Reviews and Books - the Popular and the Useful

Sometimes you are sitting on a rough-cut gem and not really making use of it. Sometimes a glass diamond glitters and you are captivated but the impact is short-lived. Sometimes you hold a rock which may be polished to a shine but does not reveal any depth.

From an old school copy of essays by Francis Bacon, I remember this advice:

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.

There are many books but there is one you. There are many distractions but there is One who loves you and who wants to build you into the likeness of the Eternal. There are many others like you and like me who form this building, a temple suitable for the indwelling Spirit of the Most High.

It is not a simple thing to build this building. The One who teaches humanity knowledge is the One who builds and who knows the cost. The cost is in the cup of salvation, a cup prepared for the wicked to drink to the dregs (Psalm 75:9):
for there is a cup in the hand of YHWH
and the wine is red
full of mixture
and he spills from it
surely they will suck the dregs
all the wicked of the earth will imbibe

and yet it is drunk by the elect instead (Psalm 116:13):
the cup of salvation I will bear
so in the name of YHWH I will call

This word cup is the same as the word for owl, used in the prayer of Psalm 102:7
I am like an unclean bird of the wilderness
I have become like an owl of the desert

Here the cup is an image of the body, as in Psalm 23:5, where my cup is saturated.

The pointer forward to Jesus and his use of the image of cup is very clear - can you drink of the cup that I must drink? If we are to be a cup fit for the master's use, then should we not chew and digest our instruction, the same instruction from which Jesus learned his own calling?  There is no better way to do this than by meditation on the Psalms and the use of the imagery of these poems in both the New and Old Testaments.

This is the work of my book Seeing the Psalter. I use it myself to consider my own calling. I wrote it so that I could learn Hebrew poetry as fully as possible and it is serving me well on a daily basis. This useful book has now been reviewed by Professor Susan Gillingham of the University of Oxford for the Society for Old Testament Studies. The review is short but very encouraging. She calls it an "unusual commentary on the Psalms, in part technological, in part aesthetic, in part hermeneutical".

Yes - it is unusual. It is meant for growth for me and for the reader (that's the hermeneutical part). It does not waste time on distractions. She ends her review with these words for which I am deeply grateful:  "Overall this is an ambitious and intriguing project, but is still very much work in progress: interested readers should look at MacDonald’s shared documents at this website."

I concur with her comment that the book is a work in progress. It is like a huge canvas, impossible to finish. The Psalms are part of the infrastructure of the temple. A commentary is, like me and like you, a work in progress. But God forbid we should fail to progress towards the full scope of the image of power and love and a sound mind that we are called into and that is prepared for us.

[Susan's review is available online through Sage Publications, but hold your clicks. It is behind a pay wall. Sage offers a one month free access once a year. When it becomes available I will note it. I am pleased indeed that the review directly references my presentation at the Open University in London last year. It is a good summary of my intent. I will make sure this address does not get deleted any time soon. The summary is in no way a substitute for pondering the Psalms!]

Religion without God (4)

Continuing the previous posts on Religion without God, a very short book (30,000 words or so) by the late philosopher and legal expert, Ronald Dworkin.

Dworkin (p.24) divides religious values into godly convictions, worship, prayer, and obedience, and the value of ethical responsibility. He rejects the first three and accepts the last as a value shared with many who do not necessarily believe in God.  It seems to me that obedience and ethics might well overlap, but he doesn't make the connection. Worship and obedience do not appear in his index. Prayer only appears under the entry "prayer in public schools". In the third entry on this subject, he notes the US compromise of a moment of silence that allows for prayer or meditation, or just resting the eyes.

Worship would focus the dispute if he had addressed it. Perhaps he makes a stab with his appeals to truth and beauty from Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn, but neither the calling out of beauty with a loud voice (A Room with a View) not the engraved for ever panting and for ever young quite does the full job of suggesting a conscious and mature worship. And the brief mentions of Otto and Tillich on the numinous are likewise not satisfying, since many do not come to worship in such a state.

The most moving courses I ever took in school were on special relativity. Time dilation has gripped my soul ever since those heady for ever days. No one can convince me that eternal and everlasting are for ever in a linear sense. Even the universe as we see it in scientific theory has beginning and end. And the ancients also knew that whatever release there was from our troubled lives was for ever in a sense that is different from a linear model of time. So Revelation speaks of the Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world. And Jewish tradition knows of the primal 'existence' of Torah.

Redemption is thus embedded in creation. (Psalm 75) Who can pay for our damage? (Psalm 49) How can we be forgiven? (Psalm 103) Time as a straight line is quite boring.

Dworkin approaches the beauty of science quite well in his chapter 2 on the universe. Yet even such awe, bordering on the numinous, does not come to the full recognition of that which is worthy of worship. Psalm 19 as I have noted before makes a direct connection between creation and Torah and the human problem of sin. The full recognition of worship is embedded in the story that is in the Psalms. For example, note Psalm 22, known for its famous verse 1: My God, My God, why have you forsaken me. In verse 23, the forsaken one announces your name to my kin. Then in verse 28, the poet proclaims:

All the ends of the earth will remember and will turn to יהוה [the name, YHWH]
All the families of the nations will worship in your presence

Verse 30 then notes:

All the sleek of the earth will eat and worship in his presence
All who go down to dust will bow

The parallel would suggest that it should read all who sleep in the earth. In Seeing the Psalter, I have translated the error into a single character slip in English from a single character adjustment in the Hebrew. Translation really can be fun. [(p. 81) sleek, דשׁן (dshn) fat, feels like a misprint for sleep, ישׁן]. Mind you sleek works too for it shows that the fat are economically exploiting the afflicted (verse 27).

The afflicted will eat and be satisfied
Those who search for יהוה will praise him
May your heart live for ever

Worship is associated with eating and being satisfied. It does not require a religious experience of the numinous. I say this for the majority who do not find such experience. Neither does it preclude the numinous. But justice with equity, and satisfaction, is the key to worship. If nations or tribes or nature or even the universe could bring about justice then patriotism, tribalism and sun worship would be justified. But they can't bring about justice, nor can vague appeals to beauty be satisfactory in themselves.

There's a lot more about worship in the psalms. They end, as is well known, with the great noise of Psalm 150 where all those who are engaged in the birthing of the universe breathe their thanksgiving. It is a remarkable collection of poems.

I have 16 references to the topic of worship in the psalms in my topical index. Read them - in fact, if you have enjoyed this series, read them in my translation with my comprehensive 55 page Hebrew-English and English-Hebrew glossary (471-526) and 7 part index where the wholeness of this poetry can be experienced. I did not shortchange you. The index alone was the work of several months. Software helps but completeness is a manual thing.

If you live in Victoria, you can order the book from me - in fact I have a few on hand. You will not be disappointed in 'the One' who is portrayed in the story and 'who teaches humanity knowledge'. (Kimhi). If you live far away, please order through Energion Direct. At 526 pages you will have plenty to occupy your capacity for poetry.

Now I am done with Dworkin. There is neither satisfaction nor completeness in Religion without God. There is no salvation either. אין ישועה בדת בלי אלוהים

Worship is most effectively expressed with praise and thanksgiving. So among many examples in the Psalms:

I will thank you for you have answered me
and you are my salvation

(Psalm 118:21)

The Bible's Cutting Room Floor by Joel Hoffman

"Perhaps surprisingly, their first question wasn't how to survive. It was why they had to survive. Or, more precisely, why no one was taking care of that for them."

So begins Joel Hoffman as story teller, page 171 of his new book: The Bible's Cutting Room Floor. I am grateful to St Martin's Press for sending me a pre-publication copy of this book. It has been a pleasure to have my attention drawn to this subject.

Cutting room floor is a modern expression first used in 1708 for the stone cutters, and only recently used in the context of editing of documents - but mostly of film. Here is a little of what the Oxford English Dictionary gives us: "(a) a room where the cutting of clothing materials, meat, etc. is done; (b) a room where surgical operations are performed; (c) a room where a film is cut or edited" (this is a cinematographic use of cut as in 'cut to scene 3').

Is the cutting room floor an apt metaphor for the editing of the Bible? Does it suggest a set of collectors, authors, editors, readers and critics preparing a volume for publication and accepting or rejecting the contents of the Festschrift for God? Or was God making a film? Applying this metaphor to the Bible leads me wondering about the means by which written texts were collected, used, stored, and modified. Why is there such a thing as a canon of Scripture? Without raising these questions explicitly, the book nonetheless addresses many issues that can arise from considering an ancient text that is called 'Holy'.

We are not talking modern editing or selection, and we are certainly not talking about surgical operations or film or butchery of meat. But clothing is apt, the Bible being a habit, as it were, and clothing a significant metaphor in the canon for both God and humanity. In the Psalms alone, the metaphor is applied to nature, hills clothed with flocks, to YHWH, pride clothed, and clothed with splendour and honour, even with the abyss. The garment will fade but the clothing is also renewed. See Psalms 22:19, 35:13, 26, 45:14, 65:14, 69:12, 93:1, 1, 102:27, 104:1, 6, 109:18, 29, 132:9, 16, 18.

But my thoughts are tangential to Joel's stated intent for the book: to start "in ancient Jerusalem" and venture "through a wide variety of texts", to bring us "back to modernity with a renewed appreciation for the Bible ... and a better understanding of some of the forces that were most influential in shaping Western society ..." (page 10). To do this, he focuses on a few of the stories that were somewhat contemporaneous with but were left out of the canon. This negative focus produces a book that tells stories we may not have heard of from their own point of view, yet addressing issues that may be compared with the treatment of the subject matter in the generally accepted canon of the Bible.

Joel deals with three main collections: The Dead Sea Scrolls (chapter 2), the Septuagint (chapter 3), and Josephus (chapter 4). These are a matter of record and he reports on them, introducing and telling the story behind each one. Then he has three chapters on specific examples of elaborations that are not in the Bible: The Life of Adam and Eve, (chapter 5) otherwise known as the apocalypse of Moses, Abraham's story from the apocalypse of Abraham (chapter 6), and 1 Enoch (chapter 7), so named for the one who 'walked with God'.

Enoch, with its imaginative historical visions, provides a clever back portion of the envelope for the book. The front portion of the envelope is Joel's summary of the 1000 year history of Jerusalem (chapter 1) in relationship to all the cultures of the ancient world, taken one at a time. Beginning with the siege of Jerusalem by Pompey in 63 BCE, he traces how this confrontation was prepared from David to the Maccabees, showing Jerusalem in conflict with Babylon, Persia, Greece, Syria, the influence of Lydia via the origins of banking, and Carthage through Hannibal's influence on Antiochus III. The back portion of the envelope (chapter 7) traces Enoch's vision of the animals as identified with many of the same historical cities and their rulers in conflict with Jerusalem.

This is a useful if brief history and will be helpful to readers who are unfamiliar with it or who have remembered isolated history lessons from their school days about Carchemish, Marathon, and the Punic wars, but have not seen them integrated into a single narrative focused around Jerusalem. One should not doubt that a reader of the Bible needs this extra-Biblical context in order to understand several of the Biblical words and stories. No language or story emerges fully formed without its meaning being enmeshed and, at least in part, defined by the surrounding culture.

Textual variations between versions of stories from the Septuagint, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic Hebrew are particularly important and Joel cites some very good examples (e.g. pages 86-88 on the text of 1 Samuel 11). Here he describes the text of 4QSam(a) which has an additional section explaining why Nahash has such a brutal desire for the pact with Jabesh-Gilead. For this example, one might not question the appropriateness of the book's subtitle: The Holy Scriptures Missing from Your Bible. But the other pseudepigraphic stories are less than illuminating and more a set of anecdotes. These writings (including Josephus) are curious, useful, provide context or even data for clarification of the canon, but are they Holy?

Joel summarizes the big picture in a short chapter 8 making his key point that "we have an ancient culture that welcomed different opinions rather than focusing on one answer." The chapter on Josephus has a number of opinions on things related to the Adam and Eve story. But one doesn't need Josephus to know that there are multiple intertwined stories in the Bible admitting of differing opinions and interpretations. I doubt that anyone consulted Josephus as the canon was forming. Joel does a good job of showing how unreliable the Josephus tradition is including its most popular English translation, (but I note a counter to my negative take on Josephus where he is called "our single most important source for ancient Jewish history".)

Joel draws from Adam and Eve, from Abraham, from Enoch, three different reasons why humanity suffers and contrasts these with the reward and punishment of Deuteronomy and its counter-argument in Job, "which suggests that life is fundamentally impossible to understand" (Page 262). I suspect that Joel wants to get inside the closed mindedness that can be produced by a canon, but I am not sure he will succeed with this approach nor am I convinced of his conclusions. I agree, though, that Job is a direct response to Deuteronomy. Just to touch on the direct allusions to the covenant, consider the successive destruction of Job's livestock and children, Deuteronomy 28:31-32 and the final straw, Job 2:7 echoes Deuteronomy 28:35. All this in the context of blessings and cursings.

I tend at this time in my life to less breadth and more close reading. That's why I am not sorry that lots of things are not in the Bible. I have found enough to study already. The Psalms alone provide all the variety about the nature of human life that these apocryphal stories do. Reward and punishment, unjustified suffering, futility, love, and glory are all adequately dealt with in that one canonical text.

I suspect that the textual transmission even in what we have as canonical is far more complex at the detail level than can be contained in the curious elaborations that were left out. Examples of such thinking arrived across my desk as I was reading. Here for instance is an abstract of how harsh expressions may have been dealt with. Redressing the Calamity in the Transmission of the Bible by Alexander Rofé.

Joel cites many examples of copyist and translation difficulties, some from the Dead Sea Scrolls, some from the magical Septuagint translation, and some highlighted by texts gleaned from the unreliable Josephus. These variations are legion. One wonders where to start and how to manage the incoherence. Perhaps, therefore, the title of the book is apt, there being so many hands in the transmission of the text.

Those who should read such a book as The Bible's Cutting Room Floor in order that they be exposed to other ways of looking at the Biblical texts likely won't pick it up, but those who don't need to maybe will, and its introductory material will be helpful to them. I found reading it a fun trial of the questions and a good read but I do not find myself satisfied by the conclusions expressed or implied concerning the Holy, the Bible, or the nature of being human.

One needs the overview of the problems in the canon both of commission and omission. But to address the Holy, one must address also the problem of canon, of Israel as parable, and of the enemy, particularly the enemy that is within each of us, in order that somehow we might begin to achieve some co-inherence within our knowledge of good and evil. It may be that the canonical garment fits well enough to stimulate such wholeness and also that books such as Joel's can begin to help us avoid our tendency to embrace tight-fitting responses to the ancient texts.

"Their new reality was so shocking, in fact, that it would take them a whole week to realize that they were hungry." 

Joel has a delightfully titled blog, God Didn't Say That (rare posts this year - he's been busy). He is now working on the site The Unabridged Bible. He is a clear teacher. I remember with gratitude his patience and help to me many years ago when I could not yet distinguish וְֽהָיָה and יְהוָה. In this clarity, he follows in his father's steps. Lawrence Hoffman's Covenant of Blood was an in-depth eye-opener for my own reading in ancient Judaism.

The Bible's Cutting Room Floor is 276 pages, including a brief appendix on further reading. There is an index of sources and Scriptural references. I missed in the index (at the stage I saw it) a pointer to 'theology' since I did want to recheck some of his theological assumptions and reflections, but I was happy to see several references to 'good and evil'.

Religion without God (3)

Continuing the previous posts on Religion without God, a very short book (30,000 words or so) by the late philosopher and legal expert, Ronald Dworkin.

A great deal of Dworkin's arguments in the first three chapters have to do with the distinct universes of facts and values. In the last legal chapter, this distinction is recognized for how vague it is. Ultimately he cannot sustain the distinction without appeals to forms of words that are, as my mother would say, ridiculous. For example, he writes (p. 23) The science part [of a religion] offers answers to important factual questions about the birth and history of the universe, the origin of human life, and whether or not people survive their own death."

Can one even speak of fact, theory, or value when one considers the creation of the universe? No, one speaks or writes in mythic language, in story language, and experientially as one considers the presence of one's own thoughts. We are alive, we consider, and we react with story, history, myth, and derived value. Fact and value are not separated into science and value.

I am not a philosopher and I have no intention of citing Hume, Kant, Nietzsche or Putnam or anyone else for my justification of my own thoughts. None of these is an authority of necessity. Nor even is the so called idea of revealed religion. One must consider the story with one's self entirely engaged. And that is the problem in a nutshell. Engagement is frightening because there is no remainder of one's self that can stand objectively against the commitment.

This is faith. And it is permitted in all spheres, including the scientific, in sports, in music, in joy and in sorrow. Faith is not a blind leap, but it is a trust that tests its own assumptions as it matures, and that looks for a fruitfulness that is acceptable. The fact of acceptance, and the desire of acceptability are indistinguishable. There is no logic other than the paradox of self-giving. Dworkin does not approach this problem. He gets close in his brief on Tillich and the appropriate antinomy of affirming and denying simultaneously, and ultimately, he himself in his legal arguments approaches the same impasse without passing over.

Anyway, what do I know that I should dare an explanation? I know that an explanation will not satisfy. Satisfaction, the end of the story of Job, is impenetrable via logic. That is why Job's comforters fail, and YHWH presents himself via the mythical behemoth and leviathan, ciphers for Job and for God also. The psalmist writes of awakening: I will be satisfied to awaken in your similitude, in your likeness, created and brought forth after your own kind. (See this post which I wrote a few days before receiving Dworkin's book.)

Now - what is the story and are you willing to commit yourself into its keeping? The question requires some hard work, like any marriage, and its fruitfulness will be evident to others whether they are explicitly committed to this story or not. In fact, they will be your judges even as the salt-seafarers judged Jonah and in doing so themselves became mortals. My words are carefully chosen. I find it curious that these pagans, from Jonah's point of view, get the situation better than the reluctant prophet.

I hope to do one more post on this book, because Dworkin raises the spectre of worship. This requires a little more work from me, but so be it. The churches have a form of worship that has drama and character and a story - let's see if it can be found...

Religion without God (2)

Continuing the previous post on Religion without God, a very short book (30,000 words or so) by the late philosopher and legal expert, Ronald Dworkin.

The first phrase that caught my attention was on page 7, "In less violent places like America they fight mainly in politics... The fiercest battles are not between different sects of godly religion but between zealous believers and those atheists they regard as immoral heathens ..."

Well, I was taken aback by the offhand phrase, less violent places like America! My response to this one phrase is a post in itself.

I wonder how he was measuring violence. But it appears that physically violent crime rates have declined since the 1990's and are about the same as in the 1960's. Equally, despite the highest rate of gun ownership, and that we hear more news of gun crimes in the US, the rate is lower than many other countries. So let's allow this unsubstantiated phrase and consider the impact of the gridlock in congress these last 6 years over health care and other budgetary items like the debt ceiling and protecting the banks from collapse by quantitative easing and so on. These are the fiercest battles, as he calls them. They reveal to me a pent-up violence from the right wing, a wing often associated with conservative, religious, 'godly', values.

This battle was not between believer and atheist, but between believer and believer. But then, some who say they believe haven't done much listening. They say "if God cares for the widow and orphan, good then, I don't have to".  And they say to the government worker, "Come now, your job is not that important, give it up for 8 weeks and join our fight against this and that." The difficulty over this is that politics in America is not actually about God but all about money and how it should be spent and accumulated. This power is ultimately what the battle is about and it affects both domestic and foreign policy in left and right wing governments.

Of all the things that characterize humanity, violence in the defense of self-interest is perhaps the most obvious. It is much more obvious than "ethical independence". Many of us can make use of the controlled violence of constraint through the application of law via the police, but even this is violence, though limited. The nine original principles of western police forces are here. They are remarkably different from and far less violent than what one might expect. Externally, many of us must also depend on the violence that protects American interests abroad. Something is amiss here - and I am complicit, like it or not. I am complicit also in the capital accumulation issue. I profit from the stock market. I am a businessman, a corporate owner, whether directly or by proxy. I am not ethically independent here. I have delegated my portfolio to an expert. Though I hope that my benefits are not on the backs of others, it is possible that my son who struggles with home payments pays banking fees that show up in my dividends. At least he will inherit some day!

Where is the place of non-violence? Where is the place of innocence? How can we be innocent of this 'abundant transgression'? (Psalm 19 directly connects the numinous of the created order, the Torah, and our complicity in trouble.) How can we deal with the domestic and foreign fears we are all subject to? Can 'religion' do the job, or can the notion of ethical independence?  One has to ask also if God can do the job. Or faith in God, whatever that means.

Let me suggest that we live in the sixth day when God said - let the earth bring forth the living creature after its kind. We have not yet entered the seventh day when God rested. (See Psalm 95 and the interpretation in the letter to the Hebrews.) And we are the work in progress that God is creating after God's own image and likeness. So we see what we are to be, and it is not what we are. We are violent and self-protective. We say, you are my refuge, but we take refuge in guns and bank accounts and the social contract that excludes many who are not in our self-image and likeness. Could we do otherwise?

There is no immediate positive answer to this question, but it reveals our knowledge of good and evil. There are some negative answers. Our tools: economics and military might, and the coercion that accompanies them cannot provide our ultimate deliverance. They create and magnify the very evil we seek to manage. Abuse begets abuse. Capital for all its benefits lures the unwary into creating scams and bubbles. And killing terrorists begets more terrorists whose interests require a strong motivation to fight against our interests, which, of course, are not theirs. Our latest tools in worldwide communications at least raise our awareness, but by themselves, they are still subject to our will as we get more and more subtle with software.

Dworkin wanted to find solutions in all his difficult legal work. But what is the story that will support a solution and that will really gift us with a spirit of power - yes we have real capacity, and love - to see and care for the other, and the self-control that comes from a sound mind?

It will not do simply to be 'less violent'.

Religion without God (1)

Does morality precede God? Abraham asks YHWH, Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right? This seems to imply that God is subject to a prior good.

Religion without God is the title of a very short book (30,000 words or so) by Ronald Dworkin, a philosopher and a substantial legal mind. He didn't use Genesis 18:25 but it would have supported his argument. I suppose though that he knew for whom he was writing and that maybe his first thoughts are for a legal argument and not a Biblical one. It's too bad, because I think if you want the weak-kneed to use your book and you know they read you with distrust and read their own book with fear (something he assumes without support in a number of places), then you should trick them with your knowledge of their book and use their own weapons against them.

I was given Dworkin to read by a friend. The thesis of the book is that the atheist has common ground with the theist in the perception of beauty and truth (He is a romantic like John Keats) and that freedom with respect to "ethical independence" should be considered as a suggestion for replacing freedom with respect to "religion" in the UN Declaration of Human Rights (and similar documents). He makes it clear with several examples how the two clauses of the First Amendment of the American constitution are in conflict with each other. The argument of the last section of the book is clearly the work of a legal mind operating within the judicial systems of the Western world. I more or less skimmed this chapter since I think my friend is more interested in my responses to the earlier chapters - which I will come to in another post. But I was very impressed with what I skimmed of the conflicts that freedom of religion has led to. These are conflicts we are familiar with. For example, the Quebec Charter of Values developed before the defeat of the parti québécois, or the Swiss prohibition of minarets in 2009, or conflicts over prayer in public spaces and of course over sexual and reproductive morality.

I have avoided writing about many of the religious problems that plague our southern neighbour and ourselves as well - such as evolution vs special creation or something called intelligent design, a name with a serious misuse of adjective. I have also taken for granted the equality of women once I realized that my youthful arguments from ignorant zeal were not going to win any day. The issues of belief and signs of religion in public places have not too much bothered me but they are always on the periphery of things that could be worrisome. It is fair to say that I would not have been happy hiring someone who wore a ceremonial weapon. I do not think weapons are a legitimate means of resolving problems and I know that people can be tempted to anger and impulse. I think Dworkin is approaching Religion without God primarily because of these divisive issues in American culture and religion. But he argues in the first sections of the book as a philosopher against God rather than as a lawyer recognizing the tension in the resolution of constitutional conflict.

His appeals to value are important and difficult, but they have nothing to do with proving anything about God from a philosophical, logical, or mathematical point of view. I gave up long ago trying to prove anything about God from the point of view of existence. It is futile. Provably so. There are things that are true that are not provable. And I was surprised to read a very clever mind trying to justify atheism. Equally futile, I think. Atheism is sometimes the only healthy option, but like God it is not provable. (I did not say like theism. God is not a theist.) The last half of the book was enjoyable because it embedded examples from the American and European story. The first half was disappointing because it seemed to completely lack story. My God is story based. The Bible is a record of encounters in a long story over millennia, a kind of Festschrift for God, a series of anecdotes, poems and stories about the perceived presence of the Holy. The Bible may be wrong in our experience about what is implied in the story, but it is not wrong to have included the story. And what it says about presence is what we know from other hints - from the cosmos, from beauty, from music, and so on.

It is easy to dethrone the gods that demand obedience to doctrine and patriotism. The God who governs should not be so trifled with. So look for a moment at the story in the Psalms.

First Psalm 45:7,
Your throne O God is now and for ever;
a sceptre of equity the sceptre of your kingdom.

This is quoted in the epistle to the Hebrews 1:8-9 concerning "the son". In Hebrew, it is immediately followed there (Hebrews 1:10-12) by a quote from Psalm 102:25-27. These two psalms were not about the future of a particular king when they were written, but were about love (Psalm 45) after the destruction of the temple (Psalm 44) and about a prayer of the poor (Psalm 102) reflecting the language of the prayer of Moses (Psalm 90) which in turn is a response to the failure of governance in Israel (Psalm 89 culminating the laments of Books 2 and 3 of the Psalter, Psalms 42-89).

Psalm 102 promises renewal even in the face of perishing of the heavens and the earth.
These will perish but you - you will stand
and they all like a garment will fade
as clothing you will renew them and they will be renewed

Psalm 90:7 reflects on the transient renewal of the mortal:
in the morning it blossoms and renews
of the evening it is cut down and dries up.

Book 4 encapsulates the rule of YHWH. Religion without God has no such pointer. It is good for the author's legal mind that he was not successful in resolving this particular problem. He closes the book with "a prayer" that theists accept atheists as having "the same grounds for moral and political conviction as they do". Here, he picks his limitations carefully and I think accurately - so also do I pick mine.

In another post, I will pick apart some of my particular beefs with the first sections of the book.

What's up Doc

Here's a good read by Amy-Jill Levine. How well do we listen and how often do we impose shuttered vision onto what we read?

I am ready to be able to see again - in 3 weeks left eye - then see double for 2 weeks - then right eye. And today walking strong - beginning my recovery with 2 to 3 km a day walks - increase gradually.

look at me and I will smile
ere I walk off and there is no me
(Psalm 39:14)

Larry Behrendt has suggested to me that I take a new project seriously. I am not qualified to do this thing - but that never stopped me before. He writes "There is a strong need to thoroughly explore the relationship between Jesus' nonviolence and the Jewish attitude towards violence in Jesus' time and place. There is a similar need to integrate the effort to interpret the Gospels to show a nonviolent message, with an effort to read the Old Testament with similar generosity and purpose."

This relates directly to the question posed at the beginning of Fretheim's book on the Suffering of God -
"It is not enough to say one believes in God. What is important finally is the kind of God in whom one believes." (Page 1!)

What kind of God? God from God, Light from Light, Very God of Very God. The question jumps to mind as I noted at Larry's blog: "there is a good argument for non violence as the core character of God. Note particularly the summary of the character of YHWH in Psalm 146:6-9.

[doing judgment for the oppressed
giving bread to the hungry
יהוה releasing the prisoners

יהוה giving sight to the blind
יהוה uplifting the disturbed
יהוה loving the righteous

יהוה sheltering the guest
orphan and widow he restores
and the way of the wicked he subverts]

The imitation of YHWH - to be complete, holy as YHWH is complete, holy is a worthy calling - exactly the same I think as the call to obedience that is given to those who follow Jesus. One could write an essay on this beginning with Exodus 34:6 as it is elaborated in the Psalms: 25, 86, 103, 111, 112, 116, and 145. "

What kind of God? And God said ... let the earth bring forth (Genesis 1:24). This word for kind will be used in the Psalms here - Psalm 17:15.

Here we are as beasts emerging from the earth - our creation and our true birth is to be made in God's image - after God's likeness. And there we are in Psalm 17 satisfied to awaken lie God.

I in righteousness will gaze on your face
I will be satisfied to awaken in your similitude

I would add that this is a God who cares about image. Psalm 73:20.

like waking from a dream
My Lord, when you are roused
you will despise their semblance

And one whose emerging children walk about almost oblivious of the image they are called to. Psalm 39:7.

surely in a semblance a person walks
surely futility they murmur
they accumulate things
and don’t know who will get them next

These two psalms use the same word as image in Genesis 1:26. Likeness is used only once in the Psalms in a verse that no one reads, Psalm 58:5.

their heat is akin to the heat of a snake
as the deaf adder plugs its ear

This verse describes the violent human and shows, perhaps if you like, a picture of how distorted humans are - but this is what we see in our humanity, violence magnified rather than the image of the Holy and Complete that we are called to. (And the original garden could be misleading if you think it is all about regaining lost innocence - far from it.)

Well there are some thoughts on a project - how should I discipline the work?