Monday, September 17, 2007

GENESIS 15, or, "Looks like Eliezer of Damascus is SOL"

Abram worries about dying without a child for an heir, God assures him he won't and reiterates that he will have many descendants who will own lots of land.

I was talking with my girlfriend about this blog, particularly about what I was reading about Abraham, and she asked how God communicates with Abraham. Is he a voice in Abraham's head? Does he appear as a man, like George Burns in "Oh God"? An angel maybe?

It's a good question. How does God appear to the people he communicates with? Most of the time the Bible simply tells us "God said..." but doesn't specify how; I've always pictured those passages as God speaking in some kind of booming, disembodied voice. The one exception I can recall is in Genesis 3, where it's written that God was "walking" through the Garden of Eden before he speaks to Adam, implying a physical form.

Here in Genesis 15, God appears to Abram in a vision. It's up for interpretation exactly what that vision was like, but it's safe to imply that Abram seeing some form of God as they spoke.

Abram tells God about his worry that he will die without a child, and have to leave all his fortunes to his servant Eliezer instead of a blood relative. God assures him that he will have a child, and that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars in the sky.

Abram wants to know how he can be certain that this will happen. God asks him for several animal sacrifices. Afterwards, Abram falls into a deep sleep, where God tells Abram that "descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years. 14 But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions" This is, I assume, a reference to Moses in Exodus. More on that later.

God also gives Abram the exact boundries of the land he is promised: "To your descendants I give this land, from the river [d] of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates- 19 the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, 20 Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, 21 Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites" That would be where Israel is today, except with wider borders.

Point of interest: Nowhere in Genesis is it outlined the exact ritual of sacrificing animals, yet Abram does it anyway. Where did animal sacrifice come from and how does Abram know how to do it? It seems like a tenant of the idolatrous religions that God expressly wanted Abram to break away from. And if Abram and others did it in the old Testament, why aren't we still ritualistically slaughtering animals today?

In fact, the Jewish word for animal sacrifices in the Torah is "Korbanot". Korbanot was a regular fixture in Jewish religious practice until the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD, where korbanot were offered. With Temple services no longer at the center of Judaism, the religion turned to text study, prayer, and personal observance, and thus korbanot offerings ceased to be seen as necessary. There is also a scriptural basis for the discontinuation of koranot in passages such as "Doing charity and justice is more desirable to the Lord than sacrifice" (Proverbs 21:3).

Korbanot may be reinstated after the construction of the prophesied Third Temple. But given the current state of the Israel, I wouldn't hold my breath.

Don't know your Amorites from your Canaanites? Don't worry, here's a map of the land God promises to Abram in Gen 15:

Friday, September 7, 2007

GENESIS 14, or, "Abram kicks some Biblical butt"

We get a history lesson about a war of George R. R. Martin proportions that was going on during Abram's time. Lot becomes a POW and Abram stages his rescue.

I won't lie... Keeping up these posts is getting more difficult. Part of the reason is that the teen chapter of Genesis have a lot less written about them than the first ten chapters, so it's harder to find interesting contextual information.

Take this war that happens in Genesis 14. You'd think it'd be easier to find more information on Google about this war, the many people that are mentioned as being involved in it, and how the Gen 14 story stacks up to historical fact. But the pickings are slim.

Anyway. War. On one side you have four kings. We'll call this the red corner:
1) Amraphel king of Shinar
2) Arioch king of Ellasar
3) Kedorlaomer king of Elam
4) Tidal king of Goiim

In the blue corner we have five other kings:
1) Bera king of Sodom
2) Birsha king of Gomorrah
3) Shinab king of Admah
4) Shemeber king of Zeboiim
5) An unnamed king of Bela (or Zoar)

The kings in the blue corner used to be subjects of Kedorlaomer of the red corner, until the blue corner kings banded together to rebel.

The red corner starts going out and conquering various lands (they're actually listed in the text, but I'll spare you). There's a big battle between the red corner kings and the blue corner kings in the Valley of Siddim. The reds start overtaking the blues, the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah of the blue corner fall back, leaving behind some of their men and possessions. The reds scoop up what Sodom and Gomorrah left behind, including Lot of Sodom (who you will recall moving out that way in the previous chapter)

Abram catches wind of this, gathers a small army of his men and proceeds to march into the red corner's territory. Here the text gets a little vague. Without going into what the details of what would have to be the most daring, against-all-odds victory of all time, Abram defeats all the kings of the red corner, rescues Lot, and takes back all the possessions and people the red corner had claimed.

Bera, the king of Sodom, goes to Abram and asks to have his people back, but tells Abram that he can keep the goods he captured. Abram tells Bera that he made an oath with God to not keep anything of his, so that he, Bera, would never be able to say, "I made Abram rich". Abram gives everything back to Bera.

Again, supplemental information on this chapter is scarce. However, Wikipedia does give us this insight into when these events may have taken place (though it is not well cited):

In the biblical account, the text begins in the days of, but the remainder of the sentence is missing, and is not found in any surviving manuscript (some modern translations run this sentence together with the next to bridge the gap)[4]. The missing text would have helped to identify the date range for the events described by the narrative, and, aside from deliberately obscuring the date (perhaps because it proved inconvenient), it is unclear why the text would be missing. The tentative identifications of Tidal, however, enables the date period to be somewhat determined:

* Assuming Tidal is the proto-Hittite Tudhaliya, this would place the events of the narrative in the 18th century BC, shortly prior to the rise of the Hyksos Empire
* Assuming Tidal is Tudhaliya I (of the Hittite New Kingdom), this would place the events of the narrative in the 14th century BC.
* Assuming Tidal is Tudhaliya IV this would place the events at the end of the Late Bronze Age.
* Assuming Tidal is one of the Neo-Hittite kings by that name, he dates to the period of the Neo-Hittite period, at the time of the Aramaean states, just prior to the rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.


Just For The Heck Of It

The king of Sodom was named Bera. Here are some other famous/semi-famous Beras:
Bera, Count of Barcelona.
BERA (Branford Electric Railway Association).
Berra, municipality in the Province of Ferrara, Emilia-Romagna, Italy
Steve Berra (born 1973), American skateboarder
Tim Berra, American biologist and author
Yogi Berra (born 1925), American baseball player and manager