Wednesday Bible Study: Let the massacres begin
2 Kings doesn ' t really need any introduction, because it ' s just the same book we ' ve already been reading. (The division was made in the middle ages.) However, I will note that for a while anyway the pace of God murdering people for trivial reasons seems to pick up. In Ch. 1, he murders 102 men, in two shifts of 51, for asking Elijah to come down from a hill. On the third try, the captain asks more obsequiously and now it ' s okay. As a matter of fact, Elijah wanted to come down from the hill all along so he could convey the bad news to Ahazi ' ah that he was about to kick the bucket. So killing the 102 guys was just ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - June 1, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: God the deceiver
(Ch. 22 is the last of 1 Kings, but as I have noted before the division of the book in two is arbitrary and is not in the Tanakh.) The plot here is a bit complicated and it ' s more than a bit weird so I ' ll state it clearly. God finally gets around to killing Ahab because Ahab because Ahab spared the life of Benhadad (1 Kings 20). So god hatches an elaborate plot. For unspecified reasons, God knows that if Israel and Judah attack Syria, the Syrians will concentrate on killing Ahab and leave the rest of the army alone.. Why the Syrians will do this is not explained. So Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, comes to visit and ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 29, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Should I Stay (Open) or Should I Close? World Legislatures during the First Wave of COVID-19
Israel Waismel-Manor (University of Haifa), Ittai Bar-Siman-Tov (Bar-Ilan University), Olivier Rozenberg (Sciences Po), Asaf Levanon (University of Haifa), Cyril Beno ît (Sciences Po), Gal Ifergane (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), Should I Stay (Open) or Should I Close? World Legislatures during... (Source: HealthLawProf Blog)
Source: HealthLawProf Blog - May 28, 2022 Category: Medical Law Authors: Katharine Van Tassel Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Biblical morality
Chapter 21 is another one of those stories that makes you scratch your head about why it ' s in the Bible. I ' m just going to summarize it. This guy Naboth owns a vineyard which, for some reason, Ahab wants. (Remember that two chapters earlier, Ahab was going to be deposed and most of the Israelites killed, but that never happened and we ' ve forgotten all about it.) But Naboth won ' t sell it so Ahab goes to bed and refuses to eat. So Jezebel has a plan: she writes letters telling some local potentates to accuse Naboth of blaspheming against God and the King, and have him stoned to death, and she signs Ahabs name. They d...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 25, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: Pack it off and send it to Muncie ....
I ' ve got a maiden aunt there in dire need of more confusion. (No, I don ' t know exactly what that ' s supposed to mean but I had a high school classmate who said it a lot.) In the previous chapter, God told Elijah to appoint Hazael king of Syria and Jehu king of Israel, and between them they ' d kill all but the 7,000 righteous men remaining in Israel. But that is instantly forgotten Benhadad is king of Syria, Ahab is still king of Israel, they fight each other, and God gives Ahab the victory. This is only after some very strange goings on between Ahab and Benhadad. Ahab lets Benhadad go after the war. Then a lion kills...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 22, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: A shaggy dog tail
Chapter 19 has Elijah go through an elaborate ordeal and pointless experiences in order to receive a communication from God, all of which begins with a communication from God that could just has easily have been the final information, so we could have skipped the whole thing. To summarize: Ahab tells Jezebel that Elijah massacred the priests of Baal, so Jezebel sends a message to Elijah that she ' s going to have him killed the next day. Elijah goes and sits under a tree and asks God to kill him now. He falls asleep, then an angel wakes him up and gives him a cake and some water. Then the angel gives him more food, te...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 18, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: A very sore winner
Chapter 18 is very long, but it tells a simple story. After long and pointless maneuvering, Elijah meets Ahab, he challenges the priests of Baal to a miracle contest, Elijah wins, then he murders all of the priests of Baal. Then God makes it rain. That ' s it. Enjoy!18 After many days the word of theLord came to Eli ′jah, in the third year, saying, “Go, show yourself to Ahab; and I will send rain upon the earth.”2 So Eli ′jah went to show himself to Ahab. Now the famine was severe in Samar′ia.3 And Ahab called Obadi ′ah, who was over the household. (Now Obadi′ah revered theLord greatly;4 a...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 15, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Introducing The Big Kahuna
In Chapter 17, we meet Elijah, who is arguably the most important figure in the Tanakh. From the Jewish perspective, he is the harbinger of the Messiah, according to the Book of Malachi. He is therefore central to the eschatology of all the faiths that revere the Hebrew Bible, including Christianity and Islam. He is obviously also the inspiration for the Jesus of the Gospels, performing several miracles that prefigure ones attributed to Jesus. (However, Christian theology conflates him with John the Baptist, not Jesus himself.) Elijah appears at the Transfiguration in all three of the synoptic Gospels. (That is Matthew, Ma...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 11, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: My eyes glaze over
I warned you that the Book of Kings gets very tedious. Here we have yet more endless recitation of faceless rulers -- we learn nothing about them but their names -- who anger God and have their families massacred. For the details, we are repeatedly referred to other books, that have been lost. Not much to say about this, and I don ' t know what the point of it is supposed to be. It ' s interesting that Melville chose to name his obsessed captain Ahab, which is not a name anyone would ordinarily give to a child. BTW KJV translates " He did not leave him a single male " in verse 11 as " He left not one who pisseth again...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 8, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Shit Happens
The Book of Kings gets quite tedious now, with endless recitation of largely pointless events. The back and forth between kings who are devout followers of Yahweh and kings who are not continues, with various random-seeming factoids thrown in. But this purports to be little more than an outline, with repeated references to other books, which have been lost, for the details. I will say that we are now close enough to the time this was written that it likely has some kernel of historical fact. There are some oddities in this chapter which I will point out along the way. I ' m going to highlight something in verse 2, and some...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 4, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: The wages of sin are delayed
Ch. 14 tells essentially parallel stories about Jeroboam in Israel and Rehoboam in Judah. Both kingdoms start putting up shrines to other Gods Yahweh gets mad. However, in the case of Jeroboam his vengeance is for some reason delayed. He kills one of Jeroboam ' s babies but another son does succeed Jeroboam, and the kingdom otherwise goes along just fine for the time being. (Yahweh will get around to clobbering them later.) As for Rehoboam and Judah, the consequences aren ' t really all that bad. Pharaoh comes and takes some treasures, and Rehoboam has to replace Solomon ' s gold shields with bronze ones, but that ' s abou...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 1, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: New wine into old bottles
For some reason, the wine industry adopted Jeroboam and Rehoboam as the names for large-size bottles. You can look it up. Anyway, while the division of the Israelites (defined presumably by the Hebrew language) into two kingdoms is probably historically real, the similarity of the names points to the likely fictitious nature of this story about how it happened. We learned in the previous chapter that Yahweh wanted it to happen because Solomon ' s wives seduced him into promoting the worship of other Gods. Yahweh somehow induces Rehoboam to say exactly what will cause the people to rebel against him, although exa...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 24, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Losing the plot
In Chapter 11 Solomon, supposedly the wisest man who ever lived, is seduced by some of his 700 wives into worshiping Gods other than Yahweh. God doesn ' t like this, obviously, but instead of the usual military defeats and plague and famine and all that, we just get the kingdom divided after Solomon dies peacefully of old age. By the way, Solomon ' s 700 wives and 300 concubines produced only three children: his son Rehoboam and daughters Taphaph and Basmaph. There are hints that he faces rebellions of some kind but we learn nothing about them. First there is the story of Haddad, who was purportedly the sole escapee f...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 20, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: International Trade
The visit of the Queen of Sheba is well known and no doubt features in the Bible stories for children genre. However, the legends that have grown up around her in the Jewish, Christian and Moslem traditions are all built from very sparse material. In this telling, we never learn her name, where the heck Sheba is, or what any of the profound wisdom was with which Solomon dazzled her. Not that it particularly matters, but scholars believe that Sheba may be based on Saba, a people of the southern Arabian peninsula. It is interesting that Solomon, along with the narrator, take the idea of a polity ruled by a woman completely i...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 17, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Fantasyland
Chapter 9 starts with yet another repetition of the motif that has appeared maybe a hundred times since Exodus: God tells Solomon that if the people stay faithful to him, he ' ll reward them with great power and riches, but if they stray, he ' ll destroy them. Yeah, we got that.Then we get more absurd claims about Solomon ' s wealth and power. Hiram had given Solmon 120 talents of gold, which would be four metric tons. Sure. (That happens to be what the Queen of Sheba will give him in the next chapter.) This is despite Hiram, for some reason, not liking the cities Solomon had given him. Solomon then enslaves the Amor...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 13, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
