Month: January 2020

Week 3 Genesis 43-Exodus 12

If I rewrote the book of Genesis I would plot the story of Joseph like this: a brutalized Jewish teen rises from abject slavery to great power, then takes revenge on his evil brothers (like a Hebrew-style Count of Monte Cristo).
But the real story is that Joseph has learned the nature of his being sold into slavery all those years ago (all that his brothers know is: we sold Joseph as a slave, he is now the prime minister of Egypt, our days are numbered).
But Joseph tries to draw a more subtle distinction for them. He tells them (these are his words): God sent me here. And he develops that idea even further and says (these are his words, too): it was not you who sent me here, but God.
His brothers maybe just stare at him – what’s that supposed to mean?
Joseph’s first-hand experience is that there are concurrent operations taking place – the bad operations of the bad operators, and also the good operations of a good operator. Bad operations result in bad outcomes, and good operations result in good ones. But not independently. The good ones kind of absorb and disarm the bad, but without eliminating them.
One of the last things Joseph tells his brothers is: you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good. And both of those intentions come true.

Notes: quotations are from Genesis 45:5, 45:8, 50:20 (NASB)

Week 3 Genesis 43-Exodus 12

I always have a good feeling about Genesis 37 because now I’m reading the story of Joseph.
Rating the best stories in the OT is a dumb-but-fun exercise that I’ve done more than once. I think my top five best stories would pretty much have to include Joseph, Ruth, Esther, Daniel, and Jonah. I know, I know…what about Noah, or Abraham, or Jacob, or Moses & Pharaoh, Samuel, David, Elijah, Nehemiah, Job? All I’m saying here is that in this little game of making up a numbered list Joseph is in my top five (probably top three; my top spot is reserved for Esther).
Anyway the Joseph story is one of the very best. His brothers hated him and sold him into slavery. Joseph the slave landed on his feet – he was soon identified as a capable manager by a man who was a capable manger himself. So, the best of a bad situation.
The capable manager had a capable wife who capably managed her own interests. She was powerful, influential, beautiful, feral. She told Joseph she wanted to have sexual intercourse with him and he gave her a principled answer – it’s kind of funny when you read the conversation, the exchange is ludicrous. It’s like the guy standing alone in the public square looking down the barrel of the tank.
It’s a great chapter in Joseph’s story. Maybe not the very best part of the story. But a great story.

Week 2 Genesis 25-42

There’s a weird story in Genesis 38.
Not weird because of the strange cultural practices.
For me it’s weird because I read the story and ask why is it in the bible at all?
Judah was one of Jacob’s sons and one day during sheep-shearing season he happened to pass a sex-worker who was sitting by the Enaim gateway on the road to Timnah. Turned out she was not a temple girl-for-hire but Judah’s own daughter-in-law, who had veiled herself and was working a scam to trick Judah into a sexual transaction because he had backed out of a bargain to let her marry his last living son. It was a dangerous con and Tamar barely escaped with her life. But things panned out. Judah would have been a bit embarrassed I guess, but admitted he was in the wrong. Tamar had Judah’s twins – Perez and Zerah. 
When I see a spicy story like this in the bible I have a gut response: this is stupid. If I’m lucky I pass on through my gut on the way to my head and ask why is this story here?
I don’t find out right now why this story is here because the writer doesn’t tell me. So I put the story on hold. I try to resist saying this is stupid, and I wait for further developments (even though it’s a lot easier to throw it in the Stupid Bin and just move on).

 

Week 2 Genesis 25-42

I’ve never been a woman, but if I was I’d want to be beautiful. Being a beautiful woman must be like winning a lottery. The pharmacy in the mall thinks so – I have to walk through the cosmetic department to get to the toothpaste aisle. My guess is that the retailing philosophy behind the floor plan is: beauty is a more desirable commodity than dental hygiene.
Leah was not beautiful. Her sister Rachel was.
Leah and Rachel were married to the same man, who loved Rachel a lot but didn’t love Leah at all.
Leah had a fully functioning reproductive system; Rachel didn’t.
Leah thought being an unattractive mom would even things out between her and her great-looking infertile sister.
Leah had a son and said now Jacob might love me.
Leah had another son and said God knows that I’m not loved.
Leah had a third son and said maybe now Jacob will be attached to me.
Three boys didn’t help. Jacob didn’t love her – the margin of my bible says that unloved really means hated.
Leah had another baby, but when he was born she said this time I will praise the Lord.
So…it looks like something happened with Leah, something like a reorientation. It looks like Leah had a bit of an interior change.

Note: Thanks to Jamie MacDonald, a local pastor, for a sermon preached last year on Leah (the good ideas are his, gaffs are mine). Story is from Genesis 29.

Week 2 Genesis 25-42 

 
When he wrote about the big three – Abraham-Isaac-Jacob – the author of Genesis had the least to say about Isaac. That’s not to say that Isaac was a lightweight – but he had a stronger start than finish.
When his twins are born one of the first things I see is that Isaac loved his first-born son the most. Number one son was Esau, who grew up to be a flawed, brutish and intemperate man.
It’s not as if the rest of the family was a flawless domestic masterpiece. Rebekah orchestrated an elaborate scam to trick her husband, Jacob lied straight-faced to his dad, and Esau, the fall-guy, predictably began making plans to murder his tricky brother.
Isaac’s life seemed to peak at that point, and from then on settled into a holding pattern, maybe even a slow descent. The last we see of him he’s hurrying Jacob out of the country while Rebekah kisses her favorite son good-bye. A last good-bye. Neither saw Jacob again. And even though Jacob and Esau met years later it was in a pretty formal let’s-let-bygones-be-bygones kind of waltz.
So there’s a bit of tarnish on the end-story of Isaac. The corrosion is sad to see. His life seemed to follow a contrasting trajectory to his son Jacob, who started out weathered with the oxide of great natural strength and ambition, but after quite a bit of buffing polished up pretty well.

Note: the main part of the Isaac story is in Genesis 25:19 – 28:9.

Week 2 Genesis 25-42

Week 1 ended with the story of Abraham’s servant’s search for a wife for Isaac – chapter twenty-four. The job was a biggish one. Abraham was an old man with the grim reaper breathing down his neck, so when he told his servant to go find a wife for Isaac he was also saying find a wife for your new boss. It’s hard to say how apprehensive the servant felt, travelling to another country, looking for an unknown girl, asking her to marry a guy who as far as she knew lived on the moon. It’s a pretty safe bet to say he was concerned.
He prayed about his assignment, asked the Lord to give him success in his mission, and then he did something that makes him – an uneducated guy living in the ancient world, a non-technological and unsophisticated rube – look pretty modern, pretty cagey. He asked for a testable sign.
He would ask a girl for a drink. She would give him water (she might have anyway), but then she would offer to water his camels (an very unlikely offer for her to make). And so he found Rebekah.
The story is a subtle mix of ho-hum day-to-day living: characters making decisions, wondering what to do, trying to be strategic; and then also, humming along quietly in not-so-ho-hum background corridors, other things are going on.

Week 1 Genesis 1-24

Right after the fiery demolition of Sodom and Gomorrah there’s a pretty interesting family story about Lot and his daughters – an incest story. Then before long there’s a story about one of Jacob’s son’s daughters-in-law taking a proactive (and legally dangerous) I’m-going-to-trick-Judah-into-having-sexual-intercourse-because-he-lied-to-me decision.
A good question with both these stories is why did the author include them in the first place? I think a reasonable answer is that the family stories of Abraham are important enough that the author decided his readers needed to know what’s going on with the clan, black sheep included. And as it turns out the children who are born from these desperation-induced sexual encounters turn out to be sizable players in the story of the bloodline. The author thought the back-story was worth including, and maybe even needed to be.

Notes: the Lot story is a Week 1 story from Genesis 19:30-38; the Judah and Tamar story in Genesis 38 comes in Week 2. One of the things I like about the author is that there’s not much finicky tut-tut-ing in these stories. He reports things. Another example of this: in 35:22 he says that Reuben slept with Bilhah, his father’s concubine, and someone told Jacob about it – and then the author just moves right on to list Jacob’s twelve sons [the words are from the NIV bible].

Week 1 Genesis 1-24

When I’m reading through I expect to find reliable things, things I can depend on, fundamental things.
A nice example of a solid thing I can latch onto is in the story of Abraham trying to barter a kind of bottom-dollar deal with the Lord over the preservation or destruction of the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah. His line of reasoning is that the Lord will not destroy what’s worth saving, the Lord will salvage what’s salvageable. And Abraham asks the question: should not the Judge of all the earth do what is right? It’s a statement put in the form of a question. Abraham isn’t looking for an answer. He knows that the judge of all the earth will do what is right.
That’s one of the solid reliables I’ll try to keep in mind as I move forward. A basic rule, a dependable rule is that the Lord does what’s right.
If God takes action then I know that the action is right.
If God takes action and I can’t dope out why it’s right then I still know that the action is right. My problem with doping it out is still a problem for me to work on, but my having a problem with it doesn’t make the action wrong.

Note: Abraham’s question is in Genesis 18:25 and the words are taken from the New Living Translation.

Week 1 Genesis 1-24

Sometimes obvious things aren’t obvious until they are.
A while ago someone tipped me off to something obvious about the family name lists in Genesis. It went like this: right now you think of them as an annoying nuisance, correct? Mm-hmm, I admitted. You ever think about them as the structural key to the whole book? Not exactly, I realized. So that was a bit of a mental jump for me.
It turns things around when I think that if, when the author uses the expression ‘this is the history of’ and then gives a list of names, and does that nine times through the book, using up about 180 of his 1533 verses, taking up roughly 12% of the book, and being a smart enough author to know that reading a list of names is not as intriguing as the story of Joseph’s rise to power in Egypt, then maybe he is saying something like I’m tracing this bloodline of Adam, Noah, Shem, Terah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob because this family line is an important one.

Note: the formula phrase ‘this is the history of’ is used in Genesis 5:1 6:9 10:1 11:10 11:27 25:12 25:19 36:1 and 37:2

Week 1 Genesis 1-24

Reading through means reading everything.
If I don’t read everything, if I don’t read the names, then I didn’t read through.
There’s a bit of a technique to reading names. I think of it like oil thinning slickly over the surface of a hot pan. I shimmer across the pages’ surface, glancing at unrecognizable names, roll fleetingly over clusters of letters and slide over the black markings on the page.
I put a credit card under the line of names and draw it down the page steadily, quickly enough to only let names register on my eyes, not sounding them out, not concerned with pronunciation. Ashkenaz and Riphath and Togarmah slip across my line of vision, meaningless names. I try to stay in focus. I notice a narrative bit: Nimrod was a mighty hunter before God. I see tribal names: Jebusites, Amorites, Girgashites. Family land holdings are geographically located with vague directions, as though the writer figured the reader ought to know where Mesha is in relation to Sephar.
Reading slickly I remember almost none of it. I’m not trying to remember; this isn’t a memorization exercise. I’m reading to read through a certain type of written material, using a reading technique I won’t use in other places.
I’ve just read Genesis 10, the family list of Noah, read it quickly, like hot oil, its surface now superficially filmed over.

Note: MHJ estimate: if Genesis 10 takes me more than 2.5 minutes to read it’s taking too long.