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Week 13 I Samuel

Let’s pretend a guy took an Old Testament and tore it up into 39 bundles of pages.
But he did it carefully, splitting the binding with a razor so that each bundle of pages ended up being exactly one OT book.
The guy took 39 manila envelopes and put one bundle in each of them. Then he licked and sealed them.
Let’s pretend the guy hired a pilot.
Then he told 39 of us to go stand in the playing fields up by the Leisure Centre.
Before very long the small plane buzzed over us and the guy dumped the 39 brown envelopes, dark rectangles tumbling out of a blue sky.
Each of us ran to grab one.
So the question is… when I open my envelope and see that I have I Samuel will I be:
     Really Happy;
     Pretty Disappointed; or
     Somewhere in between?
Answer: I can tell you that if I got the I Samuel envelope I’d be pretty pleased – maybe even Top Ten-pleased – especially if the manila envelope pretend-guy had told me that’s all I could read for the next month.
I Samuel has a bunch of really good content. For me it’s a good-fortune-read to close out the first-quarter of 2020.

Note: Whoever got the Psalms envelope would be gloating, I guess. Jeremiah, Genesis, and Deuteronomy would also be top-enders for me. I don’t figure I’d be high-five-ing anyone if I got Song of Solomon, or Obadiah, or Judges.

Week 13 Psalm 25

Yesterday I read a psalm that just came right out and said: good and upright is the Lord.
Since I had just read the last three chapters of Judges I sat thinking about those two different things I’d read back-to-back.
I thought back to an old memory I had from when I visited Victoria in British Columbia. It was an early evening in late summer and the heat was going out of the day and I was walking along Government Street and saw a crowd on the sidewalk leaning on the iron railing, looking down. Across the inner harbour the sun was setting but that’s not what they were watching. I stopped and looked over the edge with them. At the bottom of the stone-block wall and out toward the quay a man was standing semi-circled by people. He was a juggler. We all stood watching him juggle balls, and bowling pins, and burning torches. It was entertaining, even kind of mesmerizing to see him keeping things in the air. At the end he started up two chain saws and juggled those too. It was pretty amazing to watch and you wondered how he could do it.
Yesterday I sat with my good memory of the juggler on the Victoria quayside and thought about how hard it was to keep different things in the air.

Note: Psalm 25:8 (NASB version). See Judges 19-21 for the violent-Levite story.

Week 13 Ruth

Ruth is one of the great stories in the bible.
Plus, it’s a really nice story – a kind of consolation story after reading the mostly dark, violent, and (for me) kind of depressing book of Judges.
Couple of things I noticed.
First, Ruth is not an Israelite woman. But she migrates and in the end marries into the tribe of Judah – a bit like Rahab. Israel is exclusive. But some outsiders are let in.
A second thing is the family connections that show up at the end.
Boaz – a wealthy Israelite and a good-guy – marries Ruth – a poor Moabite widow and a quality-gal – and they have a son named Obed. Obed will have a son Jesse, and a grandson David (so a famous name appears).
But chapter four also gives us the genealogy going backwards from Boaz: Salmon, Nahshon, Amminadab, Ram, Hezron, and Perez.
This is interesting because in the second-week of January, back in Genesis 38, I was wondering about Perez. Or more accurately about his mom Tamar, who tricked her father-in-law – the lackluster Judah – into having paid-for sexual intercourse. As a result of that a son was born: Perez. And now generations later the Perez family has gone forward through Hezron, Ram, Amminadab, Nahshon, Salmon right down to Boaz – and through Boaz-Ruth the line is heading toward Obed, Jesse, and David.

Note: family list from Ruth 4:18-22 (NASB version)

Week 13 Judges

I finished reading Judges but went back and re-read Samson.
The story is hard to figure.
Samson seems like such a dim-witted, self-destructive guy but the bible says the Lord intervened directly with Samson seven times:
     the Lord blessed Samson when he was a boy
     in his early life the Spirit of the Lord began to stir him 
     Samson’s choice of a non-Hebrew wife was of the Lord
     the Spirit of the Lord came upon him mightily (the lion)
     the Spirit of the Lord came upon him mightily (thirty Philistines)
     the Spirit of the Lord came upon him mightily (a thousand Philistines)
     Samson was dying of thirst and the Lord miraculously provided water.
There are seven other times when the bible doesn’t specifically say that the Lord helped Samson, but divine help seems likely. Samson:
     caught 300 foxes
     broke the ropes at Lehi
     carried Gaza’s city gates 
     broke Delilah’s seven fresh ropes
     broke Delilah’s new ropes
     broke Delilah’s loom in
     pulled down the arena.
I guess no parent in the history of the world ever advised his son: be like Samson.
And yet this enormously defective, terrible-role-model of a guy was frequently utilized by the Lord. Which is hard to figure.

Notes: First seven references: 13:24, 13:25, 14:4, 14:6, 14:19, 15:14, 15:19. Second seven references: 15:4, 15:13, 16:3, 16:9, 16:12, 16:14, 16:30.

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.