Medicine Hat Joe

Week 6  Numbers 6

Schedule for Today: Numbers Four-Five-Six.
Four gives instructions to the three families of priests (Kohath & Gershon & Merari) for dismantling and transporting the tabernacle.
Five is the (baffling) Adultery Test. [In the NT the Lord said Moses had given the law of divorce because people had hard-hearts. I don’t know how many laws were created because of hard-heartedness or envy jealousy hatred lust anger pride or like that. But this one sounds like a candidate.]
Six is the Nazarite Vow. This chapter is pretty interesting and so I slow down to look at the elements of an unusual and added-effort vow. Until about half-way through the chapter when I look at my watch. Yikes! My time’s up!
I’ve walked into a bible-reader’s quandary: do I stop right now and come back to it tomorrow…or gallop through and finish the chapter? Executive decision-making time… Since I want to finish the chapter I start speed-reading. And that works okay until I get near the end…
May the Lord bless you and protect you.
May the Lord smile on you and be gracious to you.
May the Lord show you his favour and give you his peace.
This is one of the great-great paragraphs in the bible and I realize it’s crazy to blast right on through. I pretty much have to slow down. It only takes 15-seconds to read anyway. So I take 30 to read it twice. Slowly.

Note: quote from Numbers 6:24-26 (NIV); see Matthew 19:7-9.

Week 6  Psalm 39

I know a guy whose mom lived to be 104 years old.
Which seems like a very long time.
She would have been born at the end of World War I and lived through the roaring-Twenties
great-Depression
world-war-2
Hiroshima
Chinese-revolution
decolonization
cold-war
space-race
collapse-of-the-Soviet-empire
climate-change
9/11
globalization
decline -of-the-American-empire
cryptocurrency…like that (plus a lot more).
It all seems like a very long time.
Lord, remind me how brief my time on earth will be.
Remind me that…my life is fleeing away.
An entire lifetime is just a moment to you;
Human existence is but a breath.
We are merely moving shadows…
Human existence is as frail as breath.
When it comes to Time it’s kind of crazy comparing Human Time with the Lord’s Time (104 vs. 1 Trillion+ doesn’t even register).
So I don’t really think David’s main point was to compare Time with – basically – Eternity. I think that’s why he ends up focusing on the (very few) years he does actually have:
O Lord…I am your guest – a traveler passing through…Spare me so I can smile again before I am gone and exist no more.
This sounds to me like an I-Don’t-Have-Too-Much-Time Psalm.

Note: quotes from Psalm 39:5-6, 11, 12-13 (NLT)

Week 6  Numbers 1-2

Moses wasn’t in story-telling mode when he started Numbers.
I knew right away I was in bleak country so decided to switch to my Directed Listing Technique (DLT). The DLT is in the same class of bible-reading-assistance techniques as Directed Sketching or Directed Diagramming (Directed Doodling – which is more mindless – is in a related but different class).
Last year I did some Directed Diagramming of Numbers 2 to visually orient myself about Israel’s desert camp. That drone’s-eye sketch-up helped me read in a more focused way.
This year when I read the first list of tribal names I got out a pad of yellow paper and wrote them in a column down the left margin.
Something was fishy. I flipped back to Genesis 29-30 and in my Column 2 listed Jacob’s sons in their birth order. Which was a different order than Column 1.
Column 3 was the second list in Numbers 1 – the military census list. I wrote those names down and saw they were in a different order from Columns 1 & 2.
Then Numbers 2 re-categorized the twelve tribes into a list of four groups of three. This one – Column 4 – was similar to the census list but still slightly different.
I spent a bit of time trying to dope out the differences. But in the end I had my four columns of names in similar – but different – order. And in the end I still had questions.
Which – I decided – was okay. The Directed Listing Technique helped focus my attention (riddle-solving wasn’t its intended function).

Week 6  Leviticus 19

By the time I get to this point in Leviticus I’ve read a whole bunch of legal-religious data. Specific details about animal or vegetable offerings & methods to process offerings & ordination rules & kosher or non-kosher foods & infectious diseases & sexual red-lines not to cross. Like that.
There’s enough of these rules that don’t have any contemporary practical or experiential or personal value that I’m formulating an (unwritten) guideline that none of them are of any relevance. Then I get to chapter nineteen and see things like this:
don’t slander people…
don’t endanger your neighbour’s life…
don’t hate your brother in your heart…
don’t seek revenge
love your neighbour as yourself.
Hmmmm….these sound like pretty believable and decent comments (I could likely even get away with saying them out loud to someone here in town…depending on the person).
I figure one of the crosses a reader has to carry is to be making discriminating choices all along the way about what I value and what I don’t. (What I don’t think I get to say is: “None of it’s of any use”.)
And come to think of it I figure I might be crazy to dump any of it. Just because I’ll never ever have any personal use for post-menstruation separation-purification rules I’m reluctant to say that regulation is worthless. I’m a bible-reader…trying to frame up the basic structure of the bible’s early times…and I need all the materials I can get my hands on.

Note: paraphrased from Leviticus 19:16-18

Week 6  Leviticus 18

The final paragraph is pretty interesting. Moses is talking about the land of Canaan – which is Israel’s destination – and he says that the land has been defiled. That’s the word he uses…defiled. It basically means getting dirtied up. But there’s more to it. It’s like when something that people consider important has been desecrated. De-sacredized. Un-venerated. Like for instance if someone blew up a statute of the Buddha then that’s something way more than just physical property damage.
So Moses is talking about Canaan being degraded and defiled.
It sounds like something more than environmental degradation resulting from human stupidity or greed. If I pour toxic effluents into the lake and the water gets polluted that’s a pretty detectable cause-effect.
But Moses is making a less detectible connection. For about 18-verses he’s been listing sexual practices that he calls ‘defilements’. Moses says that the sexual practices have tarnished the people practicing them. But then he goes a bit farther and says those personal defilements have spilled over into the actual physical landscape of their near eastern homeland.
This link seems like mind-boggling lunacy here in Alberta where we mostly figure that sexual actions are personal and private and have no effect on anything. We know that mercury in the lake = contaminated fish. But sexual actions? No big outcomes.
Yet here in Leviticus 18 Moses identifies personal sexual tarnishments that expanded with enough symbiotic oomph to eventually taint the whole prairie.

Note: see Leviticus 18:24-30

Week 5  Psalm 33

There’s always saber-rattling going on somewhere. I haven’t checked the news yet but when I do I predict that today – Thursday, February 3, 2022 – some country will be challenging another one. I’ll maybe see a map with a bunch of little blue tanks jets infantry weapons with bracketed numbers beside them and they’re facing east and then there’s a yellow line and on the other side of the yellow line facing west I’ll see red tanks jets infantry weapons with bracketed numbers beside them. Red Country’s red tanks might say (1000) and Blue Country’s blue tanks (200). So…the mathematical forecast of Modern Warfare calculates  that Red 1000 will beat Blue 200.
Today I read:
…the best-equipped army cannot save a king, nor is great strength enough to save a warrior
...don’t count on your warhorse to give you victory – for all its strength, it cannot save you.
I checked the course offerings of the Royal Military College in Kingston Ontario and didn’t find any syllabi with titles like – for instance – Religious Factors & Influences in Armed Conflict. By contrast David didn’t isolate international warfare from the unpredictables of outside-the-normal-envelope influences:
…the Lord looks down from heaven and sees the whole human race
…the Lord shatters the plans of the nations and thwarts all their schemes
…we depend on the Lord alone to save us…protecting us like a shield.

Note: quotes from Psalm 33:16, 17, 13, 10, 20 (NLT). Added note: When I checked today’s news I saw my forecast was wrong. My predicted yellow line was actually white.

Week 5  Exodus

I started reading Leviticus today but was still thinking about the 10 Commandments (10Cs).
Personally I think that if Moses had lost all his Exodus data from 20:17 to the end of the book I’d be okay. I’d still have the Essential Code. But the fact is his data wasn’t lost…I’ve got all 21 chapters…all 692 verses.
From the 692 I subtracted 113 verses of non-legal material – stories or narrative content (e.g. the golden calf).
That left me with 579 verses of legal / law-related material.
The 10Cs – The Essential Code – is only 17 of those 579 verses. Which means that the 10Cs make up just 2.94% of Exodus 20-40. I don’t think the remaining 97.06% are non-essential. They’re not inconsequential. But they’re in a different league.
The last twenty-one chapters of Exodus begin with the ten rudiments at the fountainhead and from there spread out into a hundred applications.
The Lord spells out The Essential Code at the top of Sinai and then Moses moves on to describe some of the drip-down effects those fundaments will have on personal and public life (in this specific case within a tribe in the ancient near east).
So while I’ve been reading through Exodus I’m trying to remind myself: you’re looking at an actual historical case study (so don’t just dismiss it). At the same time it’s an old case study. So I need to make a mental transposition before I can puzzle-out how the 2.94% trickles down in its applications to personal and social life in 21st century Alberta.

Week 5  Exodus & Psalm

Today David said something about the Lord’s anger: his anger lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime…
Then twenty minutes later Moses said the Lord was: a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness.
These are a couple of useful things to know about the Lord’s anger. First it’s relatively brief. Second it takes quite a while before the Lord transitions to anger.
But useful or not my sense is that plenty of reader’s don’t like thinking about a God who is angry. So Moses and David take a kind of unwieldy emotion and begin adding some substance to it.
But substance or not some people prefer totally eliminating the idea of divine anger…to think of God exclusively as a non-angry God.
That’s a pretty appealing option. A better approach for me is to try to fit anger into the framework of a Total Bible System. Once I figure out what-all pieces I’ve got to work with then I can ask: can the system function if I eliminate that particular piece? Because if I find out that divine anger is a functional necessity in the Bible System then the question isn’t: am I willing to tolerate divine anger? It’s: will I accept the system as I find it?

Note: quotes from Psalm 30:5 & Exodus 34:6-7 (NIV). January reading update: Genesis + Exodus + Psalms 1-30 = 120 chapters (out of 1189 total).

Week 4  Exodus 25-28

Reading through the plans and designs for the Tabernacle I get a pretty strong impression there’s a huge load of detail.
But I also get a pretty strong impression there’s a huge lack of detail.
I’m thinking about it from the perspective of a contractor reading these plans. Questions left unanswered. For example how long are the acacia wood poles? What’s the design of the cherubim? How thick is the gold plating? What’s the load-bearing capacity of the rings? What are the designs & capacities of the platters and bowls? What shape are the petals on the lampstand? What’s the thread count of the curtains? What thickness are the tabernacle boards? What are the designs & dimensions of the horns on the altar? What fashion are the priests’ clothes and the specifications of the ephod and all its extras? Which tribal name gets engraved on which gem? What’s the size of the gold medallion on the turban?
Three times there are references to patterns that Moses was shown on the mountain. So it’s possible that he had specific design ideas in his head that he didn’t write down (and I guess other details might show up later in the book).
But there’s also those occasional references to builders: carpenters, engravers, weavers, metal-workers, artisans and like that. People inspired with individual talent. It’s possible that uniquely gifted people were given freedom to design and craft items of unique & individual beauty…just as long as they complied with the plans’ specified conditions.

Week 4  Exodus 20

The Ten Commandments (10Cs) are interesting because they’re really the keystone feature of a plan the Lord had for re-engineering Israel.
Israel had lived in perpetual servitude as Egypt’s under-class and had no resources for building a successful nation so the Lord gave them the 10Cs as the foundational handbook charting the route forward.
On the surface they seem to be a straightforward list of dos & don’ts. It looks like if I slavishly and robotically don’t do the don’ts and do do the dos then I’m in compliance. But it turns out that robotic compliance is pretty much just a First Level Success. A success for sure…but a fleeting one. More like a rest stop on the way to the next level. I think people figure the 10Cs are dumb and legalistic but the laws are only dumb and legalistic if I stop at the Dumb Legalism Stage.
That’s because one of the (unwritten) rules of the 10Cs is that they start on the outside of me and then they can either stay out on the surface or – over time – they can begin to percolate (a gradual process of leaching from outside to inside).
That’s likely what the Lord was getting at in the NT when he said it was good not to murder some guy. But on the other hand if I hated him being alive then there was more percolating in need of doing. Successful 10C assimilation seems to assume a kind of transformative osmotic diffusion.