Old Testament Families

Following up on what I said in my last post, I am getting bored with my old journals, and have decided to get pickier about what I post. I am mainly going to follow the path I set out on when I began a letter to my mother a few years ago – to try to explain what I believe and why I believe it and how I came to believe it. Those things that are particulary relevant to that path, I'll go ahead and type up. And if there are other things – like this book review and the thoughts it spurred, or other major things, I'll add those as well.

March 24

I have to talk some more about religion. Last night I finished Rachel and Leah, and saw that he was unable to tell the whole story so there will be a fourth book, Wives of Israel. I felt like this book was not as good at evoking and explaining early Hebrew culture as the last ones, but maybe he felt he'd already set up the context. I kept having the feeling that he was more interested in explaining how polygyny might work, and there was a note of justification. I ended up feeling this was less about Hebrews than Mormons. Some examples – the entire relationship between Jacob and all the relevant women except Rachel centers on the reading of the Holy Word, the writen scriptures. Now that is likely supposed to be the foundation of family life for Mormons, but we are talking about the grandson of Abraham. He is thought to have lived c. 2100 BCE. So call it 2000-1900, generously allowing the Biblical reports of Abraham's age at Isaac's birth.

I believe this is about when Egyptians are developing their heiroglyphics – I'd have to check about all those languages (Sumerian cuneiform, etc.). What is importat is that even the dogged believers in Moses having written the Penteteuch personally don't put the date any earlier than 1400 BCE. He might have used earlier sources, they say, but come on, Hebrews writing their own distinct language (not pictographic, by the way, but phonetic) in 1900 BCE? And they are already ancient, according to Card. How ancient could they be, if Abraham was the first Patriarch, first one to make people realize they needed any history, and you are only one generation between you and that Patriarch? It just doesn't make any sense.

It wouldn't be such a problem for the book if it was just an occasional reference to a few holy writings. But the story doesn't work without it. Jacob and Rachel's relationship develops through their common interest in herding. Leah, though, would have had no reason to even see him except Card makes the "birthright" of Abraham this large collection of holy books. Lean and one of her future concubines, Bilhah, come to Jacob to learn the scriptures, and they learn to read and write and Bilhah becomes a scribe, copying all the texts.

He, Card, uses these books as a way to explain what happens in the Biblical story such that the people involved are all essentially good. I re-read the relevant part of Genesis last night and it is as I recalled – full of trickery, deceit, betrayal, jealousy, bickering, competition and exploitation. Hard to tell it in such a way that the people are good and their behaviors justified.

I recall being troubled with the story in childhood, but I don't recall what my parents said, if anything, to help me understand it. It is hard to explain away. Jacob makes a deal with Laban for Rachel's hand. He works 7 years for her in brideservice, and then Laban tricks Jacob into marrying Leah, the older sister with weak eyes. Then Laban says he'll give him Rachel, too, if Jacob does another 7 years. And after that, Laban continues to change the terms of the deals he makes with Jacob – Jacob says "10 times"!!!

As a child, I of course would have been unfamiliar with polygyny and bridewealth to begin with, making it harder to get a grasp on this story, to tease apart what is cultural and what is people behaving badly. But as an anthropologist, I am very familiar with many different societies who practice either or both, and with pastoralist cultures in general. Pastoralist, patrilineal cultures wherein sororal polygyny is practiced and either bridewealth or brideservice is paid also generally have an economic system of balanced reciprocity. The idea of balance in exchanges permeates the entire ideology (in fact, that is at base what bridewealth is – compensation for removing the valuable bride and her future labor and children from her household) and makes possible all kinds of other ideological and symbolic exchanges like sacrifice. But the point is – you DON'T TRICK PEOPLE OR GO BACK ON YOUR WORD!!!!! Not if you care about your family's good name. Not if you ever want to do business or marry any one else in your family or graze your sheep or water your cattle, etc. I mean, this is an absolutely unheard of, terrible, wrong, evil thing to do. Ask anyone living in a pastoralist society.

So Laban is a sneaky, lying, exploitative man. But Jacob is no better – he lied and deceived his own father in order to steal his elder brother's birthright and inheritance. One might think he's gotten what he deserves.

But what about the sisters? What did they do to be punished this way? Poor Leah, who is unwanted but forced to marry a man who is in love with her sister. Poor Rachel, who was expecting to be the sole or at least first wife of her beloved, who loves her in return. Now she is second wife, and then Leah gets all the first babies as her consolation. The two sisters get into a pissing (well, birthing) match to see who can have most sons and therefore their husband's love. They throw their handmaidens at him and claim their children as their own, in a way. Rachel has to wait and wait for her first child, and then her second one kills her in childbirth.

Leah has lots of sons, and more through her servant, and yet as soon as Rachel has one, she gets special treatment, as does her son. All those sons grow up to be pretty nasty characters, infected with the terrible jealousy, bitterness and pain of ther mothers' competition. All but the youngest, Joseph, who is spoiled by his father (Rachel's child, after all), but becomes a decent human being.

This is a terrible story in so many ways. When looking at it from the sisters' point of view, one has to ask, why did this happen to them? In Judaism there is only ever one answer to that question: because God wanted it to. Humans have free will, but God, knowing their (our) personalities, sets things up in such a way that he knows or can guess, which way a person will choose.

Either: 1. People make absolutely free choices and God then works with that choice, or; 2. God arranges things such that they will happen a certain way. Either way, isn't God still interfering? Still guiding people's choices, and thus removing one's free will? If you want to defy the will of God, the Semetic religions say you can't, because God can turn ALL things to His purpose. Right?

What I am trying to establish is that no matter how you think of it, even to add a third choice, that people will attempt to discern God's will for them and will thus do it – Jacob married both Leah and Rachel because that is how God wanted it. Why? Why did God want this so badly that he was willing to destroy all these lives (or let them be destroyed), let terrible deeds go unpunished, etc.?

Well, look what happens next, what comes out of it. Ah, the sons of Jacob are the origins of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.

Wonderful. God uses those tribes as a way to organzie his people all the way through history, even up to today. And they figure somehow in the End Times, as seen in John's revelation. I can't remember the details. Priests of one of the tribes must be in silent prayer at the temple, or something like that.

Is that supposed to console Leah? Comfort Rachel? Maybe it does, so that might be fine. But when one steps back a bit, and asks questions such as, "What does this teach us about the nature of God?" "About the human condition?" "About what God expects of us?" then I feel like some very serious issues are at stake.

First, one common lesson Christians take from tales like this are that God uses even bad people and bad behavior to achieve His ultimate purpose. God turns all things to good. But that ignores the fact, or at least the implication, that god in fact set things up SO that people would behave badly. It is an echo of the Garden of Eden story. God tells people to be good, but then arranges things, playing on his knowledge of our weakneses (which He gave us), to elicit that bad behavior that He needs in order to further the story, or make His larger point. I just keep seeing Yahweh set people up and knock them down.

Why? Perhaps his ultimate purpose is so wonderful that it justifies this interference, this manipulation of his creatures so they do what he told them not to. I mean, what if Adam and Even had just obeyed him? No story, period.

I've asked many times what the Ultimate Purpose is. And maybe that's presumptuous. Maybe we puny humans aren't qualified to know that. But we have brains, so let's use them. The Old Testament is really the story of one family. Starting with Adam it tells the story of him and his descendents. In the New Testament, it's important to the writers to establish the link, to show that "Hey! This is the same family."

All the other people in the OT are just props, bit players. So God's ultimate purpose must have something to do with this family. For Jews, who are all part of this family, that's great. God started the world with this family and will end it with this family. For them, they can find much meaning – God's purpose is related to them going through all these struggles in order for . . . what? For them to finally learn to submit wholy to God's will? Mightn't they have done that sooner if god hadn't kept creating tempting situations? OK, so he's training them to never give in, no matter the temptation, so that they will one day be a holy people who usher in the Messianic Age, in which life is great for everyone and they are all obedient to God's will. Well, couldn't he have just created them that way to start with?

Maybe it is important to have a bunch of creatures come to be good and obedient of their own choice. Why? Back to the idea of a battle to fight with an Other, and God needs an army. I don't know. But if you stick with just the Jews, then what was the purpose of there being people with whom Jews would never have contact and some who would never even hear of them?

I mean, this whole universe created so one family can play out this story in which one (or two) creatures become many. Are given free will, make a lot of good and bad choices, but ultimately learn to be good. One family. Does that feel remotely true? Not to me. Of course, Jews also see their story as one that is meant to be an example to all humanity of God's existence, his love, his will, his plan. But what IS that plan?

I mean, the Hebrews and then Jews were never recruiters. They didn't try to convert people, they didn't and really still don't go out of their way to welcome those who want to join them, and they never tried really to prove that theirs was the only God to others. So they are just being a quiet example.

Christians are the ones who decided that the God of the Jews is the only god for all people. They were the first to have the idea that God's plan was to extend his relationship to others outside the one family. It is important to them to demonstrate that Jesus is a member of that family, that he is the heir to the kingdom the family has become. And he is the door that allows all humankind to be adopted by the family and his subjects in the kingdom.

So Rachel and Leah's suffering becomes meaningful in that it produced this kingdom and the heir to it so that all creatures might be saved, in a Christian interpretation.

For me, I've come to a place where this story just doesn't make sense in those ways. If god wanted all people to be a part of this family, why didn't he do it from the start?

But it's not as if all those other people out there don't have their own stories!!! They have stories about their own families, their own gods, and their own importance in the universe.

All the small societies in Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia, the Americas, the islands (the 'Nesias, as I always think of them), they have had their experiences with God. They have developed or been given by god their own rules. Maybe not written down as the Decalogue of the Jews, but Hammurabi had his codes, Egyptians, various groups of Chinese, Indians, Maya, Aztec, Inca, Medes, Sumerians, Babylonians, Akkadians, and many, many, many others DID have holy scriptures, messages and lessons and morality plays and poetry. And all of those thousands of cultures without writing nevertheless have and have had extremely sophisticated and complex religions.

More, they had their own experiences of God or Ultimate Source or wahtever they called it. God spoke to them, too. Told them THEY were the special ones. Walked them through difficulties, comforted them, punished them, all the same things that Jews had.

And then in some places people came to understand Absolute Reality in a different way. As NOT a person. And they did their work, and they devoted themsleves, and they had their own experiences of the Divine, or Absolute, which were earth-shattering, every bit as much as the voice of God was to the Hebrew prophes, as ecstatic as the followers of Jesus. And they had their own saints and wise men. Their own martyrs, too. People who were so good the world couldn't bear their example. These wise men (and women) created their own holy books full of wisdom.

I could go on and on. But the question I want to ask is this: Are we really to believe that all the wisdom of the world is nothing, because it isn't the same as the message to the Jews? Can anyone believe that God created the world, and the huge variety of people, and either left them entirely alone, or spoke to them differently, just so, at the end, everyone would chuck the beliefs that God either allowed to grow into complex philosophies that give hope and wisdom and comfort to billions of individuals, or that God helped them create these alternate philosophies by guiding and interfering to teach them lessons . . . . All of that just so at the end, everyone would throw it all away and adopt the philosphy and faith of the Christians? Would decide that actually it was the fate of one Jewish family that mattered? Would decide to abandon their own ancestors, their own rich traditions and history just because Christians have so generously opened the doors and allowed them into the Jewish family?

I cannot believe it. And so I can no longer believe that Yahwe is THE god. I can't believe that by following a different path I will be damned to hell. And yet I still feel pain as I write these words. The Bible says that Jesus spoke of one unforgivable sin, and that is to deny the Spirit. To reject the Spirit of God. I don't know what that verse means. And for the longest time, my inability to correctly decode it has kept me in fear of being damned to hell for eternity.

Even though I don't believe I am or have ever truly rejected any Spirit of God. So why am I still afraid to commit on paper to a stance that is outside what Christians would accept? I'm still afriad of going to hell, even though I haven't believed in its existence for a good 20 years! It is such a deep-rooted fear. Christianity has done such a good job of detailing it and making sure people know that's likely where they are going. Hegemonic discursive power, indeed.

And that makes Christianity unique of the major religions. None of the others suggest that the majority of individuals are going to hell. That fear of hell and how it is used was one of the first, if not the first, thing that made me question my childhood faith. How could a loving God use threats of eternal damnation to get people to behave? Even half-way decent parents know better.

Jews don't even have a concept of hell, and it is them God mostly talked to. Muslims believe all will eventually make it to heaven. Christians really are alone in this hell-and-punishment obsession.

I am not going to let fear stop me this time. I do not believe that Yahweh, as depiced in the Bible, is the one and only God. Or if He is, then Jews and their descendent religions have got it all wrong.

I don't believe in the exclusivity of it. I believe there is an Absolute Reality. I believe that the early Hebrews had contact with it, and that their story reflects their understanding of that contact. I'm certain some of their prophets were close to that Reality, touched it, and were filled by it.

And I believe Jesus also was filled with and close to it, and that Jesus and the prophets before him were trying to show people how they, too, could be close to it. And the Hebrews I think better understood that this was their contact with the Infinite. They could and did accept that without making any statement that other peoples couldn't have their own contact. I believe that other peoples did and do have contact with that same Entity/Presense/Thing/No-Thing, and that each of them interpreted that contact in their own way, according to their own history and cultural context.

I don't know exactly how it came about that Christianity took on such an exclusive and singular quality. I guess it began that way, in that Jews, Jesus' Jewish followers, all believed he was the Jewish messiah. They never suggested Jesus was there for all. In fact, I think that would (and did) freak some people out. How could their messiah be there for everyone? He's supposed to kick Roman butt, not save it!

Jesus' message was inclusive, except when he says, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father but by me." But what did he really mean by that? Many (most?) Christians use that quote to justify the conversion of the rest of the world. "You must convert in order to save yourself from eternal damnation."

Is that what he meant? What if he really meant, "You need to follow my directions?" Like the Buddha saying "You must follow the same path I did in order to find enlightenment. There is no other way but the way I did it." I find this entirely possible.

So if Jesus was inclusive, who wasn't? The early Roman church. Peter and his entire group didn't think Jesus message was for the gentiles, so why bother telling them? Again a reflection of the fact that Jews believed their relgion was their own. Their messiah their own. Their God their own. Everyone else could have their own gods. So the early Jewish Christians are exclusive, but not because they believe their religion is the only one in the world; the opposite, in fact.

Oh. Weird. So the exclusivity of Jewish Christians in Rome led them to . . . well, do it the other way. It is Paul, of course. He's the one who believes this message, this gospel, is for everyone. It is his inclusivity that leads to the Church's later exclusive position. Paul believes all the world should follow Jesus. Not because he thinks everyone else is going to some future hell, but because he believes Jesus' gift of Life, his good news, is a gift for all. He wants to share it. He does believe Jesus is coming again, he does believe there will be a heaven, a utopia, a messianic age, and he wants all people to share it.

He clearly believes that theGreeks and Romans with their pantheons are wrong, and he does try to convince people of this, but still his prosletizing feels more like someone offering a gift, being as inclusive as he possibly can.

But over time that message changed. I think it had to do first with the conversion of the European tribes after Rome had adopted Christianity. Because then it was a question of the powerful, civilized, clearly "more advanced" people – the Romans – moving into, conquering and ruling over diverse peoples with their own tribal and band-level religions. Non-Christian meant non-Roman and thus backward, disempowered, and clearly wrong about everything.

Once that association was made, it became easier for Christians to believe their way was the only way, and having people convert to your religion was also to have them convert to your culture, your economy, your political system. Those seeds of exclusivity and superiority grew through the "dark" ages, and by the time of European expansion were in full bloom. What fertile ground these twin attitudes found when the first indigenous peoples of Africa and the Americas were contacted. To the Europeans who met them, these natives were clearly backward, lawless, and amoral; clearly in need of saving. And they frightened them into conversion with gruesome depictions of hell. Not to mention all the carrots.

It might only have been in that lonely time, the thousand years after the fall of Rome, when Europeans were cut off from people of other religions, that the idea of only ONE religion having any truth or relevance could have been born and survived.

And so, why should I let irrational fear stop me from fully embracing the faith I do have? Why should I not follow my own path to the center with no guilt and no fear? There is no good reason.