God. A biography -- Friend of the family, Judge of All Earth

It's all very confusing to me: Jews, Hebrews, Judah, Israel, Semites, people, tribe... writers, editors, redactors... somehow, someone wrote all this stuff down--over how much time? Who can it be said of, that they created this god, and by extension a whole race? I think, it can be said of no one, that's my guess. It's like Reagan's America: a nostalgia for a past that never was, and the memory of that nostalgia is fueling new stories and new adepts and new faithful.

But regardless, at some point, there it was, a body of stories, a wrestling match between this god and these people. What would it feel like to believe it were true?! Here's how Miles describes it:

In the remainder of the Book of Genesis, the Lord God will be spoken of (an on occasion will identify himself) as 'of ' one patriarch or another. The Lord, the god of Abraham, will become the god of Isaac, the god of Jacob, or 'the god of your father.' As this happens, he will come to seem, often enough, more like a busy friend of the family than like the Judge of all the earth, as Abraham called him at Sodom. His help will be sought for conception and other human needs, but, significantly, the initiative will be on the human side. He will not attempt again to assert the same sort of control over reproduction that we have seen him attempting to assert over Abraham's reproduction. He will claim only what Abraham has already conceded. Yet the modest storms and calms of the house of Abraham will not be quite his concern. At times, the masterful, abrupt, inscrutable being we first me will return, for the radically unpredictable creator and destroyer personalities of yahweh and 'elohim remain in him alongside the loyal advocate now called 'god of your father.' All are in him, in a combination whose explosive potential will only gradually be revealed. (p66).

For my own purpose, I see in this part of Genesis (1:1 -25:11), the acknowledgement that the universe is not on humans' side, that it is unpredictable and unaccountable, ready to take back whatever it gives, or smear it around and leave it horribly disfigured; but it's base power thinks like us, and that by wrestling with it, you can make a deal of some kind, at heavy cost; and that that deal includes instrumental control over every fucking thing that is. There's a contradiction latent there. I think it's still here.

God. A biography - O Lord, God of my master Abraham

O Lord, God of my master, Abraham, grant me good fortune this day, and deal graciously with my master Abraham. (p 62).

So says Abraham's anonymous servant, gone to the well in a city in a foreign country, looking for a bride for Abraham's grown son, Isaac. Sarah has died. Abraham has purchased his first piece of promised land, a burial cave for his wife. This is, of course, after the big catharsis, after the games. Life has settled down. But, in the story, a revolution has happened.

To this point in God's story, God's actions have been all but motiveless and therefore numinously, ominously unpredictable. Suddenly, and this is a measure of the victory that Abraham has won over God by raising his knife against Isaac, God is beginning to become a known quantity, defined and constrained by his past commitments. (p61)

But even more, Abraham is counting on his god as an instrument. "Ancient Mesopotamian religion did know a category of a god with whom dealings at this level and in this manner were standard. This was the personal god, typically referred to by the name of his client; that is , as 'the god of X,' 'the god of Y,' and so on." (p63). Contrast this to the Canaanite god, El, "him whose authority over nature and society was broadest but whose involvement in any individual human being's life was smallest." (p61) A close, local fit to the Lord, yahweh.

It's like, in this part of Genesis, a single person, Abraham, is getting connected with personal agency, the big deal in Christianity, saved through your personal savior, protected by the hand of your god, grace. The ties that bind. "Abraham's servant knows that his master worships a god named yahweh, 'the Lord,' but he sees fit to address him doubly: 'O Lord [yahweh], God of my master Abraham.'"

It is just by such shifts, as one person talks about another's god, that religion changes. Some of the changes are deliberate, others accidental. (p64)

So in the story, this crazy, unpredictable personality, becomes intimately available to a figurehead as a personal agency, through a compounding of local ideas on divinity, through an identification of names. A plausible etiology of the compound character evolving through this story. But, regardless, the change is evident in the story, without explanation. Later, this agency is passed on through the generations: "the God of Isaac," "the God of Jacob." After that, it is passed on to a tribe or whatever--a people, a nation, Israel.

God. A biography - George and Martha

In Edward Alby's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, an undercurrent of sexual tension bursts out as George's wife, Martha, takes a young, insurgent professor upstairs where this 'historical inevitability' 'ploughs this most pertinent wife', the daughter of the President of the college, Martha herself, the derisive wife of the failed artist, the sodden professor, George, who sits below and listens, and laughs till he cries. This game? 'Hump the hostess.' So says George.

But before this game it was 'get the guests.' The new professor of biology, 'blondie,' had earlier admitted to George that he was trapped into his marriage by the hysterical pregnancy of his 'slim-hipped' wife, 'a mousey thing.' George has maneuvered the four of them, this time to a moribund, local bar, to tell an allegory--'Blondie and his frau from out of the plain states came'--and reveals to them all his humiliating knowledge that mousey's 'puff went poof' and that it had been too late, for blondie was trapped. Overlaid on this is that mousey had told George that she was afraid of birthing. An abortion? Without Blondie's knowledge?

And before this? George was spurred to his game by an earlier one: Martha's 'humiliate the host.' Martha revels in twisting an old knife in front of the newcomers, that George, 'old swampy,' 'a regular bog in the history department,' had been shot down at the beginning of his career, a boy among men, by her dad, the president, his boss, in his one attempt as a novelist making art of some painful event from his past.

So, George dries his eyes and Martha confirms that blondie finished his business and is turned from houseboy to stud, but George does not relinquish the field. Even as Martha whines, 'No games, Georgie, it's games I don't like,' George shakes her up: 'I want you awake for this, baby.' Not over yet.

As they all sober up, in the wee hours, coarse, vulgar Martha ('Martha, you have ugly talents'), in a moment of breathtaking beauty, tells the story of their son, 'Sonny Jim', with George poking at her in the background, working her up to an ecstasy, only to tell her that Sonny Jim has been killed. Martha in a rage to George: 'You can't do that! You have no right!' The guests, dumbfounded, impotently try to calm her. Slowly it becomes clear that George and Martha could not conceive and had developed this elaborate fantasy, the most human, delicate, and emotional thing that passes between them, to compensate. Martha had broken the rules in a unusual moment of girl-talk with mousey: she let on about her and George's son, their private creation. Now he had to die.

Or perhaps it was all true afterall: 'truth and reality, can you tell the difference' they both say together to the outsiders. Nonetheless, the catharsis washes everyone clean. No more games. At least not for now.

But that's just a story. Why bring it up here?

If you follow the story of George and Martha, you might be able to follow what Miles brings you through in his rendering of the story of Abram/Abraham. An understory of sexual tension, about power of the sexual act and who owns it, full of mockery, rough ugly usage, point/counterpoint, and a final catharsis, the near slaughter of a son at his dad's hand.

Everyone, everything settles down, at least for now. Some point, somehow, has been made. All the characters can get on with life, a little mauled over, a little grown up, a little quieter. At least for now.

God. A biography - Some weird stuff

Miles is moving into the Abraham story. I often feel empathy with Abraham, at least the one who turns his back on 'Babylon' and heads with his family to the desert. When I watch TV, I feel this; when I see how marketers are given wealth and prestige to lure children--and all off us--away from what I think is precious; when I watch a professional football game and think how much these men earn, how much money is thrown into this pipeline by so many people. Often.

But Miles points out, though ostensibly this is a justification for the origin of 'the nation of Israel,' whatever that means, its more about the Hebrew god learning about what sex means to him, and then getting his thing to fall into line.

And it has some weird stories about sex and procreation: A god promises and promises and promises and promises that this man's sexual act will produce a child. A god finds it important that men mutilate their penises; Abraham offers his wife to Pharaoh as a concubine; Lot offers his virginal daughters to a crowd of men to keep them off of his god; Lot's daughters lure him into incest; Abraham's wife offers his servant up to her husband for sex and his god makes it fruitful; Abraham and Sarah do it for a hundred years and finally she gets pregnant. Abraham, without a bit of evident psychology, raises his knife to slit the throat of his child.

All this to get to Israel.

God. A biography - Dangerously unpredictable

What is this thing?

Historical criticism has long since noted the similarity of the biblical flood story, in both its general structure and a number of salient details, to the comparable myth in Babylonia. … There are two differences between the Babylonian and the biblical myths, however. First, at least in synthetic form, the biblical myth provides the deity with an ethical pretext for punishing mankind: His action is not gratuitous; mankind deserves it. Second, and far more important, the Babylonian myth pits Marduk against the watery chaos-monster, Tiamat. In other words, one god starts the flood; another god--after an epic battle--ends it. (p45)

This is just one aspect: the two Hebrew stories, each akin to the Babylonian, one of 'God' and the other of 'Lord,' have been interwoven, and each has presumably subsumed an independent, "serpentine, watery destroyer, (elsewhere, in Hebrew, called Rahab)." Miles says now, this character acting out in this story has two split personalities, to simplify somewhat, each a creator/destroyer. And looking ahead, this creator/destroyer doesn't know what he wants, not until he sees his creation mucking around, does he know where he wants to put the limits.

So, here you have it: some distant thing has all you hold dear in its hands; holds claim to it, as it was his gift; doesn't know what he wants to do with it; and will smear it all over creation if he's so moved. Quick, what do you do?

Miles calls each of these creator/destroyers "the fruit of a distinct artistic and religious breakthrough." (p46). What does that mean? What did this Hebrew process create? And then, what does mankind do with them? After the flood story, "we realize what he is capable of, and we cannot forget it. He is not just unpredictable, but dangerously unpredictable." (p46)

Back to me, Bob. Which potato bug lives and which potato bug dies? The one that lands near something to eat lives. Unless a farmer kills it. The one that lands in a grassy field dies. Unless there is a weed near by that it can gristle through. Man, heroically trying to deny his own contingency.

Next, the Hebrew god learns about sex.

God. A biography - Who cares?

God and the lord god. I am looking forward, based on Miles' proposed arc of the story, to Job and thereafter. What did these Hebrews see?

In their first creation story, their god mused to itself--apparently himself--out loud, worked diligently but without apparent toil, liked the nature part but didn't comment on the human part, seemed overall satisfied, then took a break. More like an artist here, creating something for the fun of it.

In the second story, the 'lord god' acted more purposefully, setting up house, more like a parent or manager. Had to take several cracks at it to get things going, you know, letting man do the naming, noting the flaw (no 'helpmeet' for the man), working out the kinks, coming and going, a big human himself, walking, calling out, asking questions, getting mad.

Still I'm struck by this, the serpent was correct: they did not die. Nor did this act impose death on them, as it says that man was mortal at onset, lest they be like gods. The story itself does not explain or justify. Deal with it; your god lied. The serpent told the truth. Man must be limited by his god, otherwise … what? What is implied about the 'purpose' of creation by this story? And is this resolved by the story of Job? Bare up, pipsqueak, you might be right, that is, your moral sense is correct, but what of it? That is not the final arbiter. The final arbiter is untouchable, call it what you want. YOU can't change the rules. You can judge them, but who the fuck cares.

God. A biography - Original sin, who owns it?

Adam and Eve did not die when they ate of the fruit. Why not? The serpent was honest? "You are not going to die, but God knows that as soon as you eat of it your eyes will be opened…"

One may escape all these difficulties and preserve the serpent's role as a deceiver by arguing that the couple did not die at once but that theirs was a spiritual rather then a physical death. This is the classic theological interpretation of 'the fall of man,' the 'original sin.' However, as we shall see again and again, the narrative we are reading is not much given to spiritualized or purely symbolic meanings but is extremely fond of deception stories of all kinds. Rather then eliminate the conflict by spiritualizing the threatened death or rationalizing the apparent deceit, we may trace the conflict back to the Lord God, a cause of both weal and woe in the lives of his creatures because good and evil impulses conflict within his character. (p32)

Besides just liking the way this author thinks about humans and their culture and creations, I like this: the conflict is there; we are born into it; we were set into a narrative that has conflict at its core, at least as the human eye sees. What do we do now?

God. A biography - The Hebrew god as a literary character

The plot begins with God's desire for a self-image. It thickens when God's self-image becomes a maker of self-images, and God resents it. From this initial conflict, others emerge. The plot reaches its crisis when God tries and fails to conceal his originating motive from a single physically ravaged but morally aroused exemplar of himself. (p21)

Here, 'God' refers to the Hebrew god, as discernible in the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh (Hebrew 't' torah, or 'teaching', 'n' nebi'im, or 'prophets,' and 'k' ketubim, or 'writings.') Miles notes that the narrative sequence is different in the Christian Old Testament, but argues that that arrangement served the purpose of the new sect, to emphasize the foreshadowing of its figurehead, Jesus. Miles is using, mostly, the 1985 Jewish Publication Society Tanakh (JPS). (p18).

A further, important, lexical distinction: 'elohim and yahweh 'elohim and 'edonay. A little confusing, but best I can make is that the first is a common noun, 'god,' while the second is a proper noun, a name, that 'pious Jews in ancient times' did not speak so as not to 'desecrate the sacred proper name of God by pronouncing it.' The third word above is not in the Hebrew text, but translates into English means 'my lord.'

The English phrase, 'the Lord,' by convention translates yahweh in all English bibles. (p30)

God. A biography

I've picked up a book by Jack Miles: God. A Biography. Harvard PhD in Near Eastern languages, former Jesuit, studier of religion at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, yadayada.

I am enjoying the holy hell out of this book, though I'm only in it twenty pages. I keep seeing stuff I like, and a take on man's creation that makes sense to me, germane to my thinking. I keep finding things I want to get down, take off on, roll around the bed with, whatever.

So, in parallel with the Viet Nam series, I offer up other stuff.