Medicine Hat Joe

Week 6 Numbers

In chapter one the Hebrew tribes are still camped by Sinai. Been there since Exodus nineteen.
Their current project is to enumerate tribes and they do that in chapter one, counting up men of military age.
The chapter starts with a list of tribal families: Reuben Simeon Judah Issachar Zebulun Ephraim Manasseh Benjamin Dan Asher Gad Naphtali (Levi isn’t counted, and Ephraim & Manasseh are stand-ins for Joseph).
Then in the second half of chapter one the list is repeated along with the census numbers (the one difference is that Gad comes second instead of eleventh).
I looked back at Genesis twenty-nine to see the birth-order of the twelve brothers: Reuben Simeon Levi Judah Dan Naphtali Gad Asher Issachar Zebulun Joseph Benjamin. I wondered why Numbers didn’t follow that order.
I flipped over to Genesis forty-nine to see the order of Jacob blessing his sons: Reuben Simeon Levi Judah Zebulun Issachar Dan Gad Asher Naphtali Joseph Benjamin. That’s different too.
Back to Numbers – in chapter two there’s a second name list. Same names. Slightly different order but repeating the same census numbers. And chapter two also lumps the twelve into four groups of three:
Judah-Issachar-Zebulun
Reuben-Simeon-Gad
Ephraim-Manasseh-Benjamin
Dan-Asher-Naphtali.
There’s a Leah connection in group two; Rachel in group three. Hmmm.
Starting Numbers I’d hoped that figuring out the name order might help out a bit.
Turns out it didn’t. But it did help focus my thinking.

Week 5 Leviticus

I finished reading Leviticus today.
At some previous point I’d underlined Chapter 26. Meaning I figured it was worthwhile.
And I noticed a couple of things today.
I noticed it’s a cause & effect chapter. It says that input actions will have reliable and predictable output responses. [I have the feeling that twenty-six would be a kind of disappointing read if I preferred doing whatever I wanted to do without any repercussions – a life of output-less inputs. Or disappointing if I wanted to do whatever I wanted to do and get only happy results – good consequences regardless of inputs.]
I noticed a similarity between twenty-six and Genesis two. Of course there’s the numbers difference: one couple vs. about two million Hebrews. But when I forget about that discrepancy the offer is the same: if-you-do-A-then-B-will-result, if-you-do-C-then-D-will-result. It’s your choice.
I noticed that the longest section in the chapter – the negative-inputs = negative-outcomes section – has six Ifs-&-Thens. With the last four Ifs-&-Thens it’s like there’s a bit of a pause to give people a chance to reconsider before ploughing on. Verses eighteen twenty-one twenty-three and twenty-seven reminded me of Pharaoh and the plagues.
And I noticed the last six verses of the chapter swing around, revert to a promise of hope of restoration. The desolate middle-section changes to a guarantee that if you confess your iniquity, become humble, and make amends then the Lord will remember his pledge with you. Your choice.

Week 5 Leviticus

Some big study bibles split up books of the bible into smaller sections. I saw one where Leviticus was divided into twelve subsections.
The minimum division for any book is two.
If I was dividing Leviticus I would split it in half with the split after chapter sixteen (or maybe seventeen – I could go either way).
The reason I would make the break there is because pretty much everything I’ve read before chapter seventeen is material for priests – technical details about sacrifices and how they’re managed.
Chapter seventeen is aimed at both priests and non-priests.
But after that the majority of the content is for ordinary people. I did a quick initial scan through chapters eighteen to twenty-seven. Starting at eighteen I kept seeing this phrase – or one like it: then the Lord said to Moses, say this to your people, the Israelites.
There’s about 350 verses in the last ten chapters of Leviticus. Out of the 350 there’s only two sections written for priests (twenty-one & part of twenty-two – about forty verses total). Which means that 11.43% of the content is for priests, and 88.57% is for everyone.
Meaning section two was not aimed at religious professionals. It was for amateurs like me.

Note: quote from Leviticus 18:1 (NLT). Disclosure: I won’t start reading chapters 18-27 until tomorrow. But I did blitz through them this morning and I’m pretty confident that my numbers are close to accurate for my purposes. And for now close-enough is good-enough.

Week 5 Leviticus

The Tabernacle was built in the second half of Exodus and then Leviticus begins listing the sacrificial offerings that have to be brought there.
If I’m reading through then reading about offerings – burnt-grain-peace-sin-guilt – is content I figure I’ll cover fairly quickly. Except I don’t pick up the pace because chapter one is talking about burnt offerings.
I remembered Jethro from a couple of weeks ago. Jethro was Moses’ father-in-law and the two of them met somewhere in the Sinai Peninsula after the Hebrews escaped Egypt. When he heard about the great escape Jethro: presented a burnt offering and gave sacrifices to the Lord. I wondered how Jethro knew about burnt offerings since burnt offerings weren’t officially described until later.
I remembered Moses telling Pharaoh he wanted to take the Hebrew tribes out so they could sacrifice burnt offerings.
I remembered Abraham was asked to sacrifice his son as a burnt offering.
I remembered Noah offered burnt sacrifices when he left the ark.
People knew about burnt offerings long before Leviticus chapter one.
I wondered for a few minutes how many other things they knew that I haven’t been told they knew.
Hard to say. Quite a few I’d guess.
I’m satisfied I won’t figure it out anytime soon and I push on reading chapters two-three-four-five-six-seven fairly quickly.

Note: quote from Exodus 18:12 (NLT). Other stories in Exodus 10, Genesis 22 & 8.

Week 5 Leviticus

Leviticus.
It’s a bit of a relief that I already made my decision to read through at the beginning of the year. What that means is that today I don’t have to ask myself: should I bother reading Leviticus? To read or not to read isn’t the question.
Still…even though I’ve decided to read everything I do make distinctions when I read. For example I differentiate between what I’d call Gram-Weight Readings and Kilogram-Weight Readings. My informal MHJ Weighting-Scale doesn’t have anything to do with estimating the importance or value of a book – in fact my basic rule is that all sixty-six books are valuable. The MHJ Weighting-Scale is really just a personal and practical way to help me determine the time I’ll devote to different readings – a kind of pace-determiner scale.
Gram-Weight Readings will tend to get less time; Kilogram-Weight Readings get more time. Skimming along versus diving down.
If I re-ordered the five books of Moses according to my Weighting-Scale the bible would look like this: Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Numbers, Leviticus – heaviest to lightest.
Which explains why I spent thirty-one days reading the ninety chapters of the heftier Genesis-Exodus. It was all I could afford. It also explains why it’s unlikely I’ll spend the whole month of February on the ninety-seven chapters that are in Deuteronomy and the much lighter-weight Numbers-Leviticus.

Week 5 Exodus

Exodus 35-40 is a block of text that describes the Tabernacle being built, along with all the bits and pieces that were part of it.
I read the whole section at once. I thought I’d try to mentally piece together a picture of the structure as I read about it. But pretty soon I got balled-up in a clutter of boards and curtains and crossbars and rails and fabrics and loops and clasps and linen veils and measurements and points-of-the-compass directions. I’d need a bit more time to sketch it out.
When I finished I looked online for a picture of the tabernacle with its surrounding fence and the furnishings. There were a lot of pictures by different artists but they all looked about the same.
If I had never seen a picture of the tabernacle I don’t know if I’d have drawn a structure like the ones I saw from the description I read. Definitely not in the time I had.
I did come away from the exercise with a sense of the project’s detail & refinement. Precision. Quality. Beauty.
And the writer says that when it was all finished the presence of the Lord filled the place and rested there.

Progress Note: I did an end-of-the-month check to track my reading progress. There are 1189 chapters in the bible. In January I read 120 chapters (Genesis + Exodus + 30 Psalms). So I’ve read 10.09% of the bible in 8.33% of the year.

Week 4 Exodus

The gold calf idolatry in chapter thirty-two is perplexing. The Hebrew tribes had seen the Lord’s plagues in Egypt, been rescued at the Red Sea, been fed almost by magic, were thunderstruck at Mount Sinai, could always see a gigantic pillar of cloud or fire…plus they were specifically told not to worship idols. And in thirty-two they turn from the Lord and worship an idol. Why would they do that?
Last July I was reading Ezekiel’s review of Hebrew history and he mentioned the idols of Egypt (so I wrote myself a note last year to re-read Ezekiel twenty while I was reading Exodus thirty-two this year. Which I just did).
Ezekiel said that after the exodus the Lord told Israel to: get rid of the vile images you have set your eyes on, and do not defile yourselves with the idols of Egypt. That last phrase helped me make some sense of Israel’s leap to idolatry in Exodus thirty-two.
It makes pretty good sense really. Israel had been down in Egyptland for centuries so you figure that social exchanges were happening. A bit here, a bit there. Egyptian recipes, hair styles, idioms, architectural ideas, irrigation technologies, transportation, communication, art, entertainment, political ideology, religion. Idol worship.
Ezekiel says Israel had started worshipping the idols of Egypt.
Which means Exodus thirty-two wasn’t really a shocking turn-around at all. It was more just a doin-what-we-bin-doin return to normal.

Note: quote from Ezekiel 20:7 (NIV)

Week 4 Exodus

Exodus 32 is the story of the golden calf.
It’s a strange story. Right out there on the surface it seems to say that a) the Lord got super angry; b) Moses argued that the Lord shouldn’t be so angry; and c) the Lord cooled-down after Moses talked some sense into him.
It makes the Lord seem a bit loony.
So a good bible reader’s question is: if I’m reading a passage and it makes the Lord seem like a psycho then am I reading the passage the way it’s supposed to be read?
And a follow-up question is: is there another way to read this so that it makes better sense?
I looked back at what the Lord said. He definitely told Moses that he was planning to destroy Israel. And then he said: I will make you, Moses, into a great nation instead of them.
When I read the story I hardly noticed the comment but it’s a pretty gigantic offer the Lord makes to Moses. You can be the replacement guy for Abraham-Isaac-Jacob!
So I wonder if the story is not about Moses the Hero-Negotiator. What if it’s about Moses the man who was being tested by the Lord with a Hugely Tempting Offer? It changes the story quite a bit if it all turns on the question of what was going on in Moses’ soul between the last phrase of verse ten and the first phrase of verse eleven.

Note: quote from Exodus 32:10 (NLT)

Week 4 Exodus

Last year on January 28 I read Exodus 25-31.
I decided to read that seven-chapter block again today.
It’s not the easiest 242-verses to read. It’s a set of instructions for building the tabernacle and everything that goes with it.
I started reading, hoping to latch onto something to help myself stay on track. Then it occurred to me: why not look for all the things the Lord told Moses to build? It seemed like a pretty good and simple Mental-Focussing Idea.
I got a pad of paper & pencil. By the end I’d found: the ark & its cover lamp-stand tabernacle tarpaulins frames crossbars veil screens big-altar curtains utensils incense-altar & washbasin. Mixed in there were directions for making oil for the lamps and spices for the incense and elaborate clothes for the priests.
The whole passage gives you a sense of exactness and precision and specificity and detail and artistry.
This is the place where the Lord will be. It’s a special place.

Note:  The last verse of the section says: the Lord finished speaking with Moses on Mount Sinai.  I’d totally forgotten that all of this section happened on the mountain even though yesterday I read that: Moses disappeared into the cloud as he climbed higher up the mountain. He stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights. This set of instructions in 25-31 was how Moses spent some of his time alone with the Lord. Quotes from Exodus 31:18, 24:18 (NLT).

Week 3 Exodus

Exodus sixteen is the Manna chapter.
The Hebrew tribes had been on the road for several weeks, travelling south and east, in the wilderness, getting hungry, getting angry. To help them out the Lord used his power to make a flaky grain-like substance that covered the ground during the night. Like a kind of light snow. The people had to collect it each morning – specifically: take an omer for each person you have in your tent. My bible footnote says that an omer was about two litres, so two dry litres of this coriander-sized seed per person per day.
A couple of chapters back I read that coming out of Egypt: there were about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children. I worked with 600k as my baseline.
Feeding 600k people 2 litres of manna took 1.2 million litres of manna a day.
Feeding them for one year was 434 million litres.
And since the Hebrews ended up in the desert for forty years the Lord ended up providing 17,360,000,000 litres of manna all together.
The one downside of a miracle like this is its regularity. When you can set your calendar on a miracle it starts to seem like a normal thing, which means a miracle can be tricky at times.
I remind myself that normal events are normal. But normal miracles are still miracles.

Note: quotes from Exodus 16:16, 12:37 (NLT). The numbers are all ball-park, but I figure they’re on the low side.