And they had emerods in their secret parts (1Sam 6)

In examining the story unfolding here in 1Samuel 6, Robert Alter points out that there is indication of a possible mistranslation. The Philistines make an offering to the God of Israel in the form of "Five golden emerods, and five golden mice". This is the first time we hear about mice, and it's suggestive to some scholars that there is an aspect of the affliction of the Philistines about which we're not being explicitly told. Think about it: hemorrhoids are bad, but they aren't generally fatal. It may be that rather than being hemorrhoids, it was the dark boils associated with the Bubonic Plague that we're really talking about (which often appear in the groin area), a plague also associated with rodent infestations. It seems like a resonable speculation, although admittedly, golden images of their "buboes" still seems silly.

This offering of "Five golden emerods, and five golden mice" is at no point in the passage indicated to be demanded by God, only that the Philistine priests thought it was the best course of action, along with the rest of what is done in this chapter. (The issues of the number of gods and who it is that hardens hearts are ones I have previously addressed.) They put the ark onto a cart and return it to the Israelites, taking the manner in which the ark returned as a sign, which, lacking any evidence for or against God agreeing with this method of divination, you can take as you will. The actions of the cows is unusual, so it may be taken as miraculous, but it's not such an exciting miracle if so.

The final tale of this chapter is that of the men of Bethshemesh, many of whom died because they looked into the ark. Apparently, this was not a right thing to do. (It may have been reserved for Levites only to look, or it might possibly have been for no man to see the contents of the ark, I don't know; no doubt Stephen Spielberg has some thoughts on the matter.) In all of the nation of Israel's dealings with the ark, once again, the issue is their failure to take the Holy things of God seriously. Clearly, God takes the ark very seriously.

Is God merciful? You just know I'm going to give the answer "Yes" but how does one deal with the details the SAB brings up, which are certainly confusing? One thing worth noting first of all is that the first verse given in both columns is from the very same chapter. When you get an apparent contradiction that follows so quickly on itself, you're probably misreading or misunderstanding. God is merciful, yes, but His mercy is not without limit. To some extent, this is simply logical; there are cases where two parties are in conflict, and to give mercy to one would logically deny mercy to the other. Also, there's a very strange quality to mercy that I feel I understand conceptually, but may not be able to put into words well. Mercy is of a certain nature that it lives in contrast to justice. It's been said that justice is getting what you deserve; grace is getting something good you don't deserve; mercy is not getting the punishment you do deserve. If justice is never served, then in some sense, it cheapens mercy, and stretches the limits of some sort of cosmic balance sheet, it seems. God is merciful, but we can't escape punishment forever if we keep on pushing it.

He asked them, saying, Whom say the people that I am?

While it seems that the large majority oif the traffic I receive to this blog is coming through links from the Skeptic's Annotated Bible, and doesn't really care about the "blog-ish" nature of my posts here, there may be some people who are enjoying reading this as a daily offering of opinion on the Bible. I don't know. Either way, I'd like to get back to work on completing a bit more of the Bible, as I've only gone through one and a half books of a much, much larger work.

I haven't posted here in over a month for a number of reasons. I've been busy, and while I've taken some time to post occasionally on my other blogs, I've let this one languish in the midst of my overwhelming time constraints. The other reason has a lot to do with why I've let this one in particular languish: Exodus gets a lot more boring for the most part from here on out, and throughout the rest of the books of Moses, while there is some amount of plot, it's mostly long lists of laws and their related punishments and procedural applications.

Don't get me wrong, if I keep this up, eventually I expect to cover the whole Bible, but as I've said before, I don't feel it's necessary to tackle in a straight linear fashion from beginning to end. After all, most people don't read it that way. Anyway, what I'm thinking is that in order to revitalize this a little, I could switch to another book that was a little more interesting. Judges comes to mind as very jam-packed with action, but it's honestly a very difficult book to address, due to excessive sex and violence throughout the book. Eventually, covering that cook is going to be largely a droning repetition of "The Bible records this, but does not condone it." Ruth is one of my favorite books, but the SAB has virtually nothing to say about it, so it leaves me with little to say if I'm focusing on replying to objections. I considered spicing it up with Song of Solomon, since who doesn't enjoy reading ancient Hebraic erotic poetry? Still, it seems sort of gimmicky.

So, in the end, I'm going to appeal to any readers I may have: PLEASE post comments to give me a good suggestion! What do you think I should do? Jump to the New Testament? (I was considering Matthew, but it seems like I need to maybe hit all four Gospels simultaneously with a harmonization. I don't know.) Do some Psalms or Proverbs? A prophetic book? What might be nice is if Steve Wells would let me know if he has stats on which pages on his site are most popular, and I might start there. I don't know, just give me a suggestion or two so I can feel a bit more enthusiastic about moving forward.