Month: January 2022

Week 2  Genesis 36

I read through the chapter at a fairly high rate of speed. That’s my normal practice with lists of names and I read about the Esau family without feeling too invested.
But I slow down when I see this: the sons of Zibeon were Aiah and Anah. This is the Anah who discovered the hot springs in the wilderness when he was grazing his father’s donkeys.
That unexpected detail caught my attention and I checked a word book. Anah’s name came up nine times in this chapter and his claim-to-fame (apart from the hot springs) was that Esau married his daughter Oholibamah.
Thinking about this tidbit on Anah reminded me that sometimes the bible tells me virtually nothing about a person (and sometimes doesn’t tell me a single thing). So I’m left wondering what to do when it doesn’t fill-in any of the blanks for me.
One thing I don’t figure it means is that I’m free to fill them in with whatever I want.
And one thing I do figure it means is that I can – maybe have to – search around looking for answers somewhere else in the bible.
But if I can’t find a legitimate answer that makes sense I’m going to leave it blank.
I could try writing a 300-page novel about Hot Spring Anah but it wouldn’t put me any farther ahead than leaving the blank empty.

Note: quote from Genesis 36:24 (NLT)

Week 2  Psalm 11

Question: How are things going for Israel in psalm 11?
Answer: the foundations of law and order have collapsed.
If the system has broken down into anarchy the next question would be: what-to-do?
A guy who isn’t identified offered some advice to David: fly to the mountains for safety… And bugging-out definitely seems like an instinctive & logical & self-protective plan.
But David’s reaction was counter-instinctive. First he said: I trust in the Lord for protection. Then he said: the Lord still rules from heaven. Which – when the structures of society are collapsing around me – seems – on the surface – naïve and maybe even kind of dumb.
I look around at what’s going on nationally. The country is coming apart and supply chains are breaking and virus is stalking us and we’re drowning in fiat currency. And every day is more news about war injustice poverty violence financial & economic collapse international-conflict income-inequality racial & ethnic-hatred here and everywhere and like that.
The world disintegrates so there’s no room for anything else but its wreckage.
But not from David’s viewpoint. However much the ruins of collapse fill things up he’s seeing a domain that’s uncluttered and free.
David concludes by saying: the Lord is righteous and he loves justice… In this psalm one of the points seems to be that total-looking collapse isn’t as total as it looks.
Which I’ve seen in the bible before. But it’s a hard thing to always stay convinced about.

Note: quotes from Psalm 11:1, 3, 7 (NLT)

Week 2 Genesis 21

Hagar’s two-part story is told in chapter 16 & chapter 21. It’s a pretty selective story – only 30 verses all together – so quite a bit of her life is missing.
But there are similarities between the stories.
In both stories Hagar leaves home – voluntarily the first time but forcibly the second.
In both stories she ends up alone in the desert.
In both stories the angel of the Lord appears.
In both stories the Lord promises that her family line will thrive and succeed.
Anyway what jumped out at me – in the second story – was the Lord’s timing.
Abraham banished Hagar. Exiled her and Ishmael from the safety and security of the family settlement.
Alone and with nowhere to go Hagar just wandered.
She used up all her food. Drank the skin of water.
She and her son were dehydrated and famished and finally just gave up.
With the Grim Reaper vulturing around her Hagar left her boy in the shade of a bush and walked away to let him die.
During all that time the Lord was silent & out of sight.
It was only at the very very end that the Lord finally appeared and saved them. So it ended ok.
I wondered why the Lord didn’t act more quickly but I couldn’t figure out why so I filed the story away. But I’ll keep it in mind: the Lord could have acted more quickly. But he waited and waited ‘til it was almost too late.

Week 1 Genesis 11

Yesterday I looked at family name lists – 32 verses of names in chapter ten and 23 more in chapter eleven.
But sandwiched into the middle of those 55-verses is the story of the Tower of Babel and I notice a couple of things in chapter ten that relate to the Babel story…
Japheth’s family: became the seafaring people in various lands, each tribe with its own language.
Nimrod: built the foundation of his empire in the land of Babylonia, with the cities of Babel, Erech (etc.)…
Descendants of Ham were: identified according to their tribes, languages, territories, and nations.
During Peleg’s lifetime: the people of the world were divided into different language groups and dispersed.
Descendants of Shem were: identified according to their tribes, languages, territories, and nations.
In summary the Noah group of families was: listed nation by nation…the earth was populated with the people of these nations after the Flood.
So it looks like the Tower of Babel story of language & dispersal is out of chronological order because chapter ten talks pretty matter-of-factly about national & tribal & language differences and geographic dispersion. The Babel story in chapter eleven might legitimately fit just as well before chapter ten.
It’s another reminder to me that the writer had his goals in mind and he also had to make editorial decisions about content sequencing. So I take this as a heads-up reminder to not read Genesis like I’m a robot.

Note: quotes from Genesis 10:4, 10, 20, 25, 31, 32 (NLT)

Week 1 Genesis

A list of names is hard to read through and my typical bible-reader’s default is to tell myself the lists aren’t too important. But it’s hard to dispute the importance of two family lists in the first section of Genesis.
One is in chapter five. It starts with Adam & Seth and goes right down to Noah. That chapter ends like this: by the time Noah was 500 years old, he had three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
The names stop right there while the long and riveting story of Noah & the Flood takes up the next four chapters. But once the great aquatic reset is done the family list picks up in chapter 10 right where it left off: this is the history of the families of Shem, Ham, and Japheth (if you took out the Flood story you’d sail directly from SH&J in 5:32 to SH&J in 10:1).
Japheth has four verses in chapter ten listing his family…Ham fifteen…& Shem eleven. You’d get the impression that Ham was important because he’s given more space than his brothers. But that’s not true because the writer comes back to Shem in chapter 11 and works through another seventeen-verses of names that start with Shem and end with Abraham.
It’s pretty normal for a bible reader to dismiss names. But Adam & Noah & Abraham are an impressive line-up. And you figure the writer had his reasons for adding them to the story.

Note: quotes from Genesis 5:32 & 10:1 (NLT)

Week 1 Genesis

A couple of years ago a guy asked me what I made of the story about the Sons of God (SoG) and the Daughters of Men (DoM). I told him I didn’t know.
The main mystery and big question is: who are the SoG? I’m pretty sure the DoM are regular natural biological females. If the SoG are biological males why not just call them Sons of Men? Why use a confusing figure of speech? But what if SoG doesn’t refer to natural men?
And then the reference to Nephilim doesn’t help much. Two bibles I check give the impression that these men-of-renown are contemporaries of the SoG & the DoM – but not really connected to them otherwise. But a third bible makes it sound different. First it calls Nephilim giants (physical giants I think). And then it adds: for whenever the sons of God had intercourse with human women, they gave birth to children who became the heroes mentioned in legends of old. Implying the SoG were not (purely) biological males. Q: if they weren’t human…what exactly were they?
I didn’t have an answer for the guy then and I still don’t. But I do have a kind of bible reader’s rule-of-thumb for passages like this. I tell myself that if I can’t make good sense of content I shouldn’t be satisfied with nonsense. Also…don’t guess. Be willing to walk away. There’s always next time.

Note: quote from Genesis 6:4 (NLT)

Week 1 Psalm 3

I read the third psalm today.
Over on the right-hand side of the page – separated from the text – is the word “Selah”. It’s written after verses 2 & 4 & 8.
The marginal note in my bible says “Selah” might mean: Pause, Crescendo, or Musical interlude. I look at a different bible and it has the word “Interlude” written in place of “Selah”.
Psalm 3 doesn’t say anything about music in the subtitle but I glance down and see that the next six psalms do. David wrote all six and addressed them to the choir director (except psalm seven) – he even specified instrumentation.
If some of the psalms are musical psalms – if they’re lyrics set to music – then me sitting here reading them in silence is different from a Hebrew guy listening to them performed musically. How different? I looked up the lyrics of a song I heard last week (I couldn’t figure out the words the guy was singing). I read the lyrics. How different was reading lyrics from hearing them performed to music? Very.
And what if there’s even more to it than that? What if the “Selah” is tipping me off about something structural…maybe something like verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus? Or what if it’s got a Hebrew rhyme scheme…maybe some equivalent to ABAB? Or what if there’s two-thousand year-old figures of speech?
I came away a nagging feeling that – whatever all I might be getting from my reading – with the musical psalms I’m still missing something.

Week 1  Reading the Psalms

This year I’m aiming at reading one psalm per day.
My general rule in reading-through is to start at page one and keep turning pages. But the psalms face me with two problems.
The first is qualitative. The psalms are tight & focused & concentrated writing. It’s like they ask: why use a hundred words when ten will do? The Psalms are Qualitatively Different from narrative or history. I can’t read them the same way.
I think the reading-comprehension mechanism works like this: I have a (basically predetermined) Personal Absorptive Capacity – meaning that at some point I can’t take in any more. But an added feature is that my Absorptive Capacity is not uniform across different literatures. For example I could read ten chapters in Genesis and (more or less) keep my brain on track. If I try reading ten psalms I’m derailed after the first couple. Psalms are qualitatively different.
My second (and related) concern is quantitative. In my bible the Old Testament is 1334 pages long. Out of those 1334 pages the psalms run from page-763 to page-896. Which means they take up 133 pages – about 9.97001% of my OT. If I’m doing an unmodified consecutive reading plan I might need to read ten psalms in a day. I guess I could read the words but I’d start tailing-off before I’m done. The quantity would kill me.
I can manage the quality & quantity better by reading one psalm per day. [I’m hoping to read everything else in order.]

Week 1 Genesis 2

A long time ago a guy told me Genesis was screwy because it told two different creation stories. So it left me asking which one was the “real” story? Creation Story #1 or Creation Story #2?
I figure the answer is: both. I think it works something like this…
I saw an educational video where a guy was discussing a painting. It’s a picture of four people in a 1940s American diner. The inside is brightly-lit but outside the street is pretty dark & totally empty.
The guy doing the video suddenly focused on a very small detail of a couple sitting together – the left hand of the woman and the right hand of the man. The thing the guy talked about was the distance between the hands and what that meant.
None of the viewers complained that the guy was jerking them around and showing two different pictures. There was the one big picture…and then a smaller explicit detail.
And it looks to me like Creation Story #2 in Genesis 2 is a detail of Creation Story #1 in Genesis 1.
The Genesis writer concludes Creation Story #1 by saying: this is the account of the creation of the heavens and the earth.
It would have helped if he’d then said something like: now I’m going to focus your attention on a smaller detail of this big story. But he didn’t. He left me to dope that one out for myself.

Note: quote from Genesis 2:4 (NLT). The painting is Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks.

Week 1 Genesis 1

The bible maps out the big ideas for a me: my personal life & value…my world…my actions…my destiny and like that.
And right here in verse one it explains where everything and everyone came from: in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Revelation is the last book in the bible so that puts it as far away from Genesis as it could be. However…when I’m reading-through consecutively I finish Revelation 22 on December 31 and the next day – presto! – I’m reading Genesis. They’re about as close as you can get.
So I was reading Revelation a few days ago where John saw 24 elders worshipping the Lord and he heard them say: you are worthy, O Lord our God, to receive glory and honor and power. For you created everything, and it is for your pleasure that they exist and were created.
If I shift the Revelation-pieces around John says that…
a) the Lord created everything
b) because of that his glory-honor-power should be recognized – and
c) therefore he should be worshipped.
Genesis only tells me about point a). But John takes it along to b) & c).
Which is a good reminder…Genesis 1:1 is a fully accurate statement but it’s not a fully developed one.
Which also reminds me that what I read today might not be the one-and-only thing said about a topic.

Note: quotes from Genesis 1:1 & Revelation 4:11 (NLT)