Daryl
Speaker 1: Cooper: Hey, everybody. This is Daryl Cooper. This is the Martyr Maid Podcast, and this is a special episode to celebrate Easter here in 2025.
Some of you
Speaker 2: probably heard the Easter episode I did a couple
Speaker 3: of years ago. If you haven't, I'll link it in the show
notes.
Speaker 3: Or under whatever post happened
Speaker 4: to bring you here. But today I want
to talk
Speaker 4: about the book of Job.
Those of you who
Speaker 1: are subscribers to the Martyr Maid sub-stack will be familiar with a lot of the themes and material in this episode. And I'd like to give a quick message to my Bible-believing listeners. I am going
to be
Speaker 1: exploring different ways of thinking about the book of Job.
Speaker 1: And about God. And about the story told in the Gospels. And I understand
Speaker 5: that makes some people
Speaker 6: reflexively uncomfortable.
I
Speaker 7: would just ask you to approach this episode with a generous spirit. I'm going to talk
Speaker 4: about things that I've been working over and struggling with in my mind for years. And I haven't come close to figuring
them out. I'm
Speaker 8: not trying to be your pastor. I'm not claiming to be
and
Speaker 8: authority with some previously undisclosed truth about the Bible.
I
Speaker 9: myself don't have
Speaker 5: much certainty about any of the things I'm about to talk
about. I'm
Speaker 5: trying to understand things that have always been very hard for me to wrap my head around, and I'm just going to share some of
Speaker 10: that with you here. So, even if the theology is unorthodox, the last thing I'm trying to do is lead anyone
Speaker 11: astray,
or
Speaker 11: to ask anyone to accept my answers to these questions. Since even
Speaker 8: my answers might very well be different by next Easter.
So here we go. I'm content to die
Speaker 12: for my beliefs.
So cut off my head. And make me a martyr. The people will
Speaker 13: always remember it.
Speaker 14: No.
They will forget it.
Hell
Speaker 15: does exist God is a thought God is an idea It
is a
Speaker 15: place
Speaker 16: It is somewhere Hell does exist
But its
Speaker 17: reference is to something that transcends all thinking
Why must we tear
Speaker 18: ourselves apart for this small question of religion? This
is from an article in
Speaker 19: New York Times, dated
Speaker 8: October 7th, 2018. Schoharie, New York.
The
Speaker 8: 17 friends had all piled into a white stretch limousine for what was supposed to have been a birthday celebration at
Speaker 5: an upstate New York brewery,
but they never
Speaker 10: reached their destination. The
massive vehicle,
Speaker 10: speeding downhill on Saturday, approached the intersection of two highways that residents had long warned was notoriously
Speaker 5: dangerous, and
in just a
Speaker 8: few seconds of terror, their worst fears were realized—
The
Speaker 8: limousine lost control, careening through the intersection and
Speaker 10: striking an empty car. The crash killed all 18 occupants of the limousine, including the driver, as well as two pedestrians, in
Speaker 5: an accident that left deep tire tracks in the ground and the small town about 40 miles west of Albany reeling.
Four sisters,
Speaker 5: two brothers, and at least three young couples were among the dead.
Speaker 8: Jessica Kirby, 36, witnessed the crash, but when asked to describe the scene, she said, I don't want to. It's not something I want to think about.
Speaker 10: How
are we supposed to understand
Speaker 10: something like that? There's
a certain sense
Speaker 10: in which
Speaker 20: accidents unnerve us even more than murders or terrorism or deaths in
war.
And
Speaker 21: those latter three, they don't leave us at a loss over who was responsible or why it happened.
Or at least
Speaker 21: what the
Speaker 10: proximate cause was.
For the loved
Speaker 10: ones of the 20 people who died in that accident, though, things aren't
Speaker 8: so clear. You can blame the driver if you want. You can blame the limo company.
You can blame
Speaker 8: the local government for not responding
Speaker 5: to residents' warnings that the intersection was dangerous and all that's
fine.
But
Speaker 5: none of these is likely to satisfy the parents or
Speaker 22: siblings or spouses
Speaker 8: of the people in that limousine. One time many years
ago, I
Speaker 8: was at a mall in a Hallmark shop looking for a birthday card. And standing near me was this woman and her friend, and the woman's cell phone rang. And so she answers it, totally normal,
"Hello."
And then she
Speaker 3: stopped walking, stopped moving altogether. And
she and
Speaker 23: the caller exchanged a
Speaker 3: few short sentences back and forth. And
then she just
Speaker 3: collapsed to the floor, sobbing like I've never seen an adult sob before or since. Inconsolable. So
I hung around in case there
Speaker 3: was something
Speaker 5: I could do to help. Or maybe it just felt uncomfortable.
Speaker 5: inappropriate to leave and go about my day like nothing had happened.
And a
Speaker 5: little later, the woman's friend told me that that phone call, she had just found out that her husband and her only son, her only child, had been killed in a hit and
run. Now, there are people
Speaker 8: out there listening, I know, who don't have to be told how these
people felt.
Speaker 8: Because I know many of you
have been there.
One of my
Speaker 8: best friends is Daniele Bolelli, the creator of The Great History on Fire and Drunken Taoist podcasts. He has
a beautiful and
Speaker 8: brilliant daughter named
Speaker 24: Isabel, who's high school age now. But
years ago,
Speaker 24: very shortly after Isabel was born, and Daniele's written
Speaker 3: and spoken about this in public, so I hope I'm
not speaking out
Speaker 11: of school, um...
Speaker 11: Shortly after Isabel was born, her mother, who was young and healthy
Speaker 8: and beautiful, and if she captured Daniele's heart, she must have been pretty amazing in a lot of ways, was diagnosed with cancer. It progressed very quickly, and within months, she was gone.
And Daniele was left
Speaker 8: to figure out how to raise a baby daughter alone in his grief.
Thank you.
To his
Speaker 25: credit, and to Savannah's, and to the credit of Isabel's nature, he did a great job, a really, really great
Speaker 11: job, and not just under the circumstances grading
on a
Speaker 11: curve, but by any standard you could put him up against. But
I've mostly
Speaker 11: avoided discussing the topic with him over the years of our friendship. Anytime
I think of
Speaker 11: mentioning it in the context of a conversation...
It
Speaker 11: feels like I'm about to walk on sacred ground with mud all over my cheap tennis shoes. And so I just turn
Speaker 3: around and head the other way. I
think I also
Speaker 3: avoid it because,
well, not so much to
Speaker 3: protect Danieli's sensitivities. He's a very open-hearted person. He would talk about it with me if I brought it up.
But it's also just
Speaker 9: because talking, it just stops me in my tracks. I don't
think I
Speaker 9: could handle something like that.
And
Speaker 25: people say everyone thinks that And then it happens And you just handle it Because you have no choice But I don't know
The voice
Speaker 25: in my head warns me That it would probably push me past my limit And
nothing quite
Speaker 25: like that has happened to me But I'm very close with Daniele And when someone you love experiences that You don't gain any insight Into what it's like exactly But you can't just
Speaker 25: abstracted away either. You can't pretend like it's just something that happens in newspaper headlines to
Speaker 11: other people
but not
Speaker 11: to your wife or your child. From now on you know it's real and you feel a new visceral fear of things that haven't happened yet and might not
happen. But
Speaker 11: you understand down to your bones
that
That
Speaker 11: you're not on any lists for exemptions or special treatment.
When these things happen
Speaker 25: to us, the
most natural
Speaker 25: thing in the world is
to ask
Speaker 25: who to blame. And
when an answer
Speaker 25: doesn't immediately present itself, we often start looking up at the sky to find the culprit.
Because if no
Speaker 25: one's to blame, if the answer's really just, these things happen...
then you
Speaker 25: have to confront the cold, empty meaninglessness of this world that we've all been born into. Which
I think is
Speaker 3: probably harder than living in a world run by a capricious or inscrutable God. The
book of Job is one of the oldest
Speaker 25: meditations we have on this question. And
for my
Speaker 25: money, it's never been surpassed by imitators
Speaker 26: or alternatives in thousands of years since it was written.
Okay.
To me, Job is
Speaker 26: the most morally difficult book of the entire Bible. It's
frequently
Speaker 25: trotted out by skeptical non-believers to make a mockery of God. And
to be
Speaker 25: honest, it's no wonder. The story of Job seems, at face value, to invalidate many of the core claims made by
Speaker 11: Christians and Jews about the character and purpose of God.
But,
Many
Speaker 11: believers just avoid the questions raised by the book. And ironically
Speaker 25: enough, I've learned as I've expressed this opinion publicly before, ironically enough they often take up the arguments of Job's
friends, whom
Speaker 25: God at the end
Speaker 27: of the story explicitly says were wrong
about him.
Most of you
Speaker 28: will be familiar with the general outline of the story of Job, but for those who are not, here's a quick
Speaker 8: recap. Starts out, God is holding court in heaven, and the heavenly beings are taking turns presenting themselves before the throne in the manner of ministers making their reports to an ancient Near Eastern king. One of the ministers
Speaker 29: is
Satan.
At
Speaker 29: least, that's how we transliterate the word. In reality, the capitalization that we're familiar with, when we see Satan written down,
Speaker 11: that makes it a proper noun, that was added by modern translators, since there were no capital or lowercase letters in the ancient texts, and in the original it comes with the definite article attached, so it actually reads "the Satan,"
which
Speaker 10: means "the adversary" or "the accuser."
So the
Speaker 10: Satan presents himself
Speaker 30: before the Lord And
God
Speaker 9: calls him out Boasting of this man called Job The most righteous and blameless
Speaker 25: servant of God on earth He basically says, hey, accuser You
like to go
Speaker 25: around accusing people I'd
like to see you try
Speaker 25: to poke holes in this guy Good luck with
that
and
Speaker 27: so, as intended, the Satan is provoked, and he replies, well, sure. Of course, he behaves himself. You've given him everything. He's rich, respected, healthy. He's a big
Speaker 25: family. Why wouldn't he be singing your praises?
Give a dog a
Speaker 25: bone every time he barks at the moon, and he'll bark all night, but righteous?
How would
Speaker 10: you know?
He tells God
Speaker 10: that if he stops the gravy
train
Thy
Speaker 10: servant Job will curse thee to thy face.
Now, one
Speaker 10: interesting thing I've noticed about this opener is that in the pop culture version of the story, you know, the one
that people
Speaker 10: just kind of know, even if they've never actually gone and read the book of Job, it's often imagined that the Satan was the one who challenged God and
Speaker 5: provoked him to abandon Job.
But in fact,
Speaker 5: the devil was just passing through. It was God who called him out.
And
Speaker 5: started the whole ball rolling.
And so God
Speaker 25: accepts the devil's challenge. He says, I'll tell you what. Do
whatever you
Speaker 25: want to him. Except don't go cut his arms and legs off or something. You have free reign. Just don't touch his physical body.
How to interpret this has
Speaker 1: been a subject of debate probably ever since the book's author first started handing out his manuscripts for friends to proofread.
The
Speaker 29: fact that God sets the rules over what the Satan can and cannot do, that's
a clue that
Speaker 25: God remains in control of this situation.
Everything that
Speaker 25: happens is under his supervision. The
Satan has
Speaker 31: not gone rogue, and though he may be the one about to inflict the damage, he is acting as God's agent when he does it.
Now, I like to study
Speaker 29: the history behind the biblical texts as much as the
next
Speaker 8: guy. And I know the Old Testament was edited and redacted and spliced together over centuries, and only received its final polish during probably
Speaker 25: Hellenistic times. But all the stuff about different authors and different sources, all that's come to us as a result of modern scholarship.
And
Speaker 25: Christianity was given its shape by men who didn't know anything about any of that.
They took
Speaker 25: the Bible as they found it.
When someone in the
Speaker 10: Middle Ages was told that God created the universe in seven days, even though days are a way of counting the Earth's rotation relative to the sun, and the sun and moon weren't created until the fourth day, whatever. There
Speaker 8: might have been some edgy cleric saying you can't take it literally, but the vast majority of people...
Just
Speaker 1: read the story as it was written. Since that's the way it was approached by the people who shaped the religion that is the bedrock of our civilization, I like to switch out of academic mode and into religious mode and take the
Speaker 25: story seriously, on its own terms, the way it's written, the way our ancestors did. And so when you do that, when you take the story at face
Speaker 10: value, you're confronted with questions.
Speaker 10: that seem kinda silly from an academic perspective.
I have
Speaker 8: this somewhat embarrassing habit where every so often I'll find myself on,
Speaker 25: you like the passive, the use of the passive there, I find myself on the Quora website. You know, it's where people can ask questions and other people answer them and you
Speaker 5: rate the answers and they rise
to the
Speaker 5: top and so forth. So I'll find myself on Quora
Speaker 5: Reading very
Speaker 22: detailed explanations and debates of which fictional characters would win in a fight.
Who'd win
Speaker 8: between Doctor Strange and Rae Slyne Magir from the Dragonlance novels?
Or between
Speaker 8: Doctor Manhattan and pre-retcon Beyonder?
Or what if Golden Age
Speaker 8: Superman and World Breaker Hulk both threw a punch and hit each other's fist?
The answers are Rae
Speaker 6: Slyne, Beyonder, and Superman, by the way.
Well,
Speaker 6: sometimes I'll look up from my screen and
Speaker 5: realize I've been reading this stuff for over an hour.
And I
Speaker 5: don't even read comic books. I barely
Speaker 4: read them
as a kid. And I've never
Speaker 4: read any of the comic books featuring a lot of the characters I spend all this time reading about on Quora. And so I guess I just enjoy
Speaker 31: taking a fictional story on its own terms. And getting into it. Getting into
Speaker 5: that world.
And so if you're
Speaker 5: someone who sees the Bible as a work of fiction, that's fine.
Speaker 5: Just pretend this episode is one of those
Speaker 25: quora posts.
And so
Speaker 25: anyway, among those questions that you're faced with almost right
Speaker 10: away
are the apparent
Speaker 10: contradictions regarding the limits of God's knowledge and power.
If God is, as
Speaker 10: most believers suppose, omnipotent, which means all-powerful, and omniscient, which means all-knowing,
he
Speaker 10: could just take a peek into the future and know how this game with Job is going to play out. So
what's he
Speaker 10: trying to prove? And to whom is he trying to prove it?
Are we to believe
Speaker 32: that God cares what the devil thinks? That he cares so much that he's willing to inflict torture
Speaker 8: on his most loyal servant just to make his point? Or, and here I might say,
Speaker 8: teeter a little too close to the edge of blasphemy for
Speaker 10: some,
has the devil
Speaker 10: managed to introduce doubt into God's own mind regarding Job's fidelity?
For God to doubt would
Speaker 5: mean placing limits on his omniscience.
There's no
Speaker 5: room for doubt when you know everything.
But the prologue of
Speaker 10: the book of Job itself
at least
Speaker 10: seems to imply that God might be subject
Speaker 10: some kind of limits. It might seem like pedantic nitpicking, but when the devil makes his presentation, God asks him,
Speaker 8: "Where have you been?" Satan tells him that he's been wandering to and fro about the earth and traveling upon it,
a fact
Speaker 8: which God ought to have known without
asking. He then
Speaker 8: asks a follow-up question, "Have you
Speaker 31: seen my servant Job?"
which, again,
Speaker 31: omniscience should have made unnecessary. The very
Speaker 10: fact that the Satan makes his challenge in the first place seems to imply that the devil, at least, thinks that there might be room for doubt or uncertainty in God's mind. The great psychologist Carl Jung naturally interprets the text in
Speaker 22: psychological terms, and in his great little book, Answer to Job, he suggests that the adversary, the accuser, the Satan, is the embodiment
or the
Speaker 33: mythical personification of God's doubt.
He's the voice in
Speaker 8: God's head whispering to him that you can't trust these people. They're
not really
Speaker 8: what you think they are.
And the whole scene
Speaker 8: before the heavenly throne is an
Speaker 25: argument God is having with himself over whether or not his most beloved
Speaker 8: servant is really sincere.
So, in
Speaker 8: any case, the devil takes his marching orders and he just goes ham on poor Job. That same day,
some
Speaker 34: of his children are sharing a meal in the tent of their eldest
brother
Speaker 11: when they're set upon by nomadic raiders who kill all of Job's sons who were present and carry off all the daughters who
were there into
Speaker 35: slavery. Lest Job consider this some random disaster, the Satan strikes again,
Speaker 10: almost immediately.
Even
Speaker 10: as the messenger was delivering the bad news about his children, another servant comes running up and says that lightning had come down from the sky and burned up even more of his children, as well as all of his sheep. And then another servant came. Chaldeans attacked the camels and
Speaker 22: took them and killed your boys, and only I escaped to tell you.
And before this
Speaker 22: third messenger says,
was
Speaker 22: finished with his report, a fourth rushed up to tell Job that a great wind had collapsed the walls of a house unto all of his
Speaker 36: remaining children.
So all of Job's
Speaker 36: wealth and all of his possessions were destroyed or carried off,
and
Speaker 5: every one of his children had been massacred by the devil because
of a
Speaker 5: bet he made with God after God called him out.
After the
Speaker 7: final messenger finishes his report, Job tears his robes
Speaker 10: and lays down with his face in the dust. But despite it all, he not only does not curse God, he blesses him.
Speaker 8: Naked came I from my mother's womb, and naked will I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away. May the name of the Lord be blessed.
So
Speaker 8: far, the patience of Job, to quote the well-known idiom, has remained intact. So score one point for God, zero
Speaker 5: for the devil, and like negative one million points for poor old
Job. So now the scene
Speaker 10: cuts back to the heavenly throne room. And while Job is down in the
Speaker 5: dirt, grieving over his catastrophe,
God is exultant. He's
Speaker 5: celebrating.
He
Speaker 5: tells the devil to behold
Speaker 10: my servant Job is held fast to his innocence, even after you
Speaker 37: incited me to ruin him without cause.
Many Jewish and
Speaker 5: Christian apologists join Job's friends who will arrive shortly in insisting that surely Job must have done something to deserve his suffering, if only carrying the stain of original sin.
But
Speaker 5: God seems to reject their defense of his own actions. And he confirms here that he has
Speaker 22: destroyed Job for no reason.
Well, the Satan's not
Speaker 38: impressed. The old devil says, so what? A man
will give
Speaker 39: up everything he
Speaker 10: has to save his own skin. Give
me the power
Speaker 10: over his flesh and bones and
Speaker 5: he'll surely curse you to your face. And
so God says,
Speaker 5: fine. Fine.
Do
Speaker 5: whatever you want. Just don't kill him.
A command
Speaker 5: which reaffirms that it is God and not the devil who is in
Speaker 10: control here. And
so once again, the
Speaker 10: accuser seems to have manipulated God
Speaker 32: into attacking Job for no reason at all. As again, God himself has just admitted. And
so now the devil
Speaker 5: strikes Job's flesh and blood.
Speaker 5: covering his whole body from the top
Speaker 22: of his head to the soles of his feet with excruciatingly painful boils.
Bereft, Job sits
Speaker 32: down in the ashes of his ruined house, bitterly weeping and scratching his running sores
Speaker 5: with a shard of broken pottery. His
own wife, the
Speaker 5: only member of his family
Speaker 32: still alive,
comes to
Speaker 32: him and, speaking for the devil, says,
How
Speaker 40: long will you go on clinging to your innocence? Just curse God and die.
Although
Speaker 41: Job had been a
Speaker 22: respected leader of his community, his misfortune has brought him into disrepute, since he lived at a time and among people who believed, as Job always had, that righteousness is rewarded, and anybody suffering
Speaker 10: the terrible fate that had befallen Job must have secretly been engaged in some egregious evil.
But there are
Speaker 10: three
Speaker 8: friends who have not quite abandoned him,
and they
Speaker 8: come to sit and weep with Job
Speaker 22: over everything that's happened.
They weep
Speaker 22: together for seven days without speaking a word, and then finally Job opens his
Speaker 10: mouth. "God damn the day I was born, and the night that forced me from the womb! Why couldn't I have died as they pulled me out of the
dark?
Why
Speaker 10: were there knees to hold me, breasts to keep me alive, if
only I
Speaker 10: had been strangled or drowned on my way to the bitter light?
And so begins
Speaker 42: Job's lament.
He's still not
Speaker 5: cursed God, but
things are
Speaker 5: starting to get serious as this first part
Speaker 22: of the story comes to an end.
And we find
Speaker 22: ourselves wondering, with a bit of trepidation, what he's going to say next.
The story of Job is
Speaker 22: not original to the Bible,
and is
Speaker 22: more likely a Biblical spin on a tale long known throughout
Speaker 8: the ancient Near East. A Sumerian and later Babylonian poem, commonly known as "The Poem of the
Speaker 5: Righteous Sufferer," or if the title is translated literally, "I will praise the Lord of Wisdom."
have
Speaker 5: long drawn comparisons to the Book of Job, and they share enough
Speaker 29: characteristics with that Bible story that it's fairly safe to assume that the Bible story was pollinated by these
Speaker 5: earlier versions. Scholars sometimes refer to those two works as the Sumerian Job and the Babylonian Job, and both of them certainly
Speaker 1: predate the composition of the biblical story. The
earliest
Speaker 43: version of the Sumerian work
dates from
Speaker 22: around 1700 B.C.,
Speaker 22: about seven centuries before the founding of ancient Israel.
The
Speaker 29: Babylonian version is more firmly dated to the reign of King Nazi Muratash
Speaker 22: of the Kassites, who reigned from 1307 to 1282 BC.
The original
Speaker 22: version records
Speaker 8: the lament of Tabu Utu
Bel, a
Speaker 8: prosperous official in the city of Nippur,
And the
Speaker 8: later Babylonian version centers on a wealthy public official named Shubshi-Meshre-Shakhan. In each version
Speaker 10: the man is brought low and lodges a complaint against the injustice of
his suffering. To
Speaker 29: Marduk, king of the gods of Babylon, Shubshi-Meshre-Shakhan sings: "From the day Baal punished me, and the hero Marduk became angry with me,
My
Speaker 29: god rejected me. He disappeared.
Speaker 5: My goddess left. She departed from my side.
The sufferer says that the
Speaker 22: king's courtiers have plotted against him, causing him to lose the king's blessing and with it all of his worldly possessions. He had
been
Speaker 5: reduced to an object of scorn and mockery, and
his days
Speaker 5: were filled with terror and humiliation.
The word
Speaker 5: around town was
Speaker 19: that, obviously, his apparent righteousness was all a ruse. That
he must
Speaker 19: have been living secretly in sin for the gods
Speaker 10: to have abandoned him like this. When
I walked through the
Speaker 10: street, fingers were pointed at me. When I entered the palace, eyes would squint at me in disapproval. My
own city
Speaker 10: glared at me as an enemy. My own country...
was
Speaker 10: hostile to me as if it were foreign. My brother became a stranger. My friend became
Speaker 19: an enemy and a
demon. My
Speaker 19: comrade denounced me furiously. My colleague dirtied his weapon for bloodshed.
My
Speaker 29: best friend slandered
me. My
Speaker 29: own slave openly cursed me in the
assembly. My
Speaker 29: slave girl defamed me before the crowd.
Speaker 19: When an acquaintance saw me, he hid.
My
Speaker 19: own family rejected me as their flesh and blood. It
goes on like that
Speaker 10: for a while. And finally, his torment is multiplied by an affliction of painful and debilitating diseases. On
the second of
Speaker 10: the four tablets, the sufferer mounts a feeble defense of his conduct, saying that his god had treated him as somebody who had lived unrighteously and failed to fulfill his religious duties, but that in fact...
I was
Speaker 19: attentive to prayers and supplications. Prayer was my common sense. Sacrifice my rule.
Finally, he's
Speaker 10: visited in dreams by envoys of the gods who praise him for never cursing his lord. And then on the gods' behalf, they remove his afflictions and restore his place of honor. And that's how the poem ends.
An Akkadian poem says,
Speaker 44: known as the dialogue between a man and his God,
is
Speaker 19: the earliest known theodicy, which is what all of these
Speaker 45: are. Theodicy is a Greek term coined by Leibniz to refer to religious attempts to reconcile God's justice with the
Speaker 19: problem of evil, basically. This Akkadian version is shorter and simpler, but it carries the same tune. A prosperous man is destroyed by painful illness,
and
Speaker 19: the collapse of his social position, he cries out for justice, and is finally restored by the renewed
Speaker 45: attention of his god, who praises his servants' loyalty despite
his suffering. Now
Speaker 19: all of these ancient texts are relatively recent discoveries. The Sumerian version, for example, was translated in the mid-19th
century. So
Speaker 19: it's possible that some elements of the translations were influenced
by
the
Speaker 19: translator's Christian perspective regarding what a story like this is supposed to teach us. Other scholars have independently translated the poems in the years since, but one of the things that happens with texts like these is later translators often begin with the accepted original version as their starting
point and
avoid
Speaker 5: venturing out with two novel interpretations that might invite controversy or just be seen as a challenge or a dig by other translators
and so
Speaker 5: as a result problematic translations can often survive the scrutiny of many eyes for a long time as may be true of a critical passage in the book of Job which we'll discuss later
Speaker 22: but even allowing for that possibility
The
Speaker 22: similarities between all of these poems with each other and with the book of
Speaker 5: Job are to start to ignore, I think. And given the well-documented cultural and demographic interpenetration of these ancient Near Eastern societies,
Speaker 22: and the much later composition date of the biblical story of Job,
which most
Speaker 45: scholars agree is a product of the Jews' time in Babylonian captivity,
Speaker 5: so you're talking 6th century B.C.,
The
Speaker 5: baseline assumption, I think, should be that the basic framework of the story
Speaker 46: was a common possession of all the peoples in the region. That
kind of syncretism
Speaker 19: can be off-putting to more literal-minded Christians who often balk at any suggestion that biblical stories might have been influenced by older, non-biblical sources.
There
Speaker 19: are, for example, several Sumerian and Babylonian myths, all of which almost certainly predate the composition of the biblical book of
Genesis,
Speaker 8: that tell of a universal flood survived by one man and his family who had been warned to build a giant boat to ride the thing out. Tablets
and seals
Speaker 8: from ancient Sumer, Babylon, Elam, and other places depict scenes that
in
Speaker 8: which a woman is leading a male initiate to eat the fruit of a tree with a serpent coiled around
it. Or some
Speaker 8: variation on that theme. You know, the fruit might be a drink, and the serpent might be a god wearing a serpent crown.
But the
Speaker 8: similarities to Eve leading Adam to partake
Speaker 10: of the fruit that she'd eaten at the serpent's urging,
Speaker 5: very hard to deny. Christians...
And
Speaker 5: some Jews, although to be honest, Jews in my experience tend to be more flexible and open-minded regarding the
Speaker 19: literalness of their own texts than many Christians. But those
of them who insist that
Speaker 43: the Old Testament stories are historically
Speaker 5: factual, they usually don't approve of these comparisons. They find ways to argue around them.
Speaker 5: But when it comes to the book of Job, at least, I don't really think that's necessary.
Even
Speaker 47: if you do think of it that way, I don't think it's
necessary.
Speaker 6: One reason not to object to Job's story being a common possession of the ancient Near
East is
Speaker 6: written right
Speaker 10: there in the first verse
of the book.
Speaker 10: "There was a man in the land of Uz whose name
was Job."
Speaker 10: See, Job
Speaker 22: is not a Hebrew name.
And
Speaker 22: scholars best guess at the location of
Speaker 19: the land of Uz puts it in the northwest corner of Arabia, near the Gulf of Aqaba. In
other words,
Speaker 5: not in the Hebrew heartland, because Job was not a Hebrew.
This would be far from the only time
Speaker 5: in the Old Testament that God takes an interest in the fate
of a
Speaker 5: Gentile.
Speaker 5: Abraham very
Speaker 19: early or actually he's still named Abram since the scene depicted in Genesis 14 takes place before the covenant gives him his better known name of Abraham
Speaker 48: Abram pays homage to Melchizedek king of Salem
Speaker 29: and the text says a priest of the most high
and the verses
Speaker 5: that follow make clear that the most high is not some generic title for some other god but is Yahweh
the
Speaker 5: future God of the Israelites. God also commanded
Speaker 35: Jonah to prophesy against Nineveh,
capital city
Speaker 35: of the heathen Assyrian Empire,
in order that
Speaker 35: they might repent
Speaker 8: and turn their hearts to God, which they do.
King David's mother
Speaker 8: was a Moabite. So there are many such cases, which...
to a
Speaker 5: Christian, prefigure God's later expansion of the covenant beyond the confines of Israel out to all the nations.
Okay, so if
Speaker 5: Job is not an Israelite, and the rabbinical consensus is that he was not,
that means he
Speaker 5: was not
Speaker 10: subject to the law handed down through Moses at Mount Sinai. In fact, neither the law nor the history of the Israelites is mentioned or even
Speaker 5: alluded to in the book of
Job.
And
Speaker 5: there's no indication that Job is a convert to the Hebrew religion, or
that he's
Speaker 5: ever heard of the Torah, or of
Speaker 10: anyone named Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, or Moses.
And this, again, is not
Speaker 10: without
Speaker 25: precedent in the Bible. The
fact that
Speaker 25: Melchizedek was called a priest of the Most High, even though neither
Speaker 10: the covenant, nor the law, nor the
priesthood,
had
Speaker 10: yet been created at that time,
it's evidence that
Speaker 10: those are apparently not prerequisites for being in God's service, for Gentiles at least.
The Ninevites did not demonstrate the
Speaker 25: sincerity of their repentance by circumcising themselves or adopting the prohibitions
Speaker 49: and sacrifices demanded by
the law,
And it
Speaker 49: would have made no sense for them
Speaker 50: to do that
Speaker 4: Because those were things required only of the Israelites As a sign of the special task for which they had been designated
And so if Job was
Speaker 4: not under the law
The interesting
Speaker 8: question is, well then what was his religion?
The Bible scholar
Speaker 8: Jack Miles calls it the covenant of Eden Job
had the
Speaker 8: same religion, so to speak
And he had the same religion
As
Speaker 29: the pre-Abrahamic patriarchs, Adam and
Speaker 25: Noah,
as well as Melchizedek. That
Speaker 25: is, he believed in one God who created the universe, that God was good, and that one fulfilled one's duties to him by rendering
Speaker 1: sacrifice and living righteously.
Although it seems very likely
Speaker 25: that the book of Job was a new twist on an old story told by their neighbors for a long time,
Speaker 25: before the Jews ever wrote down their version,
its
Speaker 8: uniqueness is not diminished for having been shared. None of the older
Speaker 1: versions even approached the book of
Job in
Speaker 1: the beauty of its verses, or the depth of its theological ruminations, or the grandeur and ambition
of its vision.
Speaker 7: The book is divided broadly into three parts. The first part we described above.
Speaker 7: It begins with God's wager with the devil, and ends with Job seated in silent suffering
Speaker 25: with his three friends.
The second part is by
Speaker 25: far the longest, taking up most of the book, and consists of Job's laments and his disputations with
Speaker 8: his friends as they try to justify God's behavior toward him, and then finally God's appearance to speak on his own behalf.
The third part
Speaker 8: describes Job's restoration.
And it's
Speaker 8: probably significant that the first and third parts are composed in simple prose While
the
Speaker 11: long middle portion is composed in poetic verse In a meter that is apparently unique to the Hebrew Bible The
implication, I think,
Speaker 8: that we can draw from that Is
that the
Speaker 8: prologue and the epilogue They represent the portions of the story that everybody in those
Speaker 51: days knew
Speaker 51: While the long middle portion is the unique contribution of the Jews.
Speaker 4: It's as if the author was saying, part one. Okay, so you all know the story of the righteous man who was abandoned by God and fell on hard times, right? Part two.
Well, what
Speaker 4: you don't know is what he said after his life came apart. And what God said
Speaker 25: back to him.
And
Speaker 25: finally, you all know what happened. Since he remained faithful, he was restored to his former place of prosperity and honor at the
end. And so,
Speaker 25: in other words, the Book of Job might have been an early example of fanfiction spun off from a well-known story.
Speaker 11: Which, again, I really don't think diminishes it any more than the works of Aeschylus or Sophocles are diminished by their derivation from ancient Greek myths.
Speaker 11: Nowhere in the Old Testament do the authors insist that every word of it records some historical event. And
the presence
Speaker 11: of books like the Song of Solomon are pretty clear indications that the compilers were not very shy about including works that used a literary device to express a profound truth.
There's another aspect
Speaker 5: of the Bible that
pretty much
Speaker 5: everybody disagrees with
me on.
Every
Speaker 29: believing person, anyway. And namely, that's that God changes over the course of the story. To
most
Speaker 10: Christians and Jews, God is infinite.
Meaning that
Speaker 10: there is nothing missing in Him. Nothing that you could add to Him since He's already
Speaker 8: infinite.
God's also perfect. And since
Speaker 8: perfect has nowhere to
Speaker 10: go but down...
God
Speaker 10: cannot possibly change, because change would imply either that he was less than infinite before,
or
Speaker 25: that
Speaker 10: he's less
than
Speaker 25: infinite and perfect now.
The most
Speaker 22: obvious seeming change of God's character takes place between the Old and New Testaments.
And believers
Speaker 8: have ways of arguing their way around even that apparently dramatic change
Speaker 8: But if
Speaker 25: you were just a space alien reading the Bible with no preconceptions whatsoever, and no dog in the hunt saying,
you would think
Speaker 25: that God had seriously mellowed out in the years between Malachi and Matthew. In
fact, many early
Speaker 5: Christians could not reconcile the loving God of the Gospels and the Pauline epistles with the capricious and vengeful God they read about in the Old Testament.
The
Speaker 25: transition was so jarring and so incongruous that,
Speaker 25: that the followers of an important early sect, one that for a time challenged what would become the orthodox view for preeminence,
Speaker 52: decided that Old Testament
Speaker 10: God and New Testament God could not possibly be the same being. But I see God changing even over the course of the Old Testament
itself. I can
Speaker 10: point to examples like the several occasions when God changes his mind about
something,
One of my
Speaker 4: favorites is from the book of Numbers. I don't know if favorite is the right way to put it, but book of Numbers chapter 11. On God's orders, Moses has
led the
Speaker 4: Hebrews out
Speaker 5: of captivity under Pharaoh,
out into
Speaker 5: the desert on their way to the promised land. Well,
pretty soon the
Speaker 5: people are running out of food and water and they
Speaker 10: begin to complain, saying
to Moses
Speaker 10: that, hey, in Egypt at least we had food.
Why did
Speaker 10: you bring us out here just to watch us die of thirst and hunger?
Seems like a fair
Speaker 49: enough question under the circumstances. God did not think so, and it's his opinion that matters
Speaker 4: here. So he sent fire to burn the people up for complaining and killed thousands of them.
He might have
Speaker 49: killed them all, but Moses interceded, and so God relented. But even Moses was a bit annoyed by this outburst.
He
Speaker 25: repeated the question that had just brought God's fiery wrath down on the people, except
Speaker 10: referring to himself. He said, why did you drag me all the way from Midian to Egypt just to lead these people to their deaths in the desert? God
seems to listen to
Speaker 10: Moses, puts away
Speaker 5: his holy
Speaker 10: flamenwerfer, and in a gesture of supreme goodwill, he miraculously sends huge flocks of quail.
to
Speaker 10: drop dead in piles three feet deep all around the
hebrew's camp
Speaker 10: but
Speaker 53: then this is the part that gets me even as the people are eating the first meat they've had in some
Speaker 10: time and without them saying or doing anything since he changed his mind and decided to have mercy
on them
Speaker 5: god changes his mind again decides to kill
him anyway
The people
Speaker 5: spent all day and all
Speaker 10: night and all the next day and gathered the quail, and
they spread
Speaker 10: them out for themselves all around the camp.
While the meat
Speaker 10: was still between their
Speaker 54: teeth, before it was even chewed, the
Speaker 36: anger of the Lord was kindled against the people once again, and the Lord struck the people with a very severe plague.
Numbers 11,
Speaker 55: 32, and 33.
Now
Speaker 34: even here,
early in
Speaker 34: the Old Testament,
The
Speaker 34: change in God's character from the intimate,
Speaker 4: personal deity of the patriarchs into this thundering and capricious lawgiver of the desert, you can't miss it.
Throughout the book
Speaker 4: of
Speaker 8: Genesis, God reveals himself to individuals in a very personal way. He walks with Adam
Speaker 10: in the cool of the evening. He
even takes up
Speaker 10: his needle and thread and makes Adam and Eve some clothes before driving them out of his presence.
To
Speaker 5: Abraham, he appears as a man, speaks with him as a man, enjoys his hospitality as a man. Abraham's grandson, Jacob,
Speaker 10: wrestled with God in the night,
and he
Speaker 10: won. The contest went on all night, even after God dislocated Jacob's hip, causing a permanent limp.
Finally, just before
Speaker 27: first light, God had to implore Jacob, release me, for dawn approaches.
And lest
Speaker 10: anyone claim that God threw the match, Jacob refused. He said, I will not let
you go,
Speaker 10: not unless you
bless me.
Speaker 5: And so God blessed Jacob, and in doing so changed his name to Israel. For you have struggled against God and man,
and have prevailed.
Speaker 5: Now to be sure, the deity that smote Sodom and Gomorrah with divine fire
Speaker 25: Was not revealing his full power level here But under the limited rules of this contest with Jacob There can be really no doubt
Speaker 9: in the text about who came out on top
A little
Speaker 32: later, Jacob and his 12 sons
Speaker 36: I guess
it would
Speaker 36: be 11 of them at this point These are the patriarchs of the tribes of
Speaker 5: Israel They travel as refugees to Egypt during a famine And they find their long-lost brother, the 12th son
well
Speaker 5: established in Egypt, and so they accept an invitation to settle in Pharaoh's territory. And
that's how the
Speaker 5: book of Genesis, the first book of the
Speaker 10: Bible, ends. And
when the
Speaker 10: second book, the book of Exodus, picks up the story, 400 years have passed. And
during
Speaker 5: that time, the Israelites had multiplied in Egypt. The Egyptians were becoming very uneasy about their presence, and so their relationship with Pharaoh took a downturn.
By the time
Speaker 22: God sent Moses to lead them out of Egypt, the people had lost all memory of God's covenant with their ancient ancestors, and they'd taken to the ways of the people around them.
Starting with the
Speaker 5: Exodus story, God is no longer dealing with individual men. Now
he has an
Speaker 5: entire population on his hands.
And like
Speaker 5: a politician who can speak plainly in private, but when he's in front of crowds has to resort to emotive hyperbole and other effects to impress the audience, God no longer appears as a man, as he had to Abraham, but bellows at the multitude from within pillars of smoke and fire. Throughout the book of Genesis, God governed his servants with a very light touch.
From
Speaker 5: Adam, to Noah, to Abraham, down to Joseph, at the end, he expected sacrifice as tribute appropriate to his station,
Speaker 22: but he never actually demanded worship, in the sense we're used to it,
and he
Speaker 22: only demanded their obedience to a few very broad and easy-to-follow rules.
During and after
Speaker 22: the Exodus, Jesus
said,
God
Speaker 5: demands grand displays of public worship, and strict obedience to an elaborate system of regulations governing the personal and social conduct of the Israelites.
And
Speaker 10: yet, his pact with the people is sealed in the manner of
Speaker 32: ancient treaties or business contracts in the ancient
Speaker 21: Near East. And it's made clear at every turn that God will hold up his end
Speaker 21: Which means guaranteeing
Speaker 10: their safety, their prosperity, and their fertility, as long as the people followed
all of his
Speaker 8: rules. In the book of Job, as previously though only briefly in a few Psalms and Proverbs, this quid pro quo relationship
Speaker 5: between God and man is superseded by a demand for unconditional worship, even if God fails to meet his covenantal obligations.
Speaker 4: Nowhere in the Pentateuch, nor in most of the rest of the Bible, is it ever really suggested that man's obligations to serve God would remain in force if the promised rewards were not
Speaker 22: forthcoming, let
alone if
Speaker 22: they were replaced by gratuitously inflicted suffering.
Speaker 36: Yet
this is
Speaker 36: exactly what is expected of Job. Bertrand Russell wrote,
The
Speaker 36: world in which we live can be understood as a result of muddle and accident. But
if it is the
Speaker 10: outcome of a deliberate purpose, the purpose must have been that of a fiend.
Is God a
Speaker 5: fiend? The
first response to a
Speaker 5: question like that is another question. By
what
Speaker 8: standard should God be compared? And
to that
Speaker 8: question I can only think of one answer.
God
Speaker 8: can only be compared to the standards and definitions
Speaker 4: with which he himself has provided us. Unsurprisingly, his definitions of righteousness and justice and the other virtues line up
Speaker 6: pretty well with the definitions we creatures made in his image might come up with on our own.
In any case,
Speaker 10: it's fair to say that God's actions against Job can only be judged as careless at best,
Speaker 10: sadistic at worst and there's no way to justify his behavior by any standard that is comprehensible
to us every time I
Speaker 10: return to the book of Job no matter how many times I've
read it I'm surprised all
Speaker 10: over again by the intensity and
Speaker 32: the urgency of Job's
lament
many
Speaker 4: people are surprised when they read the book because the job we encounter is not the patiently suffering
Speaker 32: martyr of popular memory he is a man screaming accusations against the lord with uncompromising ferocity job's
three friends
Speaker 4: counter his accusations with common answers to the eternal question why do bad things happen to good
Speaker 36: people and good things happen to bad ones they say God is just
His
Speaker 36: universe is orderly. And if things appear
Speaker 10: unjust and disorderly to man, it can only be because there are things to which we are not privy. One
of Job's
Speaker 10: friends asks him, Can an innocent man be punished? Can a good man die in distress? I have seen the plowers of evil reaping the crimes they sowed.
Those twin
Speaker 10: questions...
Speaker 10: "can an innocent man be punished" and "can a good man die in distress" are
Speaker 4: meant rhetorically. The answer to both, as far as Job's friends are concerned, is an unequivocal, obvious, self-evident
Speaker 10: "no." An innocent man cannot be punished. A good man cannot die in distress. God is just, and justice rewards
Speaker 22: righteousness and punishes evil.
Speaker 22: And Job, well, Job might do well to search his heart for the secret sin that has brought this calamity upon him. If
I were
Speaker 36: you, he tells Job, I would pray. I would put my case before God. And
so that's
Speaker 36: exactly what Job does. He
demands a fair
Speaker 10: hearing. He
enters a plea
Speaker 10: of not guilty, and he calls on God to account for his broken promises.
Job's
Speaker 10: demands are often bitter and sarcastic. He says, "Teach me, and I will be silent. Show me where I am wrong. Do honest words offend you?
Are you
Speaker 10: shocked by what I
Speaker 56: have said? Therefore I refuse to be quiet. I will cry out my bitter despair.
Won't
Speaker 10: you even give me time to swallow my spit?
If I
Speaker 10: have sinned,
Speaker 10: What have I done to you, O watcher of men?
Before long, Job's
Speaker 40: second friend, Bildad
Speaker 6: the Shuhite,
the shortest
Speaker 6: man in the Bible, followed only by Nehemiah. Oh gosh.
Speaker 49: Sorry for the Sunday school slash youth group jokes. Anyway,
Bildad
Speaker 36: the Shuhite...
Speaker 36: has heard enough of this kind of talk from Job, and so he
Speaker 10: bitterly reproaches his friend. He says, How long will you go on ranting, filling our ears with this trash?
Does God make
Speaker 10: crooked that which is straight,
or turn
Speaker 10: truth upside down? Your children must have been evil. He punished them for their crimes.
God never
Speaker 10: betrays the innocent, or takes the hand of the wicked.
Now, to
Speaker 10: his credit, Job manages to restrain himself from striking Bildad down on the spot.
But he
Speaker 10: doesn't back down. He says, "How can I prove my innocence? Do I have to beg him for
Speaker 37: mercy? If I testify, will he even answer? Is he even listening
to my
Speaker 37: plea? He's punishing me for nothing. For no reason he has torn my flesh.
No, I
Speaker 37: am guiltless, yet his mouth condemns me, blameless, but his words convict me. He does
Speaker 56: not even care. So I say, he murders both the pure and the
wicked.
Speaker 10: When the plague brings sudden death, he laughs at the anguish of the
Speaker 57: innocent. He hands the earth over to the wicked and blindfolds its judge's eyes. Who does it?
Speaker 57: "If not
he?"
Speaker 58: Mm-hmm. Who
Speaker 32: indeed? The best answer most believers can come up with rings hollow to many other
Speaker 5: people, which does not make it untrue,
to be
Speaker 5: fair. They say, "Well, the standards by which you are attempting to judge God, those were meant to regulate the behavior of man. They have no bearing whatsoever on the behavior of God.
Speaker 5: Normal rules do not apply.
It's hard to answer
Speaker 10: that, but if
God were
Speaker 10: anyone other than God,
there would
Speaker 10: be no
Speaker 5: question of how to judge his behavior towards Job.
In the Old
Speaker 5: Testament, God frequently refers to Israel
Speaker 10: as his wife,
just as
Speaker 10: Jesus describes the church in the New Testament. So let's go with that. Imagine a husband
who
Speaker 5: tortures his loving wife
to
Speaker 5: satisfy his paranoia regarding the unconditionality of her loyalty.
Imagine she
Speaker 10: doesn't retaliate, doesn't even curse her husband,
but only
Speaker 10: weeps and asks for an explanation.
But rather than
Speaker 53: explain himself, he just shouts, I'm twice your size, I could snap your neck with my bare hands. I
pay all
Speaker 56: the bills, and the only reason you have a roof over your head or food to eat is because I give them to you.
Who do you
Speaker 10: think you are to question me?
Would anyone out
Speaker 32: there listening care to raise his voice in defense of that husband? Of course not.
Imagine it's a parent
Speaker 32: behaving this way toward a child, since that's another metaphor
Speaker 5: God often uses to describe his relationship to mankind. Or again, imagine a king.
A king
Speaker 5: gratuitously harms his subjects, in fact his most loyal
Speaker 8: subjects, for the same non-reason. The
gulf separating a
Speaker 25: king from his subjects is much wider than the gulf between husband and wife or parent
Speaker 10: and child. Does
the king's
Speaker 10: greater power and position change the equation
Speaker 5: to mitigate his guilt?
The husband's
Speaker 5: justification, basically,
Speaker 10: was that his greater power relative to his wife meant that she had no valid claim to question his conduct,
and no right to
Speaker 10: expect his behavior to conform to any standard whatsoever. If
we accept this defense
Speaker 25: from the husband even a little bit, then
the same argument
Speaker 25: ought to mitigate the guilt of a king that much more.
After
Speaker 4: all, we judge a man who kills his neighbor more harshly than a king who makes war on his. But
most of us
Speaker 53: would say no. Both the husband and the king are equally, totally, indefensibly guilty. And
I'm bigger
Speaker 10: and more powerful than you is not a justification. It's just a refusal to provide one.
But that, in so many
Speaker 10: words, is the answer that God gives Job.
and
Speaker 10: orthodox readings
Speaker 31: of the Bible do accept this non-explanation as a correct and reasonable response to Job's demands.
During his discussions
Speaker 10: with his friends, Job had, on more than one occasion, evoked a courtroom scene and demanded to cross-examine his accuser. And
he doesn't
Speaker 10: mean the Satan, he means God. If
only I knew
Speaker 10: where I might find him.
Speaker 10: THAT I MIGHT STAND IN HIS PLACE OF DWELLING. I WOULD PRESENT MY CASE BEFORE HIM, AND FILL MY MOUTH WITH ARGUMENTS. I WOULD FIND OUT WHAT ANSWER HE MIGHT GIVE, AND CONSIDER WHAT HE WOULD SAY
TO ME.
Speaker 10: WOULD HE CONTEND WITH ME ONLY BY THE GREATNESS OF HIS POWER? NO! HE WOULD HEAR ME OUT, AND THEN DROP ALL CHARGES AGAINST
ME. FOR
Speaker 10: THERE THE UPRIGHT CAN
Speaker 5: GET A FAIR HEARING,
And I
Speaker 5: would be forever delivered from my judge.
Essentially, what Job
Speaker 10: is saying here is, you know, there must be some mistake.
Because he is
Speaker 10: innocent of whatever it is that has brought this punishment upon
Speaker 36: him.
Job's uprightness was
Speaker 36: established at the beginning of the story, and it is not in question.
What is in
Speaker 5: question is whether his uprightness has anything to do with how God chooses to behave toward him. And
if it
Speaker 5: doesn't, well then what?
Speaker 10: Job certainly thinks it should. And
he didn't
Speaker 10: pull that notion out of a hat.
Half the Old
Speaker 5: Testament consists of God assuring his people that if they do right by him, he'll do right by them.
And
Speaker 25: the other half consists of God warning them of the consequences of failing to meet his expectations. He certainly makes good on that end of the
Speaker 10: bargain when they slip up.
But Job has
Speaker 10: not slipped up.
He's not
Speaker 10: only a good man, but the best man. Upright and blameless, and there is no one like him in the world, says God. If
anybody is within
Speaker 10: his rights to expect God to keep his promises and deal fairly with him,
Speaker 10: It's Job. And remember that God
Speaker 22: himself boasts to the devil of Job's steadfastness after the first round of torture. And
Speaker 10: remember the way he put it. See, he is held fast to his innocence, even after you incited me to ruin him without cause.
Job took the
Speaker 10: massacre of his family and the destruction of his property and his social position with stoic humility
and the destruction of his property.
saying
Speaker 10: that he only had those things because the Lord had provided them, so it was the Lord's prerogative if he wanted to take them back. And
it's only
Speaker 10: when Job has been reduced to a despised, penniless, lonely beggar sitting in the ashes that are all that remain of his house,
mourning
Speaker 5: his murdered family and scratching with a puncture the running sores that cover his body, that Job starts finally asking questions.
Job
Speaker 37: had faith that he would be vindicated You saw this in the last passage He had faith that he would be vindicated If only he could get God to listen If only he could stand before him And prove his
innocence But
Speaker 37: that insistence Cannot Even if it's not intended It can't help but also be an accusation Because if Job is
Speaker 53: innocent Then God is guilty Of unjustly giving
Speaker 10: him over to torture - See
you next year.
This is
Speaker 10: the blasphemy that outrages and alarms Job's three companions, but Job refuses to back down, and eventually reduces
Speaker 11: them to silence, prompting God to make an appearance to
Speaker 4: speak on
his own
Speaker 4: behalf. Someone unfamiliar with the book of Job, but familiar with the rest of the Bible,
writes
You
Speaker 4: might expect
Speaker 27: God to offer Job something by way of explanation, especially at the end, after Job has
Speaker 59: passed the
test. But what
Speaker 59: explanation is there? What explanation could God possibly give?
Speaker 11: Admitting that he'd been duped by the Satan would make him no better than Adam and Eve, whom he cursed
Speaker 56: and barred from his presence, and cursed all of their descendants down to the present
day.
just
Speaker 56: because they fell for the devil's tricks
God could even have
Speaker 8: claimed to have had reasons beyond Job's comprehension for what he had put him through and that would be less satisfying to Job, no doubt but at least has the benefit of being believable
but God
Speaker 8: gives Job nothing, nothing of the
kind and just
Speaker 8: refuses to even take his
Speaker 10: questions seriously
and
In one of
Speaker 10: the psalms, the psalmist asks a good question He sings When I consider your heavens, the work of your hands The moon and the
Speaker 8: stars which you have set in place What
is man that you
Speaker 8: might
Speaker 37: take thought of him Or human beings that you show us any concern Another
way to
Speaker 60: phrase that question might
be
Speaker 60: God, what are you getting out of this relationship? It's pretty
Speaker 4: clear what we get out of it. First and foremost we
get to exist,
Speaker 25: but what
about God?
Speaker 11: A plain reading of the Old Testament makes it seem as though we've been nothing but a profound disappointment and a thorn in his side ever since he shaped us from the dust to the
ground. For
Speaker 8: the first five days of creation, everything went according
to plan.
Speaker 8: As God effortlessly
Speaker 4: spoke the universe into
Speaker 5: existence.
But then
Speaker 5: again, his decision to rest on the seventh day raises, at least by implication, a question about how effortless it was. In any case, on the sixth day, God got around to creating man.
And right
Speaker 5: away, we're told that there's something wrong with him. Small thing, but it says it is not good for God.
Speaker 5: for him to
be alone
Speaker 31: again a minor
Speaker 25: flaw but after five days of God completing task after task and seeing that it was good as it tells us after each task is complete this is the first time in
Speaker 27: creation that anything is judged as being not good
so
Speaker 31: God parades all the animals of the world before Adam so that he can name them
and to
Speaker 31: evaluate whether any of them would make a suitable companion for Adam.
None of the animals
Speaker 5: meet the criteria, so God realizes that Adam needs someone a little more like himself. So
he puts
Speaker 5: Adam to sleep and
Speaker 6: creates Eve from one of his ribs. It did
not take
Speaker 6: long after the seventh day for the humans to find trouble. We
all know this
Speaker 8: story, I assume.
When God
Speaker 8: planted the Garden of Eden, he told Adam and Eve that
Speaker 53: they could eat any fruit or seed from any plant in the place, except
Speaker 10: for one.
Why would he do
Speaker 10: that? Any
parents of
Speaker 10: children out there, would you ever do that? Or
if you did,
Speaker 10: you would know what you were doing, right? Why
would God put
Speaker 10: the tree there at all?
Adam and
Speaker 10: Eve are only about a day old at this point So it seems a bit like leaving a
Speaker 25: child alone with a poison candy bar And telling them not to eat it Actually it's worse, it's like leaving a poison candy bar with a child And then sending an older sibling, already notorious for causing trouble To go convince the child to eat it
So who in that case
Speaker 25: would be responsible if the child did eat
it?
Of the
Speaker 25: three, the parents, the older
Speaker 27: sibling, and the child, I think most of us would say that the child bears the least responsibility,
Speaker 25: followed by the older sibling, the serpent, and that final responsibility would fall on the parents for engineering the whole ridiculous scenario in the
first place.
Speaker 25: Why did God let the devil into his brand new garden to harass his
Speaker 5: newest creations?
The most
Speaker 5: obvious answer is that the serpent and the tree were put there as a test, and it's an explanation that fits well with the rest of the Old Testament
Speaker 25: story, but why? Well, try to see things from God's perspective. Up until
the creation of man, every
Speaker 10: single phenomenon in the whole history of the universe had bent instantly to God's
will,
Speaker 53: operating according
to
Speaker 53: the ordering principles he's worked out from the first
cosmic moment.
Speaker 10: Then one day these little human creatures go off script and start doing their
own thing.
Speaker 27: This has never happened before and so God watches them with interest. He watches as these little troublemakers spread out on the earth because what
else?
Speaker 27: Could be more interesting to a being For whom literally every other thing in the universe Had always been perfectly predictable
Humans build a
Speaker 4: great big tower God decides they're getting a little big for their britches So he kicks it over and confuses their languages To delay us trying it again
Speaker 4: Before long,
Speaker 40: the fascination starts to fade a bit, and God gets tired of their attitude, so he kills off all but a handful of them with a great flood. A
little later, God
Speaker 8: finds a man named Abraham and orders him to kill his only
Speaker 9: son, Isaac.
Why would he do
Speaker 9: that? Well, it's
to see if he
Speaker 5: would do it, I guess.
God's
Speaker 5: doubts regarding Abraham's loyalty were only allayed when Abraham has the knife raised for the killing strike. And only then, at the last moment, God steps
Speaker 32: in and calls it
off. In a
Speaker 32: world of rebellious men, Abraham has proven his obedience.
Although even
Speaker 32: then you wonder if there's a sliver of doubt left in God's mind of whether he
Speaker 5: really would
have done it.
In any
Speaker 5: case, God makes a covenant with Abraham. He promises to look after his line and ensure its prosperity and safety, just so long as his descendants continue to replicate Abraham's mechanical obedience.
But is
Speaker 5: that really what God wants? He can get blind obedience from his angels, or from any of his creatures. The whole reason God
Speaker 25: took such an interest in
us
is
Speaker 25: that we're the only beings in all creation capable of surprising him.
This is made very clear
Speaker 25: in the story of Abraham's grandson, Jacob, which we discussed a little bit ago.
When Jacob
Speaker 8: wrestled with God in the dark of night, and Jacob refused to let him go as dawn approached unless God blessed him, Jacob got his blessing and a new name to
Speaker 11: go with it.
That name, as
Speaker 11: we said, was Israel.
which
Speaker 5: means one who struggles or fights against God.
Think about that. The chosen
Speaker 10: people of God, their very name refers to the fact that they are
Speaker 27: capable of resisting him. Even
if you're an atheist and
Speaker 27: don't believe anything in the Bible, just
from a literary
Speaker 27: perspective, it's an interesting approach for the authors
Speaker 31: to take.
But again,
Speaker 31: just try to see it from God's perspective.
Speaker 34: For all of eternity, up to the creation of Adam, God was alone in the universe. Nothing in existence except him
and his toys.
Speaker 34: Every atom, every molecule, every mineral, vegetable, and animal racing to fulfill his whims as fast as he could conceive
them.
And
Speaker 52: then one day this little creature looks him in the eye and God realizes I'm no longer alone.
What, if
Speaker 52: not that
Speaker 31: creature, could possibly hold his interest? Maybe that's the answer to the psalmist's question.
Speaker 11: Who is man that you might take thought of him, or human beings that you show
us any concern? All this
Speaker 25: places both God and
man,
In
Speaker 25: quite a bind, a sort of catch-22. Man's loyalty is of supreme importance to
God, but
Speaker 25: man's loyalty is only meaningful because we can choose not to give it to him. We can choose to turn
away from him. In a
Speaker 25: recent discussion on Duncan Trussell's
Speaker 11: podcast, I drew on the Marvel comic and TV series Jessica Jones for a comparison.
Speaker 10: Silly?
Maybe.
But
Speaker 10: comics, you know, can do many of the same things as myth if they're done right.
And they
Speaker 5: can be useful for boiling a story down to essentials and then blowing those essentials up to godlike proportions.
And so,
Speaker 5: in Jessica
Jones,
Speaker 4: the primary villain is called the Purple
Speaker 61: Man.
It's called
Speaker 61: that because his wardrobe favors purple suits.
Speaker 61: Well, in the comic book he has purple skin, but Netflix wisely dialed back the weirdness
Speaker 5: when they made
the show.
Speaker 62: Now, some
people
Speaker 5: are naturally skilled at
Speaker 62: manipulating others. We've
Speaker 6: all encountered these people: con men, lawyers, interrogators, cult leaders,
your
Speaker 29: friendly neighborhood malignant narcissists. They all know how to
Speaker 10: subtly alter a person's perception.
Speaker 10: Until the person does what they want without even knowing he's being manipulated.
Well, the Purple Man is a
Speaker 10: portrayal of that
Speaker 8: manipulator personality with the skill turned all the way up to the max setting. His superpower is basically the Jedi mind trick, but with no breaks.
His power is
Speaker 8: absolute and effortless.
If he says
Speaker 8: stop moving, a person will come to a halt and remain there until he starves to death.
Speaker 8: Unless he's given permission by the purple man to get going.
If instead of
Speaker 8: stop moving, he says,
Speaker 11: stay where you are, that person will fight and claw to the death if anybody tries to move him from that spot.
If he
Speaker 8: says, pick
up that hot
Speaker 8: poker and stick it in your eye, no hesitation. The person
Speaker 11: immediately picks it up, puts it in his eye. And if the purple man tells him to do it without screaming, the person will make a sound.
But here's the
Speaker 25: thing.
The
Speaker 25: power is on all the time. It's an automatic response
Speaker 10: to hearing the purple man's voice. He
can't turn it off
Speaker 10: even if
Speaker 8: he wants to. In
the story,
Speaker 8: he's had this power at least since he learned to talk.
At first,
Speaker 10: as a kid, he starts to notice that his parents never say no when he asks for a cookie, and his teachers at school never tell him he's given a wrong answer.
And over
Speaker 10: time, he begins to understand the power he wields.
We can imagine
Speaker 10: the kind of personality that takes shape from those early experiences. He grew
up
Speaker 11: as the spoiled, petulant center of the universe that any child would be if he got literally everything he wanted all the time.
And of course,
Speaker 31: as a catch, he got everything he wanted from
people...
Except
Speaker 10: the one thing he needed most, the freely willed love and care of others, especially his parents.
Once he became aware
Speaker 10: of his gift, he could never trust again that the love or positive feelings of other people were not simply a response to the power he had over them.
Maybe his parents would have
Speaker 32: loved him anyway.
You never
Speaker 32: know for sure.
And so, of
Speaker 32: course, he grows up to be a psychotic supervillain, cycling through supermodel
Speaker 11: sex partners, dining for free in expensive restaurants, and asking bank managers to give him all the money in the vault
Speaker 5: and don't call the police. And
then one day he meets the
Speaker 5: protagonist, Jessica Jones.
Speaker 56: Jessica's superpower, much simpler
and more
Speaker 63: straightforward. She's got superhuman strength.
And so
Speaker 63: Purple Man takes control of her and holds her in thrall as a girlfriend and an enforcer. One
night, the two of them
Speaker 8: are out doing villainous things, and he orders Jessica
Speaker 5: Jones to murder this woman. And for some unexplained reason, Jessica musters a split second of lucidity, and
the spell is
Speaker 5: broken just long enough for her to run away and make her escape.
And
Speaker 10: this is the
Speaker 31: first and only time in Purple Man's entire life that
this has
Speaker 31: happened. So
what would be the contents
Speaker 10: of the Purple Man's mind, given his life experiences?
Because it would be very
Speaker 32: different from ours. You know, personality is, in large part at least, a collection of the habits and
Speaker 10: strategies and compensations that we develop in.
To
Speaker 10: deal with the obstacles and disappointments that come with living in
the world. But
Speaker 31: Purple Man has none of those. He doesn't know
what an obstacle is. He
Speaker 31: doesn't know what it
Speaker 10: is to be told
no or even maybe.
Speaker 10: Every person, Albert Einstein,
Speaker 31: George Patton, Charles Manson, everyone, is nothing but a puppet
to him.
Their
Speaker 31: thoughts and their morals and their identities just pathetically
Speaker 4: fragile and temporary. He could order a mother to throw her child off a cliff and she'd do it without hesitating. So
Speaker 8: what is a mother's
love to this
Speaker 8: guy? He could make Gandhi shoot a baby or Martin
Speaker 10: Luther King give speeches in support of the KKK, so what are your silly human values
to him?
He'd gone
Speaker 31: his entire life without ever having had to convince anyone of anything. During puberty, he wouldn't have
Speaker 8: experienced any adolescent struggles with sex or social status. If he had developed a crush on a girl at school, he
can go to her
Speaker 31: house, order her parents to leave, tell her to take off her clothes, and so on.
If he really liked her and
Speaker 31: wanted her to like him back, he didn't want to play it that way, too bad.
he
Speaker 31: can't turn it off the
Speaker 27: minute he asks will you be my girlfriend the power kicks in and she's just slavishly going along with it
yes i will how could his
Speaker 31: interest in her be sustained under those circumstances
it would
Speaker 31: be impossible
it would really
Speaker 31: be impossible for him to not eventually feel contempt for
her and she
Speaker 25: would just be a robot
And
Speaker 25: you've got an infinite supply of robots, so on bad days, maybe you'd just tell her to stick that hot poker in her eye for some
Speaker 31: entertainment. The
contents of a mind that had
Speaker 31: never had to stop for even a split second to puzzle over how to
Speaker 10: get what he wanted, or
to delay
Speaker 10: gratification for even a moment, that mind would be very different from ours. It
would be a
Speaker 10: mind...
Speaker 10: Occupied solely with generating new desires and new games to play,
Speaker 64: alone with itself and the universe.
The existence is
Speaker 64: a kind of
Speaker 25: solitary confinement.
And if
Speaker 10: you've been in solitary confinement from the
day you were born,
Speaker 10: what would you use as reference points to confirm that you really
even exist?
I could go
Speaker 5: Cartesian, I think, therefore I am, and I seem to be thinking. Fair enough, but we've got thoughts in our dreams. What
makes a
Speaker 8: dream a dream is that the entire dream universe is constructed for our benefit. It's
an
Speaker 5: extension of our own minds, and technically it's all under our control, even if that control is unconscious. Well,
that's how the
Speaker 5: world was for the Purple Man, until Jessica Jones told him no.
Thank you.
And his
Speaker 5: entire existence then crystallized around her,
the only
Speaker 65: other real person in the world.
When you've been
Speaker 25: alone for your entire life,
and never
Speaker 25: suspected that there was anybody else out there, and
suddenly
Speaker 27: you're not alone anymore,
what else is there to
Speaker 27: pay attention to?
What?
the
Speaker 5: writers do a good job of portraying the ambivalence in purple man's character you
know he's
Speaker 11: exactly the psychotic child you would expect of a grown adult being told no for the first time
Speaker 40: in
his life
Speaker 40: and he reacts to jessica's rejection with tantrums threatening her and others to try to force her to say yes as she tries to to hide from
him and
even
Speaker 66: though the very thing he needs from her is her ability to say no. If
she did agree to
Speaker 25: be with him, he would never be sure whether her affection was real or whether she was just being overwhelmed by his power. He
would become
Speaker 32: paranoid, consumed with jealousy,
Speaker 8: and spend his days devising tests to try to discern whether she really loved him.
A
Speaker 8: biblical way to say this would be that Jessica
Speaker 34: Jones was the only
Speaker 32: suitable companion for the purple man. In
the story of
Speaker 32: creation, only Eve, who was taken from the body of man and made in his image, proves to be a suitable companion for Adam. And
only man,
Speaker 5: made in the image of God, could
be a
Speaker 5: suitable companion for God. This
calls up the
Speaker 5: image of a love triangle, and
Speaker 5: And one interpretation that I like of the story of
Speaker 10: the fall of man is that Adam chose to ate the fruit because his wife, Eve, had already eaten it.
She was
Speaker 10: already doomed.
And Adam was faced
Speaker 10: with the decision of either being separated from
her and
Speaker 25: remaining in paradise with God,
or else going with her
Speaker 25: and
Speaker 30: accepting the consequences. And he chose his wife.
Again and
Speaker 10: again throughout the Old Testament, God describes Himself as "jealous."
Speaker 8: The words "jealousy" and "envy" are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same thing. Envy is when you see someone's pretty girlfriend,
Speaker 33: and you wish you had a girlfriend that looked like that. Jealousy is when somebody sees your pretty girlfriend,
and
Speaker 8: you're afraid she might decide to leave you and go with him instead.
Jealousy
Speaker 45: is the fear of loss And
so it's
Speaker 45: a close cousin to paranoia From
the very
Speaker 32: beginning God
is
Speaker 8: devising loyalty tests Putting the serpent and the tree in the garden Ordering Abraham to kill his son The
Speaker 25: countless trials through which the Israelites are put in the desert I mean the whole law is kind of an elaborate test
But
When the
Speaker 5: Israelites inevitably fail his tests, his reactions often resemble nothing so
Speaker 11: much as the outrage of a betrayed husband facing public humiliation as a cuckold. The
Israelites' dalliance
Speaker 5: with foreign gods is frequently compared with fornication, adultery, and prostitution, and
the
Speaker 22: punishments that God threatens are those prescribed for a whore.
Or an
Speaker 22: ancient unfaithful
Speaker 10: wife. God thunders. Besides all your abominations and harlotries. You did not remember the days of your youth. When you were naked and bare and squirming in your blood.
Then it came
Speaker 36: about after all your wickedness. Woe, woe to you, declares the Lord God.
That you
Speaker 36: built yourself a shrine and made yourself a high place in every square.
You
Speaker 36: built yourself a high place at the top of every street and made your beauty abominable. And you spread your legs to every passerby to multiply your harlotry. You
also played
Speaker 36: the whore with the Egyptians,
Speaker 8: your lustful neighbors with huge genitals, and multiplied your harlotry to make me angry. Behold,
now I
Speaker 8: have stretched
Speaker 36: out my hand against you. I delivered you up to the desire of those who hate you.
the
Speaker 36: daughters of the Philistines, who were ashamed of your lewd conduct. Moreover, you played the whore with the Assyrians, because you were not satisfied. You played the whore with them, and still were not satisfied. You also multiplied your harlotry with the land of merchants, Chaldea.
Yet even
Speaker 36: with this, you were not satisfied.
Thus says the
Speaker 36: Lord God,
Speaker 36: because your lewdness was poured out and your nakedness uncovered through your harlotries with your lovers and with all your detestable idols, and because of the blood of your sons which you gave to idols, therefore,
Speaker 10: behold, I will gather all your lovers with whom you took pleasure, even all those whom you loved and all those whom you hated. So
I will
Speaker 10: gather them against you from every direction and expose your nakedness to them that they may gaze upon the filth of your nakedness.
Thus I
Speaker 36: will judge you like women who commit adultery or shed blood are judged.
Speaker 10: And I will bring on you the blood of wrath and jealousy. I will also give you into the hands of your lovers.
Speaker 8: And they will tear down your shrines, demolish your high places, and strip you of your clothing. They will take away your jewels and leave you naked and bare. I will incite a crowd against you, and they will stone you and cut you to pieces with their swords.
They
Speaker 40: will burn your houses with fire and execute judgments on you in the sight of other women. Ezekiel
Speaker 67: 16.
At
Speaker 5: times, God
seems to
Speaker 5: be of two minds with regard to his own actions.
His motives
Speaker 5: are multiple and ambivalent. For example, he frequently...
has
Speaker 10: his prophets pronounced that after Israel has been punished for her misdeeds, he will remember his earlier vow and have compassion
Speaker 32: on the people, relenting in his anger and restoring Israel to his
good graces. In
Speaker 32: the mouth of the prophet Ezekiel, however, God makes no such tender-hearted claims. Recalling the Israelites' time in the desert after Moses led them out of
Egypt,
God
Speaker 32: says that
Speaker 10: the only reason he spared any of them
was that if
Speaker 10: they all died, it would make him look bad to the other nations. He said,
So I said I
Speaker 10: would pour out my wrath on them and spend my anger against them in the wilderness. But I withheld my hand, and for the sake of my name, I did what would keep it from being profaned in the eyes of the nations in whose sight I had brought these people out.
And then, in
Speaker 5: one of the more shocking passages, in a book filled with shocking passages,
Speaker 32: God says this: "So I gave them other laws that were not good, and statutes through which they could not live. I defiled them through their gifts, the sacrifice of every firstborn,
Speaker 10: that I might fill them with horror.
so
Speaker 10: that they would know that I am the Lord.
God seems to be
Speaker 5: saying that he always knew that people would find it impossible to live up to the stringent requirements of the law.
That, in
Speaker 10: fact, the law had not been given to them for guidance, but
as a kind
Speaker 10: of punishment.
The law to which the
Speaker 22: Israelites were subject
Speaker 22: did, in fact, technically
Speaker 5: require families to sacrifice their firstborn child to God. In
this, God was
Speaker 5: demanding no more than what Baal or Molech or other nearby gods required of their subjects. Abraham's easy willingness to offer up Isaac probably reflected the fact that it was standard practice in the Levant in those days.
In
Speaker 5: fact, it would have been strange if God had not required Abraham and his descendants to sacrifice their children. This
is probably how the
Speaker 5: story of Isaac's sacrifice was meant to be understood by the ancient Israelites. Not
that God's
Speaker 5: demand of Abraham was extraordinary,
Speaker 4: because it wasn't in those days, nor that Abraham's obedience was extraordinary,
since even
Speaker 4: the followers of the despised Canaanite gods performed the sacrifice.
What was
Speaker 4: extraordinary...
was God's
Speaker 25: willingness to accept the sacrifice of a ram in Isaac's place.
God never
Speaker 4: renounced his claim to the firstborn children of Israelite families, but
he did show
Speaker 4: mercy by allowing them to offer substitutes, as he had with Abraham.
There are hints,
Speaker 5: though, and even at least one straightforward example, of God requiring men to follow through on sacrificing
Speaker 22: their own children in his name.
In
Speaker 22: Judges chapter 11, the warrior Jephthah is preparing to lead the people in battle against the
Speaker 32: Ammonites. The
Ammonites
Speaker 5: are strong, and victory is uncertain, so Jephthah calls on the Lord for support,
and he
Speaker 5: makes a tragic vow.
Jephthah made a
Speaker 10: vow to the Lord, saying, If you will indeed give the sons of Ammon over into my hand,
then
Speaker 10: it shall be that whatever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me when I return, it shall be the Lord's, and I will offer it up as a burnt offering.
Well, God
Speaker 6: apparently accepts the terms and gives Jephthah a great victory over the Ammonites.
When Jephthah
Speaker 6: returns home from battle,
the first thing
Speaker 3: to rush out the door and greet him is
his
Speaker 22: beloved only daughter.
When
Speaker 22: Jephthah came to his house at Mizpah, behold, his daughter was coming out to meet him with
Speaker 10: tambourines and with dancing. Now
she was
Speaker 10: his one and only child. Besides her, he had no son or daughter. When he saw her, he tore his clothes and said, Alas, my daughter, you have brought me down and devastated me, for I have given my word to the Lord, and I cannot take it back.
So she
Speaker 22: said to him, My father,
my father,
You
Speaker 22: have given your word to the Lord. Therefore, do to me as you have said.
And so Jephthah
Speaker 30: killed the girl and burned her body in the name of the Lord.
Why would God agree to a
Speaker 10: bargain like that?
Why, when
Speaker 10: Jephthah made the offer, did he not reject it out of hand?
Or even refuse to help
Speaker 10: Jephthah for suggesting a blasphemy like that?
Or why did he
Speaker 10: not do as he had done with Abraham and stay Jephthah's hand at the last moment, once it was clear that he was going
Speaker 25: to fulfill the vow? Apologists
have tried to explain
Speaker 25: this troubling story by saying that the loss of his daughter was God's punishment for Jephthah having made such an unacceptable vow. But
I've never found
Speaker 25: that explanation convincing. I don't think it's in the text.
It's
Speaker 11: true, for sure, that throughout most of the rest of the Old Testament, sacrificing your children
Speaker 5: is denounced as an abomination, but Jephthah's sacrifice is not framed that way. It's not remembered just as the catastrophic
Speaker 31: blunder of a thoughtless father. And
if it's not
Speaker 31: remembered as an act of piety and faithfulness, it's not remembered as a sin. It's
not remembered as a sin.
But what did God
Speaker 37: really think of Jephthah's sacrifice? Or of Abraham's willingness
Speaker 27: to
kill his son
Speaker 27: Isaac? Did their compliance satisfy his jealousy,
Speaker 5: but cost them his respect? Again, if God wanted robots,
Speaker 25: he could
have made
Speaker 25: them. And being willing to murder your only child on the capricious whim of a distant deity
is
Speaker 25: about as
Speaker 31: close as you can get to being a robot without being made of metal and silicone.
After Adam and Eve ate
Speaker 10: the forbidden fruit, God said, The man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil.
Doesn't that seem to
Speaker 10: imply that man's stature was actually raised in God's eyes as a result of their disobedience,
Speaker 5: even if he was pissed off about it?
Did he
Speaker 31: really want them to spend all of eternity frolicking around the Garden of Eden, picking fruit and playing fetch
with the
Speaker 68: animals? Maybe he thought that was
what he
Speaker 32: wanted. But if God can experience anger and regret and compassion and jealousy and disappointment,
couldn't he
Speaker 32: also get bored?
And to return to the
Speaker 8: topic at hand, what would have impressed God more?
If Job
Speaker 8: had continued to sing his praises even as he tortured him and massacred his family? Or
if Job stood
Speaker 5: firm in his defiance?
This is the question we're
Speaker 5: left with as we await Job's response after God's awesome outburst from the whirlwind.
I mentioned that
Speaker 5: there's one thing...
Speaker 5: About which most believers disagree with me,
Speaker 22: namely that God changes over the course of the Old Testament.
Even many people
Speaker 10: who might agree that God appears to change often fall back on the argument that it's not God who changes, but just man's perception of God.
And they may be
Speaker 10: right, but
Speaker 25: let's continue a little further down the path of reading the Bible as a work of literature in which the character God is the protagonist.
The earliest
Speaker 5: apparent change in the divine nature happens during the creation story. The first few chapters of Genesis, if taken at face value, seem to give an account
Speaker 11: that differs somewhat from the popular version of the universe's first few days. Genesis 1 describes the creation
Speaker 5: of the universe
from the
Speaker 5: void. Since God did not yet have anyone to hold the flashlight while he worked,
His
Speaker 5: first act as creator was to
Speaker 7: cause light to appear.
The biblical
Speaker 7: phrase, let there be light,
Speaker 49: is much more official and imperious sounding than the original Hebrew. The original Hebrew could be justifiably translated as simply light.
Speaker 32: Interestingly, he doesn't create the sun, moon, or stars to give light on the earth until day four, so I wonder if we're supposed to read something else into Let There Be Light.
Consider the
Speaker 32: creation story in
Speaker 8: the Indian holy text, the
Speaker 5: Brahadaranyaka Upanishad, composed in the 6th or 7th century B.C. In
the beginning,
Speaker 32: there was nothing whatsoever. In the
beginning, there was nothing whatsoever.
Then,
Speaker 32: just as in Genesis, came
Speaker 30: the first act,
and the
Speaker 5: process of creation got underway. The
Speaker 30: first
act
Speaker 5: in the history of the universe, according to this telling, was
the only
Speaker 10: thing that it could be, could only be one thing, and the Upanishad records it as, let me have a mind,
Speaker 32: or let me awaken. All
of these make the same
Speaker 32: point, that creation commenced with
Speaker 11: the emergence of consciousness,
And
Speaker 11: light is probably the most common metaphor we use to refer to consciousness. You
know, the lights
Speaker 3: are on, but nobody's home.
Are we meant to read the
Speaker 25: biblical first act? Let there be light, or light? Not
as the
Speaker 25: emergence of light, per se,
Speaker 11: since the Hebrews knew perfectly well that came from the sun and moon and stars, but
as the emergence
Speaker 11: of
Speaker 5: consciousness.
The Upanishad
Speaker 5: continues,
In the
Speaker 5: beginning,
Speaker 33: there was nothing whatsoever, but only death and hunger covering the whole world, for hunger means death.
Hunger causes death
Speaker 32: coming and going.
It puts every
Speaker 32: creature on the horns of an eternal dilemma. To
kill or
Speaker 32: be killed.
To eat or
Speaker 32: be eaten.
But how could
Speaker 32: the world be covered by death and hunger if there
Speaker 64: was nothing yet existing to die or be hungry? For endless
Speaker 31: ages before the first mind awoke, there was nothing at all happening except sex and death.
Every
Speaker 69: creature devouring every other creature
Speaker 5: that fell within its grasp and the visceral psychology of hunger, as Neumann called
it,
Ruled
Speaker 5: what we might call "consciousness" in the pre-human age.
So maybe
Speaker 26: the beginning in this story doesn't
Speaker 5: refer to the eternity before the world was formed,
but of the
Speaker 5: time before the first consciousness emerged
Speaker 11: to look around and contemplate
it. The
Speaker 11: world we see around us only looks like it does because our nervous system has evolved to perceive
it this way. With no
Speaker 11: one around to behold
it,
The
Speaker 11: universe is
Speaker 26: just energy, infinitesimal particles that don't look like anything until they're processed and rendered by consciousness.
There are no objects. There's neither
Speaker 11: time nor space in the sense that most
Speaker 10: people mean by those terms.
There's no
Speaker 10: cause and effect. These phenomena are all qualities of consciousness. A particular way of perceiving reality...
that
Speaker 11: allows an organism like humans to get what we need to survive and grow from the environment. Wittgenstein
Speaker 6: once wrote, The limits of my language are the limits of my world. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Homo sapiens
Speaker 10: didn't come with complex, elaborate language
Speaker 11: right out of the box.
There was a time,
Speaker 11: presumably,
Speaker 11: Way back when our ancestors were just emerging from apehood.
When humans only
Speaker 11: possessed a single word. It must have been a first word, I guess. Or maybe a few words.
For most of human
Speaker 11: history,
Speaker 31: language developed to help us communicate and cooperate within and among groups. To secure territory.
To avoid
Speaker 11: and fend off danger. And to find and defend food and other resources.
Okay.
An
Speaker 31: enormous amount of cognitive and linguistic development had to take place before
Speaker 4: humans could even begin to ask a simple abstract question, like, how would you feel if you didn't have breakfast this morning?
Ancient languages often
Speaker 4: resort to metaphor because they lack the vocabulary to discuss abstract ideas directly. Even we moderns use a term
Speaker 10: like consciousness –
Speaker 10: Without knowing exactly
Speaker 5: what we mean by it. Or
rather, we
Speaker 5: know what we mean, but we have trouble defining it without resorting to synonyms like mind.
The tabletop game
Speaker 8: taboo is built around the difficulty we have
Speaker 11: describing even everyday words without falling back on synonyms, analogies, and metaphors.
Imagine trying to
Speaker 11: describe the process of evolution.
or the
Speaker 11: physics of the early
Speaker 4: universe, or even ideas like "good" and "bad" without recourse to
Speaker 6: any abstract language or mathematics.
What would you
Speaker 11: do? Most of us would do what the ancients did. We'd try to explain
it by
Speaker 11: means of metaphor and narrative. We'd tell a story. You know, this is the reason myth preceded philosophy. It's the reason we teach children abstract concepts first by telling them stories.
And
Speaker 11: only later by explaining the principles
Speaker 8: embodied in the stories. Chimpanzees have been observed engaging in rudimentary tool use, like sticking a piece of straw down an
Speaker 22: anthill and drawing
Speaker 5: it back once it's covered with tasty ants. And
this is not an
Speaker 5: instinctive behavior.
Speaker 25: Not all chimps do it.
It's a cultural
Speaker 25: trait, for lack of a better term, that is taught to young chimps,
by
Speaker 25: their elders.
Chimps, of
Speaker 10: course, have no verbal language, so their only means of transmitting knowledge is by imitation. The
same is true of very
Speaker 4: young children.
The easiest way to
Speaker 4: teach a kid to tie his shoelaces is to just show him. Tell him to watch and do what you do.
When a child develops
Speaker 5: a sufficient vocabulary, you can use language to supplement his imitative learning.
You
Speaker 8: know, some kids are taught a simple story. Bunny ears, bunny ears, playing by a tree, crisscross the tree, trying to
Speaker 31: catch me. It's a mnemonic crutch for shoelace tying if they can't remember what it is they saw their parents do. Narrative
enables children
Speaker 53: to learn by imitating figures that exist only in their minds. They
learn how to handle fear
Speaker 5: and develop courage and determination.
by
Speaker 5: hearing stories about courageous, determined people who overcame fear.
Research has shown that
Speaker 5: children before the age of about seven
lack the
Speaker 5: cognitive capacity,
and I
Speaker 5: don't just mean the skill or the ability, but the neurological hardware, to work fluently with abstract concepts.
Trying to teach
Speaker 5: them to
Speaker 11: be good and
by way of
Speaker 25: Kant's categorical imperative, would be a wasted effort, obviously, and if you tried to do
Speaker 8: it, you would almost involuntarily start telling them a very short story, like, being good is when you see someone who needs
help, and you stop to help
Speaker 8: them. Some
Speaker 22: lessons can't be taught by imitation, and require more precision than a metaphor
Speaker 5: can provide,
But
Speaker 5: these are rarely relevant
Speaker 25: to a child; in fact, most adults can go through their entire lives and get along just fine without ever having much use for abstract theoretical concepts. Great civilizations were built by men who believed that the sun was
Speaker 5: the wheel of a god's chariot being driven
across the firmament. The
Speaker 5: genius of the Greeks was that they took that giant step
from
Speaker 5: understanding the world through narrative and metaphor, myth, to
trying to
Speaker 5: understand it by means of abstract concepts,
Speaker 31: philosophy. In
that sense, the
Speaker 31: Greeks may have
Speaker 1: been the first adults in history, at
least in the
Speaker 1: world west of Persia.
The biblical creation story
Speaker 5: was written down thousands of years ago,
It was
Speaker 5: based on an
Speaker 32: oral tradition that may have gone back tens or even hundreds of thousands of years. Who
Speaker 8: knows? Back when the human vocabulary consisted solely of terms related to practical
Speaker 4: experience. Those of us in the West whose concept of religious belief is based on Jewish and Christian traditions often struggle with the question of whether ancient pagans really believed
their
Speaker 11: myths.
The
Speaker 11: Greeks could climb Mount Olympus and go see for themselves that Zeus and his court were nowhere to be found.
They certainly
Speaker 34: believed their myths, if belief means that their behavior was shaped by the stories.
But if belief
Speaker 34: is taken to mean that they took the stories literally, I
think it's probably
Speaker 34: doubtful
Speaker 25: that they believed them in that sense.
The core elements
Speaker 25: of most mythologies are...
Speaker 25: Almost unimaginably ancient. They go back far,
Speaker 5: far, far deeper
than the
Speaker 5: records, any of the records we have of them.
And we know that
Speaker 10: because of people around the world who share motifs and elements of these stories that
Speaker 31: are unmistakably related
to
Speaker 31: And being able to go back and say, well, when was the last time these two groups of people had any kind of
Speaker 6: common contact before they went their separate ways?
Greek myths were
Speaker 6: not original to Greece.
They had their template
Speaker 8: among Aryan warrior herdsmen of the South Russian steppe, the womb of nations, whose conquests spawned civilizations from India to Greece, from Persia to Britain.
And.
We know
Speaker 8: the
Speaker 25: myths of these ancient civilizations had a common source because they share similarities which are otherwise inexplicable. There
are myths
Speaker 25: recounting an ancient
Speaker 31: battle between the thunderbolt-wielding king of the gods and an older feminine water dragon or water serpent. And
they're found
Speaker 66: throughout the Northern Hemisphere, pretty much anywhere reached
Speaker 5: by the Proto-Indo-European migrations. Okay.
And so,
Speaker 5: for example, in India, there's the story of Indra, king of the gods, using his lightning bolt to strike
Speaker 11: down the water monster Vritra, who was preventing all the rivers and rains from nourishing the earth.
Greece had the same
Speaker 11: story of lightning-wielding Zeus, destroying the water monster Typhon.
Norse mythology has
Speaker 11: the thunder god Thor in combat against the world serpent Jormungandr.
Jormungandr.
The
Speaker 11: motif is found in Siberia and even across the Bering Strait among some native North American tribes,
most
Speaker 49: notably the Iroquois. And so this last diffusion
Speaker 11: suggests a very ancient origin for this myth, since
the last
Speaker 11: meaningful contact between the peoples of Eurasia and North America predates the last Ice Age.
A similar
Speaker 11: motif is also found in Semitic myths in the Levant and Mesopotamia, suggesting some cross-pollination in the ancient Middle East. This
is interesting,
Speaker 11: but not really surprising, since Indo-European cultures, the Scythians and other steppe peoples, Persians, Hittites, Cretans, ancient Armenians, and others,
They
Speaker 11: interacted through trade and conquest with the region's Semitic peoples long before anybody began to make records of it. In
fact, the
Speaker 11: ancient Armenian homeland was the site of two prehistoric tales from the early chapters of the Book of Genesis.
We find the Babylonian
Speaker 8: god Marduk casting his lightning bolt at the sea dragon Tiamat
and the
Speaker 8: Canaanite thunder god Baal
Speaker 8: doing the same against the serpentine sea god, Yam.
And even in the
Speaker 5: Bible, there are hints of Yahweh's victory over the primordial sea beast, called Rahab, in Job chapter 26, Isaiah chapter 51, and Psalm 89.
While the mythological
Speaker 5: motif I described above is almost certainly an example of cultural diffusion,
there are
Speaker 8: other examples that...
Speaker 8: pending the discovery of yet unknown cultural exchanges, can only be explained by independent parallel
development. In
Speaker 8: linguistics, this phenomenon is called a false cognate, meaning similar words that indicate the same thing in languages that have no known historical connection
to each other. The
Speaker 8: most famous cognate is maybe the most well-known word on Earth,
Speaker 8: And for many of you, it might have been the first
Speaker 6: word you ever spoke. Ma. You know, mother, mama, mum. Ma,
or some
Speaker 6: close variation, such as mama or nana,
refers to
Speaker 6: mother in languages as
Speaker 10: diverse as English and Swahili, crossing boundaries not only of language, but of language
groups. Yeah.
There are a
Speaker 10: few theories why this is
Speaker 32: so, but the simplest and most convincing is that ma is one of the first words that
a human
Speaker 32: infant begins to consistently generate. Ma
is just the
Speaker 32: word that results when you make a sound
Speaker 35: with your lips closed, mm, and then continue making the sound with your
Speaker 71: lips apart, mm, ma, mm, ma.
Speaker 71: "ma-ma-ma-ma."
This became associated
Speaker 35: with the mother because in every ancient culture, mother
Speaker 29: was the infant's constant companion
and the
Speaker 29: infant's primary reference point throughout its early development. At first, that might be kind of counterintuitive. Today, we already have the word
Speaker 25: "ma," so mothers try to teach their babies to call them "mama." But originally, it might have been the other way
around.
Speaker 25: Before humans had a word for mother, the baby's most common babble sound, ma-ma-ma-ma-ma, might have provided it.
The number of languages
Speaker 25: in which this phenomenon is present,
and the
Speaker 25: rich linguistic and
Speaker 11: religious and philosophical traditions that have grown around that word in so many different cultures, indicate that ma is probably one of the most ancient words in the history of human language.
In any
Speaker 5: case, there is a very high likelihood that not only English and Swahili-speaking kids but also children of Paleolithic cave dwellers
Speaker 10: probably
Speaker 6: called their female parent mama or nana. An
infant is not born
Speaker 6: with a self-concept nor
any sense of
Speaker 10: subject-object differentiation.
Or even
Speaker 10: a sense of the world
Speaker 32: being made up of discrete objects. It
has no
Speaker 32: identity. No
sense
Speaker 31: that the world outside is separate from its own being. It
sees and hears
Speaker 31: in the sense
Speaker 10: that its eyes and ears work. But
it doesn't
Speaker 10: know what it's seeing or
Speaker 31: hearing.
The experience of
Speaker 31: one moment has very little connection to the next moment.
Or the
Speaker 72: one that came before it.
The infant has
Speaker 32: no sense of what is worth paying attention to, and what should be
Speaker 11: ignored.
The world of
Speaker 11: the infant begins as a buzzing, flashing chaos with just one anchoring presence to hold on to. The
first separate object
Speaker 25: of which the infant becomes aware is invariably the mother. And
with that
Speaker 25: first recognition of an other...
Speaker 25: The world, which had been an undifferentiated whole, is suddenly torn
Speaker 11: in
two. The
Speaker 11: infant mother dyad is the basis of every human's first
cosmology. Eventually
Speaker 11: the baby learns that the universe is neither its own undifferentiated self,
nor
Speaker 11: the self-mother dyad, but a much more complex arrangement in which mother is just one of countless objects and forces that populate it.
But it takes a
Speaker 11: little while. The Brahadaranyaka Upanishad, mentioned earlier a few moments ago,
seems to
Speaker 11: recount this
Speaker 6: process, I think, in mythological terms.
Immediately after
Speaker 6: the awakening of the divine mind, nothing else had yet been created.
Speaker 6: There's only the mind, and the mind was all there was. And since nothing else yet existed, the
mind had
Speaker 6: nothing to think about, nothing to contemplate,
except itself. But then one day, the
Speaker 31: mind had a thought.
The first thought in
Speaker 31: the history of the universe.
And that
Speaker 31: thought was,
Speaker 73: I,
or I
Speaker 31: am he.
Indeed, what
Speaker 31: else could it be?
There
Speaker 31: was nothing else but himself to think about, and like the baby in the womb, the
Speaker 25: divine mind had presumably floated in unconscious bliss for uncountable eons,
Speaker 5: because time had not yet begun,
before it
Speaker 5: became aware of itself as a locus of experience and will.
This is the moment
Speaker 5: early in the infant's life when,
Speaker 25: in its extremely rudimentary way, the child realizes that it is an individual.
Speaker 25: Everyone's first thought, although they haven't maybe learned the word for it, is "I". As soon as that first thought happened, it immediately gave rise to a second thought. The mind thought,
Speaker 31: "Well, now that I know I exist, what if something happens to me?" The automatic and inevitable consequence
Of
Speaker 31: having a self is fear.
On the heels of this
Speaker 10: second thought followed a third.
Equally
Speaker 5: inevitable and automatic. Which was, wait, I don't have anything to be afraid of. I'm here all alone.
That caused the
Speaker 5: fear to subside, but it was immediately replaced
Speaker 25: by a new feeling.
He was not at
Speaker 10: all happy. Therefore, people to this day are not happy when alone.
He
Speaker 10: desired a companion.
So the
Speaker 10: two immediate results,
Speaker 53: inevitable, automatic, of having a self, a sense of I,
are
Speaker 32: fear and desire.
And it was these impulses which
Speaker 11: caused the divine mind, God, in our Western way of thinking, to create the world.
This is a
Speaker 11: central point in later Indian and especially Buddhist mythology. According to
the
Speaker 31: Upanishad, the desire for a companion was satisfied when he split himself in two and produced a woman, who was simultaneously daughter,
Speaker 11: wife, and mother.
It's the
Speaker 11: story of Genesis, just told as if Adam was not merely an image of the creator, but the creator
Speaker 31: himself. In old
Sanskrit,
Speaker 31: The Indo-European language of ancient India, the root word "ma" means
Speaker 11: "to measure", as in the important Indian cosmological term "maya" which means "to measure forth" or "to measure and mark off the part from
the whole".
Speaker 5: The Sanskrit root "ma" also means "to make", "to create", or "to bring forth".
And Mother becomes
Speaker 8: even more interesting as she continues to develop. From that root Ma we also get Matrix, which is defined as a situation or surrounding substance within which something else
Speaker 10: originates, develops,
or is
Speaker 10: contained. In the typical Bronze Age cosmology, the central religious cult revolved around the
Speaker 11: Goddess as Matrix.
The
Speaker 11: goddess was herself the universe. She was time and space. The matrix within which we all live and breathe and have our being.
The gods
Speaker 11: were secondary.
They existed
Speaker 5: within the same structural matrix as mankind. Just a much more exalted place in the hierarchy. In
ancient
Speaker 11: Egypt, for example, the great sun god Ra, the solar disk,
Speaker 11: "passed through the body of the goddess each night to be reborn again each morning."
Heinrich
Speaker 3: Zimmer, a scholar who specialized in Indian mythology, commented on her manifestation here.
He
Speaker 5: said, "If one inquires to know her ultimate origin,
The
Speaker 5: oldest textual remains and images can carry us back only so far and permit us to say, "Thus she appeared in those early times. So and so she may have been named, and in such and such a
Speaker 8: manner she seems to have been
revered." But
Speaker 8: with that we have come to the end of what can be
said. With
Speaker 8: that we have come to the primitive problem of her comprehension and being. She is the primum mobile, the first beginning, the material matrix,
Out
Speaker 8: of which all comes forth.
Also from ma
Speaker 8: we get mater, which is Latin for mother, as well as matter and material.
The generative
Speaker 8: act of the human mother was seen
as a mere
Speaker 8: shade of the generative act of the earth goddess.
And the
Speaker 25: association of the Feminine Principle with the realm of matter that is of life in the world, in time, in space, the cycle of birth, maturity, death, regeneration, the association of the Feminine Principle with all that, all this, is ancient and widespread, I mean, across the continents. We
shouldn't be
Speaker 25: surprised.
The
Speaker 25: woman is herself the embodiment of that deep, unfathomable mystery of life. Woman is the beating core, the actual main
Speaker 11: event of everything going on
around us. The
Speaker 11: cities that men build, you know, the art we create, the stories we tell, these are decorative shells that we build around the pulsing heart of life, endlessly begetting
life.
The
Speaker 11: nineteenth-century Swiss philologist J.J. Bakhafen
Speaker 5: in his study of Gynocracy in the Ancient World wrote: "The mother is earlier than the son. The feminine has priority, while masculine creativity only
Speaker 10: appears afterward as a secondary phenomenon. Woman comes first, but man becomes. The prime datum is the earth, the basic maternal substance.
Speaker 32: Visible creation proceeds from her womb, and it is only then that the sexes are divided in two.
Only then
Speaker 10: does the masculine form come into being. The first earthly manifestation of masculine power takes the form of the sun.
From the
Speaker 10: sun, we infer the
Speaker 6: father. The existence and nature of the masculine power are only evidenced by the sun.
on
Speaker 6: this rests the subordination of the masculine principle to that of the mother the man appears as creature as effect
Speaker 8: not cause the reverse is true of the mother she comes before the creature appearing as cause the prime giver
Speaker 10: of life and not as an effect
she is not
Speaker 10: to be inferred from the creature but is known in
Speaker 6: her own right in a word the
Speaker 6: The woman first exists as mother, and the man first exists
as
Speaker 10: son. Earlier I mentioned that a mythological motif calling up the image of Adam and Eve, accepting the serpent's gift,
can in fact be found
Speaker 10: in many Near Eastern cultures
Speaker 8: besides that of the Hebrews.
There are
Speaker 8: late Sumerian and Akkadian seals, for example, that are variously arranged to present that same essential
Speaker 63: scene, which we described earlier, either a serpent coiled around a tree full of fruit or a serpent king or serpent
Speaker 11: god in human form with a serpent crown or some other identifier to let you know that that's who he is, handing out a gift, usually a fruit or a goblet of the fruit's juice or wine.
Speaker 5: to a male initiate who is being directed to the serpent's offer by a female attendant
of course we're all
Speaker 11: familiar with the biblical tale of a woman leading a man to eat a piece of fruit at the behest of a serpent but there's an important difference which i'll address shortly
serpents are often
Speaker 3: associated with the moon
in
Speaker 8: world mythologies
there was a native
Speaker 8: american tale in which the primordial
Speaker 4: man forgot to attend a meeting
at
Speaker 4: which the creator was going to choose which of his creatures would live eternally the serpent was there he was
Speaker 25: present to accept the offer and so he acquired from the moon its power to shed its skin as the moon sheds its shadow to become new again on
the sumerian
Speaker 25: seal pictures the
cup being offered by
Speaker 25: the serpent king to the initiate
has the
Speaker 10: symbol of the crescent moon
above it
The
Speaker 10: association of serpent and moon, serpent and woman, woman and moon. Those
Speaker 8: associations appear again and again across the world with prehistoric roots that reach
Speaker 10: back to long before the earliest river civilizations. There's
a figure, a
Speaker 8: Venus, from 20,000 to 27,000 B.C.,
Speaker 8: depicting a rotund female, holding up a
Speaker 11: crescent bullhorn, which is often in many cultures used to symbolize the
Speaker 5: moon for obvious reasons, and it's got 13 marks on
it, and
Speaker 5: she's pointing to her pregnant belly with her other
hand. There are
Speaker 5: 13 lunar cycles
Speaker 10: in a year, and the human female ovulates
Speaker 8: about 13 times in the same
span,
A
Speaker 8: fact which apparently was noticed as far back as the Paleolithic Cultures that
Speaker 4: share the serpent, woman, moon motif Make it quite clear what these symbols
Speaker 8: mean to them
All three are
Speaker 8: symbols of material regeneration
Speaker 10: Representing the seething, pulsing powers of nature The endless birth and death of generations
- Thank you.
Blood
Speaker 22: sacrifice, temple prostitutes, and other
Speaker 11: rites centered on sex and death predominated in the religious life of all of these societies. All
three symbols,
Speaker 61: furthermore, are often associated with water.
Serpents with
Speaker 61: their smooth liquid
Speaker 8: movements are often found in water.
The
Speaker 8: ancients who noticed the correlation between lunar and menstrual cycles would probably have also observed the relationship between the moon and the tides and
Speaker 11: that a woman releases water immediately before she begins the sacred rite of giving birth. So
the mother goddess was the
Speaker 10: supreme being of Bronze Age civilizations before
Speaker 5: they were conquered and wiped out by nomads from the Semitic desert and the Aryan steppe.
The
Speaker 6: conquerors inhabited the cities and towns of their defeated foes. And their contact
Speaker 32: with the provincial village was minimal, as long as their tax payments were consistently forthcoming.
And so as a
Speaker 32: result, the new rulers were able to impose their own system of religion on the population centers. But
shards of
Speaker 32: the older system...
and
Speaker 32: the older symbols were preserved among the peasants scattered about the
Speaker 8: countryside. In
her Prolegamina to
Speaker 8: the Study of Greek Religion, Jane Ellen Harrison makes the case that the
Speaker 5: mystery cults of the Mediterranean were the vestiges of the region's pre-Homeric past.
She talks
Speaker 5: about rites that were not
Speaker 32: performed in the shining Apollonian light of day, as the Greeks would have preferred,
Speaker 32: but at twilight or
Speaker 11: dawn, and not in a mood of celebration, but one of
Speaker 74: dread, foreboding.
Offerings were
Speaker 36: made, always by women,
in a spirit
Speaker 36: of riddance or pacification
to dark
Speaker 32: and indefinite deities that might be temporarily satisfied, maybe,
Speaker 5: but which remain dangerous.
never
Speaker 5: to be brought under control or made subject to human designs.
The beings
Speaker 30: worshipped,
Speaker 32: Harrison wrote,
were not
Speaker 32: rational, human, law-abiding gods, but vague, irrational, mainly
Speaker 33: malevolent spirit things, ghosts and bogeys and the like.
Welcome to life in
Speaker 33: the longhouse. In
one
Speaker 11: Orphic write,
Speaker 11: Offerings of sweet cakes were given to live serpents and the reaction of the serpents to the offering was studied for signs of whether the coming year was going to bring good or evil.
Sacrifices were not offered
Speaker 10: on sunlit hilltops, as with the Olympian cults of classical Greece, but at first or last light in pits dug into the earth.
It's important enough to
Speaker 10: reiterate that the offerings to
Speaker 8: the serpents were always made by women.
Just as
Speaker 8: in the Mesopotamian Seals and the Garden of Eden, it's the woman who's in direct contact with the serpent god. Just
as Eve's
Speaker 8: interaction
Speaker 22: with the serpent began the narrative of biblical history, really, so
did an
Speaker 22: eel come to
Speaker 8: Hina, the moon maiden of Polynesia, to
Speaker 10: make her an offer that would begin their creation story.
So this
Speaker 10: motif traveled well, even out to islands where there were no snakes, and eels were just slotted in there as a replacement. As
I think about it, two common, but not
Speaker 9: universal, but very common
Speaker 10: characteristics of Paleolithic and Neolithic art come to mind. And the first is that images representing women are almost always naked.
Speaker 10: Whether they're statues or
Speaker 8: paintings or anything like that, almost always naked while the images of men are always clothed
or in a
Speaker 8: costume adorned with something. And second, the two-dimensional
Speaker 10: paintings, when they represent humans, are typically of costumed men, while the three-dimensional carvings are usually of women.
the
Speaker 10: meaning of the first point is obvious enough the images of women with ample breasts and hips usually
Speaker 49: and occasionally holding out a breast or pointing to the belly or vulva for viewers who require
Speaker 10: direct instruction I suppose they're nude because a woman whose identity is rooted in the capacity to generate and nourish new life a
woman has
Speaker 10: no need of
Speaker 32: outer vestments
You
Speaker 8: know, of culture, really, to tell her who she is.
She carries
Speaker 8: her own meaning in her body.
She requires no
Speaker 8: induction ceremonies or
Speaker 10: rites of passage. Her first menstruation is a more powerful initiation than any contrived ritual could ever be.
Man, on the other
Speaker 5: hand, we
rely for
Speaker 5: our identity on the construction of symbolic
Speaker 22: social roles.
men
Speaker 22: are pictured as
Speaker 10: costumed because men are nothing without a mask to wear
a woman needs
Speaker 10: no language to articulate her purpose or fashion her identity man cannot do without it
a woman's
Speaker 10: destiny is rooted in her being
while man
Speaker 10: has to fashion his own Oswald Spengler wrote
Speaker 10: Endless becoming is comprehended in the idea of motherhood. Woman as mother is time and is
Speaker 5: destiny. All symbols of time and distance are also symbols of maternity.
Care is
Speaker 5: the root
Speaker 8: feeling of future, and all care is motherly.
When the nomadic
Speaker 8: hunters and herders from the steppe and desert broke out against the Bronze Age
Speaker 5: goddess-worshipping agricultural civilizations, they brought with them their active masculine warrior gods.
These gods
Speaker 5: were not associated with the ever-revolving and ever-recurring cycles of life and
time.
They
Speaker 5: were not
Speaker 31: vague representations of natural forces. They were conscious actors, heroes, and seers in the image of man, battling it out for honor and
Speaker 10: supremacy. And
rather than scratching out
Speaker 10: all memory of the early myths of the defeated peoples, the conquerors retained them,
but they
Speaker 31: did so in an inverted
Speaker 8: form to commemorate their victory, I suppose.
So in
Speaker 8: the pre-biblical
Speaker 10: Mesopotamian representations described above, the liaison between the serpent lord and the woman at the
Speaker 75: foot of his fruit
Speaker 25: tree is not portrayed disapprovingly as it is in the Bible. In the Bible, the serpent tells Eve that she will not
Speaker 5: die if she tries his fruit,
but in
Speaker 5: fact will have her eyes opened and become like God, knowing
Speaker 32: good and evil.
The
Speaker 32: Bible treats this as an elaborate trick by the serpent to bring down a curse upon all
Speaker 5: creation. But
in the
Speaker 5: pre-biblical versions, the serpent's words are taken at face value. That is, it's not a trick. He really is presenting the fruit as a gift. In
the mythology of the
Speaker 5: conquerors,
The
Speaker 5: goddess and her titanic children were transformed into demons
Speaker 8: that had been overcome by their own heroic warrior gods.
And so, as
Speaker 8: noted earlier, at the beginning of time, Hebrew Yahweh slays Leviathan, or Rahab, Babylonian Marduk destroys
Speaker 32: Tiamat, Greek Zeus kills Typhon, and Indian Indra puts an end to Vritra.
In each of
Speaker 30: these,
The
Speaker 30: sea dragon, the feminine sea dragon that is destroyed
Speaker 32: is a vestige of the earlier mythology. Well,
the god
Speaker 32: who
Speaker 11: destroys her is
the hero of
Speaker 11: the new mythology, of the conquerors. Out
of the
Speaker 11: dragon's corpse, the new gods fashioned the world. The
world was
Speaker 11: not grown or given birth. It was
Speaker 75: built. It was
built.
Like an
Speaker 75: artifact. The Chhthonic goddess, previously
Speaker 8: associated reverently with the serpent, was now transformed into a terrifying dragon, or a snake-haired gorgon like Medusa. Or
as we see in the
Speaker 8: biblical
Speaker 11: version of Eve and her serpent friend, into the very source of evil and
Speaker 27: death in the world.
This is our version of
Speaker 27: the story of civilization.
The
Speaker 27: raw energy of nature is
Speaker 10: rationally arranged and made to conform to an order
Speaker 22: hatched
by the human mind. The focus
Speaker 22: of life shifts from nature to culture,
away from the
Speaker 22: voluptuous nude
Speaker 32: female to the consciously contrived world of the symbolically costumed male. And yet...
In the
Speaker 32: examples of Medusa and the Indian goddess Kali, as
well as
Speaker 32: many others, those are the two
Speaker 25: most prominent ones that come
to mind, the
Speaker 25: myths of the conquering heroes carry a surprising ambivalence.
Athena, a
Speaker 25: warrior goddess born not from the loins of a woman but from the forehead of her father Zeus, Athena tells Asclepius how to draw blood from Medusa's corpse and
And
Speaker 25: how blood taken from her right side has the power to kill.
But blood taken
Speaker 25: from her left side has the power to heal and even resurrect from the dead.
Or again, consider
Speaker 32: Kali, wife of the god Shiva.
This is in
Speaker 32: India. Shiva's neck is adorned with a serpent. And Kali's his wife.
And in images of her
Speaker 32: that you'll see universally...
Speaker 32: She
Speaker 25: brings death with one set of her arms,
but she's
Speaker 25: offering a gift of some kind with her other set. And surprisingly, even the Bible is a bit ambivalent on the question of serpents, which you wouldn't think after how it starts.
After the
Speaker 8: incident with Eve, the serpent is cursed by God to go about on its belly below all the other animals and to be the eternal enemy of humankind. But just a short time later,
we
Speaker 8: find Moses wielding, of all things, a serpent staff, which he uses to carry out his most famous miracles.
Once when the
Speaker 8: Israelites begin grumbling at Moses for having led them into an endless desert to die, God sends fiery serpents to bite and kill thousands of them.
Appealing to
Speaker 25: Moses, the people cried out, saying, We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord and against you.
Speaker 25: Now pray unto the Lord, that he might take away the snakes from us.
So Moses
Speaker 25: prayed for the people.
The Lord
Speaker 25: said to
Speaker 5: Moses, Fashion a snake, and put it up on a pole, and it shall come to pass that everyone who is bitten may look upon it and live.
And Moses fashioned
Speaker 75: a snake of bronze and raised it on a pole.
Then when
Speaker 75: anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze
Speaker 11: snake, they lived.
Amen.
That
Speaker 11: bronze serpent on its pole was preserved by the Hebrews And for centuries was an object of worship to them Until it was destroyed in the religious
Speaker 5: revolution of King Hezekiah of Jerusalem Hezekiah removed the high places and smashed the idols And cut down the sacred groves And broke into pieces the
Speaker 36: bronze serpent
Speaker 32: that Moses had made
Speaker 36: For unto
Speaker 32: those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it
and
Speaker 32: he called it Nehushtan.
Speaker 4: Later, in the Christian Gospel of John, Jesus alludes to his crucifixion when he connects himself
to the
Speaker 4: bronze serpent of Moses.
And as Moses
Speaker 32: lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him shall not perish,
but
Speaker 5: have eternal life.
The narrative of
Speaker 8: the Bible
says,
Speaker 8: especially if the Old and New Testaments are taken together, can
be read
Speaker 8: as the gradual development of the idea of the divine
from
Speaker 32: the tribal war god that we find in the Pentateuch into the more complex, much more expansive,
Speaker 10: even infinite god that comes into view later. In
fact, it's
Speaker 10: worth noting that in the chronological last two books of the Old Testament, Ezra and Nehemiah,
God
Speaker 10: does not speak or appear at all the books are pure historical narratives
people
Speaker 25: talk about God but that's it God floats unseen in the background just glimpsed in scraps of dialogue
Speaker 10: from humans who never see him or hear of him anymore
the book of
Speaker 10: Job in fact
is the
Speaker 5: last time God speaks
Speaker 5: directly to man in the Hebrew Bible which means that God's speech to Job was God's final word to man
Speaker 32: if you're a Jew or his final word before making an appearance among us in the flesh if one is a Christian the final
Speaker 30: exchange between Job and God must therefore be considered of utmost importance
so as we
Speaker 76: gear up for the home stretch here
I want to
Speaker 76: restate two thoughts
Speaker 5: that I have mentioned a couple times in this series. The
first is one I
Speaker 5: mentioned just a moment ago, that
I think
Speaker 5: God changes over the course of the Bible.
Speaker 32: And the second is that the book of Job is the pivot on which the rest of the Bible story turns. Taking
those two
Speaker 7: thoughts together, the book of Job is the critical turning point in the transformation of God in the
Speaker 5: Bible.
God's
Speaker 5: speech to Job, as I just said, is the last time God speaks for himself in the Hebrew Bible. It's
worth
Speaker 64: revisiting some of the highlights of the story leading up to God's final message to man. One
of the most striking
Speaker 77: things about the Old Testament is that God, if you read
it
Speaker 21: straight through, God gradually withdraws his presence over the course of the story. Right?
The God
Speaker 32: of Genesis walks in the Garden of Eden. He speaks directly with Adam and Eve. I
mentioned one of my
Speaker 32: favorite little details earlier, how after the fall, when poor Adam and Eve had covered their nakedness
Speaker 25: with leaves, God made them some clothes before throwing them out into the world. It's very intimate, you
Speaker 32: know, kind of sweet, honestly. The
creator of the
Speaker 7: universe says,
You
Speaker 11: know, he probably caused the clothes to appear by snapping his figurative fingers, but I like to picture him taking their measurements and making the cuts and sitting down with his sewing needle.
Either way,
Speaker 11: the God we find in the second book, Exodus, is
Speaker 64: not a God who would ever condescend to making a human's
Speaker 78: undergarments.
The next four books
Speaker 8: tell the story of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt to the Promised Land.
But
Speaker 8: rather than eating and chatting with the
Speaker 32: people, as he had done with Abraham, God appears as a pillar of smoke and fire, and manifests as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
He speaks
Speaker 8: only with Moses.
And from this
Speaker 8: point on, God will communicate with the Israelites only through designated prophets.
Even King David,
Speaker 10: whom we're told the Lord loved like a friend,
Had
Speaker 10: to consult a
Speaker 32: prophet to receive any word from God.
God never came
Speaker 32: to him.
The messages of
Speaker 32: the prophets, as the story goes on, become more and more abstract, more mysterious and symbolic. And the vast majority of people never hear or see God directly.
And
Speaker 32: finally, as I just said, in the chronological last two books of the story, Ezra and Nehemiah, after the Jews have been freed from Babylonian captivity by the
Speaker 30: Persians and allowed to go back and rebuild the second temple in Jerusalem,
in those
Speaker 30: two books, God's just a whispered rumor. His
last direct appearance to a
Speaker 30: human being in the Hebrew Bible comes in the climax to the book of Job.
Speaker 79: after Job calls God
Speaker 32: to the carpet to account for Job's suffering and after Job's friends are unable to sway him from his position God finally shows
Speaker 36: up
and Job is
Speaker 36: taken up into a whirlwind and provided with one of the most spectacular visions
Speaker 32: found in any piece of religious literature ever written the only scene I know that
Speaker 32: really compares with it, is the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, when Krishna reveals
Speaker 30: his ultimate form to Arjuna.
That Indian
Speaker 8: text is actually interesting to hold up next to the Book of Job.
They address
Speaker 8: similar
Speaker 32: questions,
adjusted for
Speaker 32: cultural differences between ancient Hebrews and Indians, and they resolve them in a somewhat similar manner.
The Bhagavad Gita is the
Speaker 36: most famous section of a much larger work, the great epic known as the Mahabharata.
And
Speaker 36: its setting, the Bhagavad Gita's setting,
Speaker 32: is the field of battle just before the climactic confrontation between armies on two sides of a civil war. The
protagonist is
Speaker 32: Arjuna, a great warrior
who is
Speaker 32: struggling with an apparent contradiction in his religious
Speaker 8: duties. On one hand, he is of the Kshatriya class. He's
Speaker 22: a warrior.
He
Speaker 22: has a sacred duty to fulfill his obligation
to fight.
Speaker 22: On the other
hand,
Speaker 31: there are friends and relatives arrayed across the battlefield against him, people he respects and
loves. What
Speaker 5: about his obligations
to them?
Speaker 5: Arjuna concludes that it must be a greater sin to kill his friends and family
than
Speaker 5: to shirk the duties of his caste, and so he lays down his bow and refuses to participate in
Speaker 64: the battle.
Well, his
Speaker 64: chariot driver, who, unbeknownst
Speaker 30: to Arjuna, is actually the god Krishna in human form. You'd have thought the blue skin would have given it away, but hey.
Krishna tries
Speaker 30: to convince Arjuna to fight,
and he tries
Speaker 32: it using the arguments that would have been common answers to the conundrum in those days.
He
Speaker 32: provides the answers Job's friends would have given Arjuna.
Some scholars
Speaker 32: have suggested that the Bhagavad Gita was added to the Mahabharata in order to provide a theological response
Speaker 64: to challenges raised by
Speaker 25: the spread of Buddhism. If
that's true,
Speaker 25: this runs parallel to the suggestion of some Bible scholars that Job's friends were making the standard
Speaker 64: pat arguments commonly provided for God's apparent abandonment of the Jews during the Babylonian exile.
But,
Krishna's
Speaker 64: arguments fail on Arjuna, just as the justifications of Job's friends fail to persuade Job. And after
Speaker 32: the debates run their course and Arjuna remains unconvinced, Krishna reveals his true form, and gives Arjuna an unforgettable divine vision.
In the
Speaker 32: vision, Arjuna sees both armies.
Speaker 32: Rushing into Krishna's gaping mouths and being crushed like grapes. Rivers of their blood running down Krishna's chin. He's shown that human life is
a flash
Speaker 32: in the pan.
And that he need not
Speaker 32: be worried about killing his enemy because everyone on both sides has already been dead a thousand times. And they will die a thousand times more, killed not by Arjuna...
but by
Speaker 32: the God who devours all without discrimination. Whole universes blink in and out of existence in the time it takes Krishna to take a breath.
In the
Speaker 64: end, Arjuna sees that the divine reality whose laws he was attempting to judge is
far beyond
Speaker 64: his comprehension and that the duty of man is to follow his dharma by fulfilling the obligations of the caste into which he was born.
Like
Speaker 64: Arjuna, Job is given a glimpse of ultimate reality.
Speaker 61: Blood-crazed war horses snorting and stomping as they lust for battle.
Speaker 32: Lions tearing apart gazelles. Ravens desperately searching for food as their young starve
in the nest.
Speaker 32: A passage from a piece in a recent Passage Prize book captures
it
Speaker 26: captures it well it's a little overwrought maybe it's very overwrought but i'm giving the author the benefit of the doubt and assuming that
he
Speaker 32: intended it that way quote all health beauty intelligence and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher's yard of unbounded carnage requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages
This
Speaker 32: is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, but
also of
Speaker 32: the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible, preservable trait, and then, still further, of the unavailable horrors that fitness or sheer survival itself predominantly entails.
"'We
Speaker 32: are a minuscule sample of agonized matter "'comprising genetic survival monsters "'fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants "'by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite. "'This is still, perhaps, "'to put an irresponsibly positive spin on the story, "'but it should suffice for our purposes here.'" End quote.
Man is
Speaker 32: condemned. We are all condemned. End.
to
Speaker 32: live out our days in a slaughterhouse. Killing and consuming simply to survive until our own biomass is consumed and repurposed by nature.
This was the
Speaker 30: way of the world for billions of years before humans ever opened our eyes and realized
Speaker 10: what was happening. We love, we seek
meaning,
And not
Speaker 10: only do we have the capacity for these things, but we seem to need them desperately. We wither away without them. And yet, we
know we
Speaker 10: will watch everyone we love die,
or they
Speaker 32: will watch us die. Every meaningful moment of our lives will be forgotten.
and even
Speaker 32: the larger collective projects through which we try to steal a small piece of immortality, they will all eventually pass away. Some
of us have faith that the end
Speaker 32: of this world
Speaker 64: is not the end of everything, but
very few of us
Speaker 22: are blessed with a vision like Job or Arjuna, so our faith always stops short of certainty.
And even
Speaker 32: those who've managed to talk themselves into certainty would probably do well not to dwell on it too much. But
could the universe have been
Speaker 32: constructed in a manner that would have spared us all this? Is
that even
Speaker 80: possible? Job spends much of his airtime insisting that, hell yes, it's possible. It could and should have been made that way.
This is a
Speaker 32: hubristic claim, and God lets Job know it in no uncertain terms. God's speech to Job has been interpreted as a bullying display of raw power meant to intimidate Job into silence. But
I don't read
Speaker 21: it that way. After
all, God
Speaker 21: himself chastises Job's friends for trying to justify his actions by
Speaker 32: invoking terms like justice and virtue. He says that they have spoken falsely of him.
Speaker 32: While his servant Job was the one Who had
Speaker 40: spoken truthfully
And when
Speaker 40: you go back Through chapter after chapter of Job's lament Some of which we read earlier It's
quite an
Speaker 40: admission to say That Job was the one who was speaking truthfully About the nature of God
Speaker 32: See a universe Without change Is one Which does not grow or evolve It's just Dead matter
But
Speaker 32: to us creatures caught in the wheel of time, change is usually experienced as suffering. God can accomplish miracles, but his power is limited by logical contradictions. You know, he can't create a universe that grows and evolves but does not change. Not because he's too weak, but it's just a contradiction in terms. An inventor...
can
Speaker 80: build a robot to serve him but not to love him. To be loved, he must
have a child. But
Speaker 80: children are risky, much riskier
than a robot.
Speaker 32: Children die of leukemia. They stick their fingers in electrical
sockets. They
Speaker 32: can be obnoxious and disappointing
Speaker 32: And despite your best efforts, they often grow up to be very different than you would have
Speaker 81: made them had you been designing a robot.
And even if
Speaker 81: everything goes according to plan, even if everything goes perfectly, your children will watch you die.
And then they may
Speaker 81: go before God to say it isn't fair and shake their fists at the sky and demand to know why he would make a world where such suffering
was not
Speaker 81: only possible,
But mandatory. And what could he say? Except that
Speaker 56: it's not personal.
And if I could spare
Speaker 56: you all this, I would. But, and you'll just have to take my word for this for now, because you won't understand it.
It has to
Speaker 56: be this
Speaker 32: way.
This is very far from
Speaker 32: the moral platitudes offered by Job's friends.
The fact
Speaker 32: that Job merited a response
Speaker 56: at all speaks to the nobility of his stand.
All the usual
Speaker 56: arguments for why bad things happened to good people were tried against him, and none of them worked.
If Job had
Speaker 32: accepted those justifications, and repented of his or his family's alleged sins, God might never have taken notice of
him.
He would
Speaker 5: have been just another guy who'd suffered tragedy, his cry stifled by worldly rationalizations before ever making it to God's ear.
Just by showing up
Speaker 5: to answer the charges against him,
God is
Speaker 5: admitting that Job had a valid claim, a valid point. In
my reading of the
Speaker 57: Bible,
The book of
Speaker 57: Job represents the turning point in God's relationship with man because Job's
Speaker 32: firm stand forced God to recognize just
what it
Speaker 32: was his human creations were going through. God
had never
Speaker 32: watched a parent or a child die. He
had never
Speaker 32: lost a spouse or become paralyzed from the waist down.
he had
Speaker 32: never known hunger or thirst or desire or fear when moses led the israelites out of egypt the people soon found themselves hounded by enemies and on the brink of starvation and as we discussed earlier in their distress some of them spoke
out of fear
Speaker 32: questioning whether they'd made the right decision and god who had never
Speaker 31: known fear never known the
terror
Of
Speaker 31: seeing one's children shriveled from hunger. He slaughtered them for it. He
had no idea what they
Speaker 31: were going through.
Because he
Speaker 31: never experienced anything like it. And he slaughtered them for it. Job forced God,
for the
Speaker 31: first time, to
reckon with
Speaker 31: what his creatures were going through.
With how the
Speaker 32: world looked and felt
Speaker 32: From the inside.
Yet the
Speaker 79: fact remained that the universe could have been created no other way.
So, what could
Speaker 32: God do to reconcile himself to mankind? Well,
I'm a Christian, so
Speaker 32: you know my answer.
He couldn't spare us the
Speaker 32: suffering without reducing us to machines.
But he could come down
Speaker 32: to experience
Speaker 22: it with us.
He
Speaker 22: was humiliated, tortured, and publicly executed, knowing in the depth
Speaker 32: of his being what Job and the rest of mankind had felt when they cried out,
Speaker 56: Father, Father, where are you? Why have you forsaken me?
The traditional
Speaker 5: Anselmian view of the crucifixion sees Jesus as a blood sacrifice that reconciled man to God.
That
Speaker 5: is basically similar to the sacrifices of goats and rams Except one with the power to render all future sacrifices
Speaker 36: unnecessary I
won't argue
Speaker 36: with orthodoxy But I will admit that that view has never sat well with me
The
Speaker 10: crucifixion In
my
Speaker 32: view Reconciles God to man
And allows
Speaker 32: him to say truthfully
I
Speaker 32: understand how you feel. I
Speaker 3: finally understand. And
I'm sorry it
Speaker 3: has to be this way.
But I
Speaker 3: promise you, everything is going to be okay.
Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!
Hallelujah!
Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!
The kingdom
Speaker 84: of this world is begun.
The kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ, and of his Christ. And he shall reign forever and ever.
Speaker 85: Welcome, and we shall make
for you.
Speaker 85: Oh,
oh, oh, oh, oh.
For ever and ever, Alleluia, Alleluia! For ever and ever, Alleluia, Alleluia! In the midst of the earth,
Speaker 86: Alleluia,
Speaker 84: Alleluia,
Alleluia!
Speaker 83: CHOIR
Speaker 88: SINGS
Speaker 88: And
all of us, and we shall be forever and ever, forever and ever, forever and ever, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. Alleluia. Thank you.