//Just in case your Old English isn’t too good, here’s what’s happening in today’s verse: God needs a plan to kill King Ahab, and comes up with the idea of luring Ahab into a battle he can’t win. But how to convince Ahab? The “host of heaven” around God’s throne suggest one idea after another, until finally a “lying spirit” shows up and offers to be of service. So God sends the lying spirit forth to fool all of Ahab’s advisers—four hundred of them. It works, Ahab is convinced to fight, and he dies.

Great story! But I’d venture a guess that there’s more to the tale. Call me a skeptic, but I’m a little unconvinced about any “host of heaven” debating strategy, or any lying spirits, or why God wouldn’t be able to figure out his own battle plan in the first place. So, tomorrow, I’ll let you in on how I think the whole thing really went down.

//This is one of the ten commandments. It’s recorded also in Deuteronomy 5:17, and repeated twice in the New Testament: once by Jesus (Matthew 5:21) and again by Paul (Romans 13:9). Always in the very same, clear language. Thou shalt not kill. Serious stuff.

So strong has this polemic grown that many Christians refuse to bear arms in battle; refuse to approve the death penalty; refuse to celebrate the death of Osama Bin Laden.

Now, I’m not arguing that war is good or that capital punishment is appropriate, nor can I think of anybody I’ve ever wanted killed. That’s hardly the Christian nature. But I do want to clarify what the Bible really says.

In each case, I’ve been quoting the King James Version. But the wording has been corrected in the New King James Version, and many other translations. A much more precise wording is Thou shalt not murder. It is hardly against the Law of God to justifiably kill another person; indeed, many of God’s laws require stoning the perpetrator to death. The Hebrew verb in this commandment is ratzach, which normally describes homicide. In particular, premeditated killing. In the few cases where it refers to accidental death, provision is recorded for a lesser sentence, making it clear that the Bible does not consider all forms or reasons for killing to be equally wrong.

★★★★

This story is a quest for purpose, by a middle-aged woman who seems to have lost ties with everything and everyone that once gave life meaning. She toys with religion, on a sort of intellectual level, trying to break through the intellectual shell to the experiential. She and her new friends find themselves “seeking something that is one breath, one heartbeat, one step away,” but with different approaches.

As it turns out, the spiritual side braids with the mundaneness of life, and the two cannot be torn apart. There is sadness in the story. It soon becomes apparent that even the most imaginative author would destroy the book’s theme by trying to tidy up all its confusion by book’s end … so we are left with a sort of melancholy realism. The draw of the characters, and the bizarre connection I felt to them, leaves me shaking my head. I can’t figure out if I’m happy to have read the story or not. I suspect I’ve fallen prey to precisely the emotions Hume wanted to evoke.

Lest my late-night meandering thoughts leave the wrong impression, I want to be clear that Hume writes with intelligence and feeling. A well-written, intriguing read.

//Remember the battle of Jericho? Israel marched around and around its walls until the walls simply fell down, and they plundered the city. Every living thing—men, women, cattle, sheep and donkeys—was put to the sword, and the city and everything in it was burned. Joshua then concludes the ordeal with this curse against anybody who tries to rebuild it. It will cost the builder his firstborn son.

Well, if you don’t believe in curses, maybe you should. Around 500 years later, a man named Hiel couldn’t resist rebuilding Jericho, and though we don’t know the details of what happened, the Bible hints at something sordid:

In Ahab’s time, Hiel of Bethel rebuilt Jericho. He laid its foundations at the cost of his firstborn son Abiram, and he set up its gates at the cost of his youngest son Segub. –1 Kings 16:34

//John’s Gospel reads a little different than the others here. In Mark 14:58 Jesus promises:

I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and within three days I will build another made without hands.

Jesus is thus condemned by the Jewish leaders for threatening to destroy the temple, a magnificent construction begun by Herod the Great. John, however, turns this around. In his version, Jesus no longer says “I will destroy the temple” but instead tempts the Jews with a command: “Destroy this temple.”

Why? Because John has a unique understanding to share. E. P. Sanders argued that Jesus actually prophesied the destruction of the temple (which did, indeed, happen, though it took another 40 years to occur) and expected God to send a new one. This new temple would be God-given, much like the God-given city promised in the book of Revelation. There, the city would float down from heaven and settle atop Mount Zion. No human hands would join in the construction, for God himself would do the constructing.

John, writing his gospel 25 years or so after the temple was destroyed, may have finally concluded that no new temple was on the horizon. Certainly it didn’t come within the three-day deadline. Yet, that concept of a “temple made without hands” was surely tantalizing. Another of Revelation’s promises, you may recall, is that there would be no temple in the new City of God; Jesus himself would be the temple.

So now we come to John’s fascinating insight, turning failure into success, for the new temple was constructed as promised after all! Jesus was never talking about Herod’s temple in the first place! That’s why he could dare the Jews to “destroy this temple.” The next verse reads:

John 2:21, But he spake of the temple of his body.

Jesus wasn’t talking about a new temple at all, when he said he would rebuild one in three days. He was talking about his own resurrection!