//One of the “eight great debates” in first-century Judaism was this matter of divorce. Under what circumstances was divorce to be permitted? Respected rabbi’s Shammai and Hillel espoused different teachings, and when the Pharisees came to “test” Jesus, they really were merely trying to nail down which side of the debate Jesus would take.

In this example, Jesus sides with Shammai … interesting, because he usually sides with Hillel. But this time, Hillel, quite lax on the matter, argued that divorce was permitted “even if she [merely] burns his soup.” Like the Pharisees ask, “Any and every reason.” Shammai’s stance was more strict, that divorce should only occur over a matter of immorality.

Thus we reach Jesus’ teaching in Matthew, who chooses Shammai in the debate: 

I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery. –Matthew 19:9

It’s curious that only Matthew includes this exception about infidelity. It doesn’t exist in Mark, the text that Matthew copies from. Mark simply says divorce is a no-no. But Matthew, apparently more familiar with the two sides of the big debate than Mark, adds the clause that a person is permitted to divorce under the circumstance of infidelity.

 //The story goes that when Abraham lived in Gerar, he deceived Abimelech, king of Gerar, telling him that his wife Sarah was really his sister. So Abimelech, knowing no better, “sent for Sarah and took her.” (Not really; two verses later, scripture explains that he didn’t have opportunity to get near her, but it was apparently a close call. God intervened.)

Nevertheless, God is angry, and says Abimelech had better make things right with Abraham or he will die. God also “closed up every womb in Abimelech’s household” so that Abimelech couldn’t conceive an heir.

Abimelech pleads with Abraham, and Abraham is moved to pray to God, not only to spare Abimelech’s life but to restore his ability to conceive. God hears the prayer, and opens the wombs of Abimelech’s wife and slave girls.

Legend tells us that this was the first time in human history that God fulfilled the prayer of one human being for another. Not the first time someone prayed for another; Abraham had previously begged God to spare Sodom, though God refused. But Abraham’s incessant pleading for others wore God down. Indeed, as the legend goes, the very reason God conversed with Abraham at all was because of Abraham’s concern for others: when Abraham begged for leniency toward Sodom, God said, “You take delight in defending My creatures, and you would not call them guilty. That is why I have spoken to no one but you during the ten generations since Noah.”

//This particular section of scripture (attributed to Paul, though probably written after his time) draws little appreciation from most women. First, “Paul” insists that a woman may not speak in church, but should “learn in quietness and full submission.” Then he says that women will be saved by having children.

Really?

Actually, there is another interpretation of this verse. In no translation does it actually say saved by having kids. It says through, or in. And what, exactly, does “saved” mean? We tend to read the New Testament through the lens of today’s afterlife-oriented Christianity, but that may be inappropriate.

Consider, for example, that Timothy (the letter’s addressee) lived in Ephesus. Just down the street from him would be the world-famous temple dedicated to Artemis, the goddess who protected women from harm as they gave birth to children. I’ve heard it said that one out of two women in Ephesus died during childbirth; if that’s true, then Artemis wasn’t doing a very good job.

Artemis’s failure should come as no surprise. Recall God’s promise to Eve because of her sin in the Garden of Eden: To the woman he said, “I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. But in the new age, the paradise of Eden will be restored, and this age, according to the first Christians, lived in its birth pangs. It was supposed to be just around the corner.

Thus in today’s verse “Paul” exposes Artemis as a fraud while at the same time reminding believers of the promise of safe child bearing through faithfulness to the true God.

//After Sarah died, Abraham married again, to a woman named Keturah. Together, they had several more children. 1 Chronicles 1:32, however, calls Keturah not a wife but a concubine. So which is it? Wife or concubine?

Answer: Maybe both. Keturah was Sarah’s maidservant and bore a child to Abraham years before she became Abraham’s wife. How do we know this? Because if oral tradition is to be trusted, we already know this woman well. Keturah is another name for Hagar, the woman who bore Ishmael. The woman whom Sarah demanded be cast out into the desert with her son. Keturah means “perfumed,” and the tradition notes that Hagar was “perfumed with good deeds.”

So with Hagar out on her own, how did this reconnect with Abraham transpire? Well, it turns out that Isaac had been living in Beerlahairoi before he married, which hints that he had been living with Hagar and Ishmael. See Genesis 16:14, 24:62, 25:11. Evidently, after Sarah died, the influence of Isaac and Ishmael brought Hagar and Abraham back together … one happy family once again. When Abraham died, Isaac and Ishmael together buried him.

A speculative scenario, but a pleasant one.

For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?

//Help! Science has stolen my soul, and I can’t get it back!

For at least a couple hundred years before Christ, many Jews believed in an afterlife. They understood there would be a physical resurrection, and they would live again in the flesh, on the earth. It may have been around the time of Christ that the Greek concept of a soul made inroads into branches of Judaism, and lodged firmly in the branch we know today as Christianity.

But if I have a soul, can it really be me? My feelings, my mental skills, my memories reside within a piece of meat housed in my skull. Likewise, so is everything I’ve learned to say and do and enjoy, everything that makes me “me.” My love for music, my competitive spirit, my unappreciated wry sense of humor, my weakness for cute noses. That’s what’s me.

So maybe I do have a soul, a living parasite housed somewhere within my body. Maybe this soul has some sort of otherworldly link to God, perhaps God pulls the strings on this parasite, and perhaps it can even somehow stir the electrical impulses that fire between the neurons of my brain to make me think and act differently. Maybe it lives on after I die, and maybe it then goes to heaven or hell. The question I struggle with is, Why do I care about it? Or, more to the point, why would I care any differently about my parasite than yours? I hope they all go to heaven, and I hope they dance happily there while the personalities they leave behind fade into oblivion.

Comments welcome.

//In today’s verse, Abraham, newly-circumcised, sees three men and rushes to provide hospitality. It is said that the third day after circumcision is the most painful, and this was the third day. Despite his groin pain, he jumps up and runs to them, begging them to let him serve them.

According to Jewish tradition, service is simply in Abraham’s nature. He cannot help but show kindness. Kabbalah tradition tells us that Abraham was so motivated by desire to provide hospitality that on this day he sent a servant out into the desert hoping to find some weary passers-by whom he could aid. Finding no one, he dejectedly returned to his tent, when the three strangers appeared. He immediately and joyfully rushed to greet them.

In pain from circumcision, he nevertheless “runs to the herd and selects a tender calf” and has a feast prepared. Abraham’s reward? A child born to Sarah, his wife, and the fulfillment of God’s promise of an uncountable nation. 

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.

He will deliver us from the Assyrian when he invades our land and marches into our borders.

//Micah prophesied the arrival of a military savior who would rescue Israel from the Assyrians. When no such savior appeared, this prophecy was retained in the minds of later readers as a general reference to the anticipated Jewish Messiah. 

The Christian claim, of course, is that Jesus was (and is) this very Messiah. Micah 5:2 is quoted by Matthew as evidence that Jesus would be born in Bethlehem, so Matthew clearly recognized Micah’s prophecy as relating to Jesus.

These sorts of questions highlight the problem with taking Old Testament Bible prophecies of Jesus literally. Matthew was no idiot; he surely knew he was reinterpreting the Bible as he quoted Micah. If the authors of the Gospels, thought by many to be the very disciples sitting at the feet of Jesus, knew the prophecies were being fulfilled in a symbolic or other non-literal way, why should we read the Bible literally today? Why do we imagine, for example, that Revelation’s horrors are to be interpreted literally?

And did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ.

Sometime later, the Israelites thirst again, and again God tells Moses to bring forth water from the Rock. Tradition says this is the same Rock as the first time, which had been following the Israelites around providing water, but now it had apparently quit producing.

This time, however, God commands Moses to merely speak to the Rock. It doesn’t need further physical inducement. But Moses doubts, and whacks the poor Rock. It doesn’t respond, so he whacks it again. This time, the Rock gives up its water (Numbers 20:11). God is displeased over Moses’ inhumane treatment of the Rock, and decides Moses will be denied entrance to the Promised Land.

This is the traveling Rock that Paul writes about in today’s verse. John’s Gospel further explains the analogy, describing the death of Christ: “But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water.” This act of piercing Jesus’ side, like that of Moses striking the rock, produced water but was unnecessary. Accordingly, as Moses was denied entrance into the Promised Land, so will these men be punished, while those redeemed by the blood/water of Christ are welcomed into the new age:

Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him: and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him. Even so, Amen. (Revelation 1:7)

//If you said Jacob stole Esau’s birthright, you’re right.

If you said Jacob stole Esau’s blessing, you’re right.

If you said Jacob stole Esau’s wife, you’re right.

According to oral tradition in the Kabbalah, the story goes that Laban’s two daughters had been betrothed to Isaac’s two sons all along. Rachel to Jacob, the older Leah to the older Esau. Jacob falls in love with Rachel and agrees to work seven years for her, while Esau wanders off and ignores his bride. So, after the seven years are over, Leah remains unmarried, and according to custom, the older must marry first, so in the morning Jacob wakes up to find not Rachel in bed with him, but Leah! He has married the one betrothed to his brother! 

He works another seven years for Rachel, and Esau seems unperturbed about losing Leah (she had “weak eyes”), so all’s well that ends well.

//This verse may be difficult to picture from today’s understanding of the cosmos, but in the day it was written, it actually made perfect sense. The sky was pictured as a dome overhead, enclosing the flat earth, and when the day came for the earth to be destroyed, the dome was rolled up and discarded. Whether or not Jews truly expected a cataclysmic end to the universe or were merely playing with metaphors, at least the idea made sense back in the day.

The image of the universe as a big scroll holds me spellbound. Revelation alludes to another mysterious scroll, with all of the mysteries of God written therein. In Islamic thought, God provides two great tools for our understanding: The Qur’an and the physical universe are twin manifestations of God Himself. The universe can be pictured like a written scroll, perhaps slowly unrolling to teach us about God’s glory and the meaning of his creation. It invites us to explore and learn. One day, of course, it’ll come to an end … “The Day when we shall roll up the heavens as a recorder rolleth up a written scroll.” (Qur’an 21:104). 

//Do you picture Isaac as a young boy when Abraham took him up the mountain to sacrifice him? Most people do. But one wonders how he is able to carry the wood for the sacrifice on his back if he’s a child.

Instead, according to both the Talmud and the Kabbalah, Isaac was a fully-grown man of 37 years old. Now, if we do the math, Isaac was born to Sarah when she was 90, and Sarah died when she was 127 years old, so that would make Isaac 37 years old. Thus Sarah died in the year God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, his son.

We can probably pin the time of her death down even further. After Abraham (and presumably Isaac) trudge back down the mountain after the aborted sacrifice, they head off to Beersheba. The very next thing we read is that Sarah died at Kiriath Arba (Hebron), and Abraham “went” to mourn for her. So Abraham never saw his wife again alive after he left to sacrifice Isaac. Batteries hadn’t been invented yet, so Abraham’s cell phone would have been no help. We are left with the assumption that Sarah died of heartache from Abraham travelling off to murder her only son.

So, God saves Abraham’s son from sacrifice but the ordeal kills his wife?