Wouldn't be sporting, chaps
Jan. 21st, 2018 10:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cincinnatus_c
Down the pipe yesterday and today from Bible Gateway: Genesis 25-29.
Genesis 25, somewhat surprisingly (to me), begins with Abraham taking another wife, named Keturah. I had seen this indicated on one of the Old Testament family trees I've looked at lately, but without looking at the sources of these things you never know what crackpot theories might be behind them, and I was completely unfamiliar with the idea of Abraham having another wife, so I'd been wondering whether another baby-momma of Abraham's was actually going to show up ... and here she is. A number of sons and grandsons are listed (and keep in mind, this is after Abraham has supposedly been remarkably old to be Isaac's father--the rules of aging are very unsettled here), the only names of whose ring any bells for me are Midian and Sheba. Sheba reminds me of something, since, while I suspect Midian will be the namesake of the Midianites, I'm less confident Sheba will have anything to do with the queen of Sheba (and, well, looking it up in the wikipedia, I see it's uncertain) ... and that the Midianites are indeed supposed to have been descended from Midian). The thing it reminds me of is that the place Abraham's servant went looking for a wife for Isaac, the place where Abraham's brother Nahor lives, is called Haran, but apparently was definitely not named after Abraham's brother Haran, who died in Ur. But the noteworthy thing is not that (except insofar as that goes to show you have to be careful of homophones in the bible), but rather this: Genesis 11 specifies that Tehar took Abram, Nahor's son Lot, and Abram's wife Sarai. This, you'd think, means Nahor didn't go with them (in the same way you'd think it means Sarai, who is specified as Tehar's daughter-in-law, is not Tehar's daugter). But Nahor and his wife Milcah, who is Haran's daughter, are found by Abraham's servant in Haran (not to be confused with Nahor's brother Haran). Obviously Nahor and Milcah may gone and joined Tehar later (or, for that matter, Nahor's son Bethuel, who is Rebekah's father, may have gone there later, since I don't recall anything specifically saying that Nahor was there); my point is not that this is particularly mysterious, but that the narrative once Tehar's crew leaves Ur is pretty confusing sometimes--because, not knowing what exactly "Mesopotamia" was supposed to refer to, I originally thought that Abraham's servant had gone all the way back to Ur to find Isaac a wife from among Abraham's people.
And now I see I'm not the only person confused about this; the Wikipedia article for Rebekah says Abraham sent his servant to his birthplace to find Isaac a wife! (Which is the kind of thing I ordinarily might correct, but I'm not feeling very confident about anything here.) Actually I think the main source of the confusion, moreso than the fact that Nahor wasn't said to have left Ur with Terah, is that Abraham tells his servant to go to his country--which, along the lines of what I was saying before about Abraham being an alien in the land promised to him by God because he wasn't from there, you'd expect to be the place where he was from originally, but actually is the place where he "grew up" (until he left the nest at the age of 75). Something else in the mix on the "where y'all from, anyhow?" question: the text says of both Rebekah's father, Bethuel, and her brother Laban that they are Arameans. This, I think, is the first time that anyone's group membership has been identified according to where they're from rather than who they're descended from, because Terah and his crew are descended from Noah's grandson Arpachshad, not his grandson Aram (who, according to the wikipedia, may not be, but presumably is, the namesake of the Arameans).
Abraham not only has another wife after Sarah, but he has concubines as well, and unspecified sons by them--or does "concubines" at Genesis 25:6 refer to Hagar and Keturah, who were maybe not so properly called "wives" as Sarah was? Well, maybe? Anyway, Abraham dies at the age of 175, "an old man and satisfied with life," and then another surprising (to me) thing happens: Ishmael shows up, and he and Isaac bury Abraham in the cave where Sarah was buried (and the text again specifies exactly where the cave is and that it was purchased from the sons of Heth). And then the sons of Ishmael are named; none of them ring any bells for me, but the text says they are twelve princes of twelve "tribes" (and here the NASB has annoyed me for the first time, because the Hebrew word is not the same as the word for the twelve tribes of Israel; the NASB at least gives a footnote that says the word literally means "peoples", though that per se doesn't tell you it's a different word; the KJV, which I must say continues to have the best track record with me for keeping its words in order, says "nations"). Nothing much else is said about Ishmael, and he dies at the age of 137 ... although he comes up again at Genesis 28:9, when Esau marries a previously unmentioned daughter of Ishmael's after he hears Isaac tell Jacob not to marry a Canaanite woman, and so gets the idea that he shouldn't, either.
After Abraham, and before Jacob, Isaac is a remarkable blank. The story of the only time he goes anywhere is a repetition of the story of Abraham passing off Sarah as his sister and not his wife, with Abimelech himself even playing a part again, and Isaac having been motivated to go to the land of Abimelech, as Abraham had been motivated to go to Egypt, by famine. But there's something remarkably different in this repetition of the story: God doesn't do anything to reveal that Rebekah is Isaac's wife; Abimelech realizes she's his wife when he sees him ... well, the NASB and NIV say "caressing" her, the NRSV says "fondling" her, but the KJV once again has the more literal and less misleading translation in saying "sporting with" her. The Hebrew word, for which Strong's has "to laugh outright (in merriment or scorn); by impl. to sport:--laugh, mock, play, make sport," apparently appears only one other time in the bible, oddly enough at Exodus 32:6; it's the word used for the merry-making the people do following their eating and drinking after Aaron makes them the golden calf. (Something I'm starting to worry about is that the Strong's index of words follows the KJV, and so I wonder whether the translations it gives are influenced by the KJV's translations. If that's the case, then it's no wonder the KJV keeps coming out looking closer to Strong's definitions, and this dark I'm fumbling in with the Hebrew is even darker than I thought.) Anyway, this time there's no suggestion that any wrong has been done except in that, as Abimelech says, Isaac's deception has put his people in danger of bringing guilt upon themselves by having sex with Rebekah. (Rebekah's status as an independent woman has been downgraded since she decided to leave home to marry Isaac; she apparently has no say in the matter as to whether she'll be passed off as Isaac's sister and have sex with other men.)
After that, Isaac grows wealthy as a prosperous farmer, blessed by God--unlike Abraham, he doesn't become wealthy by being rewarded for his deceptions--and the Philistines grow envious of him, so they stop up his well, which the text says had been dug by Abraham's servants, and which apparently is the well of which Abraham claimed ownership against Abimelech. (I've gathered recently, by the way, that this was not likely the same well God pointed out to Hagar in the desert, though this is still not clear to me, and anyway the point of the story about Abraham and Abimelech and the well could be the same even if it's not the same well.) This time Abimelech won't give it back; he tells Isaac to get out of his country, because he is too powerful. And so Isaac moves a little way away, from Gerar to the valley of Gerar. Now that's a pretty remarkable thing: Isaac leaves because he is told he's too powerful, rather than using his power to stay. Now, he re-digs another well that had been dug by Abraham and stopped up by the Philistines; they complain that the water is theirs, he moves on and re-digs another well, they complain again, he moves on and re-digs another well, and about this one they don't complain, so he says: "At last the Lord has made room for us, and we will be fruitful in the land." But then for no specified reason he leaves and goes to Beersheba. God appears to him that night and tells him he will bless him and multiply his descendants for the sake of Abraham. And then Abimelech comes with the commander of his army to make peace, because they have seen that God is with him--I guess, they have seen that Isaac prospers despite his continual backing away from fights (over wells, which are pretty much the most important things on earth).
After that, every story about Isaac is a story of his interactions with his sons, Jacob and Esau, and takes place when he is an old man. The first of these is the one where Jacob gets the blessing supposedly meant for Esau by disguising himself as Esau. I feel like Howard has said that he doesn't believe Isaac doesn't know it's Jacob, but I can't find where. But it is certainly hard to believe, and it is hard to know how to make sense of. It seems like the kind of thing where, e.g., in a Shakespeare comedy a woman pretends to be a man or vice versa, and you know that in real life there's no way they would be fooling anyone, but in the world of the play they succeed. In a play you can accept that whatever it is that characters do to disguise themselves stands for whatever it is they might do that would actually work. Sometimes, complaining that something is unrealistic in fiction is unfair and beside the point, because making it more realistic would take too much time or expense and wouldn't help the work in any way except that no one in the audience would be bugged about it being unrealistic. Of course, you don't want to be unrealistic in ways that will actually mislead people such that they will come away from the work with false beliefs about the real world. The funny thing about the story of Jacob "stealing" Esau's blessing is that no one but a child would think that Isaac could be fooled by Jacob's disguise (and, well, I guess you don't have to be a super-genius of a child not to think he could be fooled, either), and it is exactly children who hear the story, in Sunday school and children's bibles.
I've got to leave this for today, not having even gotten into today's selection at all (though I have read it--I do have a knack for raising the bar on myself so that I'm always failing!).
I don't know if I never knew or had forgotten that each year of the three-year lectionary cycle takes most of its gospel readings from one of the three synoptic gospels, with John making special appearances during special times, and more appearances during Mark years, such as this year is, since Mark is shorter. Which, speaking of which, well, this is another of those things I guess I don't know if I never knew or had forgotten, but either way it came utterly as news to me the other day to learn that, in 1998, a stand-alone edition of the gospel of Mark was published with an introduction by Nick Cave. Funny thing about the first sentence of the introduction being, I've sporadically been reading And the Ass Saw the Angel lately, finding the writing really amazing (once I got over the "ah"s and "mah"s, which had previously repelled me from it--once I got into it I came to appreciate that they are kind of necessary (in a way that reminds me, as I am often reminded, of (I think it was) my grade 5 teacher telling us that we'll never be able to read quickly as long as we hear what we're reading in our heads--this book, if you don't hear it in your head, you pretty much miss it altogether), kind of like Cormac McCarthy crossed with a Nick Cave song (and, oddly, it makes me wonder why more of his songs aren't like this, which is almost too sing-songy for narrative prose), amazed incidentally by the frequency with which he uses words I don't know--it's one of those things that makes me wonder how it is that anyone can know how to use words that they have seen or heard used probably once at most--and then it struck me, I bet he gets em from the KJV.
Anyway, today's lectionary reading from Mark has Jesus, all grown up, baptized, and tempted by Satan already, fifteen verses into the first chapter, saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near"--so, yeah, as Nick Cave says, this one is driven by the end right from the beginning. I saw today that the wikiquotes page for Nick Cave has a bit where he says he's not that interested in Eastern religions because he's a hammer-and-nails kinda guy. As you know, I am not a hammer-and-nails kinda guy, but I do have to concede that Jesus's being-toward-death makes for a more compelling narrative, and makes him a more compelling human character, than his being-from-birth.
Currently at Havelock: -0.1.
Genesis 25, somewhat surprisingly (to me), begins with Abraham taking another wife, named Keturah. I had seen this indicated on one of the Old Testament family trees I've looked at lately, but without looking at the sources of these things you never know what crackpot theories might be behind them, and I was completely unfamiliar with the idea of Abraham having another wife, so I'd been wondering whether another baby-momma of Abraham's was actually going to show up ... and here she is. A number of sons and grandsons are listed (and keep in mind, this is after Abraham has supposedly been remarkably old to be Isaac's father--the rules of aging are very unsettled here), the only names of whose ring any bells for me are Midian and Sheba. Sheba reminds me of something, since, while I suspect Midian will be the namesake of the Midianites, I'm less confident Sheba will have anything to do with the queen of Sheba (and, well, looking it up in the wikipedia, I see it's uncertain) ... and that the Midianites are indeed supposed to have been descended from Midian). The thing it reminds me of is that the place Abraham's servant went looking for a wife for Isaac, the place where Abraham's brother Nahor lives, is called Haran, but apparently was definitely not named after Abraham's brother Haran, who died in Ur. But the noteworthy thing is not that (except insofar as that goes to show you have to be careful of homophones in the bible), but rather this: Genesis 11 specifies that Tehar took Abram, Nahor's son Lot, and Abram's wife Sarai. This, you'd think, means Nahor didn't go with them (in the same way you'd think it means Sarai, who is specified as Tehar's daughter-in-law, is not Tehar's daugter). But Nahor and his wife Milcah, who is Haran's daughter, are found by Abraham's servant in Haran (not to be confused with Nahor's brother Haran). Obviously Nahor and Milcah may gone and joined Tehar later (or, for that matter, Nahor's son Bethuel, who is Rebekah's father, may have gone there later, since I don't recall anything specifically saying that Nahor was there); my point is not that this is particularly mysterious, but that the narrative once Tehar's crew leaves Ur is pretty confusing sometimes--because, not knowing what exactly "Mesopotamia" was supposed to refer to, I originally thought that Abraham's servant had gone all the way back to Ur to find Isaac a wife from among Abraham's people.
And now I see I'm not the only person confused about this; the Wikipedia article for Rebekah says Abraham sent his servant to his birthplace to find Isaac a wife! (Which is the kind of thing I ordinarily might correct, but I'm not feeling very confident about anything here.) Actually I think the main source of the confusion, moreso than the fact that Nahor wasn't said to have left Ur with Terah, is that Abraham tells his servant to go to his country--which, along the lines of what I was saying before about Abraham being an alien in the land promised to him by God because he wasn't from there, you'd expect to be the place where he was from originally, but actually is the place where he "grew up" (until he left the nest at the age of 75). Something else in the mix on the "where y'all from, anyhow?" question: the text says of both Rebekah's father, Bethuel, and her brother Laban that they are Arameans. This, I think, is the first time that anyone's group membership has been identified according to where they're from rather than who they're descended from, because Terah and his crew are descended from Noah's grandson Arpachshad, not his grandson Aram (who, according to the wikipedia, may not be, but presumably is, the namesake of the Arameans).
Abraham not only has another wife after Sarah, but he has concubines as well, and unspecified sons by them--or does "concubines" at Genesis 25:6 refer to Hagar and Keturah, who were maybe not so properly called "wives" as Sarah was? Well, maybe? Anyway, Abraham dies at the age of 175, "an old man and satisfied with life," and then another surprising (to me) thing happens: Ishmael shows up, and he and Isaac bury Abraham in the cave where Sarah was buried (and the text again specifies exactly where the cave is and that it was purchased from the sons of Heth). And then the sons of Ishmael are named; none of them ring any bells for me, but the text says they are twelve princes of twelve "tribes" (and here the NASB has annoyed me for the first time, because the Hebrew word is not the same as the word for the twelve tribes of Israel; the NASB at least gives a footnote that says the word literally means "peoples", though that per se doesn't tell you it's a different word; the KJV, which I must say continues to have the best track record with me for keeping its words in order, says "nations"). Nothing much else is said about Ishmael, and he dies at the age of 137 ... although he comes up again at Genesis 28:9, when Esau marries a previously unmentioned daughter of Ishmael's after he hears Isaac tell Jacob not to marry a Canaanite woman, and so gets the idea that he shouldn't, either.
After Abraham, and before Jacob, Isaac is a remarkable blank. The story of the only time he goes anywhere is a repetition of the story of Abraham passing off Sarah as his sister and not his wife, with Abimelech himself even playing a part again, and Isaac having been motivated to go to the land of Abimelech, as Abraham had been motivated to go to Egypt, by famine. But there's something remarkably different in this repetition of the story: God doesn't do anything to reveal that Rebekah is Isaac's wife; Abimelech realizes she's his wife when he sees him ... well, the NASB and NIV say "caressing" her, the NRSV says "fondling" her, but the KJV once again has the more literal and less misleading translation in saying "sporting with" her. The Hebrew word, for which Strong's has "to laugh outright (in merriment or scorn); by impl. to sport:--laugh, mock, play, make sport," apparently appears only one other time in the bible, oddly enough at Exodus 32:6; it's the word used for the merry-making the people do following their eating and drinking after Aaron makes them the golden calf. (Something I'm starting to worry about is that the Strong's index of words follows the KJV, and so I wonder whether the translations it gives are influenced by the KJV's translations. If that's the case, then it's no wonder the KJV keeps coming out looking closer to Strong's definitions, and this dark I'm fumbling in with the Hebrew is even darker than I thought.) Anyway, this time there's no suggestion that any wrong has been done except in that, as Abimelech says, Isaac's deception has put his people in danger of bringing guilt upon themselves by having sex with Rebekah. (Rebekah's status as an independent woman has been downgraded since she decided to leave home to marry Isaac; she apparently has no say in the matter as to whether she'll be passed off as Isaac's sister and have sex with other men.)
After that, Isaac grows wealthy as a prosperous farmer, blessed by God--unlike Abraham, he doesn't become wealthy by being rewarded for his deceptions--and the Philistines grow envious of him, so they stop up his well, which the text says had been dug by Abraham's servants, and which apparently is the well of which Abraham claimed ownership against Abimelech. (I've gathered recently, by the way, that this was not likely the same well God pointed out to Hagar in the desert, though this is still not clear to me, and anyway the point of the story about Abraham and Abimelech and the well could be the same even if it's not the same well.) This time Abimelech won't give it back; he tells Isaac to get out of his country, because he is too powerful. And so Isaac moves a little way away, from Gerar to the valley of Gerar. Now that's a pretty remarkable thing: Isaac leaves because he is told he's too powerful, rather than using his power to stay. Now, he re-digs another well that had been dug by Abraham and stopped up by the Philistines; they complain that the water is theirs, he moves on and re-digs another well, they complain again, he moves on and re-digs another well, and about this one they don't complain, so he says: "At last the Lord has made room for us, and we will be fruitful in the land." But then for no specified reason he leaves and goes to Beersheba. God appears to him that night and tells him he will bless him and multiply his descendants for the sake of Abraham. And then Abimelech comes with the commander of his army to make peace, because they have seen that God is with him--I guess, they have seen that Isaac prospers despite his continual backing away from fights (over wells, which are pretty much the most important things on earth).
After that, every story about Isaac is a story of his interactions with his sons, Jacob and Esau, and takes place when he is an old man. The first of these is the one where Jacob gets the blessing supposedly meant for Esau by disguising himself as Esau. I feel like Howard has said that he doesn't believe Isaac doesn't know it's Jacob, but I can't find where. But it is certainly hard to believe, and it is hard to know how to make sense of. It seems like the kind of thing where, e.g., in a Shakespeare comedy a woman pretends to be a man or vice versa, and you know that in real life there's no way they would be fooling anyone, but in the world of the play they succeed. In a play you can accept that whatever it is that characters do to disguise themselves stands for whatever it is they might do that would actually work. Sometimes, complaining that something is unrealistic in fiction is unfair and beside the point, because making it more realistic would take too much time or expense and wouldn't help the work in any way except that no one in the audience would be bugged about it being unrealistic. Of course, you don't want to be unrealistic in ways that will actually mislead people such that they will come away from the work with false beliefs about the real world. The funny thing about the story of Jacob "stealing" Esau's blessing is that no one but a child would think that Isaac could be fooled by Jacob's disguise (and, well, I guess you don't have to be a super-genius of a child not to think he could be fooled, either), and it is exactly children who hear the story, in Sunday school and children's bibles.
I've got to leave this for today, not having even gotten into today's selection at all (though I have read it--I do have a knack for raising the bar on myself so that I'm always failing!).
I don't know if I never knew or had forgotten that each year of the three-year lectionary cycle takes most of its gospel readings from one of the three synoptic gospels, with John making special appearances during special times, and more appearances during Mark years, such as this year is, since Mark is shorter. Which, speaking of which, well, this is another of those things I guess I don't know if I never knew or had forgotten, but either way it came utterly as news to me the other day to learn that, in 1998, a stand-alone edition of the gospel of Mark was published with an introduction by Nick Cave. Funny thing about the first sentence of the introduction being, I've sporadically been reading And the Ass Saw the Angel lately, finding the writing really amazing (once I got over the "ah"s and "mah"s, which had previously repelled me from it--once I got into it I came to appreciate that they are kind of necessary (in a way that reminds me, as I am often reminded, of (I think it was) my grade 5 teacher telling us that we'll never be able to read quickly as long as we hear what we're reading in our heads--this book, if you don't hear it in your head, you pretty much miss it altogether), kind of like Cormac McCarthy crossed with a Nick Cave song (and, oddly, it makes me wonder why more of his songs aren't like this, which is almost too sing-songy for narrative prose), amazed incidentally by the frequency with which he uses words I don't know--it's one of those things that makes me wonder how it is that anyone can know how to use words that they have seen or heard used probably once at most--and then it struck me, I bet he gets em from the KJV.
Anyway, today's lectionary reading from Mark has Jesus, all grown up, baptized, and tempted by Satan already, fifteen verses into the first chapter, saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near"--so, yeah, as Nick Cave says, this one is driven by the end right from the beginning. I saw today that the wikiquotes page for Nick Cave has a bit where he says he's not that interested in Eastern religions because he's a hammer-and-nails kinda guy. As you know, I am not a hammer-and-nails kinda guy, but I do have to concede that Jesus's being-toward-death makes for a more compelling narrative, and makes him a more compelling human character, than his being-from-birth.
Currently at Havelock: -0.1.
