I will make the wilderness a pool of water (Exod 17)

Chapter 17 is a pretty easy one, so as I often do in such cases, I'm going to complicate things with my own comments on what I suggest the SAB might want to say.

First of all, it seems like verse 2 ought to be added to this page, although only if Wells is trying to be comprehensive in his citations. I think a lot of the time, he's just looking for a few good examples, but I'm not sure. It should be noted that he has mistakenly put Genesis 22:1 and 2Sam. 24:1 on this page, which I don't think he meant to. This verse would fit just fine, though. I suppose that since I therefore have not addressed this issue, I ought to here. I think the issue is not whether God can be tempted per se, but whether people will try to tempt God. One of the hard things about this concept is that "tempt" and "test" are largely used interchangeably, with some confusing results. God's certainly not going to be tempted into sin, which is the way we usually think of "tempting". However, God is certainly able to be tested; the only question is whether or not it's appropriate to do so at any given time or in any given manner. For some reason, throughout most of the wilderness wanderings of Israel, the kind of testing/tempting they were doing was inappropriate, while there are examples both of people testing God with positive results, and God actually ordering the people of Israel to test Him! Although the word "test" is not in that verse, the concept is pretty clear there, and I think Wells ought to consider adding it to the test page.

Really, I don't understand this well. I once heard a pastor who said that all testing of God is forbidden in the Bible except for what we find in Malachi 3:10. The guy was a great speaker, but I think he had forgotten Gideon, who doesn't really fit under this heading. (This is also akin to the story in Luke 1 which I really should have included in my "Christmas edition", in which one person gets in trouble for asking a question to an angel, and another person does not.) My only thought is that it has a lot to do with attitude. The Israelites were essentially saying, "Oh my gosh! Moses has led us out into the desert to die, and God doesn't care about us!" While people like Elijah tested God with an attitude more like, "I'm so certain that God is with me, that I'm willing to give him a test to show you!" This is only speculation on my part, but it makes some sense in that God seems to value faith very highly.

Now, Moses goes with the leaders of the tribes to this place where there is this rock that God says, "I will stand before thee there..." which I assume to be somewhat figurative; perhaps the pillar of smoke mentioned previously stopped at the rock. Moses hits the rock with the staff, and water comes out of it. "God is such a clever guy!" the SAB says. Yes, I suppose He is. Apparently, this is absurd to Steve Wells, but he doesn't explain why. I guess it's another case of anything miraculous is absurd. This is definitely meant to be a miracle, and aside from the obvious fact that it's supernatural for rocks to spew out water when hit, the fact that this staff is used is often an indication in the Torah that miracles are involved.

Shortly after this (although it's not clear, since the Bible isn't much on sequential storytelling) the Amalekites come to attack the Israelites. Apparently, the SAB deems fighting back against this attack to be cruel, unjust, and intolerant. Am I to take it then that they should have just let themselves be attacked?

Something miraculous seems to happen in this story. Moses goes up on a hillside, and holds up his staff. So long as the staff is over his head, the Israelites keep winning, when he puts it down, the battle turns on them. This may indeed be a miracle (remember what I said about the staff?) in which case it needs no further explanation. I do notice however that most of the miracles that Moses performs during his ministry are following an order from God to do them. No such order is mentioned here, and I wonder if it might have been a psychological morale-booster for the troops to see Moses holding up the staff? It's a possibility.

God tells Moses to write the story down "in a book," presumably this one we're reading now. I find this verse in itself to be an odd one, and it may be a Hebrew idiom that we don't fully understand, but God says essentially, "Make sure everyone remembers the Amalekites, because I'm going to make sure everyone forgets them." Huh? Sort of the reverse of Jesus' statement in Matthew 26, where He says the woman with the ointment will be remembered forever, but Matthew fails to tell us who the heck she was. (It may have been Mary, as a very similar story is told in John, and Mary is named there.) In any case, as I mentioned way back, Israel indeed had to keep fighting generation after generation of Amalekites, and yes, most of the time they had to do it without Moses' help.

The LORD is a man of war (Exod 14)

Finally back from a long hiatus, most of my work situation has been properly arranged, and I am going to try to spend some time posting on my blog. While my other blog is going to be focusing on the separation of church and state here in the USA, here I will be conversely be focusing on the establishment of a theocracy in the Middle East, of course, as once the Israelites leave Egypt, the nation of Israel really begins, despite having no land to settle on for quite some time.

Most of the issues pointed out in this chapter have to do with Pharaoh's heart being hardened, which I addressed in a previous post. In the midst of all of this heart-hardening, I think the SAB missed something that they might want to mention. Namely, that God instructs the Israelites to camp in such a manner that they feign being vulnerable. The plagues are not quite enough for some reason; God wants to destroy the Egyptian army and embarrass the nation of Egypt.

If the SAB is looking for absurdities, and likes to mark miraculous occurrences as such, then they've missed one of the biggies. God causes the sea to become dry, and the Israelites cross over it that night. Note that there is no talk of "parting" the Red Sea (although there may be a hint of it in verse 29), but rather the wind blows all the water off to one side. This act is not considered an absurd concept as a miracle, but having chariot wheels fall off is. Also, in the midst of this, the SAB notes as an absurdity (I think it's supposed to be a contradiction, which seems to make more sense) that there are horses still available for the Egyptian army, since they were all killed in Exodus 9. I stand by essentially what I said before, which is that the verse in question says beasts that were in the fields were struck down. Most likely, the army's horses were kept in stables, and thus many of them if not all may have survived the plagues.

As a side note, it would be an interesting discussion to examine why these miracles, done by God, had to be preceded by a small action on Moses' part. If God wanted to allow the Israelites to walk across the bottom of the sea on dry ground, does He really need a waving staff to make it happen? I can think of a few reasons for God having Moses do this, but I'm not going to give appreciable time to it in this blog unless I come to text that seems more clearly to beg the question.

So God drowns the Egyptian army. The SAB marks this as cruel and/or violent, which I suppose is deserving enough, but it should be noted that there is something that's just naturally cruel and violent about war. Remember, these are not just a few Egyptians out for a leisurely Sunday drive, but an army, and no doubt their aim was not exactly a kindly one. In a way, this was an act of war upon Israel and upon God. God destroyed the army to put a final end to it, and Israel was finally a free nation.

Now these are the generations of Pharez (Gen 38)

To quote the SAB regarding chapter 38, "This lovely Bible story is seldom read in Sunday School, but it is the basis of many Christian doctrines, including the condemnation of both masturbation and birth control." On-the-mark assessment of this story as a whole, which is a very odd one that only has some of its issues explained through appeal to a better understanding of cultural customs of the time.

Now the first thing that the SAB has issue with in this story is verses 2-4. I really have no idea why. (Steve Wells makes his case in the comments below.) Those verses, along with verse 5, are a simple straightforward setup of the story in which all we see happening is Judah meets a woman and seems to fall in love with her and start a family. What's wrong with that? They have three children, and the eldest of the three marries a woman named Tamar. Up until now, there's not really anything noteworthy of this story.

This eldest son, whose name was Er, does something bad that causes his own death: the Lord kills him. (This may be a figure of speech, but probably not.) Since we don't know what he did to deserve death, I'm not sure we can judge God at all for striking him down. I mean, if you simply don't believe that evil should be punished, or more particularly that you don't believe in capital punishment, then that's more of a personal issue that's part of a larger debate than this passage.

Then comes the weird part, at least to people of more modern sensibilities. Onan, the second brother, is told to go and get his sister-in-law Tamar pregnant. This practice is explained more thoroughly in another part of the Bible later on, but essentially if a woman's husband dies and they have no son, then a near relative is required to impregnate the widow so that the male line is not ended. Telling Onan to do this was something that was supposedly fairly commonplace in that culture and time.

For whatever reason--and despite many people making suggestions such as Onan not wanting to be responsible for a child that would get his older brother's inheritance for instance, we don't really know specifically--Onan decides not to impregnate Tamar, and instead pulls out and "spills his seed". There's a lot of speculation as to what it was that was so particularly wrong with this action on Onan's part. As the SAB notes (and I quoted above) the common beliefs are that it was a matter of the evils of masturbation and/or this particular form of birth control (thus the coinage of the term "onanism" for either practice) or even birth control in general. I tend to think there are a few deeper issues at stake here. The slightly more obvious one is the whole concept of a man impregnating his brother's widow as being so important that it requires an action (sleeping with your sister-in-law) that no doubt would be quite taboo if the circumstances were any different. If it's this important for Onan to fulfill his duties, then refusing to fulfill them is probably a serious offense. On a more subtle note, Tamar is in the genetic line of King David, and therefore also Christ; God may have special reason beyond our understanding to want to see this woman have a child whose father is in the house of Judah. (In my mind, that's what the whole book of Ruth is about.)

So supposedly after Onan died, Tamar should have been married to Shelah, the third brother; but Judah says that he's too young, and Tamar ought to go back and live with her parents until Shelah is old enough. Apparently, though, Judah's just thinking that if he gives his third son to this woman, he's going to die, too. I can't say I fully blame him, it's the sort of thing a father-in-law probably would start to think about.

Eventually enough time passes that Shelah's old enough to get married, and Judah's wife dies, but nobody ever goes to get Tamar back from her parents. Tamar decides that it's time to take matters into her own hands, in a rather unusual manner. She finds out where Judah is going to be the next time he's out of town, and waits for him, dressed up in disguise like a prostitute. It works; Judah sees her, and propositions her for sex.

Now, what Judah is doing, unaware of who the "harlot" really is, is quite in the wrong. He shouldn't be sleeping with some random woman he meets in the road in return for livestock. The story is however quite full of delightful irony. While he is being tempted into doing what is wrong, Tamar is, in a sense, doing what is right, because either Judah or Shelah is supposed to be getting her pregnant so she can have a son as an inheritance for her husband Er. Note that she asks Judah to pledge to her as a deposit, "Thy signet, and thy bracelets, and thy staff," which were symbolic of Judah's authority and inheritance to eventually give to the first-born son of his first-born son. And of course, since Judah is eventually the tribe of Israel out of which the Davidic dynasty comes from, these items are, in a sense, the royal seal and scepter of Israel. Judah hardly seems to pause, though, and hands them over. He gets the sexual gratification he wants, and she gets the child she wants, along with proof that the father is exactly who it should be. (The other irony is the contrast of this story with the immediately following story of Joseph being tempted with sex, and responding very differently.)

I find it interesting that later, when Judah sends a friend to pay off the debt to the "harlot", it echoes some of the supposition that we've seen earlier that the surrounding nations have no moral scruples. Judah's friend seems to have no intent of being delicate about the matter, and simply asks something along the lines of, "Hey guys, where's the whore that used to hang out over there? I owe her something." The men reply that there is no prostitute in the town. Back home, upon hearing the news, Judah decides not to pursue the matter in case it brings him disgrace.

Shortly after, Judah hears that his daughter-in-law (whom he hardly treated as though she existed) was pregnant "by whoredom." Judah gets all indignant and insists that she should be burnt to death. Before this happens, though, Tamar says, "Oh, by the way, the father of the child gave me these," and shows the stuff that Judah gave her. I always love stories like this, of which there are a handful in the Bible, where one person gets all "righteously" angry about somebody else's sin, and is ready to rip them a new one, as they say, and then someone says, "Oh, by the way, what about your involvement?" Judah puts the whole story together and realizes that the only one who really did anything wrong was he himself. Suddenly all that righteous anger goes away, and everyone goes free.

At the birth, it turns out to be twins, so Tamar gets two sons even though Judah never sleeps with her again. Both these sons rise to some prominence in Israel, Pharez of course becoming the next in the royal line to David.