), which mirrors "pride" in that it's prima facie not a good thing but can be, or a certain kind of it can be, in certain circumstances, especially when it's not too extreme. So: you feel shame about it when you break the commitment, even slightly. (Which reminds me of JD saying to me once, "What were you, raised Catholic or something?" Nevertheless.) That's some part of why I keep playing my little internet games every day (not the only part, because sometimes I play them because I'm looking for something to do to put off doing something else)--I play them every day because I play them every day. It's a thing that I do. I'll feel like I've let myself down a bit if I don't. (And then also a different kind of pridefulness comes into it in that improving at them and running up my scores is enjoyable. (The games themselves--as I've said before--are often not at all enjoyable in themselves; playing them sometimes gives me crushing. (Then again, identifying what it is that's enjoyable in itself about anything is harder than you might think. (I don't just mean for me; I am not actually anhedonic.) The thing that comes to mind as being enjoyable in itself in video games is shooting things. I suspect that shooting things in video games is enjoyable in the same way that sweeping the floor is: there is a very clear connection between doing this simple thing and a plainly positive result. But, of course, it's still the result that makes it enjoyable ... which maybe will just go to show in the end that things look inherently enjoyable to the extent that the relationship between action and positive effect is very short and direct. And I guess also to the extent that the action is not itself unpleasant. And, come to think of it, the relationship between action and positive result also has to be reliable--the games that are most likely to give me crushing are the games that, no matter how well I'm playing, bad things are always threatening to happen.) Also you have to distinguish between actions in games that are inherently enjoyable and games that are inherently enjoyable--e.g. there are some games that are perfectly enjoyable right up until you suddenly die, which if it happens too soon, makes the whole game unenjoyable.)) This is one of the kinds of things I meant when I said you wouldn't believe the things I feel under some kind of ethical obligation to do. (And obviously it goes to show that there are some feelings of ethical obligation you'd be better off without.) But I suppose to elaborate on that I'll defer to Lent again.
So! Yesterday [i.e., two days ago--wrote this last night but internet conked out] was Genesis 16-18; today [i.e., yesterday] is Genesis 19-21. Now that Abram has settled down somewhat, this is where things really get going.
Sarai says God has kept her from having children, so maybe Abram ought to have sex with Sarai's Egyptian slave Hagar (who, reading this in its wider context, you know was a prize Abram and Sarai had won by pretending Sarai was his sister and not his wife and letting Pharaoh have her) so that Sarai can have a family that way. This is something that I don't think has fully registered on me before: Sarai intends to use Hagar as a surrogate ... and so the dodge of responsibility in what comes next hasn't fully registered on me, either: when Hagar becomes pregnant, "she began to despise Sarai. Then Sarai said to Abram, 'You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my slave in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge between you and me.'" (Howard Adelman says there are two basic kinds of sins in the Hebrew bible: taking responsibility for everything (Moses strikes the rock) and claiming you're responsible for nothing (the woman made me do it, the serpent made me do it, etc., etc.). (I guess Aaron making the golden calf and then claiming that that was just the way the gold came out of the fire when he threw it in is an example of both.) That's an idea I like though I've never been sure it's exactly true. (And obviously it's easier to think of examples of under-claiming responsibility than of over-claiming it. But I wonder if that's more reflective of the biasses we[who?] tend to have than of what's actually there.)) So Abram tells Sarai to do whatever she wants with Hagar; Sarai is mean to her, and she runs away into the desert. The angel of the Lord finds her beside a spring--this time, as opposed to what happens later when Abraham sends her away, she finds water on her own (which may support the view that Abraham didn't suppose he was sending her to her death, since she had found water before)--and tells her to go back and put up with Sarai's mistreatment, and that she will have innumerable descendants. The angel tells Hagar that her son will be called Ishmael, meaning "God hears", because God has heard of her misery. And the angel tells Hagar that Ishmael will be "a wild donkey of a man," and that everyone will be set against him and he will be set against everyone else, including his brothers. (I don't know exactly how popular this tradition is, but a tradition of some popularity among Christians and presumably Jews has it that Arabs are descended from Ishmael.) Hagar is apparently unfazed by this; she replies: "You are the God who sees me"; "I have now seen the One who sees me"--and she goes back. The implication is that she goes back not because God has ordered her to, against her will and in dread of more suffering, but because her suffering (and, you might suppose, the future suffering of her son) is redeemed by the fact that it takes place in the sight of God.
Thirteen years later, when Abraham is ninety-nine, God appears to Abram to reaffirm the covenant between them. He renames Abram Abraham. Again the covenant is to be marked with a cutting; this time it is a cutting off of Abraham's foreskin and the foreskins of all males at least eight days old in his household. (God tells Abraham that this is to be done to every male born into his household and every male bought into his household with money. It strikes me reading this that while reading the origins of Judaism here drives home how Judaism is an ethnicity, which explains the traditional Jewish reluctance to accept converts let alone to proselytize, it seems like what God says here means that if you want to become a Jew--if you have a penis, anyway--all you have to do is get the Jews to buy you and then cut off your foreskin.) Then God tells Abraham that Sarai is now to be called Sarah, and that she will have a child and will be the mother of nations. Abraham falls down laughing at the idea that Sarah will bear a child at ninety. This is the first time that any woman's age has been mentioned in Genesis, and it is the first indication that something close to the normal rules of human aging are now in play (though not quite the normal rules, because years later still, Abraham, at over a hundred years old, will march up a mountain and bind Isaac on an altar). Abraham says to God, "If only Ishmael might live under your blessing!" It is God, not Abraham, and not Sarah, who decides that the line of Abraham will run through the son of Sarah the Hebrew (if that term isn't anachronistic in this context) from Ur; Abraham, at this point, would be happy for it to run through the son of Hagar the Egyptian.
Apparently in the same year, God shows up at Abraham's tent. When God shows up at Abraham's tent, Abraham looks up and sees three men. Traditionally I suppose these are thought to be angels; I'm not sure, but I suppose it's traditionally thought that two of them are angels (which may be supported by Genesis 19, at the beginning of which two angels head for Sodom) and one of them is God. But Genesis 18 says nothing about angels. It only says that God visited Abraham, and that Abraham saw three men. This makes into an obvious problem an ambiguity that, I think, was first introduced when the angel of God finds Hagar at the spring, and first the angel speaks, and then God speaks. This seems to be something that the Hebrew bible wrestles (!) with again and again: God has to be in the world, and in a way such that it can be said that humans are the image of God, but how? (Christianity, you might say, is the answer to this problem. A partisan of Judaism might say, and might have a point, that the Christian answer (though, of course, there is hardly just one interpretation of the Christian answer) is too tidy, and that the problem must remain a problem.) One of the three men tells Abraham that in a year he will return (which--I don't think that return is recounted?) and Sarah will have a son. Sarah, who is in the tent, overhears. The narration says that Abraham and Sarah are very old and past childbearing, and Sarah laughs to herself, and says to herself, "after I am worn out and my lord is old, will I now have this pleasure?" Now God, specifically, asks Abraham why Sarah laughed. God asks, "Is anything too hard for the Lord?" Which, I guess, is the first appearance of another recurring motif, which will be taken to its ultimate conclusion with Jesus saying that with God all things are possible (and its ultimate ultimate conclusion with Kierkegaard saying that God is that all things are possible). The narration says that Sarah is afraid and so she lies to God's face and says she didn't laugh. And God says, yes you did so laugh.
The three men get up to leave, but God decides he owes it to Abraham to tell him what's going to happen next, because he has chosen Abraham and Abraham will direct his children and his household "to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just." So he tells Abraham that he is going to Sodom and Gomorrah to see if what is happening there is as terrible as he's heard. God hears but doesn't see at a distance, and he doesn't necessarily trust what he hears. And so Abraham begins his ethical bargaining with God, asking him if he will "sweep away the righteous with the wicked": "Far be it from you to do such a thing--kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the judge of all the earth do right?" This is not just bargaining. This is Abraham calling on God to be his best self. It is maybe easy to lose sight of how extraordinary this is, given God's frequent tendency in the Hebrew bible to be a narcissistic psychopath. And this is the kind of thing I really dwelt on when Howard Adelman's Hegel classes turned my attention to religion twenty years ago: what is it that God needs from creation? Christians very often think that people need God if they are to be moral. The story of Abraham's bargaining with God suggests that God needs people if God is to be moral--or at least that people might significantly help God to be moral, not exactly by arguing or bargaining for God to do the right thing (because if God just is, or right now is being, a narcissistic psychopath then moral arguments are useless) but by trying to shape God's subjectivity by making being good look appealing to God.
Which brings us to today's selection, in which, as it happens, Abraham's bargaining per se is maybe made to appear useless because he doesn't get down to a low enough number: first he got God to agree not to destroy Sodom if he finds fifty good people there; then forty, then thirty, then twenty, then ten. In the event, God spares Lot, his wife, and his two daughters (and is willing to spare the daughters' fiances, but they think the whole thing is a joke and refuse to leave--come to think of it, there's nothing to say they weren't part of the mob demanding to have sex with the angels), and destroys the rest of Sodom. And yet: if these are the righteous and the rest of Sodom is wicked, then God has not killed the righteous along with the wicked. And yet again: there is nothing to suggest that any of the others spared along with Lot, his wife or his daughters, is righteous (and there is especially nothing to suggest that of the fiances, whom God was willing to spare as well). Lot's righteousness, though, is established as the wickedness of Sodom is established: all the men of Sodom lay siege to Lot's house and demand that Lot give them his two visitors so they can have sex with them. (Genesis 19 begins with two angels arriving at Sodom, after Genesis 18 ended with three men and God (maybe as one of the three men, maybe as all three of them, maybe as some presence in addition to them) heading for Sodom. Why the shift? Obviously it might be a result of who knows what triviality of composition that has been lost to history, but from the narrative itself two possibilities suggest themselves: (1) the idea of God himself being threatened with rape is too much to bear; (2) God chooses not to appear to Lot for whatever reason (and this is borne out by the fact that there is less ambiguity between angels and God speaking to Lot; the speech of the angels is never specifically attributed to God, though in the end Lot addresses one of them, and one of them replies, as if he is God, though this is not specified--again, pointing to this being a problem without an easy solution for the text's author), possibly because Lot and his family are not included in the covenant God has made with Abraham: God does not spare them because they are his people; God spares them as a favour to Abraham, because they are Abraham's people.) Lot, infamously, offers them his virgin daughters instead--and this is probably the most profoundly sexist moment in the Hebrew bible (which obviously has not been doing all that great in that regard all the way along so far): it's not just that Lot is willing to give his daughters over to be gang raped; it's also that the wickedness of Sodom is established by, and everyone but Lot and his household is killed for, the actions of Sodom's men alone. Sodom's women outside Lot's household are never even mentioned. To those accustomed to expect sexism from the bible this may seem unremarkable. But this is surely remarkable in its extremity. And then, further, God's ethical failing here is not just a matter of sexism, because the actions of Sodom's men are enough to convict and condemn all of Gomorrah as well.
Unless! you suppose that while the two angels are hanging out with Lot and being threatened with rape, God is out having a look at Sodom and Gomorrah and the rest of the plain and finding every single person there terrible, possibly for reasons that have nothing at all to do with men wanting to put their willies in other men's bottoms. Sure, why not! After all, Genesis 19 concludes: "So when God destroyed the cities of the plain, he remembered Abraham, and he brought Lot out of the catastrophe that overthrew the cities where Lot had lived." As I was saying, a favour to Abraham, and so Abraham's ethical bargaining may have been even more useless than it appears. (And, of course, Abraham's ethical bargaining may have been a subterfuge in the first place, designed to save the lives of his nephew and his nephew's family, who maybe are good people and maybe are not.) Maybe if God had been there when Lot had offered his daughters to be gang raped he would've been horrified and struck Lot dead right then and there. I mean, probably not, you'd suppose ... but there is nothing in the text itself ruling that out.
Anyway: Lot and his family flee; his wife looks back, after they had been instructed not to, and she turns into a pillar of salt--which it strikes me on reading it this time is remarkable as being the first thing that happens in Genesis that is obviously symbolic--it's the first thing that happens that, if taken literally, is what I might call magical physics. (I can't actually think of any other examples of magical physics in the Hebrew bible--I mean things for which there is literally no physical explanation, and so have to be either taken as symbolic or magical--not that there aren't any, so, we'll see. Jesus's changing water into wine and feeding multitudes with small amounts of food are examples of this in the New Testament. (But, e.g., maybe to clarify the kind of thing I mean, raising Lazarus from the dead is not this kind of thing, because you can come up with an explanation for that that doesn't defy normal physics, along the lines of voodoo zombies or what have you. Similarly, e.g., I think I've heard of people trying to come up with normal physical explanations for the sun standing still in Joshua.) Lot and his daughters go to Zoar, a city he had persuaded God or the angel on behalf of God to spare so he could take refuge there, but they leave again because he is afraid of something unspecified (maybe that God will change his mind and destroy Zoar too--maybe because Lot knows that there are no righteous people there, including him, who knows!), and they go and live in a cave in the mountains. One day the older daughter says to the younger that they should get Lot drunk and have sex with him so that they can have children "as is the custom all over the earth" and "preserve [their] family line." And so they do, and the narrative says that they each have a son, and the two sons become the fathers of the Moabites and the Ammonites "of today". And that's that. (Why is that there? Who knows. Maybe just to cast aspersions on the ancestry of the Moabites and Ammonites.)
Genesis 20 begins with Abraham moving again, for unspecified reasons, to the south into the Negev. "For a while he stayed in Gerar," and there again he passes Sarah off as his sister and not his wife. Pretty much the same thing happens as happened with Pharaoh: Abimelek (who's getting a "k" now cuz I'm settling on the NIV as my default for the time being), king of Gerar, takes Sarah. (I wonder if I would've noticed on this reading, if I hadn't seen Howard point it out a couple of months ago, that Sarah is apparently supposed to be ninety years old when this happens, and so the idea that Abraham would want to protect himself from men who might want her, and that Abimelek would actually want her, is very odd!) But God doesn't motivate Abimelek to give Sarah back indiretly by afflicting him as he did to Pharaoh; instead he comes to Abimelek in a dream and tells him he is "as good as dead because of the woman you have taken; she is a married woman." Abimelek protests his innocence and God says he knows it, and that's why he kept Abimelek from touching her, and if he returns her to Abraham, then Abraham will pray for him and he and his kingdom will live. Abimelek calls Abraham in and asks why he did this. Abraham says, "I said to myself, ‘There is surely no fear of God in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife,'" but also that he didn't exactly lie because Sarah really is his half-sister, his father's daughter but not his mother's. This is the first time this has come up, and I have to wonder whether the author puts it in so as not to make Abraham an outright liar. On the other hand, this is the first of two occasions that Abraham tells Abimelek something that is remarkable for its not having come up before, the second being when he claims to have dug the well at Beersheba--the remarkableness of that is marked by Abimelek himself saying it's the first he's heard of it; the remarkableness of Sarah being Abraham's half-sister not having come up before is more subtly marked by the fact that when Terah leaves Ur with his family, the text specifies that Abram's brother Nahor's wife is the daughter of a third brother (Haran, who is said to have died in Ur), but says nothing of whose daughter Sarai is (which, if she's Terah's daughter, would seem worth noting at the time). So, far from having Abraham claim that Sarah is his half-sister so as to make him less of a liar, it could be that this claim makes him even more of a liar--it could be that he lies to Abimelek every time he speaks to him.
If I'm not mistaken (but I have been mistaken so many times already that I can't be sure I'm not), this is the first time that "fear of God" has come up, and, in keeping with what I was saying to Howard about the fear of God Abraham demonstrates by his apparent willingness to sacrifice Isaac, the fear of God that actually motivates Abimelek to return Sarah to Abraham is fear of death. Abimelek gives Abraham sheep and cattle and slaves and silver, and tells him that he can live anywhere he likes in his land, and he tells Sarah that "this is to cover the offense against you before all who are with you"--which is interesting insofar as it recognizes an offense against Sarah rather than against Abraham. This suggests that somewhat different assumptions are operating here than Howard suggests are operating in the story of "the rape of Dinah": in Abimelek's eyes, at least, it is possible to commit an offense against Sarah herself; Sarah is not merely the property of Abraham. Anyway, just as with Pharaoh, Abraham is handsomely rewarded for his deception. The chapter concludes with Abraham praying and God healing Abimelek and his wife and female slaves, because, the narrative now says, God had prevented them from conceiving as long as Sarah was with Abimelek. This either (1) under the assumption that it is even possible for Sarah to have a miracle baby in her old age by anyone other than Abraham (a) is overkill as a means to ensure that Sarah won't become pregnant, or (b) means that when God says that he prevented Abimelek from touching Sarah, he means that he prevented him from impregnating her and not that he prevented him from having sex with her, or (2) under the assumption that Sarah can't have a miracle baby by Abimelek, is just an affliction God sends to motivate Abimelek to right the wrong that has brought about the affliction, though he may not know what the wrong is until God tells him--in which case it is also overkill, because God's telling Abimelek that Abimelek will die if he doesn't give Sarah back is sufficient to motivate him. Although I guess if you really wanted to stretch it you could say the "death" Abimelek fears is the death of his nation that will come about if no one has any babies.
And then, in Genesis 22, along comes Isaac, as promised. And for the next while this is a story we've heard before, and I have to go fight with the laundry and go to sleep. (But the internet is down, so I dunno when I'll post this.)
Currently at Havelock: -0.9, very slowly rising for the last two hours. High today: 0.4.
So! Yesterday [i.e., two days ago--wrote this last night but internet conked out] was Genesis 16-18; today [i.e., yesterday] is Genesis 19-21. Now that Abram has settled down somewhat, this is where things really get going.
Sarai says God has kept her from having children, so maybe Abram ought to have sex with Sarai's Egyptian slave Hagar (who, reading this in its wider context, you know was a prize Abram and Sarai had won by pretending Sarai was his sister and not his wife and letting Pharaoh have her) so that Sarai can have a family that way. This is something that I don't think has fully registered on me before: Sarai intends to use Hagar as a surrogate ... and so the dodge of responsibility in what comes next hasn't fully registered on me, either: when Hagar becomes pregnant, "she began to despise Sarai. Then Sarai said to Abram, 'You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my slave in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge between you and me.'" (Howard Adelman says there are two basic kinds of sins in the Hebrew bible: taking responsibility for everything (Moses strikes the rock) and claiming you're responsible for nothing (the woman made me do it, the serpent made me do it, etc., etc.). (I guess Aaron making the golden calf and then claiming that that was just the way the gold came out of the fire when he threw it in is an example of both.) That's an idea I like though I've never been sure it's exactly true. (And obviously it's easier to think of examples of under-claiming responsibility than of over-claiming it. But I wonder if that's more reflective of the biasses we[who?] tend to have than of what's actually there.)) So Abram tells Sarai to do whatever she wants with Hagar; Sarai is mean to her, and she runs away into the desert. The angel of the Lord finds her beside a spring--this time, as opposed to what happens later when Abraham sends her away, she finds water on her own (which may support the view that Abraham didn't suppose he was sending her to her death, since she had found water before)--and tells her to go back and put up with Sarai's mistreatment, and that she will have innumerable descendants. The angel tells Hagar that her son will be called Ishmael, meaning "God hears", because God has heard of her misery. And the angel tells Hagar that Ishmael will be "a wild donkey of a man," and that everyone will be set against him and he will be set against everyone else, including his brothers. (I don't know exactly how popular this tradition is, but a tradition of some popularity among Christians and presumably Jews has it that Arabs are descended from Ishmael.) Hagar is apparently unfazed by this; she replies: "You are the God who sees me"; "I have now seen the One who sees me"--and she goes back. The implication is that she goes back not because God has ordered her to, against her will and in dread of more suffering, but because her suffering (and, you might suppose, the future suffering of her son) is redeemed by the fact that it takes place in the sight of God.
Thirteen years later, when Abraham is ninety-nine, God appears to Abram to reaffirm the covenant between them. He renames Abram Abraham. Again the covenant is to be marked with a cutting; this time it is a cutting off of Abraham's foreskin and the foreskins of all males at least eight days old in his household. (God tells Abraham that this is to be done to every male born into his household and every male bought into his household with money. It strikes me reading this that while reading the origins of Judaism here drives home how Judaism is an ethnicity, which explains the traditional Jewish reluctance to accept converts let alone to proselytize, it seems like what God says here means that if you want to become a Jew--if you have a penis, anyway--all you have to do is get the Jews to buy you and then cut off your foreskin.) Then God tells Abraham that Sarai is now to be called Sarah, and that she will have a child and will be the mother of nations. Abraham falls down laughing at the idea that Sarah will bear a child at ninety. This is the first time that any woman's age has been mentioned in Genesis, and it is the first indication that something close to the normal rules of human aging are now in play (though not quite the normal rules, because years later still, Abraham, at over a hundred years old, will march up a mountain and bind Isaac on an altar). Abraham says to God, "If only Ishmael might live under your blessing!" It is God, not Abraham, and not Sarah, who decides that the line of Abraham will run through the son of Sarah the Hebrew (if that term isn't anachronistic in this context) from Ur; Abraham, at this point, would be happy for it to run through the son of Hagar the Egyptian.
Apparently in the same year, God shows up at Abraham's tent. When God shows up at Abraham's tent, Abraham looks up and sees three men. Traditionally I suppose these are thought to be angels; I'm not sure, but I suppose it's traditionally thought that two of them are angels (which may be supported by Genesis 19, at the beginning of which two angels head for Sodom) and one of them is God. But Genesis 18 says nothing about angels. It only says that God visited Abraham, and that Abraham saw three men. This makes into an obvious problem an ambiguity that, I think, was first introduced when the angel of God finds Hagar at the spring, and first the angel speaks, and then God speaks. This seems to be something that the Hebrew bible wrestles (!) with again and again: God has to be in the world, and in a way such that it can be said that humans are the image of God, but how? (Christianity, you might say, is the answer to this problem. A partisan of Judaism might say, and might have a point, that the Christian answer (though, of course, there is hardly just one interpretation of the Christian answer) is too tidy, and that the problem must remain a problem.) One of the three men tells Abraham that in a year he will return (which--I don't think that return is recounted?) and Sarah will have a son. Sarah, who is in the tent, overhears. The narration says that Abraham and Sarah are very old and past childbearing, and Sarah laughs to herself, and says to herself, "after I am worn out and my lord is old, will I now have this pleasure?" Now God, specifically, asks Abraham why Sarah laughed. God asks, "Is anything too hard for the Lord?" Which, I guess, is the first appearance of another recurring motif, which will be taken to its ultimate conclusion with Jesus saying that with God all things are possible (and its ultimate ultimate conclusion with Kierkegaard saying that God is that all things are possible). The narration says that Sarah is afraid and so she lies to God's face and says she didn't laugh. And God says, yes you did so laugh.
The three men get up to leave, but God decides he owes it to Abraham to tell him what's going to happen next, because he has chosen Abraham and Abraham will direct his children and his household "to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just." So he tells Abraham that he is going to Sodom and Gomorrah to see if what is happening there is as terrible as he's heard. God hears but doesn't see at a distance, and he doesn't necessarily trust what he hears. And so Abraham begins his ethical bargaining with God, asking him if he will "sweep away the righteous with the wicked": "Far be it from you to do such a thing--kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the judge of all the earth do right?" This is not just bargaining. This is Abraham calling on God to be his best self. It is maybe easy to lose sight of how extraordinary this is, given God's frequent tendency in the Hebrew bible to be a narcissistic psychopath. And this is the kind of thing I really dwelt on when Howard Adelman's Hegel classes turned my attention to religion twenty years ago: what is it that God needs from creation? Christians very often think that people need God if they are to be moral. The story of Abraham's bargaining with God suggests that God needs people if God is to be moral--or at least that people might significantly help God to be moral, not exactly by arguing or bargaining for God to do the right thing (because if God just is, or right now is being, a narcissistic psychopath then moral arguments are useless) but by trying to shape God's subjectivity by making being good look appealing to God.
Which brings us to today's selection, in which, as it happens, Abraham's bargaining per se is maybe made to appear useless because he doesn't get down to a low enough number: first he got God to agree not to destroy Sodom if he finds fifty good people there; then forty, then thirty, then twenty, then ten. In the event, God spares Lot, his wife, and his two daughters (and is willing to spare the daughters' fiances, but they think the whole thing is a joke and refuse to leave--come to think of it, there's nothing to say they weren't part of the mob demanding to have sex with the angels), and destroys the rest of Sodom. And yet: if these are the righteous and the rest of Sodom is wicked, then God has not killed the righteous along with the wicked. And yet again: there is nothing to suggest that any of the others spared along with Lot, his wife or his daughters, is righteous (and there is especially nothing to suggest that of the fiances, whom God was willing to spare as well). Lot's righteousness, though, is established as the wickedness of Sodom is established: all the men of Sodom lay siege to Lot's house and demand that Lot give them his two visitors so they can have sex with them. (Genesis 19 begins with two angels arriving at Sodom, after Genesis 18 ended with three men and God (maybe as one of the three men, maybe as all three of them, maybe as some presence in addition to them) heading for Sodom. Why the shift? Obviously it might be a result of who knows what triviality of composition that has been lost to history, but from the narrative itself two possibilities suggest themselves: (1) the idea of God himself being threatened with rape is too much to bear; (2) God chooses not to appear to Lot for whatever reason (and this is borne out by the fact that there is less ambiguity between angels and God speaking to Lot; the speech of the angels is never specifically attributed to God, though in the end Lot addresses one of them, and one of them replies, as if he is God, though this is not specified--again, pointing to this being a problem without an easy solution for the text's author), possibly because Lot and his family are not included in the covenant God has made with Abraham: God does not spare them because they are his people; God spares them as a favour to Abraham, because they are Abraham's people.) Lot, infamously, offers them his virgin daughters instead--and this is probably the most profoundly sexist moment in the Hebrew bible (which obviously has not been doing all that great in that regard all the way along so far): it's not just that Lot is willing to give his daughters over to be gang raped; it's also that the wickedness of Sodom is established by, and everyone but Lot and his household is killed for, the actions of Sodom's men alone. Sodom's women outside Lot's household are never even mentioned. To those accustomed to expect sexism from the bible this may seem unremarkable. But this is surely remarkable in its extremity. And then, further, God's ethical failing here is not just a matter of sexism, because the actions of Sodom's men are enough to convict and condemn all of Gomorrah as well.
Unless! you suppose that while the two angels are hanging out with Lot and being threatened with rape, God is out having a look at Sodom and Gomorrah and the rest of the plain and finding every single person there terrible, possibly for reasons that have nothing at all to do with men wanting to put their willies in other men's bottoms. Sure, why not! After all, Genesis 19 concludes: "So when God destroyed the cities of the plain, he remembered Abraham, and he brought Lot out of the catastrophe that overthrew the cities where Lot had lived." As I was saying, a favour to Abraham, and so Abraham's ethical bargaining may have been even more useless than it appears. (And, of course, Abraham's ethical bargaining may have been a subterfuge in the first place, designed to save the lives of his nephew and his nephew's family, who maybe are good people and maybe are not.) Maybe if God had been there when Lot had offered his daughters to be gang raped he would've been horrified and struck Lot dead right then and there. I mean, probably not, you'd suppose ... but there is nothing in the text itself ruling that out.
Anyway: Lot and his family flee; his wife looks back, after they had been instructed not to, and she turns into a pillar of salt--which it strikes me on reading it this time is remarkable as being the first thing that happens in Genesis that is obviously symbolic--it's the first thing that happens that, if taken literally, is what I might call magical physics. (I can't actually think of any other examples of magical physics in the Hebrew bible--I mean things for which there is literally no physical explanation, and so have to be either taken as symbolic or magical--not that there aren't any, so, we'll see. Jesus's changing water into wine and feeding multitudes with small amounts of food are examples of this in the New Testament. (But, e.g., maybe to clarify the kind of thing I mean, raising Lazarus from the dead is not this kind of thing, because you can come up with an explanation for that that doesn't defy normal physics, along the lines of voodoo zombies or what have you. Similarly, e.g., I think I've heard of people trying to come up with normal physical explanations for the sun standing still in Joshua.) Lot and his daughters go to Zoar, a city he had persuaded God or the angel on behalf of God to spare so he could take refuge there, but they leave again because he is afraid of something unspecified (maybe that God will change his mind and destroy Zoar too--maybe because Lot knows that there are no righteous people there, including him, who knows!), and they go and live in a cave in the mountains. One day the older daughter says to the younger that they should get Lot drunk and have sex with him so that they can have children "as is the custom all over the earth" and "preserve [their] family line." And so they do, and the narrative says that they each have a son, and the two sons become the fathers of the Moabites and the Ammonites "of today". And that's that. (Why is that there? Who knows. Maybe just to cast aspersions on the ancestry of the Moabites and Ammonites.)
Genesis 20 begins with Abraham moving again, for unspecified reasons, to the south into the Negev. "For a while he stayed in Gerar," and there again he passes Sarah off as his sister and not his wife. Pretty much the same thing happens as happened with Pharaoh: Abimelek (who's getting a "k" now cuz I'm settling on the NIV as my default for the time being), king of Gerar, takes Sarah. (I wonder if I would've noticed on this reading, if I hadn't seen Howard point it out a couple of months ago, that Sarah is apparently supposed to be ninety years old when this happens, and so the idea that Abraham would want to protect himself from men who might want her, and that Abimelek would actually want her, is very odd!) But God doesn't motivate Abimelek to give Sarah back indiretly by afflicting him as he did to Pharaoh; instead he comes to Abimelek in a dream and tells him he is "as good as dead because of the woman you have taken; she is a married woman." Abimelek protests his innocence and God says he knows it, and that's why he kept Abimelek from touching her, and if he returns her to Abraham, then Abraham will pray for him and he and his kingdom will live. Abimelek calls Abraham in and asks why he did this. Abraham says, "I said to myself, ‘There is surely no fear of God in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife,'" but also that he didn't exactly lie because Sarah really is his half-sister, his father's daughter but not his mother's. This is the first time this has come up, and I have to wonder whether the author puts it in so as not to make Abraham an outright liar. On the other hand, this is the first of two occasions that Abraham tells Abimelek something that is remarkable for its not having come up before, the second being when he claims to have dug the well at Beersheba--the remarkableness of that is marked by Abimelek himself saying it's the first he's heard of it; the remarkableness of Sarah being Abraham's half-sister not having come up before is more subtly marked by the fact that when Terah leaves Ur with his family, the text specifies that Abram's brother Nahor's wife is the daughter of a third brother (Haran, who is said to have died in Ur), but says nothing of whose daughter Sarai is (which, if she's Terah's daughter, would seem worth noting at the time). So, far from having Abraham claim that Sarah is his half-sister so as to make him less of a liar, it could be that this claim makes him even more of a liar--it could be that he lies to Abimelek every time he speaks to him.
If I'm not mistaken (but I have been mistaken so many times already that I can't be sure I'm not), this is the first time that "fear of God" has come up, and, in keeping with what I was saying to Howard about the fear of God Abraham demonstrates by his apparent willingness to sacrifice Isaac, the fear of God that actually motivates Abimelek to return Sarah to Abraham is fear of death. Abimelek gives Abraham sheep and cattle and slaves and silver, and tells him that he can live anywhere he likes in his land, and he tells Sarah that "this is to cover the offense against you before all who are with you"--which is interesting insofar as it recognizes an offense against Sarah rather than against Abraham. This suggests that somewhat different assumptions are operating here than Howard suggests are operating in the story of "the rape of Dinah": in Abimelek's eyes, at least, it is possible to commit an offense against Sarah herself; Sarah is not merely the property of Abraham. Anyway, just as with Pharaoh, Abraham is handsomely rewarded for his deception. The chapter concludes with Abraham praying and God healing Abimelek and his wife and female slaves, because, the narrative now says, God had prevented them from conceiving as long as Sarah was with Abimelek. This either (1) under the assumption that it is even possible for Sarah to have a miracle baby in her old age by anyone other than Abraham (a) is overkill as a means to ensure that Sarah won't become pregnant, or (b) means that when God says that he prevented Abimelek from touching Sarah, he means that he prevented him from impregnating her and not that he prevented him from having sex with her, or (2) under the assumption that Sarah can't have a miracle baby by Abimelek, is just an affliction God sends to motivate Abimelek to right the wrong that has brought about the affliction, though he may not know what the wrong is until God tells him--in which case it is also overkill, because God's telling Abimelek that Abimelek will die if he doesn't give Sarah back is sufficient to motivate him. Although I guess if you really wanted to stretch it you could say the "death" Abimelek fears is the death of his nation that will come about if no one has any babies.
And then, in Genesis 22, along comes Isaac, as promised. And for the next while this is a story we've heard before, and I have to go fight with the laundry and go to sleep. (But the internet is down, so I dunno when I'll post this.)
Currently at Havelock: -0.9, very slowly rising for the last two hours. High today: 0.4.
