Medicine Hat Joe

Week 12  Psalm 78

Yesterday in picking & choosing I tried comparing the official version of The Plagues of Egypt Story in Exodus with a condensed version in Psalm 78. So anyway just as my reading-time ran out I spotted a cross-reference to Psalm 105 in the margin of my bible.  I jotted it down and looked at it today and it turned out to be a pretty nice coincidence because Psalm 105 is another long History Psalm – just like 78 – and about halfway through it the writer started talking about…The Plagues of Egypt!
I’d already made a table comparing Exodus 7-11 and Psalm 78 – looking for similarities / differences in the list of plagues. So today I added a third column: “Plagues in Psalm 105”. Here’s the plagues I found there: Darkness Water-to-blood Frogs Flies Gnats Hail Locusts Death-of-firstborn. Eight of them.
Except for Darkness everything was roughly in the same order as 78.
In Psalm 78 Asaph skipped Gnats Animal-Plague Boils & Darkness.
The Psalm 105 writer also left out Boils & Animal-Plague – but included Gnats & Darkness
I can’t figure why some plagues were left off these lists. Can’t figure why Boils & Animal-Plagues were left off both lists. In the last couple of thousand years there’s likely been some creative guesses about why. But even good guesses are still in the guess category. So I wonder how much farther I’d be for guessing.

Note: It turns out that Psalm 106 is another long History Psalm too. I did a quick scan. I think it skipped the Ten Plagues completely.

Week 12  Psalm 78

Right off the top Asaph said: I will teach you hidden lessons from our past and the Lesson that caught my attention today was the plagues of Egypt story (what Asaph called the Lord’s miraculous signs in Egypt). Right away I thought something seemed a bit off. Asaph’s story looked short.
I decided to compare Asaph’s story of the plagues with the full-length Exodus account. I drew up a table with two columns:
Left-hand column (“Plagues in Exodus 7-11”)
Right-hand column (“Plagues in Psalm 78”).
Then I flipped back to scan through Exodus.
I wanted to line up the two accounts point-for-point side-by-side. But it didn’t work like that. There were anomalies. In the original story there were ten plagues. Exodus & Asaph both had six: Water-to-blood Flies Frogs Hail Grasshoppers/Locusts & the Death-of-the-Firstborns.
But Asaph didn’t have Gnats Animal-Plague Boils or Darkness.
Asaph also referred to a band of destroying angels – which wasn’t one of the plagues (even though angels might have been involved).
A couple of quick conclusions:
I figure Asaph knew there were ten plagues
I figure his psalm was a representative sample
I figure that he figured that his readers would get the point (the Lord had led his people)
I figure Asaph’s version was a shorthand literary digest of a longer (very well-known) story.

Note: quotes from Psalm 78:2 43 49 52. Right at the end I spotted a cross-reference to Psalm 105:28-36. A similar psalm. A similar list of plagues. But no time to compare it!

Week 11  Joshua 15

The last section of the chapter in my bible is titled “The Towns Judah Inherited”. It’s 43-verses long – name after name after name.
To give myself a mental focus I decided to look for Bethlehem. But I couldn’t find it! (I don’t think I missed it. I don’t think it’s there.)
Anyway the reason I was interested was because a couple of years ago I posted on a prophecy Micah made about the town: but you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times.
At that time I wondered what the odds were of Micah guessing correctly that the ‘Ruler’ would come from Bethlehem so I found a bible map and counted roughly 55 towns & villages in Judah (that meant Micah had 1-in-55 chances of guessing the correct town).
But looking at Joshua 15 today I count about 112 towns listed. So Micah’s odds of guessing correctly just got quite a bit worse. (I realize that in the interval between Joshua & Micah some towns might have disappeared and new ones might have developed. So 112 isn’t exact.) My only point is that my estimate a couple of years ago was likely wrong. Which made Micah’s odds of guessing wrong even bigger (I calculated his odds-probability. He had a 99% chance of guessing wrong).

Note: quote from Micah 5:2 (NIV). See post: ‘longshot’ September 3 2021

Week 11 Joshua 10-11

The section is filled with violence. It’s very unsettling to read.
I check a cross-ref in Genesis: after four generations your (Abraham’s) descendants will return here to this land, when the sin of the Amorites had run its course.
I draw two columns. The left column: Israel. Right column: Amorites.
Under Israel I write down what’s been happening all those hundreds-of-years. Abraham Isaac Jacob Twelve-sons Egyptian-slavery Exodus Mount-Sinai Wilderness Promised-Land. The Amorite column is pretty short and I write Accumulating Civilizational Evil. The one key thing that was happening was that Amorite criminality was running-its-course (another version: the sin of the Amorites has not reached its full measure. Another: the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet complete.)
In the Amorite column I add: ‘evil is getting stacked higher and higher’. I also add a bunch of undesignated plus-signs as place-holders.
I wish I knew what-all and how-all the pieces fitted together. But basically it looks like the Lord hung-around for centuries. Waiting… Waiting… Waiting while either a) evil kept piling up or b) the Amorites turned around. Waiting until an (unspecified) tipping-point was reached.
I’m glad to be past Joshua 10-11. About a dozen-and-a-half times (in 11:10-23 alone) the text says that everyone was destroyed. That’s hard reading to start out my day. I look at my two (useless) columns and try to reason things out clinically but I’m not too successful.
Mostly I’m just glad to get past it.

Note: quote from Genesis 15:16 (NLT NIV NASB)

Week 11  Joshua 5

It’s rare for a supernatural being to appear to a regular person. So when a supernatural being appears to Joshua it’s an exception to the rule.
At first Joshua just saw a man facing him with a sword in his hand. But it turned out that the ‘man’ was actually the commander of the Lord’s army. So when the Commander told Joshua to: ‘take off your sandals…Joshua did as he was told. And that’s the end of the chapter.
So then there’s a double-space in my bible. Then there’s a subtitle in italics (The Fall of Jericho). And then a big number 6. And the next chapter begins: now the gates of Jericho were tightly shut because the people were afraid of the Israelites. It looks like I’m leaving Joshua standing barefoot back in chapter 5. I’m moving on to Jericho. At least that’s what I thought until the very next verse says that the Lord said to Joshua… (and that’s followed by four verses of the Lord (the Commander?) speaking).
So I get a couple of bible-reader’s alerts.
First of all the Jericho Closure in 6:1 is just a sidelight (personally I think the writer should have used brackets to show that).
Secondly the chapter break between 5:15 and 6:1 shouldn’t (in my view) be there (I blame the chapter-break guy for that).
Anyway two quick reminders. A) don’t be lulled by sidebars that break the story-line. B) don’t be diverted by unhelpful chapter breaks.

Note: quotes from Joshua 5:13 14 15 6:1 2 (NLT)

Week 10  Deuteronomy 28

The subtitle added to this chapter in my bible is: Curses for Disobedience.
My own (mental) subtitle: forgetting God is a pretty direct route to national catastrophe.
I tallied-up the number of curses in this passage. In 53-verses I counted 55 curses (a little over 1 curse per verse.) I don’t have time to cross-reference the OT to check that the 55 individual curses panned-out in actual literal real life developments. But I’ve read about the judges. About the topsy-turvy kingdoms. About the nation’s slow grinding down into exile.
Anyway reading this passage it’s easy to form an impression about the Lord. He’s pretty harsh. Pretty nasty. I re-read what Moses said:
a) You can abide by the commandments & be benefitted
b) You can disregard the commandments & be maledicted
I wonder about other outcomes. Two theoretical possibilities are:
c) You can disregard the commandments and be benefitted
d) You can abide by the commandments and be maledicted
But it’s only the first two that are (realistically) on offer.
Mulling over the passage I don’t think Moses’ intention was to show that the Lord was a heartless goon. I figure he intended to impress on his audience a simple binary: Take Path A to a Good Life. Take Path B to walk off A Cliff.
So I don’t think chapter 28 is a description of God-the-Ghoulish-Tyrant. I think it’s more a straightforward & guaranteed list of outcomes: What my compensation will be when I decide to forget about God.

Note: Deuteronomy 28:15-68

Week 10  Deuteronomy 17

Moses knew that Israel would eventually have a monarchial government. And so he gave the (future) king Two Recommendations. Plus Four Outcomes.
Recommendation #1 the king must copy for himself this body of instruction (so he needed his own bible)
Recommendation #2 he must always keep that copy with him and read it daily as long as he lives (so he had to read it).
If the king did those two things then there’d be four results:
1. He’ll learn to fear the Lord his God by obeying all the terms of these instructions
2. Reading will prevent him from becoming proud and acting as if he is above his fellow citizens
3. It will prevent him from turning away from the Lord’s commands
4. It will ensure that he and his descendants will reign for many generations.
Moses doesn’t say definitely that the Recommendations & Outcomes applied only to the king. So even though it’s a pretty safe bet to say that I’ll never be king of Israel (Outcome #4) I think it’s reasonable to figure the other outcomes are (theoretically) transferable. Meaning that when I read the bible I can hope that
1. I’ll gradually learn to revere the Lord
2. I’ll eventually become more genuinely humble
And 3. I’ll follow the Lord more consistently.
Which aren’t bad aspirations for a bible reader.

Note: quotes from Deuteronomy 17:18-20 (NLT). Personally I think it would have helped if Moses said how many chapters the king should read per day.

Week 10  Deuteronomy 2

Last weekend I was thinking about the Edomites & the Ammonites & the Moabites (“whose land?“). They were three Outsider Families from early in Genesis. Definitely Not Israel. But in spite of that still hanging-around for hundreds of years.
Anyway a couple of days ago I see that Israel was approaching the Promised Land the Lord told Moses: Leave Those People Alone because I’m Giving Them Land! So I was wondering how long the land grant to those groups lasted.
I checked my bible maps. One of them showed Tribal Land Divisions (so around about Joshua’s time). East of the Jordan River – ranged top to bottom – Manasseh & Gad & Reuben were marked in bright red. And Ammon & Moab & Edom were right there too (low-lighted in black).
The next map was The Divided Kingdom (so quite a bit later). Manasseh & Gad & Reuben are not marked on that map (though maybe their successors were there.) But Ammon & Moab & Edom are still there and holding onto territory east and south of the Dead Sea.
The last map is Palestine in the Time of Jesus – hundreds of more years later. There’s no sign of Manasseh Gad Reuben Ammon Moab or Edom.
I know this is an almost totally useless way to accurately track how long Ammon-Moab-Edom retained the land they got from the Lord (it’d take more digging inside-and-outside-the-bible for that). But it looks like Ammon-Moab-Edom held onto the land the Lord gave them for a fairly long time. Not permanently. But for centuries.

Week 10  Psalm 63

If I chose one line to summarize this psalm it would be: all who trust in (the Lord) will praise him.
I don’t see any hints in the psalm that praise is circumstance-specific. David doesn’t say: “when things are going okay people who trust in the Lord will praise him”.
The subtitle says the events happened when David “was in the desert of Judah”. He called it: a dry and weary land where there is no water. So David is saying “I’m in this dry & weary land and I’ll trust the Lord and I’ll praise him”. Desert Situation? I praise the Lord.
I draw a square box on the back of an old cash register slip. Divide it into three compartments:
1) Good Circumstances
2) Neutral Circumstances
3) Bad Circumstances.
About 2-inches to the right of the box I write the word PRAISE.
I ask myself: When do I praise-the-Lord? And I draw one mental line from Good Circumstances to PRAISE
I ask myself: When does David praise-the-Lord? He has three lines:
Good Circumstances —> PRAISE
Neutral Circumstances —> PRAISE
Bad Circumstances —> PRAISE
One defect with the diagram is that it gives a (visual) impression that David is praising the Lord for Good & Neutral & Bad Circumstances.
But I think that for David PRAISE is part of a completely separate class of practices that isn’t modified by any Circumstances at all. It’s independent.

Note: quotes from Psalm 63:11 1 (NLT)

Week 9  Deuteronomy 2

Israel isn’t ‘wandering’ anymore.
Now they’re heading toward the Promised Land.
And the Lord told them three things about the tribal regions they were approaching:
First: you will pass through the country belonging to the Edomites, who live in Seir. The Edomites will feel threatened, so be careful. Do not bother them, for I have given them all the hill country around Mount Seir as their property, and I will not give you even one square foot of their land.
Second: do not bother the Moabites, or start a war with them. I have given them Ar as their property, and I will not give you any of their land.
Third: today you will enter the land of the Ammonites. But do not bother them or start a war with them. I have given the land of Ammon to them as their property, and I will not give you any of their land.
I’ve gotten pretty used to the idea of the Promised Land being earmarked for Israel. In the OT the marquee tenancy is Israel in the Promised Land.
But Deuteronomy is also saying that – since the Lord is the custodian of all land (not just Canaan) – he also allocated other specific territories for the use of other groups of people.
There’s The Promised Land for Israel.
And also a raft of other Designated Territories for other groups.

Note: quotes from Deuteronomy 2:4-5 2:9 & 2:18-19 (NLT)