Sunday Sermonette: Patriarchy works in mysterious ways
With Chapter 36, we come to the end of the seemingly interminable Book of Numbers. It ends anticlimactically, straightening out a problem -- or a problem at least within the constrained world of patriarchal inheritance -- created in Numbers 27, when the daughters of Zelophehad were allowed to inherit because he had no male heirs. It occurs to some of Zelophehad ' s male relatives that if the heiresses marry outside the tribe, the inheritance will pass to the tribe of their husbands, and we can ' t have that, now can we? So God orders them to marry within the tribe. That ' s it.The allocation of land and property among the ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - November 15, 2020 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Law and Order
Numbers 35 may be difficult to understand for modern people, because it ' s set in a legal regime that seems very strange to us. The Israelite culture represented here is similar to many others in that vengeance for murder is the right of the victim ' s close kin. " The avenger " mentioned here is presumably a brother or son or father who has the obligation to kill his relative ' s murderer. The law here distinguishes manslaughter from murder, but rather than tempering the right of vengeance in the case of manslaughter in a straightforward manner, it assumes that the avenger will act anyway and therefore provides for a pla...
Source: Stayin' Alive - November 11, 2020 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: Bad cartography
Mercifully, we ' re coming to the end of the Book of Numbers, only two more chapters after this, and it ends anti-climactically. Here, in chapter 34, God delineates the boundaries of Israel, but as is often the case, his promises and prophecies are worthless. The borders described here do include more or less what we think of as Israel, but also all of Lebanon and much of Syria, territory that Israelites never occupied. Possibly King Josiah had his eye on some conquests when this was written? Also, the enclave on the east side of the Jordan is acknowledged as part of the allotment to the tribes, but not included in the bou...
Source: Stayin' Alive - November 8, 2020 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: More eye glazing
I can ' t say why the scribes decided to insert this here, because I can ' t see why anybody would care and I don ' t suggest you bother to read it. Scholars can ' t identify most of these place names with any known location, so we can ' t make a map of the wandering. I do have a couple of comments along the way. 33 Here are the stages in the journey of the Israelites when they came out of Egypt by divisions under the leadership of Moses and Aaron.2 At theLord’s command Moses recorded the stages in their journey. This is their journey by stages:3 The Israelites set out from Rameses on the ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - November 4, 2020 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: Cleaning up the plot
Numbers 32 is basically just there to solve a technical problem. The basic plot is that the Israelites are going to cross the Jordan from the east and conquer the lands on the west side, but obviously at the time this was written around 620 BCE there were Israelites living on the east side, and they had to be accounted for. Remember, however, that the whole story is fictitious. The people were in fact indigenous to Canaan, this conquest from outside never happened. The only additional point I ' ll make is that God somehow has to make sure that nobody older that nobody older than 60 survives. How this happens is never ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - November 1, 2020 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Shoah
I was originally going to title this post res ipsa loquitur because I didn ' t think I really needed to comment. You are commanded to read the whole thing. I do however want to make a few points about this.1) Moses ismarriedto a Midianite woman. There is evidently nothing wrong with that. She has several sisters. Her father was Moses ' s confidante and counselor. I wonder how she felt about all this.2) The incident which precipitated this, described in Chapter 25, made no mention of Balaam. All of a sudden he gets the blame, which seems strange since he was totally respectful of Yahweh and predicted that the Israelites wou...
Source: Stayin' Alive - October 28, 2020 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Searching for Monopolies
Julian SanchezThe Justice Department announced Tuesday that itwas launching an antitrust lawsuit against Google alleging that the search giant ’s deals with browser and operating system developers to make Google a default search engine amounted to anticompetitive behavior. The suit bears all the hallmarks of a political stunt —an unnecessary government intervention in the online search market that has little chance of yielding any meaningful benefit to consumers.Oddly, the suit does not target Google ’s dominance in the online advertising space, which hasoften been the focus of critics, but Internet se...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - October 21, 2020 Category: American Health Authors: Julian Sanchez Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: My eyes glaze over
It ' s called the Book of Numbers because of the two censuses, and now we come to the second one. The point of this may be obscure to modern readers. The actual numbers are certainly fanciful, since a) these events never occurred and the entirety of Israel was never camped out on the plane of Moab to be counted in this way; b) as with the first census, this claims that the population went from 70 people (Exodus 1:5) to several million -- more than 600,000 adult men -- in 400 years, despite God repeatedly killing off tens of thousands in various plagues and massacres. The population is actually more plausible around the tim...
Source: Stayin' Alive - October 11, 2020 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: The definition of insanity . . .
. . . is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. If you accept that, Balak evidently has that diagnosis. However, as I said before, the real reason for this story seems to be to provide a frame for presenting the songs, which come from a lost source. The only other comment I have at this point is to note again the oddity that the people are suddenly on the east side of the Jordan. They came from the west in Egypt, wandered around what was apparently the Sinai and the Negev (although the geography is generally quite vague) and now all of a sudden here they are on the east bank and the proposa...
Source: Stayin' Alive - October 4, 2020 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
101 Quotes About Change (to Help You Live Your Best Life)
Today I'd like to share the best and most powerful quotes about change.
Because change is inevitable. Sometimes it surprises and tackles us on a regular Tuesday afternoon.
At other times we may simply realize that a change is needed to live a happier, less stressful or more successful life.
So in this post you'll find 101 of the most helpful and thought-provoking quotes about dealing with change and about making a change happen in your own life.
Inspirational Quotes about Change in Life
“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
Mahatma Gandhi
“You never change your life until you step out of you...
Source: Practical Happiness and Awesomeness Advice That Works | The Positivity Blog - October 1, 2020 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Henrik Edberg Tags: Personal Development Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: Talking out of your ass
The next three chapters are the story of Balaam. This is a departure in several ways. It is the first time since Genesis that the focus has not been directly on the Israelites or their progenitors. Rather, the protagonists are other people, perceiving the Israelites and their God. It also has stylistic departures, not so much in today ' s chapter but in the next two. We ' ve come across a song here and there, but there are many songs in the two later chapters of this story. And, as for the first time in the previous chapter, the people are called Israel; anachronistically, they are also called Jacob.I ' ve done a little (v...
Source: Stayin' Alive - September 27, 2020 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible study: What's in a name?
Numbers 13 advances the plot, but in a strange way. I don ' t know why it was so important to list the names of all the explorers and their fathers. Only two of these characters take on any individual importance. And then there is the report of what they find. I ' ll discuss that when we get to it.13 TheLord said to Moses,2 “Send some men to explore the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelites. From each ancestral tribe send one of its leaders.”3 So at theLord’s command Moses sent them out from the Desert of Paran. All of them were leaders of the Israelites.4 These are their names:from ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - August 26, 2020 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
More Entitled People Get Angrier After Experiencing Bad Luck
By Matthew Warren
We’ve all had the experience of losing our temper when being treated unfairly by someone else. And while anger isn’t the most pleasant emotion, it can be a useful social tool to signal to another person that we’re not happy with how they’re acting towards us.
But what about when we suffer because of bad luck, rather someone else’s actions? In that case it would seem to make little sense to get mad. And yet, a new study in Personality and Individual Differences finds that a certain group of people are more likely to show anger in such situations: those who feel like they are particular...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - August 26, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Anger Personality Source Type: blogs
What's new in midwifery - 26th August 2020
This is the first of these for some weeks - first, I was away on leave, then, I was just disorganised.There are too many new research articles and systematic reviews to list, so I suggest you go to McMaster ' sEvidence Alerts and search for your topic of interest.Start on the launch page, where you can see how they identify studies to include. Then go to Search and enter your term(s) - Advanced Search Options lets you specify things like diagnosis, discipline (e.g. Obstetrics) and population (e.g. Neonates). Although your search term may mean you don ' t need to specify discipline or population, of co...
Source: Browsing - August 26, 2020 Category: Databases & Libraries Tags: midwifery Source Type: blogs
Podcast: Self-Help Cliches Have a Peculiar Value
Take the bull by the horns! Pick yourself up by your bootstraps! Are these cliches condescending for people with mental illness? Or is there a grain of truth to them? Today, Gabe and Lisa debate the pros and cons of the all too common “taking your life back” advice we all get from well-meaning people. Gabe shares his personal story of gaining back control of his life a day at a time while healing from depression.
When you struggle with mental illness, how much of your behavior, thoughts and emotions do you actually have control over? Is it helpful to feel in control of your life, even when it screws you over?
(...
Source: World of Psychology - July 28, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Not Crazy Podcast Tags: General Mental Health and Wellness Not Crazy Podcast Self-Help Source Type: blogs
