Poor Decision Making

After all the plagues—the locusts and the lice, the flies and the boils, the death of livestock and the death of the children—the Israelites were camped out at the edge of a sea when the Egyptians came after them.

You have to wonder what possessed the Egyptians to come at all. Trying to keep the Israelites in Egypt had gone very badly (see the above plagues), until even Pharaoh’s priests and courtiers begged him to just let them go already, and Pharaoh—king and god of Egypt—agreed. So it’s odd that so soon after their departure he changed his mind and charged after them

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Sense of Scale

In the story of Babel that I was taught as a kid, the Babelites were not sure they were going to earn their way to heaven and were uncertain of God’s grace, so they figured they’d just climb. They built a tower that punctured the clouds, hoping to find where God lived.

I love this image. It’s so literal and graphic. It’s also wrong. Robert Alter, my favorite Biblical commentator, says no one was trying to build a tower to get to heaven. The text says that the tower’s top was “in the heavens,” but that “is a hyperbole found in Mesopotamian inscriptions for celebrating high towers” (Alter 39). The Babel built tower is the linguistic and literal equivalent of our “skyscrapers.”

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Blood, Phlegm, Bile, and How I'm Not Smarter than the Ancient Greeks

In ancient Greece there was an ongoing argument about what humans were made of. Hippocrates begins the famous Nature of Man (which was actually probably written by Polybus, but details) refusing to participate in the debate of which of the four elements people were made of: fire, air, water, or earth? None of these things, he points out, are “an obvious constituent of a man.” In other words, this is a stupid question.

Hippocrates/Polybus is more interested in the more scientific proposals, specifically “some . . . say that a man is blood, others that he is bile, a few that he is phlegm.”

I read this in a class on the conception of Christian bodies (which, naturally, has to start with non-Christian Greeks, because Western bias), and I couldn’t stop laughing. Someone who walked this earth seriously contemplated that people were formed “in unity” of phlegm.

I imagined a time traveler coming up to me and saying, “Excuse me, are people made of blood, phlegm, or bile?” and I, the humanities major with a high school and nonfiction essay informed idea of the human body, would have to say some version of, “Your assumptions are so wrong, I don’t even know how to answer your question.”

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Choosing Our Contradictions

The story of Abraham (almost) sacrificing Isaac is one of those Bible stories I’ve heard so many times I almost don’t hear how weird it is anymore.

Abraham has waited his entire life for kids and is finding fatherhood significantly more complicated than he’d imagined. For one thing, God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. Abraham goes to the preordained mountain and gets as far as reaching for the knife before an angel intervenes: “Do not reach out your hand against the lad, and do nothing to him, for now I know that you fear God and you have not held back your son, your only one, from Me.” (Genesis 22: 10-12). Abraham then re-receives the promise given to him in earlier chapters: we will be the father of many nations. After, Abraham and Isaac go back down the mountain to a quasi-happy ending.

None of this tells us what went through Abraham’s mind as he trudged up the mountain or when Isaac caught on to what was happening. It doesn’t tell us if Abraham had decided what he was going to tell his wife, Sarah, and if he’d allowed himself to think about what their marriage and lives would be like without Isaac. It also doesn’t tell us how this episode affected Isaac and Abraham’s relationship or what either of them did tell Sarah about the trip when they got home.

When we tell this story, we usually echo the angel. We say that it’s about fearing God, about being willing to sacrifice everything, about obedience, and it absolutely might be, but my New Testament professor told me that stories lose their power when we only let them mean one thing, so let me suggest a different telling, one that is about coming to know God and making choices in the face of contradictions.

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This Week in Div School: Eve and Asherah

Div school is always fun (except when I’m eating oatmeal for the third meal in a row and googling the meaning of words I think I know while wearing pajamas at four o’clock in the afternoon), but this week was extra fun because there was so much scriptural women stuff.

Eve and Eden

The first time I ever really started thinking of doing religious scholarship was in a Milton class where we were reading Paradise Lost, and I noticed that Eve’s interactions with divinity always happened through Adam, which annoyed me. Partially because I really, really think the Eden story matters. For Christians and Westerners, it’s one of the stories we understand ourselves through.

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