Truth and Peace

Journeying from mount Hor, the Israelites "spoke against God and Moses," aggravated from lack of water and from eating manna, which they call leḥem hakelokel (despised or rotten bread). In response, the people are set upon with fiery serpents ( neḥashim haseraphim ), "fiery" possibly meaning poisonous or referring to the burning sensation of the bites they sustained. [1] After a multitude die, the people approach Moses and ask for help: וַיָּבֹא הָעָם אֶל מֹשֶׁה וַיֹּאמְרוּ חָטָאנוּ כִּי דִבַּרְנוּ בַי-הוָה וָבָךְ, הִתְפַּלֵּל אֶל יְ-הוָה וְיָסֵר מֵעָלֵינוּ אֶת הַנָּחָשׁ וַיִּתְפַּלֵּל מֹשֶׁה בְּעַד הָעָם And the people came to Moses, and they said: We have sinned when we spoke against YHVH and against you; ' hitpalel ' to YHVH so that he will remove the serpent from upon us; and Moses ' hitpalel-ed ' on behalf of the people. (Num 21:7) The meaning of 'hitpalel' What exactly is lehitpalel ? The usual translation is "pray....

Bronze bull, Samaria, c. 1200 BCE When I go through the Golden Calf narrative through the end of Exodus 34, I tend to find myself fairly disoriented. It's a seeming jumble of retribution, beseechment and forgiveness which I have a very hard time getting straight in my head. So for my own purposes (and I hope it will help you as well), I'm going to outline the events in order, just to give a bird's eye view. Then I'll identify the narrative oddities I find so confusing, followed by a few thoughts on that. After that, I'll mention the source-critical approach and how that (at least for me) doesn't address the narrative confusion. And I'll wrap up by bringing up some more thematic questions about the Golden Calf itself. No "sermons" in this piece, no tidy answers. Mostly a lot of questions. But sometimes it helps just to organize what you don't know, "lasso the calf" as it were. SEQUENCE OF EVENTS The following covers the Golden...

If you're reading the text of Exodus 20 straight, without any preconceptions and without thinking you had to divide verses 2-13 into ten distinct laws, you'd most likely never assume that "I am YHVH your God" is, by many people's interpretations, a command. First off, in the traditional parsing of verses, it's not even a separate verse: I am the YHVH your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the home of slavery; you should have no other gods before me. (Ex 20:2) Though to be fair, verse 12 contains 4 commandments. And verses 7-10 encompass one commandment. So you can't look to the verse as a unit of measure for a commandment here. But even in the traditional paragraph spacing ( petuchot and setumot ), "I am YHVH" is grouped with the commands relating to idolatry, i.e. with no break in between, whereas there is a space between all the other commandments. (Interestingly though, there's also a space between "Do n...

Visual development art from “The Prince of Egypt” When it comes to evaluating truth claims, I admit to being a fan of rational scientific skepticism. It strikes me as the best methodology at our disposal for ascertaining factual reality. But what does that mean then for evaluating Biblical narratives like the Parting of the Red Sea? Well, as enamored as I am of skepticism, it occurs to me that it's hopelessly out of place here. It's the wrong paradigm, the wrong set of glasses to be looking through. Because it views the Red Sea episode first and foremost as a "claim" to be scrutinized, instead of a narrative to immerse oneself in, to visualize, experience, and comprehend for its content . Here I am ready to get into the story... A nation enslaved. A Pharaoh so obsessed with maintaining the subjugation that he lets his own nation absorb blow after destructive blow and refuses to release his grip. He finally relents just long enough for the fledgling Israelite...

Moses assures his people they will be freed from slavery, extracted from Egypt with God's outstretched arm, and brought to the land of their ancestral inheritance. The people balk: וְלֹא שָׁמְעוּ אֶל מֹשֶׁה מִקֹּצֶר רוּחַ וּמֵעֲבֹדָה קָשָׁה "...but they did not listen to Moses, out of shortness of spirit and hard labor." (Ex 6:9) Rashi understands the phrase "they didn't listen to Moses" to mean: לא קבלו תנחומין "They did not accept [his] words of consolation." But is what Moses says really "consolation?" He essentially tells the people that everything is going to be okay. Which pretty much flies in the face of all conventional wisdom about how to offer consolation. When you go to a shiva house, you don't pronounce that everything is going to be okay. Because it's not "okay." Far better to simply be there with the mourner, listen to them. Something more along the lines of what God tells Moses just a few ver...

In his zeal to counter the perceived threat from the Hebrews, Pharaoh issues a decree to kill the newborn boys: "And Pharaoh commanded all his people, saying: Every newborn boy you must throw into the Nile, and every girl keep alive." (Ex 1:22) He commands "all" his people, and doesn't specify "Hebrew" boys. The Talmud ( T.B. Sotah 12a ) picks up on this and suggests that Pharaoh's astrologers told him that the savior of the Hebrews was just born, but they didn't know if he was an Egyptian or a Hebrew. So Pharaoh imposed his decree to drown every boy on Egyptians and Hebrews alike. In this interpretation, Pharaoh is so determined to stop the Hebrews that he's willing to kill his own people if that's what it takes. The plain meaning however is that "Hebrew boys" is implied by the context. The phrase "all his people" then means that all Egyptians were commanded to carry out the decree against the Hebrews. Whi...