My Yemen Blog

OK, I’ve basically finished the Old Testament. I did not read every single word, I really don’t have the patience. Many of the books (especially the prophets) were simply the warnings about the judgement of God on Israel and Judah. They talk about how the people and kings of Israel and Judah worshiped other gods and how angry God was over and over and over. Seriously, I estimate that 3/4 of the Old Testament can be paraphrased with, “You have sinned against God, you and your descendants will be punished by marauding armies from other nations. You will mostly be wiped out, but the people that survive will come back from exile and enjoy a great life as long as they do what they are supposed to.” If idol worship isn’t a problem, you can pretty much ignore the vast majority of the Old Testament if you’re a Christian. I also did not have the patience to read about the judgement on the other nations like Babylon and Edom. What are we supposed to do with prophecies that have already come to pass? Why should we care about these particular passages when those nations and gods are long gone? There were a few opaque references to what I assume is the Messiah. Most of them are pretty vague, and there is more than a little reaching needed in order to think that the Messiah is involved at all. On top of that, for every sentence about the Messiah, there are probably 100-150 about Babylon or the Philistines. I also couldn’t help but notice the complete lack of prophecies about the Romans, Islam, or the Nazis. Sure, maybe God expected everyone to follow Jesus, but there are zero prophecies about Christians and their troubles with the aforementioned groups. The signal to noise ratio is pretty low in most of the books. I really had to search for anything of value that I could take away from most books.

There are exceptions of course. Jonah was illuminating, and mercifully short. Job is, in my mind, the standout in the Old Testament. It asks some pretty direct, critical questions of God, about faith, and the payout we should expect. Some of those questions are answered, sort of. It’s complicated, but at least it deals with some real religious issues and isn’t mostly irrelevant history like the rest of the Old Testament. Read Job, maybe Jonah, but don’t bother with the rest unless you need to know every prophecy against those good for nothing Israelites…

In my mind, Job is the first book in the Old Testament worth reading. The books before that don’t really engage the (Christian) reader with any sort of religious thought. It’s mostly just history and laws that don’t necessarily apply to you. I will say that Ezra was a relief. Up until that point, the books were written in such a way that God was a tangible, known quantity when He clearly wasn’t. They wrote the books with the idea of, “Look, there’s God and He’s doing X.” Well, if God’s motives and intentions were so transparent, most of what happened in the Old Testament wouldn’t have happened. It’s clear to me that all of the things that happened in Judges, the Samuels, both Kings, and both Chronicles were histories of things that happened and were later ascribed to God’s actions. God may or may not have been involved but it is clear to me that the authors of those books didn’t really have any idea. After all, if God were directly involved with everything that they wrote about you wouldn’t come away from those books with the idea that you better do what God says or else he’ll smite you… eventually. Or maybe the generation after you, or maybe not. In any case everything in those books are really important… if you’re the king of Israel.

Seriously, everything was about the kings, but what about all the people? Yes, they did what was evil in the Lord’s sight, but it sounds like there were entire generations, with their kings, that got away with it. I would hope to see a more consistent doling out of justice… This gets back to my question about the afterlife. All of what happened in those books would have been OK if there were some mention of people getting their just desserts after they died.

So yeah, I’ve been pretty disappointed in the Old Testament so far, but Job is different. Job is troubling, complicated, and I don’t quite understand it. There does seem to be some good information in there though and some really good questions. This was the third time I had read this particular book, and I think I’ll need to read it a few more times… Some of the more interesting tidbits for me are:

1) Satan is named and shown to be a real tormentor, but with God’s cooperation. God gives him permission to do these things to Job. Does that imply that all bad things are done with God’s permission?

2) Job calls out for an intermediary between him and God. This would seem to put the Catholic practice of praying to Mary or any one of the myriad saints into question. After all, no one in the Old Testament was shown to be praying to Abraham or Moses for intervention. Maybe it’s just a time issue, maybe God hadn’t gotten around to implementing that yet. I have a feeling that some people will see this as foretelling the coming of Jesus. The only problem with that is that if Jesus is God, how is He an intermediary?

Anyway, Job made me think and that’s a good thing. I hope there’s more like Job to come!

There were a few terms I kept running into during my reading of the Old Testament that I wanted to know more about. First up was Baal. Turns out there were a bunch of Baals, it was also a term for “father,” “lord,” or “master.” He was your typical fertility, crop, good weather god for the most part. Some people worked in human sacrifice, probably from the cult of Molech. How’s this for creepy, there was a huge bronze statue of Molech that was hollow. They would keep a fire burning in it, making the statue glow a dull red. People would place their first born son or daughter in its hands and through an ingenious mechanism, the hands would move up and drop the child into its mouth where the baby would drop inside and burn to death… The priests would dance around and cut themselves while this was going on and there would be musicians playing flutes, harps, and tambourines to drown out the screams. Can’t say as I’m sorry to see that cult fade away…

I made the mistake of looking up “temple prostitutes” on the web. I had seen this term a couple of times and didn’t really know what it meant. Well, it turns out that various cults used sex as part of their services. It was to call the divine power, bring good luck, etc. There were both male and female shrine prostitutes and there is little or no evidence that they had sex with the same sex. Well, this has caused considerable outrage among the more wacko, gays are evil incarnate crowd. Apparently, the term shrine or temple prostitute replaced “sodomite” that was used in the original King James version of the Bible. People are outraged that any reference that paints gays in a negative light be changed, accuracy be damned. Granted, I don’t have the background to argue this from first hand sources, but from what I can tell, the term shrine prostitute is a more accurate translation and it is MUCH more specific as to what is being disallowed. The anti-gay folks should just relax, there are still plenty of references of man on man sex as being forbidden and/or shown in a negative light. The whole incident with Lot and the angels in Sodom, God’s judgement on Sodom and Gomorra, there’s a part in Leviticus that explicitly states that sex between men is forbidden (or is anathema to the Lord or some other language like that). If there really was a plot to make homosexuality look “more acceptable” in the Bible, those last things would be the things getting revised, not a correction of sloppy translation of a vague term.

i really get a kick out of people getting all in a lather because a verse in a Bible is not how they learned it, inevitably from the King James version. They say you can’t alter the “word of God” and that it is blasphemy. How can people be so thick to miss the fact that they are reading a translation? And the texts that the translators are working from aren’t from anywhere near the time of those things happening. Especially when it comes to the Old Testament, who knows how many times those books were revised, edited, or just “neatened up” in order to clarify things. There is no way to know what was originally written. To me, this is a good thing. How can anyone, with a straight face, tell me that God’s will can be explicitly stated with something as clumsy as language, especially through so many translations. Anything, yes anything, that God “says” will be considerably simplified and yes, mangled when put into one of our languages. We can only receive or understand a small portion of “The Truth.” Get over it people…