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Week 13 Judges

Yesterday I saw a verse in Psalm 18: as for God, His way is blameless.
It was a nice find since Judges – even though it’s in the bible – can grind on you with its pretty gruesome content.
As for God, His way is perfect helps me take stock. Knowing the Lord’s way is pristine doesn’t clear everything up. It’s more a reminder that wherever I go with the judges’ material my mental landing spot needs to include the idea that the Lord is perfect.
Sure, it’s a simpler thing to say the judges were a bunch of primitive and violent people. Simpler to say the Lord’s way with the judges isn’t perfect.
But if the Lord’s way is perfect I can’t choose the simpler thing. I’m reading these troubling stories, wondering what’s going on, seeing that the Lord is engaged in some way with what’s happening, trying to fit pieces together, and also knowing in advance that the puzzle doesn’t supply a piece that says as for God his way is imperfect.
One of my fundaments is that over time the bible is self-clarifying.
I can read something and be unsure or troubled or offended. Fair enough – as far as I know there’s no law against being unsure or offended.
And so I keep reading along with my hope – and my sometimes loosely-held expectation – that I’ll eventually find some clarity for my troubled-nesses.

Note: Psalm 18:30 is quoted from the NASB and the NLT versions.

Week 12 Judges

I’ve noticed a couple of things about the Spirit of the Lord in my reading.
For one thing, he hasn’t been mentioned very often so far. Maybe only a dozen times in 350 pages.
But now in Judges there’s a bit of a blip – half a dozen references to the Spirit (about once every six pages).
I noticed something else. The Spirit of the Lord does surprising things. It’s no big surprise if the Spirit prompted, say a law-abiding guy to present a good sacrifice, or be an honest neighbour – you know, be a good religious guy. But I’m remembering that weird example of Balaam: the Spirit put words into the seer’s mouth that he didn’t want to say. Kind of ventriloquized him.
And now here in Judges the Spirit is ‘coming upon’ several people – Othniel, Gideon, Jephthah, Samson – overwhelming them with power.
The Spirit is going to get something done, and so uses a person to do it. He chooses Othniel (who seems to be a pretty good guy), he chooses Gideon, and Jephthah (who don’t seem to be pretty good guys), and bafflingly chooses Samson (who strenuously devoted his life to awful decision-making). Good guy? Bad guy? That doesn’t seem to be the issue.
What qualifies someone is that the Spirit just makes a decision – no character-reference needed.

Notes: 1. number estimates are mhj-counts, so are ball-park-accurate only. 2. See Numbers 24-27 on Balaam. 3. See the four judges in Judges 3:10, 6:34, 11:29, and multiple times for Samson in 13:25, 14:6, 14:19 & 15:14.

Week 12 Judges

Now that I know what to look for I wonder how I ever missed it – the repeated pattern in Judges.
The pattern looks like this (I can fill-in-the-blanks with different names and numbers, but the basic pattern stays the same):
The people of Israel turned against the Lord, and so the Lord let them be conquered by king _____, and king _____ oppressed Israel for ___ years. Then Israel prayed to the Lord for help, and the Lord sent _____ to help them out, and _____ defeated king _____. And so Israel had peace and rest for ___ years.
The formula is not too concerned with ground-level-type explanations. For example, the author doesn’t say: the people of Israel had a flawed battle strategy against the Hivites and so they were defeated and subjugated. That might be true, but the writer is more interested in a different type of explanation, a reason that is a different kind of reason, a reason that plays out on a different plane. He’s saying: Israel did evil, and so this happened.

Note: the pattern is spelled out pretty clearly in 2:11-23, and then it’s repeated in chapters 3, 4, 6, 10, 13. It doesn’t describe every judge. All we know about Tola, Jair, Ibzan, Elon, and Abdon is that they lived, they judged, and they died – a couple of verses each. But the pattern does apply to all the marquee judges.

Week 11 Joshua

Joshua’s farewell speech begins on page 348 and runs for about 27-verses.
Soon he’ll be gone, and so he reminds Israel of their story. He begins with Abraham (page 16 in my bible) and selects some key events that bring the audience right up to page 348. Three hundred and thirty-two pages collapsed into eleven verses.
I notice two things about the condensed version.
First, Joshua misses a lot of detail. Included in the quite-a-bit-of-detail-missed is all of the negative history. For nine or ten weeks I’ve been reading numerous examples of Hebrew dereliction. Joshua skips all of them (for example, he just says that Israel lived in the desert for a long time – that’s it). That looks like a pretty intentional omission.
The second thing I notice is that Joshua’s very-positive-history leads up to a point in verse 14. The Lord has really benefited you all he says: therefore honor the Lord and serve him wholeheartedly.
That seems to be it. He’s promoting honoring and serving the Lord wholeheartedly. And it’s a pretty soft sell. No browbeating or haranguing or manipulating or hammering the way you’d think an OT guy might. He just lays out two options: serve the Lord alone. But…if you’re unwilling to serve the Lord, then choose today whom you will serve.
Serve or don’t.
And Israel stands there at a junction with their choice to make.

Note: paraphrased quotes from Joshua 24:14 & 15 (New Living Translation)

Week 11 Joshua

There’s not much time for anything but reading.
Still, I slow down in Joshua 13-19, flipping back and forth between the text and a map at the back of my bible. It’s a big help to me.
I work through Joshua 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17. The chapters take their time wading through the land allotments of Reuben, Gad, and half of Manasseh (all of them east of the river), and then Judah, Ephraim and the other half of Manasseh west of the Jordan. Lots of names in the five chapters and 139 verses (~28 verses per tribe). I check the map and it’s saying pretty clearly: those five tribes got the lion’s share of the land.
In chapters 18 and 19 the other seven tribes straggle in, looking a bit sluggish, tardy, like one of them had dropped the baton. Their land hasn’t even been surveyed. Finally when their lottery is done I look at the map again and see the same big winners: Judah and Joseph’s boys – Ephraim and Manasseh. Powerful, land-rich tribes, prime locations.
I think back to the death-bed forecasts Jacob made to his sons (it’s weeks since I read Genesis 49 but I remember). I take the time to go back and reread it. If you asked me which of those twelve blessings I would choose to be blessed with it would be a toss-up: Judah or Joseph (the others aren’t even close). And now here the two of them are showing up as heavy-weights in the promised land.

 

Week 11 Joshua

Reading through Joshua it’s easy to get knotted-up about the deaths of everyone in the Canaanite states.
I guess there’re lots of people more than just knotted-up, more like angered enough by the wars of conquest to charge the Lord with genocide. And once you’ve got a genocidal deity it’s not a big jump to other conclusions about God – he’s a blood-thirsty, frenzied, murderous tyrant, and like that.
The disadvantage in swinging over to the God-is-an-unrestrained-and-distempered-lunatic view is that it doesn’t work as a stand-alone. It’s appealingly simple, but I have to deal with the bigger problem of juggling Joshua with a raft of other non-maniacal-sounding things the bible says about God.
The thing is, I’m reading through, and so I’m reading everything. I can’t stop and isolate Joshua, can’t forget about what I’ve already read, forget there’s more to come. Can’t highlight or low-light. I have to fit this in with a whole bunch of other things.
Maybe the bible isn’t as streamlined as I’d like it to be, but I can’t change that. I’m reading, trying to make sensible content-management decisions, working toward good conclusions, admitting it to myself when conclusions are standoffish.
It’s great to be clinical. But not so simple to be detached when I’m feeling fearful, and insecure, and distracted, and anxious, and alone, and angry, and confused. Who knows what kind of conclusions are going to surface out of all that?
So I’m wary of my one-dimensional conclusions.

Week 11 Joshua

Rahab lived in Jericho. She knew about Israel. Knew they were camped across the Jordan, about a two-hour walk from her home.
One evening after sundown two men knock on Rahab’s door. Even in the shadows she knows they’re strangers. They have the look of resourceful, dangerous men, but she lets them in.
A citywide search for two men has begun. Rahab figures it out soon enough that she’s harbouring enemies of the state.
By the time the police show up the men are hidden. Rahab pleads ignorance, half-truths them, then lies outright, sending them on a wild goose chase. When the police are gone she divulges valuable intelligence to the men who will sack her city.
She knows Israel’s back-story and she’s afraid: what they’ve done; will do.
Knows why they’ll succeed, and spells it out pretty clearly to the agents: the Lord your God is the supreme God of the heavens above and the earth below.
Something more and bigger than city-state and cultural disloyalty is going on with Rahab. She’s started to shift away from her gods, not so sure any more that the local divinities can complete, impressed with the God of the heavens and the earth.
It wasn’t much to go on, but it was enough.
Enough to save herself and her family.
Jericho will soon be rubble, but by the time the dust settles Rahab will be embraced by a new tribe.

Note: quote from Joshua 2:11 (New Living Translation)

Week 11 Joshua

Moses is gone; a giant is dead.
He’s replaced by Joshua, who isn’t as gigantic, but still an above-average guy. As his book opens the Lord is speaking to him – eight verses of direct communication from the Lord.
One of them is underlined in my bible from when I read it before: study this Book of the Law continually. Meditate on it day and night so you may be sure to obey all that is written in it. Only then will you succeed.
At first, Joshua 1:8 seems like a pretty good verse for an I-plan-to-read-through-the-Bible-in-a-year guy. I’m reading through and so far so good but when I stop and look at the words maybe it’s not so good.
The Lord is kind of piling on. He tells Joshua that to succeed:
He has to study the law.
He has to study it continually.
He has to meditate on the law.
He has to meditate on it day and night.
Not only that, but he has to be sure to obey all that the law says.
I sit looking at the verse, asking myself if I’m doing anything other than reading.
Do all of these things to be successful, it says.
So not really doing any of them isn’t so great.
I sit staring at the text, slowed right down for a bit before I finally decide to move on.

Note: quotation from The New Living Translation.

Week 10 Deuteronomy

In Deuteronomy 33 Moses gives his final blessing to the tribes of Israel.
When I was reading it I remembered Jacob’s just-before-dying farewell to his boys. It seemed like there was an echo between the chapters.
It crossed my mind to go back and compare the two lists. There is a predictive, prophetic element in both of them, and I wondered whether there were any differences.
At least, I wondered until I realized how long that would take. So I stopped wondering.
But one thing I did do was compare to lists for name-order (that was the quickest and easiest comparison).
In Jacob’s list the order is: the six sons of Leah; then the four sons of his not-actual-wives Zilpah & Bilhah; and then finally Rachel’s two boys.
Moses’ list starts like he will follow that format: Jacob’s #1, #2, and #3 are Moses’ #1, #3, and #2 – which is pretty close. But after that Moses heads in a different direction. Also, in Moses’ list everyone except Levi and Joseph only get one or two verses – so there’s added content with those two (Jacob also highlighted Joseph (so he’s a key player in both lists) but he also featured Judah, not Levi). And for some reason Simeon and Issachar are not on Moses’ list. It’s hard to figure why not.
Comparing the lists left me with a couple of questions I didn’t have before, which means I have a couple of questions I don’t have answers for.

Note: the Jacob list is in Genesis 49.

Week 10 Deuteronomy

Moses is talking about prophets in chapter 18. So far not much has been said in the bible about prophets.
So far. I flip back to the table of contents. I see that prophets in the bible are kind of like those little rubber alligators I buy in a dollar store and put in water in my bathtub at bedtime and in the morning the gator fills half the tub. Books written by prophets will eventually take up 379-pages. They’ll expand like alligators. But not so much in Deuteronomy.
That said, Moses does bring up a prophet-issue in 18. And it’s a pragmatic, fully modern question. If a guy comes along and says he’s a prophet how do I know whether to believe him?
Moses lays out a testable, reliability-rule: if a prophet forecasts something and it comes true, then you’ll know he’s legitimate.
Okay, so now I know.
But actually now I don’t know.
And I don’t know because I read Deuteronomy 13 yesterday and remembered that Moses was talking about prophets and he said that if a prophet predicts something that does come true (which means he is a true prophet) and then he also tells me to worship another god (which I know is not true) then he’s not legitimate and his forecast – as true and convincing as it was – doesn’t mean he’s legit.
So I tell myself: proceed with caution. One day’s reading is just one day’s reading.

Note: see Deuteronomy 18:14-22 and 13:1-11