★★★★★

O daughter of Babylon … blessed shall he be that taketh thy children and throweth them against the stones. –Psalm 137

In my book about Revelation, I suggest that this psalm may be both the most heartrending and the most disturbing passage in the Bible. Interesting that Vincent should choose it to highlight the question of how to read the Bible. What are we supposed to do with verses like this?

Vincent reminds us that much of the Bible is a cry of pain: “This psalm is in fact a very moving piece of dramatic poetry. If we were in the theater and heard someone cursing their enemy and calling on God for revenge in this kind of language, we would not ‘tut-tut’ or walk out in disgust! We would be caught up in the power of the drama, and go away saying what a good play it was. It is only the fact that the Bible has been set up as a theological and moral authority that makes this psalm a problem.”

Let the Bible be itself, Vincent suggests, and I really enjoyed his discussion. He describes briefly what to expect in the Bible, how it came to be, and the hazards of reading it as a divine instruction book. While it’s been a long time since I read the Bible as a fundamentalist, I do remember the awkwardness of trying to justify its errors, outdated morals, and claims of divinely sanctioned killing. Vincent has a knack for simple, understandable writing, bringing the Bible alive with both its warts and its beauty. Here’s an interesting observation: “If we believe God speaks through the bible, this must surely imply that God too is playful, experimental, changing and developing, even in some mysterious way self-contradictory and self-correcting—in other words, alive.”

Short book, but highly recommended.

//John chapter five tells of a lame man lying by the pool of Bethesda, where a great multitude of “impotent folk” lay waiting for the “moving of the water.” Today’s verse is a late addition to the Gospel of John, which clarifies the purpose for their gathering there.  Apparently when the water “moved,” it was believed to be at the prompting of an angel, and the moving water had healing powers. The original writing doesn’t contain this verse, presuming its readership’s familiarity with the pool, with no need to explain its healing powers. Many current translations of the Bible choose not to include this verse.

Excavations confirm the existence of a pool of Bethesda before Jerusalem’s destruction. The pool divided into two parts, north and south, with steps descending to multiple landings deep within the southern pool, facilitating bathing, regardless of water level. Tunneled sluice gates at the bottom enabled emptying and replenishing the pool, the resulting bubbling and frothing probably explaining the phenomenon of an “angel disturbing the water.”

★★★★★

Oh, man, do I relate. Here is an atheist who wants to lift atheism above the polarized wars that have developed from writings of the New Atheists. While I’ve never considered myself an atheist (I’m happy with the phrase “agnostic Christian”), even if I were, I would hesitate to take the title. I don’t want to be known as someone who tears down rather than builds up. I have more in common with nonbelievers than fundamentalists, but I have never been able to swim in the waters of an online atheist forum without feeling queasy … like I just plain don’t belong. I’m not alone: so uncomfortable are many people with atheists that polls show them to be the least electable group in America.

Why? Why are atheists so distrusted? Enter Chris Stedman, a believer-turned-atheist who misses the goodness of Christianity, and feels happiest when he is joining the Church in the soup kitchen.

Yet, the “regular Joe” atheist is as misunderstood as anyone of any contrary belief system, insists Stedman. The problem is, when there is little familiarity, extremists become the face of a religious movement, and this is just as true of non-religion (atheism). The New Atheists have managed to monopolize the public discourse on atheism. They have succeeded in making atheism more publicly known, but at what cost?

The goal of the New Atheist movement is the total eradication of religion. Confront the religious, expose the idiocy of believing, and sneer it under the table. The antireligious rhetoric spewed by aggressive atheists is not a critique of theology, says Stedman. That, he could deal with on an intellectual level. Rather, such attacks are “based in a willful ignorance of what it actually means to be religious and of the way religious lives are lived, and turn religious people into a cheaply mocked caricature.” Chris tells of trying to fit in at an American Atheists gathering in New Jersey, which was “packed full of blasphemy sessions and speeches comparing religion to sexually transmitted diseases.” He recalls how “Witnessing the sheer vitriol some expressed toward the religious, I actually cried—hot, angry tears. I called friends of mine back home—atheists, no less—and recalled what I’d seen … One friend said to me: ‘You see, this is why I don’t want to call myself an atheist.’”

Today, says Stedman, he cannot recount the number of fellow atheists and agnostics who do not want to be associated with the movement. What has gone wrong? How did atheism sink to the level of polarized fundamentalism it claims to despise, and can the image be fixed?

An atheist chaplain! Hee, hee! I doubt the New Atheists are amused, but I am in awe. This is a captivating, inspiring, must-read book, whether you are a believer or an atheist. Get it now.

//Yesterday, I told how Naomi hatched a plan to get her widowed daughter-in-law re-hitched. Per Naomi’s instructions, Ruth visited Naomi’s “kinsman” while he slept off a drunk, and he invited her under the covers.

The next day, however, Boaz pulls a sneaky one of his own. Apparently, Naomi has a parcel of land for sale, and the custom is that she must sell it to her nearest relative. That would be an unnamed man known only as Naomi’s “kinsman-redeemer.” Boaz invites this kinsman-redeemer to sit with him and ten elders of the town, and tells him of the parcel. Quickly, the man agrees to purchase the land, as is his right.

Boaz then casually mentions Ruth. If you buy the land, he says, you must take on the responsibility for her, since she depends upon the land to sustain herself. I can’t find where any such law is mentioned in the Bible, but we can assume it was indeed the custom for the “kinsman-redeemer” to take on such a responsibility.

The man replies that he cannot, for taking Ruth would endanger his own inheritance. Thus Boaz is able to buy Naomi’s land in his stead.

So, to summarize: Naomi, concerned about Ruth’s future, located an obscure relative and instigated a plan to get the two together. She had Ruth seal the deal by bringing up their kinship. The next day, Boaz uses his new relationship with Ruth to obtain land that should have belonged to Naomi’s closer kinsman. Was Ruth more than a pawn in a chess game? Did Naomi play Boaz, or did Boaz play Naomi? Or did everyone live happily ever after?

I think all three.

//Here’s a puzzle for you. Who got played in the story of Ruth and Boaz?

As the story goes, the young widow Ruth accompanied her mother-in-law Naomi back from the land of Moab to Israel, where she had no social ties. Concerned about her daughter-in-law’s future, Naomi decides to help out. She instructs Ruth to wash and perfume herself, and then to follow Boaz, Naomi’s “kinsman.” While Boaz is sleeping off a drunk, Ruth should lie down with him and uncover his “feet” (a euphemism for genitals throughout the Bible).

So Ruth does what her mother says, and Boaz wakes up in the middle of the night to find Ruth there. Ruth introduces herself, and suggests that Boaz should “redeem her” (that is, take her for his wife, as was the custom for the in-law of a widow).

Thus Ruth obtains a husband and stability in a new land. Sneaky, huh? But wait … that’s only one side of the story. More tomorrow.

//When Moses came down the mountain with the ten commandments, he started listing them off to the people.

1. You shall have no other gods before me.

2. You shall not make idols … for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God …

… and the people freaked out. They cried, “Moses, you talk to us. But don’t let God do the talking, or we’ll die!”

But isn’t this Moses talking in the first place, just repeating what God told him? Maybe not. The chapter starts with:

And God spoke all these words

Curiously, though, after these first two commandments, the tense switches from first-person to third-person:

3. You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.

… and so on. No longer “me” and “I” but “the LORD.” It sounds like someone else is talking now. So, according to Jewish tradition, Moses must have stepped in for God and spoke the remaining eight commandments.

//Three years, right? Jesus’ ministry lasted for three years.

But do you know where we get this idea? It comes from the Gospel of John. Today’s verse tells how, at Passover time, Jesus drove the money changers out of the Temple. John then narrates two more Passover celebrations, with the third one culminating in Jesus’ death. Three years, then, right?

The problem is that all three of the other Gospels contradict this. They all narrate only about one year for Jesus’ ministry, after which Jesus travels up to Jerusalem and dies during Passover.

The question, then, is this: Did John mean for his Gospel to be read chronologically? In an earlier post, I described how John uses the Jewish feasts as a backdrop for his stories of Jesus, and suggested that a chronological reading misses the point. Like the book of Revelation, another document in the Johannine corpus, the order of events may be thematic rather than chronological. The Temple cleansing in today’s verse, for example, surely occurred in Jesus’ final Passover; not two years before! It is, in fact, the trigger for the arrest of Jesus.

Could there have been two attacks on the Temple by Jesus, one two years before the other? Or should we recognize John’s literary creativity in reordering the events, and side with the other three Gospels for about a one-year ministry?

I vote for the latter.

(More about this topic can be found in my latest book, John’s Gospel: The Way It Happened)