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Old Testament

No unifying thread today. Just a bunch of one line thoughts.

I wonder if this is where the phrase, “You’ve made your bed, so now you have to lie in it” came from:

The bed you have made is too short to lie on.
The blankets are too narrow to cover you.

Apparently it’s God who gives farmers knowledge about farming. Funny. I thought it was trial and error that developed farming techniques.

I wonder if Paul was inspired to talk about clay vessels by this verse:

How foolish can you be?
He is the Potter, and he is certainly greater than you, the clay!
Should the created thing say of the one who made it,
“He didn’t make me”?
Does a jar ever say,
“The potter who made me is stupid”?

Note however that Isaiah, unlike Paul, does not imply that the potter can use the created vessel however he wishes.

Also, various blessings and curses. Making alliances with Egypt is bad.

New Testament

Paul continues to talk about why the law existed in the first place if it is so useless now. Apparently, it was a temporary guardian. So because the law was like a guardian, the people who accept Jesus are like children of God. Or something like that.

Paul then mentioned his great concern for the former gentiles in the church. After that we get a typically Pauline bit of exegesis. Paul, as usual, stretches our credulity when he tries to use examples from the Hebrew scriptures to illustrate his point.

Today he does this by comparing people to Abraham’s two children: Isaac, the son of his wife and Ishmael, the son of his concubine. Paul states that

The first woman, Hagar, represents Mount Sinai where people received the law that enslaved them.

Right… so Hagar represents Mount Sinai and the law and, symbolically, the Jews who still follow the law. Despite the fact that by Jewish tradition it is Sarah, mother of Isaac, who is the ancestor of the Jews. In short, Paul is just taking a story about a slave woman and a free woman and tearing it away from the original context to make his point.

And people complain when atheists quote from the Bible without, they claim, providing the proper context.

Psalms and Proverbs

Don’t hang out with drunkards and gluttons.

Reference links:

Old Testament

The first part of today’s reading consists mostly of a prayer/psalm of praise for God and the judgment he will bring (both good and bad). This text further emphasizes the theme of justice for the downtrodden. Overall, this part of the reading definitely has a number of lines that I can see being brought into modern prayers.

Today’s reading also contains what I believe is a fairly well known verse that expresses a sentiment that seems to hark back to the deuteronomic vision of history (the good will prosper and the wicked suffer):

But for those who are righteous,
the way is not steep and rough.
You are a God who does what is right,
and you smooth out the path ahead of them.

As we are well aware by now, this sentiment is in direct contrast with the idea developed elsewhere, especially in Job and the New Testament, that the righteous do sometimes have a “steep and rough” path to tread. I would say that the New Testament authors, especially Paul, sometimes even go so far as to imply that being on the steep and rough path is a sign of righteousness.

After that, we switch back to Isaiah’s standard gloom and doom. The message here is that the Lord’s anger will serve to purify the Israelites and Jerusalem. Through suffering, their sin will be purged. Both this and the preceding section help me see why many Christians seem so fond of Isaiah. I had been quite confused on this point when Isaiah was mostly going on about the downfall of long gone kingdoms.

Speaking of which, the reading ends with some gloom and doom against Samaria. It does have this highly amusing bit:

What sorrow awaits the proud city of Samaria—
the glorious crown of the drunks of Israel.

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Old Testament

After an an extended prophecy against Jerusalem, we read a prophecy that is, oddly enough, against a specific individual. Isaiah says that Shebna, the palace administrator, will lose his position to Eliakim son of Hilkiah. Both Shebna and Eliakim were mentioned back in the books of Kings. There, Eliakim is the palace administrator and Shebna the court secretary.

This means that, for once, we may have a prophecy that was actually fulfilled (although making predictions about the current political climate can hardly be called prophecy). However, the Lord’s hurling away of Shebna seems to have been merely a demotion from palace administrator to court secretary which does not seem as dramatic as Isaiah makes it sound.

This is followed by a long prophecy against Tyre and a prophecy about the destruction of the earth. When the earth is destroyed, God will hand out punishment and rule on Mount Zion.

Now, I know we haven’t gotten to Daniel or Revelations yet, but from what little I know of them, this mini-apocalypse of Isaiah seems much more tame. Which is to say, there is nothing which causes me to suspect the author was writing this while on drugs. 

Side musings: Given that most of Isaiah’s prophecies did not come true, why were they included in the Bible? Maybe those choosing the canon thought they would still come true. Maybe they thought some of them had come true. Maybe they interpreted the prophecies symbolically.

But maybe something else is going on. Maybe Isaiah was included because of the twist he gave to the story of Israel. Isaiah, in addition to emphasizing the idea of God’s justice, also emphasized the idea of God’s universality. This was something that had been largely absent from the other writings that were contemporary with Isaiah in subject or composition. Isaiah’s vision of a God who punishes all nations, not just the Israelites, was probably a welcome take on the past for those living in a world where the idea of Yahweh as the most powerful tribal God no longer cut it.

Maybe what’s important about Isaiah isn’t its relationship to actual historical events, it is it’s relationship to the evolving Jewish understanding of their God.

New Testament

Paul recounts some of his common themes: the inadequacy of the law for making one right with law, crucifixion of the self, reception of the Holy Spirit through faith, the adoption of believers as children of Abraham.

Psalms and Proverbs

Nothing of particular note.

Reference links:

Old Testament

Isaiah predicts more doom and gloom. Today mostly about Egypt and Ethiopia and Babylon, plus some ambiguous messages about other places.

The most exciting part of today’s reading is the bit where Isaiah wanders around naked to make a point:

In the year when King Sargon of Assyria sent his commander in chief to capture the Philistine city of Ashdod, the Lord told Isaiah son of Amoz, “Take off the burlap you have been wearing, and remove your sandals.” Isaiah did as he was told and walked around naked and barefoot.

Then the Lord said, “My servant Isaiah has been walking around naked and barefoot for the last three years. This is a sign—a symbol of the terrible troubles I will bring upon Egypt and Ethiopia. For the king of Assyria will take away the Egyptians and Ethiopians as prisoners. He will make them walk naked and barefoot, both young and old, their buttocks bared, to the shame of Egypt.

New Testament

Paul’s version of his relationship with the folks in Jerusalem is distinctly different from that of Acts. In particular, Paul describes himself as only having briefly interacted with the leadership in Jerusalem until after he has been preaching for 14 years. Acts, on the other hand, made a big deal of how Paul, right after his conversion, met the apostles and then went around with them.

Acts also makes it sound like Barnabas already had an established reputation with the Jerusalem church while Paul implies that Barnabas was accepted by the apostles in Jerusalem later. While some of these discrepancies could be explained by different perspectives, it is hard to accept these two accounts as consistent.

Paul emphasizes his vision of Christianity’s independence from Jewish law. Not only was following Jewish law unnecessary for those who had come to believe in Christ it was, in some circumstances, hypocritical. To me, Paul’s discussion of the Jewish law in today’s reading just serves to emphasize the diversity of early Christianity. In particular,

But when Peter came to Antioch, I had to oppose him to his face, for what he did was very wrong. When he first arrived, he ate with the Gentile Christians, who were not circumcised. But afterward, when some friends of James came, Peter wouldn’t eat with the Gentiles anymore. He was afraid of criticism from these people who insisted on the necessity of circumcision. As a result, other Jewish Christians followed Peter’s hypocrisy, and even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy.

Paul paints this incident as an example of clear hypocrisy and giving in to fear on Peter’s, but the fact that so many prominent people followed this alternate view point makes me think the case was not as cut and dry as Paul wants his readers to think. When modern folks talk about getting back to the true roots of Christianity, they should realize that even the early Christians had a diverse set of beliefs.

Psalms and Proverbs

A proverb praising discipline of children, particularly of the physical sort.

Reference links:

Old Testament

Isaiah prophecies against Moab. Isaiah prophecies against Damascus. Isaiah prophecies against Ethiopia. Erika wonders if she is going to be able to get through Isaiah without losing her mind…

Isaiah’s God is a vengeful God. The language of destruction and desolation are repulsive. The violence goes beyond the requirements of justice to the extreme of revenge. These sounds more like the words of Isaiah, the man living in uncertain and fearful times, than any God worthy to be called such.

Also, Eglath-shelishiyah is an awesome place name.

New Testament

We start a new letter today: the letter to the Galatians. According to Harris in Understanding the Bible:

Like the letters to Corinth, this letter to the Galatian churches reflects Paul’s ongoing struggle with opponents who challenged his apostolic authority and his “gospel” that believers must live free of the Mosaic Law. An angry declaration of Christianity’s independence of Judaism, Galatians vigorously defends Paul’s doctrine of salvation through faith. The letter also proclaims Paul’s independence of Jerusalem’s Christian leadership. 

This uniquely Pauline gospel [that only faith in redemption through Christ can obtain salvation] revolutionized the development of Christianity. By sweeping away all Torah requirements, including circumcision and dietary restrictions, Paul opened the church wide to Gentile converts. 

Paul has a twofold purpose: (1) to prove that he is a true apostle, possessing rights equal to those of the Jerusalem “pillars” and (2) to demonstrate the validity of his gospel that Christian faith replaces works of law, including circumcision.

It is important to remind ourselves just how much these ideas about salvation are uniquely Pauline. Many of the standard ideas of Christianity came from Paul’s interpretation of his knowledge of Jesus. Given that the gospels, which were written after Paul’s letters, have very little overlap in things like the finer points of salvation, it seems reasonable to assume that in Paul’s time and after, there were multiple competing Christian traditions (the difference between the gospel of John and the synoptics presents yet another potential competing tradition).

Although Christians like to look at the Bible as having a unified message, it is important to realize that the authors themselves came from diverse backgrounds and would, most likely, often have disagreed with each other, even if you only consider the authors of the New Testament books.

On to today’s content! Paul admonishes the Galatians for following a different gospel than the one he preached (more proof of competing traditions) and defends his authority. Here we see Paul claiming that his authority comes directly from Jesus and is independent of (but approved by) existing authorities.

Psalms and Proverbs

Commit yourself to instruction;
listen carefully to words of knowledge.

Random musings today. People often think they are committing themselves to  knowledge and instruction when, in reality, they are actually only committing themselves to knowledge and instruction that match their preconceived notions.

I have had people reject what I have to say about the Bible just because I am an atheist. That’s just dumb. I may be an atheist, but I am also someone who has spent 8.5 months reading and learning about the Bible. I have under my belt what is probably the equivalent of two semesters of Biblical introduction classes. There is a ton I don’t know, but I have learned a lot, and it disappoints me when people dismiss what I have to say just because they think they only need to listen to those who share their same conclusions.

Reference links:

Old Testament

After a little bit of pleasant poetry of praise, we get prophecies about the destruction of Babylon, Assyria, and the Philistines. Now, some might consider those to be properly fulfilled prophecies. So let’s be generous for a moment and assume that all the specifics which were not fulfilled were poetic license. In that case, Isaiah was just predicting that kingdom he did not like would fall. Guess what, they did! As has pretty much every kingdom that existed at the time. Kingdoms rose and fell all the time back in those days. In other words, despite all of Isaiah’s verbosity, the results come as no surprise to anyone. This is especially true given that there were probably about 200-300 years between the writing of the earliest strata of Isaiah and the fall of Babylon. Even in modern times, a lot of countries have risen and fallen in that amount of time.

New Testament

Paul closes his letter. This statement is interesting:

Examine yourselves to see if your faith is genuine. Test yourselves. Surely you know that Jesus Christ is among you; if not, you have failed the test of genuine faith.

This verse says, essentially, that if you have doubt, you have failed. I wonder how many people on the edge of losing their belief were pushed further because of this verse.

Psalms and Proverbs

Repeat! We already know not to move boundary stones.

Reference links:

Old Testament

Isaiah predicted that the Lord would use Assyria to destroy many nations and then he would destroy Assyria. He would cause most of the people of Israel to be killed off. Now, I know it’s generally considered an auto-fail to invoke Hitler as an analogy, but one cannot help but be reminded of the Holocaust.

Isaiah then goes on to discuss how the remnant that remained would turn back to God. A “new Branch” will initiate a period of justice and peace. It is from this passage that we get the famous vision in which dangerous creatures coexist peacefully with domesticated ones (such as children and lambs).

This section is generally considered a prophecy yet to be fulfilled because world peace for man and nature obviously hasn’t happened yet. Even those Christians that believe Jesus is the “new Branch” mentioned in Isaiah cannot claim that the specific results of that have occurred yet. Combine that with the fact that the prophecy is very geographically limited to the area surrounding Israel, and you can see why religious tension magnifies so much of the political tension in that region today.

New Testament

Paul continues to rant. I continue to not care.

Psalms and Proverbs

Don’t eat with stingy people because it’s not fun.

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Old Testament

Isaiah, in his chat’s with the Lord, decides to write Maher-shalal-hash-baz on a signboard. According to the footnote, that means “swift to plunder and quick to carry away”. For some reason, he seems to think this significant that he got two honest men to witness this event. Isaiah the goes on to name his son Maher-shalal-hash-baz as a sign of the impending doom of Damascus and Samaria.

In any case, Isaiah then predicts that Judah will be overwhelmed with a mighty flood, covering the land chin deep. Except for the flood’s not really a flood. It’s a metaphor for the king of Assyria.

Isaiah has been warned to fear the Lord, but for those of Israel and Judah who do not heed that warning, the Lord

will be a stone that makes people stumble,
a rock that makes them fall.
And for the people of Jerusalem
he will be a trap and a snare.

Reference links:

Old Testament

We get something a little different today. That’s nice.

Isaiah tells of his vision of the Lord. In that message, he is charged with delivering a message with the people. The passage is familiar. The Lord says,

“Yes, go, and say to this people,
‘Listen carefully, but do not understand.
Watch closely, but learn nothing.’
Harden the hearts of these people.
Plug their ears and shut their eyes.
That way, they will not see with their eyes,
nor hear with their ears,
nor understand with their hearts
and turn to me for healing.” 

This passage is quoted several times in the New Testament to describe Jesus’ reception by the people of his time. A couple observations about this message. Based on the quoting, only the “Listen carefully” line and the one following are what Isaiah is supposed to say to the people. The rest is God’s commentary to Isaiah.

In that commentary, it sounds as if God is instructing Isaiah to do what he can to prevent people from understanding. Furthermore, he seems to want to prevent people from turning to him for healing. That seems decidedly at odds with the idea of a loving God.

Next interesting bit is this passage:

Later, the Lord sent this message to King Ahaz: “Ask the Lord your God for a sign of confirmation, Ahaz. Make it as difficult as you want—as high as heaven or as deep as the place of the dead.”

But the king refused. “No,” he said, “I will not test the Lord like that.”

Then Isaiah said, “Listen well, you royal family of David! Isn’t it enough to exhaust human patience? Must you exhaust the patience of my God as well? All right then, the Lord himself will give you the sign.

Conventional wisdom is that wanting to test the Lord is bad. That the Lord, being tested, will refuse to submit himself to such human weakness and folly. Such conventional wisdom makes sense to an atheist because people need to somehow validate that God never seems to respond in ways that can be objectively verified.

But this passage provides a counter to such conventional wisdom. Ahaz is admonished for not testing God. Now, one could claim extenuating circumstances (he was, after all, asked to test God). But still, it is an intriguing challenge to conventional wisdom.

Immediately following that is a famous passage. The New Living Translation gives it as this:

All right then, the Lord himself will give you the sign. Look! The virgin will conceive a child! She will give birth to a son and will call him Immanuel (which means ‘God is with us’).

However, as other translations point out and as Joel M. Hoffman’s And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible’s Original Meaning goes into at length, the word translated as ‘virgin’ almost certainly did not mean virgin in the original Hebrew. The NET Bible site has side-by-side comparisons of several translations and an informative translators note:

Traditionally, “virgin.” Because this verse from Isaiah is quoted in Matt 1:23 in connection with Jesus’ birth, the Isaiah passage has been regarded since the earliest Christian times as a prophecy of Christ’s virgin birth. Much debate has taken place over the best way to translate this Hebrew term, although ultimately one’s view of the doctrine of the virgin birth of Christ is unaffected. Though the Hebrew word used here (עַלְמָה, ’almah) can sometimes refer to a woman who is a virgin (Gen 24:43), it does not carry this meaning inherently. The word is simply the feminine form of the corresponding masculine noun עֶלֶם (’elem, “young man”; cf. 1 Sam 17:56; 20:22). The Aramaic and Ugaritic cognate terms are both used of women who are not virgins. The word seems to pertain to age, not sexual experience, and would normally be translated “young woman.” The LXX translator(s) who later translated the Book of Isaiah into Greek sometime between the second and first century b.c., however, rendered the Hebrew term by the more specific Greek word παρθένος (parqenos), which does mean “virgin” in a technical sense. This is the Greek term that also appears in the citation of Isa 7:14 in Matt 1:23. Therefore, regardless of the meaning of the term in the OT context, in the NT Matthew’s usage of the Greek term παρθένος clearly indicates that from his perspective a virgin birth has taken place.

In short, the author of Matthew quoted a badly translated version, but he didn’t know that it was badly translated. The fact that a Biblical author failed to quote the Hebrew Scriptures correctly does, however, discount the plausibility of certain forms of Biblical inspiration.

New Testament

Paul continues ranting without substance. I am sure that he feels very strongly about what he is saying, but it sure does not give me much to say.

I do find this bit at the end interesting:

When I was in Damascus, the governor under King Aretas kept guards at the city gates to catch me. I had to be lowered in a basket through a window in the city wall to escape from him.

This is interesting because there seems to be a discrepancy between this version of Paul’s story and the version told in Acts.

After a while some of the Jews plotted together to kill him. They were watching for him day and night at the city gate so they could murder him, but Saul was told about their plot. So during the night, some of the other believers lowered him in a large basket through an opening in the city wall.

It could be that Paul was escaping from both the governor and the Jews, but it seems odd that neither passage mentioned both groups.

Psalms and Proverbs

Kings’ dinners cannot be trusted.

Reference links:

Old Testament

Isaiah continues on about the sins of Israel and the punishments that will be brought upon Jerusalem. There are some interesting metaphors, including one comparing Jerusalem to a woman who has her beauty stripped away and another comparing Israel to a vineyard which only yields bitter grapes.

However, it seems to me that what is most interesting is how generic this prophecy is so far. This is pretty much a generic prediction of punishment. Especially once you go down the road of interpret metaphorically, it could apply to almost any country or city that has fallen. Examples like this are why non-believers are unimpressed by arguments from fulfilled prophecy. For reference, here are some criteria for what would make a good prophecy as determined by Richard Carrier in Sense and Goodness Without God and stated by Luke at Common Sense Atheism:

1. The prophetic text clearly envisions the sort of event alleged to be the fulfillment. (The prediction should not be so vague that a wide range of events would “fit” the prediction.)
2. The prophecy was made well in advance of the event predicted.
3. The event actually happened.
4. The event predicted could not have been staged by mere humans.
5. The event should be so unusual that its apparent fulfillment could not be explained as a good guess, and could not have been inevitable.
6. The source of the prophecy should not have been edited to produce a selection bias. (That is, we should be fairly confident that compilers didn’t just make a hundred predictions and throw away their 99 documents which made false predictions and keep the one that came true.)

By these criteria, Isaiah clearly fails to provide a convincing prophecy. So far in Isaiah, (1) clearly does not hold. We do not have data to judge on (2) and (3). Isaiah’s prophecies, if they came true, probably would fulfill (4). Countries rise and fall relatively frequently, especially in the ancient world, so no points on (5). Since we know Isaiah was edited, we can not judge either way on (6).

Of course, it could be unfair to interpret this as prophecy as all. Maybe Isaiah actually intended this to be a rhetorical warning about all that would happen if the people of Israel failed to follow the ways of God. That makes the passage more reasonable, but, in a way, less interesting. It becomes little more than rhetoric. Good fiery rhetoric, but rhetoric all the same.

New Testament

Paul talks about false apostles or, as my translation would have it “super apostles”. What a great phrase! Super apostles! You can almost hear the fanfare and the cheers.

I find it interesting that, in today’s reading at least, Paul makes no attempt to convince the readers why these apostles are false. He seems to take it as good enough that they preach a message he considers incorrect. Paul could provide reasoning showing why his preaching is right and theirs is wrong. Instead, he just states that they are deceitful and wicked. This is just an argument from authority, and such arguments are fallacious.

Psalms and Proverbs

Don’t move ancient boundary markers. I know you’re thinking about it. But don’t do it. It’s bad. Also, competent workers will rise to high positions.