Medicine Hat Joe

Week 3  Psalm 19

I read Exodus 10 today. The book is absorbing right now but I know that in a couple of days I’ll be getting into bible-reader’s deep water – a long block of laws regulations directions and like that. So it was a pretty nice coincidence that I also read psalm 19 today.
The reason 19 jumped out was because – with the last half of Exodus and then Leviticus staring me in the face – David surprises with his enthusiasm for the law.
He describes the law with about eight specific words. Because of time I was mostly interested in the first four…the law is: Perfect Trustworthy Right & Clear (helpful reminders because the law is sometimes described as: imperfect untrustworthy wrong & fuzzy).
Anyway I also noticed a value-added feature – the four descriptor-words include what I’d call Personal Outcome Statements…
…the perfection revives my soul
…trustworthiness helps me shift away from simplicity and towards wisdom
…rightness brings joy to my heart
…clarity gives me insight into life.
Even if I’m not sure how the connections work this information changes things up for me.
Am I interested in reading the law? Not really.
But do I want to:
…have my soul revivified?
…move toward wisdom?
…have more joy in my heart?
…have my life come into better focus?
Well…yeah, for sure.

Note: quotes from Psalm 19:7-8 (NLT). Added: I haven’t put together a list of My Top Ten Psalms but if I did I think 19 would be in the mix.

Week 3  Psalm 17

David starts out by asking the Lord to: pay attention to my prayer, for it comes from an honest heart. David seems to be saying “I know you won’t pay attention to a dishonest heart but it’s okay to listen to mine”.
And he doesn’t just leave it there. He says: you have tested my thoughts and examined my heart…You have scrutinized me and found nothing amiss, for I am determined not to sin in what I say. I have followed your commands, which have kept me from going along with cruel and evil people. My steps have stayed on your path; I have not wavered from following you.
I’m really impressed. Maybe a bit jealous. David’s probing interior self-examination resulted in emphatic personal affirmation. (Probably the very best example of this kind of I-know-that-I’m-ok testimonial is Job. He was: blameless, a man of complete integrity. He feared God and stayed away from evil… And he knew it.)
Anyway the thing I notice is that David then right away asks the Lord for help because he’s under attack from murderous enemies. Even though he has a clean sheet.
This is a good bible-reader’s reminder that being a good guy doesn’t insulate me from trouble. Whatever-all are the results of following the Lord it looks like having a trouble-free life isn’t one of them.

Note: quotes from Psalm 17:1, 3-5, Job 1:1 (NLT)

Week 3  Genesis 49

I finished Genesis and started Exodus today.
The second last chapter of Genesis is the passage where Jacob blesses his twelve sons. Some of the blessings make better & clearer sense to me than others and I sit thinking about them for a little bit. So I’ve got them in mind when I start Exodus and see the boys’ names listed again (except for Joseph who was already in Egypt).
The list in Exodus 1 says:
Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, Benjamin, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher.
I turn back a page. The list in Genesis 49 says:
Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Zebulun, Issachar, Dan, Gad, Asher, Naphtali, Joseph, Benjamin.
The order is different. I look back to the long birth-of-the-boys narrative in Genesis 29 & 30:
Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Joseph, Benjamin.
There’s another short list in chapter 35 that I cross-check:
Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, Joseph, Benjamin, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher.
I don’t think any of the lists are exactly the same. As far as I can tell the Genesis 29-30 list is the strict chronological sequence. The other lists look like they group the sons by their mothers – so Dan & Naphtali are back-to-back in three lists because they had the same mother. Ditto for Gad & Asher.
Even though I can make some sense of a couple of differences the order is still a bit curious & perplexing to me and I wonder if I’m missing something. But for now I’ll keep these in mind.

Week 2  Genesis 47

Jacob’s family had emigrated to Egypt in the middle of a devastating multi-year famine and against all odds they prospered and thrived in Egypt (thanks to their connection with Joseph).
The really interesting & disturbing part of the story is how this national emergency was used by the Egyptian state to a) gain absolute despotic control and to b) totally subjugate the country’s entire working class (illustrating that there’s nothing more useful to powerful people than a good emergency).
It’s hard to know how much or little the people of Egypt knew about Joseph’s forecast of troubles that were coming. But either way they didn’t prepare for famine. By contrast the government had been busy for years stockpiling millions of tons of grain. And then the hammer fell.
First the people spent all their money buying government-supplied food
…when their money ran out they traded livestock-for-food
…then they sold their land-for-food
…and finally with nothing left but their bodies they became slaves of the state.
So in the end they-had-nothing.
I’m not sure why this story is included in Genesis. Maybe to contrast the suffering of the Egyptians with the Hebrew’s unexpected prosperity.
But for me the story is dominated by how quickly a powerful country’s fortune can turn and especially how quickly citizens can be pauperized by the actions of their state.

Note: the story of the awesome power of state power is in Genesis 47:13-25. The prosperity of the Hebrews is told briefly in 47:11-12 & 27.

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)