Month: January 2021

Week 5 Exodus

Exodus 35-40 is a block of text that describes the Tabernacle being built, along with all the bits and pieces that were part of it.
I read the whole section at once. I thought I’d try to mentally piece together a picture of the structure as I read about it. But pretty soon I got balled-up in a clutter of boards and curtains and crossbars and rails and fabrics and loops and clasps and linen veils and measurements and points-of-the-compass directions. I’d need a bit more time to sketch it out.
When I finished I looked online for a picture of the tabernacle with its surrounding fence and the furnishings. There were a lot of pictures by different artists but they all looked about the same.
If I had never seen a picture of the tabernacle I don’t know if I’d have drawn a structure like the ones I saw from the description I read. Definitely not in the time I had.
I did come away from the exercise with a sense of the project’s detail & refinement. Precision. Quality. Beauty.
And the writer says that when it was all finished the presence of the Lord filled the place and rested there.

Progress Note: I did an end-of-the-month check to track my reading progress. There are 1189 chapters in the bible. In January I read 120 chapters (Genesis + Exodus + 30 Psalms). So I’ve read 10.09% of the bible in 8.33% of the year.

Week 4 Exodus

The gold calf idolatry in chapter thirty-two is perplexing. The Hebrew tribes had seen the Lord’s plagues in Egypt, been rescued at the Red Sea, been fed almost by magic, were thunderstruck at Mount Sinai, could always see a gigantic pillar of cloud or fire…plus they were specifically told not to worship idols. And in thirty-two they turn from the Lord and worship an idol. Why would they do that?
Last July I was reading Ezekiel’s review of Hebrew history and he mentioned the idols of Egypt (so I wrote myself a note last year to re-read Ezekiel twenty while I was reading Exodus thirty-two this year. Which I just did).
Ezekiel said that after the exodus the Lord told Israel to: get rid of the vile images you have set your eyes on, and do not defile yourselves with the idols of Egypt. That last phrase helped me make some sense of Israel’s leap to idolatry in Exodus thirty-two.
It makes pretty good sense really. Israel had been down in Egyptland for centuries so you figure that social exchanges were happening. A bit here, a bit there. Egyptian recipes, hair styles, idioms, architectural ideas, irrigation technologies, transportation, communication, art, entertainment, political ideology, religion. Idol worship.
Ezekiel says Israel had started worshipping the idols of Egypt.
Which means Exodus thirty-two wasn’t really a shocking turn-around at all. It was more just a doin-what-we-bin-doin return to normal.

Note: quote from Ezekiel 20:7 (NIV)

Week 4 Exodus

Exodus 32 is the story of the golden calf.
It’s a strange story. Right out there on the surface it seems to say that a) the Lord got super angry; b) Moses argued that the Lord shouldn’t be so angry; and c) the Lord cooled-down after Moses talked some sense into him.
It makes the Lord seem a bit loony.
So a good bible reader’s question is: if I’m reading a passage and it makes the Lord seem like a psycho then am I reading the passage the way it’s supposed to be read?
And a follow-up question is: is there another way to read this so that it makes better sense?
I looked back at what the Lord said. He definitely told Moses that he was planning to destroy Israel. And then he said: I will make you, Moses, into a great nation instead of them.
When I read the story I hardly noticed the comment but it’s a pretty gigantic offer the Lord makes to Moses. You can be the replacement guy for Abraham-Isaac-Jacob!
So I wonder if the story is not about Moses the Hero-Negotiator. What if it’s about Moses the man who was being tested by the Lord with a Hugely Tempting Offer? It changes the story quite a bit if it all turns on the question of what was going on in Moses’ soul between the last phrase of verse ten and the first phrase of verse eleven.

Note: quote from Exodus 32:10 (NLT)

Week 4 Exodus

Last year on January 28 I read Exodus 25-31.
I decided to read that seven-chapter block again today.
It’s not the easiest 242-verses to read. It’s a set of instructions for building the tabernacle and everything that goes with it.
I started reading, hoping to latch onto something to help myself stay on track. Then it occurred to me: why not look for all the things the Lord told Moses to build? It seemed like a pretty good and simple Mental-Focussing Idea.
I got a pad of paper & pencil. By the end I’d found: the ark & its cover lamp-stand tabernacle tarpaulins frames crossbars veil screens big-altar curtains utensils incense-altar & washbasin. Mixed in there were directions for making oil for the lamps and spices for the incense and elaborate clothes for the priests.
The whole passage gives you a sense of exactness and precision and specificity and detail and artistry.
This is the place where the Lord will be. It’s a special place.

Note:  The last verse of the section says: the Lord finished speaking with Moses on Mount Sinai.  I’d totally forgotten that all of this section happened on the mountain even though yesterday I read that: Moses disappeared into the cloud as he climbed higher up the mountain. He stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights. This set of instructions in 25-31 was how Moses spent some of his time alone with the Lord. Quotes from Exodus 31:18, 24:18 (NLT).

Week 3 Exodus

Exodus sixteen is the Manna chapter.
The Hebrew tribes had been on the road for several weeks, travelling south and east, in the wilderness, getting hungry, getting angry. To help them out the Lord used his power to make a flaky grain-like substance that covered the ground during the night. Like a kind of light snow. The people had to collect it each morning – specifically: take an omer for each person you have in your tent. My bible footnote says that an omer was about two litres, so two dry litres of this coriander-sized seed per person per day.
A couple of chapters back I read that coming out of Egypt: there were about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children. I worked with 600k as my baseline.
Feeding 600k people 2 litres of manna took 1.2 million litres of manna a day.
Feeding them for one year was 434 million litres.
And since the Hebrews ended up in the desert for forty years the Lord ended up providing 17,360,000,000 litres of manna all together.
The one downside of a miracle like this is its regularity. When you can set your calendar on a miracle it starts to seem like a normal thing, which means a miracle can be tricky at times.
I remind myself that normal events are normal. But normal miracles are still miracles.

Note: quotes from Exodus 16:16, 12:37 (NLT). The numbers are all ball-park, but I figure they’re on the low side.

Week 3 Exodus

Chapters seven to twelve tell the story of the ten plagues of Egypt.
One of the things I hadn’t seen before was that three times Moses is told to speak with Pharaoh in the morning. The Lord said: go to Pharaoh in the morning as he goes down to the river. Stand on the river bank and meet him there. That was before the first plague – blood. Moses didn’t meet Pharaoh in the morning before the second & third plagues – frogs & lice.
Then the Lord told Moses: get up early in the morning and meet Pharaoh as he goes down to the river. That was before the fourth plague – insects. Moses didn’t meet Pharaoh in the morning before the fifth & sixth plagues – pestilence & boils.
Then the Lord told Moses: get up early in the morning. Go to Pharaoh and tell him… That was before the seventh plague – hail. Moses didn’t meet Pharaoh in the morning before the eighth & ninth plagues – locusts & darkness.
It’s hard to know what to make of those morning meetings. And it’s hard to know what to make of Pharaoh getting no advance warning at all before the third, sixth, and ninth plagues. Boom! They just happened.
But it seems like there’s a distinction being made between the first second and third sets of plagues.
What exactly it is I don’t know for sure. It’s too complicated a distinction if you’re just reading through.

Note: quotes from Exodus 7:15, 8:20, 9:13 (NLT)

Week 3 Exodus

By January 16th – two days ago – I knew I was falling behind. You don’t have to be much of a mathematician to know that if a) you need to read 100 chapters in January, and that if b) you’ve only read 36 by the 16th then you aren’t exactly in good shape.
So I wasn’t surprised when I did a mid-month check-up. I spent too much time on Jacob’s trek from Shechem in thirty-five. Ditto for thirty-six – who can afford to spend a day on Esau’s family-tree?
My solution wasn’t a real good one but I did it: on Sunday I read Genesis 37-50.
Fourteen chapters  is a lot to absorb in a day. But if I had to read fourteen all at once then Genesis 37-50 was a Lucky 14. It’s the story of Joseph, one of the great long stories in the bible and one of my favourites.
And finishing Genesis yesterday helped me get back on track.
I read Exodus 1-3 today. It’s a pretty sobering story.
The Egyptian state was unsettled by the rapid growth of the Hebrews so they turned them into slaves as an indirect means of population reduction. Then they legislated abortion/infanticide-at-birth. When babies kept being born, follow-up laws required that boys were to be drowned.
When you brutalize and grind down and use up and exploit and end other peoples’ lives then something is going to happen. I read Exodus last January and I know that something awesomely destructively terrible is going to happen in Egypt.

Week 2 Genesis

Chapter 36 is a list of mostly names of Esau’s clan members.
If you weren’t reading through you’d likely skip the chapter.
There are pencil lines crisscrossing the pages where I’ve tried connecting the names sometime before. Today I get a pad of paper and on the left write Esau-Adah, in the middle Esau-Oholibamah, and on the right Esau-Basemath. Esau’s three wives.
Below that I write Eliphaz (left), J-J-and-K (middle), Reuel (right). Esau’s sons.
Then the thing pyramided out dizzyingly into grandsons and beyond. So I quit writing.
There’s one thing here that I’ll try to keep in mind.
After Isaac died Esau & Jacob put their bad blood behind them and lived in the same territory for a while – brothers, and maybe kind-of friends. Eventually the rangeland couldn’t support all their livestock and so: Esau…went into another land away from his brother Jacob.
Esau moved away, far enough away that his clan pretty much completely disconnected from Jacob’s: so Esau lived in the hill country of Seir; Esau is Edom. My bible map shows that Edom is a big sprawling territory south of the Dead Sea. I’ll try to keep that in mind.
I check my word book and see that Edom is mentioned more than eighty times after Genesis 36. Esau and Edom and Seir are different names for the same group. I remember them from before. They don’t just quietly disappear.
They’re important enough that I’ll try to keep them in mind.

Notes: quotes from Genesis 36:6, 8 (NASB)

Week 2 Genesis

In chapter 35 the Lord told Jacob to leave Shechem and go to Bethel.
I wasn’t sure of the geography so I checked a map in the back of my bible.
Shechem was approximately in the geographic centre of the region. Not far away I found Bethel – about 30 kilometres to the south.
Bethel was where Jacob had his Jacob’s Ladder dream / vision, and now years later the family settled there for a while.
After some period of time the family moved on from Bethel and again headed south toward Bethlehem. On my map Bethlehem looked to be about 30 kilometres south of Bethel. Rachel died in childbirth on that trip. Jacob stopped there to bury the wife he loved most, and put a memorial pillar at her grave.
Eventually the family travelled farther south to the tower of Eder (which I couldn’t find). But as I read on I realized that Jacob was headed for home: and Jacob came to his father Isaac at Mamre of Kiriatharba (that is, Hebron), where Abraham and Isaac had sojourned. Hebron was another 20 kilometres south of Bethlehem.
When I first read the chapter I thought the trip was a more or less continuous journey from Shechem to Hebron. But looking at it again I think it might have taken years. And so after roaming far and wide to the north-east Jacob goes back home to settle in the south country.

Note: quote from Genesis 35:27 (NASB)

Week 2 Genesis

Isaac’s wife Rebekah first showed up in chapter twenty-four. She was a very beautiful young woman and a considerate, helpful and hospitable host to Abraham’s servant. She seemed to be brave and venturesome too, willing to head into an unknown future with an unknown guy from an unknown country. A beautiful, nice, strong, young woman.
There’s a twenty-year gap in the story. Then Rebekah had her twin boys Esau & Jacob. Isaac loved Esau; Rebekah loved Jacob. Maybe not the best situation in a family, but not the worst either – depending on how it played out.
Years later when the boys were grown-up Isaac decided to give the family blessing to Esau. But in the best-known episode in Rebekah’s story she and Jacob colluded in deceiving Isaac – the blind old man is tricked into giving Esau’s blessing to the devious Jacob. It was a cold piece of domestic treachery and a side of Rebekah we didn’t see before showed up – she was dishonest ambitious self-interested unscrupulous conniving.
I think it’s easy to get the sense from the little bit of info the writer tells me that Rebekah started stronger than she finished. But that’s hard to say. Maybe her ambition was there from the beginning.
Either way, in the end she was more than a match for her older husband.
And whatever the quality of their relation was before, it’s hard to imagine it got better after that.