Easter Message 2 - Confrontation: The Book of Job

episode to celebrate Easter here in 2025.

“Now some of you probably heard the Easter episode I did a couple of years ago, if you”

haven't, I'll link it in the show notes or under whatever post happened to bring you here. But today I want to talk about the book of Job, those of you who are subscribers to the Marta Made Substack will be familiar with a lot of the themes in material in this episode, and I'd like to give a quick message to my Bible believing listeners. I am going to be exploring different ways of thinking about the

book of Job and about God and about the story told in the gospels, and I understand that makes some people reflexively uncomfortable. I would just ask you to approach this

“episode with a generous spirit. You know, I'm going to talk about things that I've been”

working over and struggling within my mind for years, and I haven't come close to figuring them out. I'm not trying to be your pastor. I'm not claiming to be in authority with some previously undisclosed truth about the Bible. I myself don't have much certainty about any of the things I'm about to talk about. I'm trying to understand

things that have always been very hard for me to wrap my head around, and I'm just

going to share some of that with you here. So even if the theology is unorthodox, the last thing I'm trying to do is lead anyone astray, or to ask anyone to accept my answers to these questions. Since even my answers, my very well be different by next Easter. So here we go. I can contend to die for my beliefs. So cut off my

“head, and make me a martyr. The people will always remember it. No, they won't forget.”

God is a thought, God is an idea. It is a place. It is somewhere. But it's a reference for somebody who transcends all this. This is from an article in New York Times, dated October 7th, 2018. Scott Hari, New York. The 17 friends had all piled into a white stretch limousine for what was supposed to have been a birthday celebration at

an upstate New York brewery, but they never reached their destination. The massive

vehicle, speeding downhill on Saturday, approached the intersection of two highways that residents had long worn, was notoriously dangerous. And in just a few seconds of terror, their worst fears were realized. The limousine lost control, co-reening through the intersection and striking an empty car. The crash killed all 18 occupants of the limousine, including the driver, as well as two pedestrians, and an accident that left

deep tire tracks in the ground, and the small town about 40 miles west of Albany, Reeling. Four sisters, two brothers, and at least three young couples were among the dead. Jessica Kirby, 36, witnessed the crash. But when asked to describe the scene, she said, "I don't want to. It's not something I want to think about." How are we supposed to understand something like that? There's a certain sense in which

accidents, a nervous, even more than murders, or terrorism, or deaths in war. And those latter three, they don't leave us at a loss over who was responsible, or why it happened. Or at least what the approximate cause was. For the loved ones of the 20 people who died in that accident, though, things aren't so clear. You can blame the driver if you want. You can blame the limo company. You can blame the local government for not responding to

residents' warnings that the intersection was dangerous, and all that's fine. But none of these is likely to satisfy the parents or siblings or spouses of the people in that limousine.

And standing near me was this woman and her friend and the woman's cell phone rang. And so she

“answers it. Totally normal. Hello. And then she stopped walking, stopped moving all together.”

And she and the caller exchanged a few short sentences back and forth. And then she just collapsed

to the floor, sobbing, like I've never seen an adult sob before or since, inconsolable.

So I hung around in case there was something I could do to help, or maybe it just felt inappropriate to leave and go about my day like nothing had happened. And a little later, the woman's friend told me that at phone call, she had just found out that her husband and her only son, her only child, had been killed in a hit and run. And there are people out there listening, I know, who don't have to be told how these people felt because I know many of you have been there.

One of my best friends is Daniela Bolelli, the creator of the great history on fire and drunken Dallas podcast. He has a beautiful and brilliant daughter named Isabel, who's high school age now. But years ago, very shortly after Isabel was born, and Daniela's written and spoken about this in public. So I hope I'm not speaking at a school. Shortly after Isabel was born, her mother, who was young and healthy and beautiful, and if she captured Daniela's heart, she must have been

pretty amazing in a lot of ways, was diagnosed with cancer. It progressed very quickly and within

months, she was gone. And Daniela was left to figure out how to raise a baby daughter alone in his grief, to his credit and to savannas, and to the credit of Isabel's nature. He did a great job, a really, really great job, and not just under the circumstances, grading on a curve, but by any standard you could put them up against. But I've mostly avoided discussing the topic with them over the years of our friendship.

“Anytime I think of mentioning it in the context of a conversation,”

it feels like I'm about to walk on sacred ground with mud all over my cheap tennis shoes, and so I just turn around and head the other way. I think I also avoided because well, not so much to protect Daniela's sensitivities. He's a very open-hearted person. He would talk about it with me if I brought it up. But it's also just because talking, it just stopped me in my tracks. I don't think I could handle something like that. And people say everyone thinks that

and then it happens and you just handle it because you have no choice, but I don't know. You know, the voice in my head warns me that it would probably push me past my limit. And nothing quite like that has happened to me, but I'm very close with Daniela, and when someone you love experiences that, you don't gain any insight into what it's like exactly, but you can't just abstract it away either. You can't pretend like it's just something that happens in newspaper

headlines to other people, but not to your wife or your child. From now on, you know it's real. And you feel a new visceral fear of things that haven't happened yet, and might not happen. But you understand down to your bones that you're not on any lists for exemptions or special treatment. When these things happen to us, the most natural thing in the world is to ask who to blame. And when an answer doesn't immediately present itself, we often start looking up at the sky to

find the culprit. Because if no one's to blame, if the answer's really just these things happen,

“then you have to confront the cold, empty meaninglessness of this world that we've all been born into.”

Which I think is probably harder than living in a world run by a capricious or inscrutable god. The book of Job is one of the oldest meditations we have on this question.

And for my money, it's never been surpassed by imitators or alternatives in thousands of years since it was written.

It's frequently trotted out by skeptical non-believers to make a mockery of God.

“And to be honest, it's no wonder. The story of Job seems at face value to invalidate many of the”

core claims made by Christians and Jews about the character and purpose of God. Many believers just avoid the questions raised by the book. And ironically enough, I've learned as I've expressed this opinion publicly before. Ironically enough, they often take up the arguments of Job's friends. Home God at the end of the story explicitly says we're wrong about him. Now most of you will be familiar with the general outline of the story of Job, but for those who

are not, here's a quick recap. Starts out, God is holding court in heaven. And the heavenly beings are taking turns presenting themselves before the throne in the manner of ministers making their

“reports to an ancient Near Eastern king. One of the ministers is Satan. At least that's how we”

transliterate the word. In reality, the capitalization that we're familiar with when we see Satan written down that makes it a proper noun that was added by modern translators. Since there were no capital or lower case letters in the ancient texts, and in the original it comes with the definite article attached. So it actually reads the Satan, which means the adversary or the accuser. So the Satan presents himself before the Lord. And God calls him out,

boasting of this man called Job, the most righteous and blameless servant of God on earth.

He basically says, hey, accuser, you like to go around accusing people. I'd like to see you try to

poke holes in this guy, good luck with that. And so as intended, the Satan is provoked, and he replies, well sure, of course he behaves himself. He's given him everything. He's rich, respected, healthy, is a big family. Why wouldn't he be singing your praises? Give a dog a bone,

“every time he barks at the moon and he'll bark all night, but righteous, how would you know?”

He tells God that if he stops the gravy train, the servant Job will curse thee to thy face. Now, one interesting thing I've noticed about this opener is that in the pop culture version of

the story, you know, the one that people just kind of know even if they've never actually gone and

read the book of Job, it's often imagined that the Satan was the one who challenged God and provoked him to abandon Job. But in fact, the devil was just passing through. It was God who called him out and started the whole ball rolling. And so God accepts the devil's challenge. He says, I'll tell you what, do whatever you want to. Except Uncle cut his arms and legs off or something. You have free range, just don't touch his physical body. How to interpret this has been a subjective debate

probably ever since the books author first started handing out his manuscripts for friends to proofread. The fact that God sets the rules over what the Satan can and cannot do, that's a clue that God remains in control of this situation. Everything that happens is under his supervision. The Satan has not gone rogue and though he may be the one about to inflict the damage, he is acting as God's agent when he does it. Now I like to study the history behind the

biblical texts as much as the next guy and I know the Old Testament was edited and redacted and spliced together over centuries and only received its final polish during probably Hellenistic times. But all the stuff about different authors and different sources, all that's come to us as a result of modern scholarship. And Christianity was given it shape by men who didn't know anything about any of that. They took the Bible as they found it. When someone in the Middle Ages was told

that God created the universe in seven days, even though days are a way of counting the earth's rotation relative to the sun and the sun and moon weren't created until the fourth day, whatever. There might have been some edgy clerics saying you can't take it literally, but the vast majority of people just read the story as it was written. Since that's the way it was

I like to switch out of academic mode and into religious mode and take the story seriously.

On its own terms, the way it's written, the way our ancestors did. And so when you do that, when you take the story at face value, you're confronted with questions that seem kind of silly from an academic perspective. I have this somewhat embarrassing habit where every cell often, I'll find myself on, you like the passive, the use of the passive there. I find myself on the Quora website. It's where people can ask questions and other people answer them and you rate the

answers and they rise to the top and so forth. So I'll find myself on Quora reading very detailed explanations and debates of which fictional characters would win in a fight.

“You know, who'd win between Dr. Strange and Raesland Magier from the Dragonlands novels?”

Or between Dr. Manhattan and Pre-Retcon Beyonder? Or what if Golden Age Superman and World Break or Hulk both through a punch and hit each other's fist? The answers are Raesland Beyonder and Superman, by the way. Well, sometimes I'll look up from my screen and realize I've been reading this stuff for over an hour and I don't even read comic books. I barely read them as a kid.

And I've never read any of the comic books featuring a lot of the characters I spend all this time

reading about on Quora. And so I guess I just enjoy taking a fictional story and it's own terms. I'm getting into it, getting into that world. And so if you're someone who sees the Bible as a work of fiction, that's fine. Just pretend this episode is one of those Quora posts. And so anyway, among those questions that you're faced with, almost right away,

“are the apparent contradictions regarding the limits of God's knowledge and power?”

If God is, as most believers suppose, omnipotent, which means all powerful, and omniscient, which means all knowing, he could just take a peek into the future and know how this game with Job is going to play out. So what's he trying to prove? And to whom? Is he trying to prove it? Or we'd have believed that God cares what the devil thinks, that he cares so much, that he's willing to inflict torture on his most loyal servant just to make his point,

or, and here I might teach a little too close to the edge of blasphemy for some, as the devil managed to introduce doubt in the God's own mind regarding Job's fidelity. For God to doubt would mean placing limits on his omniscience. There's no room for doubt when you know

“everything. But the prologue of the book of Job itself,”

at least seems to imply that God might be subject to some kind of limits. It might seem like pedantic nitpicking, but when the devil makes his presentation, God asks him, "Where have you been?" The Satan tells him that he's been wandering too and fro about the earth and traveling upon it, a fact which God ought to have known without asking. He then asks the follow-up question, "Have you seen my servant Job?"

Which again, omniscience should have made unnecessary.

The very fact that the Satan makes his challenge in the first place seems to imply that the devil at least

thinks that there might be room for doubt or uncertainty in God's mind. The great psychologists, Carl Jung, naturally interprets the text in psychological terms, and in his great little book answered a Job, he suggests that the adversary, the accuser, the Satan, is the embodiment or the mythical personification of God's doubt. He's the voice in God's head whispering to him that you can't trust these people. They're not really what you think they are.

And the whole scene before the heavenly throne is an argument God is having with himself, over whether or not his most beloved servant is really sincere. So in any case, the devil takes his marching orders and he just goes ham on poor Job. At same day, some of his children are sharing a meal in the tent of their eldest brother when they're set upon by nomadic raiders, who kill all of Job's sons who were present and carry

off all the daughters who were there in the slavery. Less Job consider this some random disaster, the Satan strikes again, almost immediately.

another servant comes running up and says that lightning had come down from the sky and burned up

“even more of his children as well as all of his sheep. And then another servant came.”

Caldeans attacked the camels and took them and killed your boys. It only I escaped to tell you.

And before this third messenger was finished with his report, a fourth rushed up to tell Job

that a great wind had collapsed the walls of a house onto all of his remaining children. So all of Job's wealth and all of his possessions were destroyed or carried off and every one of his children had been massacred. By the devil, because of a bet he made with God after God called him out. After the final messengers finishes his report, Job tears his robes and lays down with his face

“in the dust. But despite it all, he not only does not curse God, he blesses him.”

Naked came I from my mother's womb and naked will I return. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away me the name of the Lord be blessed. So far the patience of Job to quote the well-known idiom has remained intact. So score one point for God zero for the devil and like negative one

million points for poor old Job. So now the scene cuts back to the heavenly throne room. And while

Job is down in the dirt grieving over his catastrophe, God is exultant. He's celebrating. He tells the devil to behold. My servant Job is held fast to his innocence even after you incited me to ruin him without cause. Many Jewish and Christian apologists join Job's friends who will arrive shortly

“and insisting that surely Job must have done something to deserve his suffering if only”

carrying the stain of original sin. But God seems to reject their defense of his own actions. And he confirms here that he has destroyed Job for no reason. Well the Satan's not impressed. The old devil says so what? A man will give up everything he has to save his own skin. Give me the power of his flesh and bones and he'll surely curse you to your face. And so God says fine. Do whatever you want. Just don't kill him.

You command which reaffirms that it is God and not the devil who is in control here. And so once again the accuser seems to have manipulated God into attacking Job for no reason at all as again God himself is just admitted. And so now the devil strikes Job's flesh and blood. Covering his whole body from the top of his head to the souls of his feet with excruciatingly painful boils. But Reft, Job sits down in the ashes of his ruin house, bitterly weeping and scratching

his running sores with a shard of broken pottery. His own wife, the only member of his family still alive comes to him and speaking for the devil says, "How long will you go on clinging to your innocence? Just curse God and die." Although Job had been a respected leader of his community, his misfortune has brought him into disrepute since he lived at a time and among people who believed

as Job always had that righteousness is rewarded. And anybody suffering the terrible fate that

it befone Job must have secretly been engaged in some egregious evil. But there are three friends who have not quite abandoned him and they come to sit and weep with Job over everything that's happened. They weep together for seven days without speaking a word, and then finally Job opens his mouth. "God damn the day I was born and the night that forced me from the womb. Why couldn't I have died as they pulled me out of the dark? Why were there

knees to hold me? Breasts to keep me alive. If only I had been strangled or drowned on my way to the bitter light. And so begins Job's lament. He's still not cursed God but things are starting to

bit of trepidation what he's going to say next. The story of Job is not original to the Bible

“and is more likely a biblical spin on a tale long known throughout the ancient Near East.”

A Sumerian and later Babylonian poem commonly known as the poem of the righteous sufferer or if the title is translated literally, I will praise the Lord of wisdom. I have long drawn comparisons to the book of Job and they share enough characteristics with that Bible story that it's fairly safe to assume that the Bible story was pollinated by these earlier versions. Scholars sometimes refer to those two works as the Sumerian Job and the Babylonian

Job and both of them certainly predate the composition of the biblical story. The earliest version of the Sumerian work dates from around 1700 BC but seven

“centuries before the founding of ancient Israel. The Babylonian version is more firmly”

dated to the reign of King Nazim or Atash of the Cassites, who reign from 1307 to 1282 BC. The original version records the lament of Tabel Utubel, a prosperous official in the city of Nippur and the later Babylonian version centers on a wealthy public official named Shubshimeshrakhan. In each version, the man is brought low and lodges a complaint against the injustice of his suffering. To Marduk, King of the Gods of Babylon, Shubshimeshrakhan sings,

"From the day bell punished me and the hero Marduk became angry with me. My God rejected me. He disappeared. My Goddess left. She departed from my side." The sufferer says that the King's courteers have plotted against him, causing him to lose the King's blessing and with it all of his worldly possessions. He had been reduced to an object of scorn and mockery and his days were filled with terror and humiliation. The word around town was that

obviously his apparent righteousness was all arous. That he must have been living secretly in sin for the gods to have abandoned him like this. When I walked through the street, fingers were pointed at me. When I entered the palace, eyes would squinted me in disapproval. My own city glared at me as an enemy. My own country was hostile to me as if it were foreign. My brother became a stranger. My friend became an enemy and a demon. My comrade denounced me furiously. My colleague dirtied his weapon

for bloodshed. My best friend slandered me. My own slave openly cursed me in the assembly. My slave girl defamed me before the crowd. When an acquaintance saw me, he hid. My own family rejected me as their flesh and blood. It goes on like that for a while. And finally, his torment is multiplied by an affliction of painful and debilitating diseases. On the second of the four tablets, the sufferer amounts of feeble defense of his conduct,

saying that his god had treated him as somebody who had lived unrighteously and failed to fulfill his religious duties. But that in fact, I was attentive to prayers and supplications. Prayer was my common sense. Sacrifice my rule. Finally, he's visited in dreams by

envoys of the gods who praise him for never cursing his Lord and then on the gods behalf,

“they remove his afflictions and restore his place of honor. And that's how the poem ends.”

In a catean poem known as the dialogue between a man and his god is the earliest known the Odyssey, which is what all of these are. The Odyssey's a Greek term coin by leaving it to refer to religious attempts to reconcile God's justice with the problem of evil, basically. This catean version is shorter and simpler, but it carries the same tune. A prosperous man is destroyed by painful illness and the collapse of his social position. He cries out for justice

and is finally restored by the renewed attention of his god, who praises his servant's loyalty

despite his suffering. Now all these ancient texts are relatively recent discoveries. The Sumerian version, for example, was translated in the mid-19th century.

Christian perspective regarding what a story like this is supposed to teach us. Other scholars have independently translated the poems in the years since, but one of the things that happens with texts like these is later translators often begin with the accepted original version as their starting point and avoid venturing out with two novel interpretations that might invite controversy or just be seen as a challenge or a dig by other translators.

And so as a result problematic translations can often survive the scrutiny of many eyes

for a long time as maybe true of a critical passage in the book of Job, which we'll discuss later.

But even allowing for that possibility, the similarities between all of these poems with each other

“and with the book of Job are too start to ignore, I think. And given the well-documented,”

cultural and demographic interpenetration of these ancient Near Eastern societies and the much later composition date of the biblical story of Job, which most scholars agree as a product of the Jews' time in Babylonian captivity, so you're talking 6th century BC. The baseline assumption I think should be that the basic framework of the story was a common possession of all the peoples in the region.

And that kind of syncretism can be off putting to more literal-minded Christians who often

bulk at any suggestion that biblical stories might have been influenced by older non-biblical sources. There are, for example, several Sumerian and Babylonian myths, all of which almost certainly

“predate the composition of the biblical book of Genesis, the tale of a universal flood,”

survived by one man and his family who had been warned to build a giant boat to ride the thing out. Tablets and seals from ancient Sumer, Babylon, Elam and other places, depict scenes in which a woman is leading a male initiate to eat the fruit of a tree with a serpent coiled around it, or some variation on that theme. You know, the fruit might be a drink and the serpent might be a god wearing a serpent crown, but the similarities to Eve leading Adam to

partake of the fruit that she'd eaten at the serpent's urging, very hard to deny. New Christians and some Jews, although to be honest, Jews in my experience tend to be more flexible and open-minded regarding the literalness of their own texts than many Christians.

“But those of them who insist that the Old Testament stories are historically factual,”

they usually don't approve of these comparisons. They find ways to argue around them. But when it comes to the book of Job, at least, I don't really think that's necessary. Even if you do think of it that way, I don't think it's necessary. One reason not to object to Job's story being a common possession of the ancient Near East

is written right there in the first verse of the book.

There was a man in the land of ooze whose name was Job. See Job is not a Hebrew name, and scholars best gas at the location of the land of ooze puts it in the northwest corner of Arabia near the Gulf of Akaba. In other words, not in the Hebrew Heartland, because Job was not a Hebrew. And this would be far from the only time in the Old Testament that God takes an interest in the fate of

a Gentile. Abraham, very early, are actually still named Abram since the scene depicted in Genesis 14 takes place before the covenant, gives him his better known name of Abraham. Abram pays homage to Melchizedek, King of Salem, and the text says, "a priest of the most high." And the verses that follow make clear that the most high is not some generic title for some other God, but is, Yahweh, the future God of the Israelites.

God also commanded Jonah to prophesy against Nineveh, capital city of the Heathen, a Syrian Empire, in order that they might repent and turn their hearts to God, which they do. King David's mother was a Moabite, so there are many such cases, which to a Christian, pre-figure God's later expansion of the covenant beyond the confines of Israel out to all the nations. Okay, so if Job is not an Israelite, and the rabbinical consensus is

In fact, neither the law nor the history of the Israelites is mentioned or even alluded to in the book of

“Job. And there's no indication that Job is a convert to the Hebrew religion, or that he's ever”

heard of the Torah, or of anyone named Abraham Isaac Jacob or Moses. And this again is not without precedent and the Bible. The fact that Melchizedek was called a priest of the most high, even though neither the covenant nor the law nor the priesthood had yet been created at that time. It's evidence that those are apparently not prerequisites for being in God's service, for Gentiles at least. The Ninevites did not demonstrate the sincerity of their repentance

by circumcising themselves or adopting the prohibitions and sacrifices demanded by the law. And it would have made no sense for them to do that, because those were things required only of the Israelites as a sign of the special task for which they've been designated.

“And so if Job was not under the law, the interesting question is,”

well then what was his religion? The Bible scholar Jack Miles calls it the covenant of Eden. Job had the same religion, so to speak, as the pre- Abrahamic patriarchs, Adam and Noah. As well as Melchizedek. You know that is he believed in one God who created the universe that God was good and that one fulfilled one duties to him by rendering sacrifice and living righteously. Although it seems very likely that the book of Job was a new twist on an old story

told by their neighbors for a long time before the Jews ever wrote down their version, its uniqueness is not diminished for having been shared. None of the older versions even approached the book of Job in the beauty of its verses or the depth of its theological reminations or the grandeur and ambition of its vision. The book is divided broadly into three parts.

The first part we described above begins with God's wager with the devil and ends with Job

seated in silent suffering with his three friends. The second part is by far the longest, taking up most of the book and consists of Job's laments and his disputations with his friends as they try to justify God's behavior toward him and then finally God's appearance to speak on his own behalf. The third part describes Job's restoration. It's probably significant that the first and third parts are composed in simple prose while the long middle portion is composed in poetic

“verse in a meter that is apparently unique to the Hebrew Bible. The implication I think that”

we can draw from that is that the prologue in the epilogue they represent the portions of the story that everybody of those days in those days knew while the long middle portion is the unique contribution of the Jews. It's as if the author was saying part one. Okay, so you all know the story of the righteous man who was abandoned by God and fell on hard times, right? Part two, what you don't know is what he said after his life came apart and what God said back to him

in part three. And finally you all know what happened since he remained faithful. He was restored to his

former place of prosperity and honor the end. In other words, the book of Job might have been an early example of fanfiction spun off from a well-known story. Which again, I don't think I really don't think diminishes it any more than the works of Escalis or Sophocles are diminished by their derivation from ancient Greek myths. You know where in the Old Testament do the authors insist that every word of it records some historical event. And the presence of books like the song of Solomon

are pretty clear indications that the compilers were not very shy about including works that used a literary device to express a profound truth. And there's another aspect of the Bible that pretty much everybody disagrees with me on. Every believing person anyway, and namely that's that God changes over the course of the story. To most Christians in Jews, God is infinite. Meaning that there is nothing missing in him. Nothing that you could add to him

since he's already infinite. God's also perfect. And since perfect has nowhere to go but down,

or that he's less than infinite in perfect now. The most obvious seeming change of God's character

“takes place between the Old and New Testaments. And believers have ways of arguing their way”

around even that apparently dramatic change. But if you were just a space alien reading the Bible with no preconceptions whatsoever, and of dog and the hunt saying, you would think that God had seriously mellowed out in the years between Malachi and Matthew. In fact, many early Christians could not reconcile the loving God of the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles with the capricious and vengeful God they read about the Old Testament. The transition was so jarring and so in

Congress that the followers of an important early sect, one that for a time challenged what would

become the Orthodox view for preeminence. Decided that Old Testament God knew Testament God could not possibly be the same being. But I see God changing even over the course of the Old Testament itself. And I can point to examples like the several occasions when God changes his mind about something. One of my favorites is from the Book of Numbers, I don't know if favorite is the right way to put it, but Book of Numbers chapter 11. On God's orders, Moses has led the Hebrews

out of captivity under Pharaoh out into the desert on their way to the Promised Land. We'll pretty soon the people are running out of food and water and they begin to complain, saying to Moses that

“in Egypt, at least we had food, why'd you bring us out here just to watch us die of thirst and hunger?”

Seems like a fair enough question under the circumstances. God did not think so. And it's his opinion that matters here. So he sent fire to burn the people up for complaining. He killed thousands of them. He might have killed them all, but Moses interceded and so God relented. But even Moses was a bit annoyed by this outburst. He repeated the question that had just brought God's fiery wrath down on the people. Except referring to himself, he said, "Why did you drag me all the way from

Midian to Egypt just to lead these people to their deaths in the desert?" God seems to listen to Moses puts away his holy flamen verfa and in a gesture of supreme good will, he miraculously sends huge flocks of quail to drop dead in piles, three feet deep all around the Hebrews camp.

“But then, this is the part that gets me. Even as the people are eating the first meat they've”

had in some time. And without them saying or doing anything, since he changed his mind and decided to have mercy on them. God changes his mind again, decides to kill him anyway. The people spent all day and all night, and all the next day, and gathered the quail, and they spread them out for themselves all around the camp. While the meat was still between their teeth, before it was even chewed, the anger of the Lord was kindled against the people once again,

and the Lord struck the people with a very severe plague. Numbers 11, 32 and 33. Now even here, early in the Old Testament, the change in God's character from the intimate personal deity of the patriarchs into this thundering and capricious law giver of the desert, you can't miss it. And throughout the book of Genesis, God reveals himself to individuals in a very personal way. He walks with Adam in the cool of the evening.

He even takes up his needle and thread and makes Adam and Eve some clothes before driving them out of his presence. To Abraham, he appears as a man, speaks with him as a man, enjoys his hospitality as a man. Abraham's grandson, Jacob, wrestled with God in the night, and he won. The contest went on all night, even after God dislocated Jacob's hip,

causing a permanent limp. Finally, just before first light, God had to implore Jacob,

release me for dawn approaches. Unless anyone claimed that God threw the match, Jacob refused. He said, "I will not let you go, not unless you bless me." And so God blessed, Jacob, and in doing so, changed his name to Israel. For you have struggled against God and man, and have prevailed. Now to be sure, the deity that smoked Sodom and Gomorrah with divine fire,

with Jacob, there can be really no doubt in the text about who came out on top. A little later, Jacob, in his 12 sons, I guess it would be 11 of them at this point. These are the patriarchs of the tribes of Israel. They travel as refugees to Egypt during a famine, and they find their long-lost brother, the 12th son, well-established in Egypt,

“and so they accept an invitation to settle in Pharaoh's territory. And that's how the book of”

Genesis, the first book of the Bible, ends. And when the second book, the book of Exodus picks up the

story, 400 years have passed. And during that time, the Israelites had multiplied in Egypt. The Egyptians were becoming very uneasy about their presence, and so their relationship with Pharaoh took it down turn. By the time God sent Moses to lead them out of Egypt, the people had lost all memory of God's covenant with their ancient ancestors, and they'd taken into the ways of the people around them. Starting with the Exodus story, God is no longer dealing with individual men.

Now he has an entire population on his hands. And like a politician who can

“speak plainly and private, but when he's in front of crowds has to resort to emotive hyperbole,”

and other effects to impress the audience, God no longer appears as a man, as he had to Abraham. But bellows at the multitude, from within pillars of smoke and fire. Throughout the book of Genesis, God governed his servants with a very light touch. From Adam to Noah to Abraham, down to Joseph at the end, he expected sacrifice,

says tribute appropriate to his station, but he never actually demanded worship in the sense we're

used to it. And he only demanded their obedience to a few very broad and easy to follow rules. During and after the Exodus, God demands grand displays of public worship and strict obedience

“to an elaborate system of regulations governing the personal and social conduct of the Israelites.”

And yet his pact with the people is sealed in the manner of ancient treaties or business contracts in the ancient Near East. And it's made clear at every turn that God will hold up his end, which means guaranteeing their safety, their prosperity, and their fertility, as long as the people follow all of his rules. In the book of Job, as previously, though only briefly in a few Psalms and Proverbs, this quid pro quo relationship between God and

man is superseded by a demand for unconditional worship, even if God fails to meet his covenantal obligations. Nowhere in the Pentateuch, nor in most of the rest of the Bible, is it ever really suggested that man's obligations to serve God would remain in force if the promised rewards were not forthcoming. Let alone if they were replaced by gratuitously inflicted suffering. Yet this is exactly what is expected of Job.

Bertrand Russell wrote, "The world in which we live can be understood as a result of muddle and accident. But if it is the outcome of a deliberate purpose, the purpose must have been

that of a fiend." He's God a fiend. The first response to a question like that is another question.

Are what standards should God be compared? And to that question, I can only think of one answer. God can only be compared to the standards and definitions with which He Himself has provided us. Unsurprisingly, His definitions of righteousness and justice and the other virtues line up pretty well with the definitions we creatures made in His image might come up with on our own. In any case, it's fair to say that God's actions against Job can only be judged as

careless at best, sadistic at worst, and there's no way to justify His behavior by any standard that is comprehensible to us. Every time I return to the book of Job, no matter how many times I've read it, I'm surprised all over again by the intensity and the urgency of Job's lament. Many people are surprised when they read the book because the Job we encounter is not the

with uncompromising ferocity. Job's three friends counter His accusations with common answers

“to the eternal question. Why do bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad ones?”

They say God is just. His universe is orderly and if things appear unjust and disordily to man, it can only be because there are things to which we are not pretty. One of Job's friends asks him. Can an innocent man be punished? Can a good man die in distress? I have seen the powers of evil reaping the crimes they sowed. Those twin questions. Can an innocent man be punished? Can a good man

die in distress are meant rhetorically? The answer to both, as far as Job's friends are concerned,

is an unequivocal, obvious, self-evident? No. An innocent man cannot be punished. A good man cannot die in distress. God is just and justice rewards righteousness and punishes evil. And Job, well, Job might do well to search his heart for the secret sin that is brought this calamity upon him. If I were you, he tells Job, I would pray. I would put my case before God. And so that's exactly what Job does. He demands a fair hearing. The enters a plea of not guilty,

and he calls on God to account for his broken promises. Job's demands are often bitter and sarcastic.

“He says, "Teach me and I will be silent. Show me where I am wrong. Do honest words offend you?”

Are you shocked by what I have said? Therefore, I refuse to be quiet. I will cry out my bitter despair. Won't you even give me time to swallow my spit? If I have sinned, what have I done to you? Oh, watcher of men. Before long, Job's second friend, build that the shoe height, the shortest man in the Bible, followed only by Nihai Maya. Oh, gosh. Sorry for the Sunday school slash youth group jokes.

Anyway, build that the shoe height has heard enough of this kind of talk from Job, and so he bitterly reproaches this friend. He says, "How long will you go on ranting, filling our ears with this trash? Does God make crooked that which is straight or turn truth upside down? Your children

must have been evil. He punished them for their crimes. God never betrays the innocent or takes the

hand of the wicked." Now to his credit, Job manages to restrain himself from striking build that down on the spot, but it doesn't back down. He says, "How can I prove my innocence? Do I have to

“beg him for mercy?" If I testify, will he even answer? Is he even listening to my plea?”

He's punishing me for nothing. For no reason, he has torn my flesh. No, I am guiltless, yet his mouth condemns me. Blameless, but his words convict me. He does not even care. So I say, he murders both the pure and the wicked. When the plague brings sudden death, he laughs at the anguish of the innocent. He hands the earth over to the wicked and blindfolds its judges eyes. Who does it if not he? Who indeed? The best answer most believers can come up with brings hollow to many other people,

which does not make it untrue to be fair. They say, "Well, the standards by which you were attempting to judge God, those were meant to regulate the behavior of man. They have no bearing whatsoever on the behavior of God. Normal rules do not apply." It's hard to answer that, but if God were anyone other than God, there would be no question of how to judge his behavior towards Job. In the Old Testament, God frequently refers to Israel as his wife. Just as Jesus describes

the church and the New Testament. So let's go with that. Imagine a husband who tortures his loving wife to satisfy his paranoia regarding the unconditionality of her loyalty. Imagine she doesn't

But rather than explain himself, he just shouts, "I'm twice your size. I can snap your neck

with my bare hands. I pay all the bills, and the only reason you have a roof over your head or food to eat is because I give them to you. Who do you think you are to question me?"

“Would anyone out there listening, care to raise his voice and defense of that husband?”

Of course not. Imagine it's apparent behaving this way toward a child. Since that's another metaphor, God often uses to describe his relationship to mankind. Or again, imagine a king. A king gratuitously harms his subjects. In fact, his most loyal

subject for the same non-reason. The Gulf separating a king from his subjects is much wider than the

Gulf between husband and wife or parent and child. Does the king's greater power and position change the equation to mitigate his guilt? The husband's justification, basically, was that his greater power relative to his wife meant that she had no valid claim to question his conduct and no right

“to expect his behavior to conform to any standard whatsoever. If we accept this defense from the husband”

even a little bit, then the same argument ought to mitigate the guilt of a king that much more. After all, we judge a man who kills his neighbor more harshly than a king who makes war on his. But most of us would say now, both the husband and the king are equally totally

indefensibly guilty. And I'm bigger and more powerful than you. It's not a justification.

It's just a refusal to provide one. But that in so many words is the answer that God gives Job. And Orthodox readings of the Bible do accept this non-explanation as a correct and reasonable response to Job's demands. During his discussions with his friends, Job had on more than one occasion evoked a courtroom scene and demanded a cross-exam in his accuser. He doesn't mean the Satan, he means God. If only I knew where I might find him, that I might stand in his place of dwelling.

I would present my case before him and fill my mouth with arguments. I would find out what answer he might give and consider what he would say to me. Would he contend with me only by the greatness of his power? No, he would hear me out and then drop all charges against me. For there the upright can get a fair hearing and I would be forever delivered from my judge. Essentially what Job is saying here is, you know, there must be some mistake

because he is innocent of whatever it is that's brought this punishment upon him. Job's uprightness was established at the beginning of the story and it is not in question. What is in question is whether his uprightness has anything to do with how God chooses to behave toward him and if it doesn't, well then what? Job certainly thinks it should and he didn't pull that notion out of a hat and half the old testament consists of God assuring his people

that if they do right by him he'll do right by them and the other half consists of God warning them of the consequences of failing to meet his expectations and he certainly makes good on that end of the bargain when they slip up but Job has not slipped up. He's not only a good man but the best man upright and blameless and there is no one like him in the world says God if anybody is within his rights to expect God to keep his promises and deal fairly with him it's Job.

“And remember that God himself boasts to the devil of Job's steadfastness after the first round of”

torture and remembering the way he put it. See he has held fast to his innocence even after you incited me to ruin him without cause. Job took the massacre of his family and the destruction of his property and his social position with stoic humility saying that he only had those things because the Lord had provided them so as to the Lord's prerogative if you wanted to take them back and it's only when Job has been reduced to a despised, penniless lonely beggar sitting in the

ashes that are all that remain of his house morning his murdered family and scratching with a

Job had faith that he would be vindicated you saw this in the last passage. He had faith that he

would be vindicated if only he could get God to listen for only he could stand before him and prove his innocence. But that insistence cannot even if he even if it's not intended it can't help but also be an accusation because if Job is innocent then God is guilty of unjustly giving him over to torture. And this is the blasphemy that outrageous and alarms Job's three companions but Job refuses to back down and eventually reduces them to silence prompting God to make an appearance to

speak on his own behalf. Someone unfamiliar with the book of Job but familiar with the rest of the Bible might expect God to offer Job something by way of explanation especially at the end after

“Job has passed the test but what explanation is there? What explanation could God possibly give?”

It admitting that he'd been duped by the Satan would make him no better than Adam and Eve whom he cursed and barred from his presence and cursed all of their descendants down to the present day just because they fell for the devil's tricks. God could even have claimed to have had reasons beyond Job's comprehension for what he had put him through. And that would be less satisfying to Job no doubt but at least as the benefit of being believable. But God gives Job nothing,

nothing of the kind just refuses to even take his question seriously and one of the Psalms, the Psalmist asks good question. He sings, "When I consider your heavens, the work of your hands,

“the moon and the stars which you have set in place, what is man that you might take thought of him,”

or human beings that you show us any concern?" Another way to phrase that question might be, "God, what are you getting out of this relationship?" It's pretty clear what we get out of it.

You first and foremost, we get to exist. But what about God? A plain reading of the Old Testament

makes it seem as though we've been nothing but a profound disappointment and a thorn in his side, ever since he shaped us from the dust of the ground. For the first five days of creation, everything went according to plan has God effortlessly spoke the universe into existence. But then again, his decision to rest on the seventh day raises, at least by implication,

“a question about how effortless it was. In any case, on the sixth day, God got around creating man.”

And right away, we're told that there's something wrong with him. Small thing, but it says, "It is not good for him to be alone." Again, a minor flaw. But after five days of God completing task after task and seeing that it was good, as it tells us after each task is complete,

this is the first time in creation that anything is judged as being not good.

So God parades all the animals of the world before Adam so that he can name them and to evaluate whether any of them would make a suitable companion for Adam. None of the animals meet the criteria, so God realizes that Adam needs someone a little more like himself. So he puts Adam to sleep and creates Eve from one of his ribs. It did not take long after the seventh day for the humans to find trouble.

And we all know this story, I assume. In God planted the garden of Eden, he told Adam and Eve that they could eat any fruit or seed from any plant in the place. Except for one. Well, what did he do that? Any parents of children out there? Would you ever do that? Or if you did, you would know what you were doing, right? Well, I would go to put the tree there at all. Adam and Eve are only about a

day old at this point. So it seems a bit like leaving a child alone with a poise and candy bar. And telling them not to eat it. And actually it's worse. It's like leaving a poise and candy bar with a child and then sending an older sibling already not torius for causing trouble to go convince the child to eat it. So who in that case would be responsible the child did eat it?

child bears the least responsibility. Followed by the older sibling, the serpent.

“And that final responsibility would fall on the parents for engineering the whole ridiculous”

scenario in the first place. And why did God let the devil into his brand new garden to go

around harassing his newest creations? Most obvious answer is that the serpent and the tree were put there as a test. And it's an explanation that fits well with the rest of the old testament story. But why? Well try to see things from God's perspective. Up until the creation of man, every single phenomenon in the whole history of the universe had bent instantly to God's will, operating according to the ordering principles he's worked out from the first cosmic moment.

Then one day, these little human creatures go off script and start doing their own thing.

This has never happened before. And so God watches them with interest. He watches as these

“little troublemakers spread out on the earth because what else could be more interesting to”

a being for whom literally every other thing in the universe had always been perfectly predictable. The humans build a great big tower. God decides they're getting a little big for their riches. So he kicks it over and confuses their languages to delay us trying it again. And before long, the fascination starts to fade a bit and God gets tired of their attitude. So he kills off all but a handful of them with a great flood.

A little later, God finds a man named Abraham. And orders him to kill his only son, Isaac.

And why would he do that? Well, it's to see if you would do it, I guess. God's doubts regarding Abraham's loyalty were only a laid when Abraham has the knife raised for the killing strike. And only then, the last moment God steps in and calls it off. In a world of rebellious men, Abraham is proven his obedience. Although even then, you wonder if there's a sliver of doubt left in God's mind of whether he

really would have done it. In any case, God makes a covenant with Abraham. He promises to look after his line and ensure its prosperity and safety just so long as his

“descendants continue to replicate Abraham's mechanical obedience. But is that really what God wants?”

He can get blind obedience from his angels from any of his creatures. The whole reason God took such an interest in us is that we're the only beings in all creation capable of surprising him. And this is made very clear on the story of Abraham's grandson, Jacob, which we discussed a little bit ago. When Jacob wrestled with God in the dark of night and Jacob refused to let him go as dawn approached and let God bless him, Jacob got his blessing and a new name to go with it.

That name, as we said, was Israel, which means one who struggles or fights against God. Think about that. The chosen people of God, they're very name, refers to the fact that they are capable of resisting him. And even if you're an atheist and don't believe anything in the Bible, just from a literary perspective, it's an interesting approach for the authors to take. But again, just try to see it

from God's perspective. For all of eternity up to the creation of Adam, God was alone in the universe. Nothing in existence except him and his toys. Every Adam, every molecule, every mineral, vegetable and animal, racing to fulfill his whims as fast as he could conceive them. And then one day, this little creature looks him in the eye and God realizes, "I'm no longer alone."

Well, what, if not that creature, could possibly hold his interest. And maybe that's the answer to the song, this question. Who is man that you might take thought of him, were human beings that you show us any concern? All this place is both God and man in quite a bind, a sort of catch-22. Man's loyalty is of supreme importance to God,

from him. In a recent discussion on Duncan Trustle's podcast, I drew on the Marvel Comic and

“TV series, Jessica Jones, for a comparison. Silly, maybe. But comics, you know, can do many of the”

same things as myth if they're done right. And they can be useful for boiling a story down to essentials and then blowing those essentials up to God-like proportions. And so, in Jessica Jones, the primary villain is called the purple man. It's called that because his wardrobe, favors, purple suits. Well, in the comic book he has purple skin, but Netflix wisely dialed back the weirdness when they made the show. Now, some people are naturally skilled at manipulating

others. We've all encountered these people. Conmen, lawyers, interrogators, cult leaders, your friendly neighborhood malignant narcissists. They all know how to subtly alter a person's perception until the person does what they want without even knowing he's being manipulated. Well, the purple man is a portrayal of that manipulator personality with the skill turned

all the way up to the max setting. His superpowers basically the Jedi mind trick, but with no breaks,

his power is absolute and effortless. If he says stop moving, a person will come to a halt and remain there until he stars to death unless he's given permission by the purple man to get going. If instead of stop moving, he says stay where you are, that person will fight and claw to the death if anybody tries to move him from that spot. If he says pick up that hot poker and stick it in your eye, no hesitation. Person immediately picks it up, puts it in his eye. And if the purple man

“tells him to do it without screaming, the person will make a sound. But here's the thing,”

the power is on all the time. It's an automatic response to hearing the purple man's voice. He can't turn it off even if he wants to. In the story, he's had this power at least since

he learned to talk. At first, as a kid, he starts to notice that his parents never say no

when he asks for a cookie and his teachers at school never telling him he's given a wrong answer. Over time, he begins to understand the power he wields. We can imagine the kind of personality that takes shape from those early experiences. He grew up as the spoiled petulant center of the universe that any child would be if he got literally everything he wanted all the time. And of course, as a catch, he got everything he wanted from people,

except the one thing he needed most. The freely wield love and care of others, especially his parents.

Once he became aware of his gift, he could never trust again that the love or positive

feelings of other people were not simply a response to the power he had over them. Maybe his parents would have loved him anyway. He never know for sure. And so, of course, he grows up to be a psychotic supervillain, cycling through supermodel sex partners, dining for free and expensive restaurants and asking bank managers to give them all the money in the vault and don't call the police.

And then one day he meets the protagonist, Jessica Jones. Jessica's superpower, much simpler and more straightforward, just got superhuman strength. And so, purple man takes control of her and holds her in the wall as a girlfriend and an enforcer. One night, the two of them are out doing villainous things and he orders Jessica Jones to murder this woman. And for some unexplained reason, Jessica musters a split second of lucidity

and the spell is broken just long enough for her to run away and make her escape. And it says the first and only time in purple man's entire life that this has happened.

“So, what would be the contents of the purple man's mind given his life experiences?”

Because it would be very different from ours. You know, a personality is in large part at least, a collection of the habits and strategies and compensations that we develop to deal with the obstacles and disappointments that come with living in the world. But purple man has none of those. He doesn't know what an obstacle is.

Every person, Albert Einstein, George Patton, Charles Manson, everyone is nothing but a puppet

“to him. Their thoughts and their morals and their identities just pathetically fragile and temporary.”

He could order a mother to throw her child off a cliff and she'd do it without hesitating. So, what is a mother's love to this guy? He could make Gandhi shoot a baby or Martin Luther King gives speeches and support of the KKK. So, what are your silly human values to him? He'd gone his entire life without ever having had to convince anyone of anything.

During puberty, he wouldn't have experienced any adolescent struggles with sex or social status. You know, if you had developed a crush on a girl at school, he could go to her house, order her parents to leave, tell her to take off her clothes and so on. If he really liked her and wanted her to like him back, he didn't want to play it that way.

“Too bad. He can't turn it off. The minute he asks, will you be my girlfriend?”

The power kicks in and she's just slavishly going along with it. Yes, I will. How could his interest in her be sustained under those circumstances? You would be impossible. It would really be impossible for him to not eventually feel contempt for her. And she would just be a robot. And you've got an infinite supply of robots, so on bad days, maybe you just tell her to stick that hot

poker and arrive for some entertainment.

The contents of a mind that had never had to stop for even a split second to puzzle over how to get what he wanted,

or to delay gratification for even a moment, that mind would be very different from ours. It would be a mind occupied solely with generating new desires and new games to play, alone with itself in the universe. The existence is a kind of solitary confinement. And if you've been in solitary confinement from the day you were born,

what would you use as reference points to confirm that you really even exist? Could go Cartesian, I think, therefore I am, and I seem to be thinking, fair enough, but we've got thoughts in our dreams. What makes a dream a dream is that the entire dream universe is constructed for our benefit. It's an extension of our own minds and technically it's all under our control, even if that

“controls unconscious. Well, that's how the world was for the purple man,”

until Jessica Jones told him no, in his entire existence then crystallized around her. The only other real person in the world, when you've been alone for your entire life,

and never suspected that there was anybody else out there, and suddenly you're not alone anymore.

What else is there to pay attention to? The writers do a good job of portraying the ambivalence in purple man's character. You know, he's exactly the psychotic child you would expect of a grown adult being told no for the first time in his life. And he reacts to Jessica's rejection with tantrums, threatening her and others, to try to force her to say yes, as she tries to hide from him, even though the very thing he needs

from her is her ability to say no. If she did agree to be with him, he would never be sure whether her affection was real or whether she was just being overwhelmed by his power. He would become paranoid, consumed with jealousy, and spend his days devising tests to try to discern whether she really loved him. A biblical way to say this would be that Jessica Jones was the only suitable companion for the purple man. In the story of creation, only Eve, who was taken

from the body of man and made in his image, proves to be a suitable companion for Adam. And only man, made in the image of God, could be a suitable companion for God. This calls up the image of a love triangle. And one interpretation that I like of the story of the fall of man is that Adam chose to eat the fruit because his wife, Eve, had already eaten it, but she was already doomed. And Adam was faced with the decision of either being separated from her

chose his wife. Again and again throughout the Old Testament, God describes himself as jealous.

“The words jealousy and envy are often used interchangeably, but they're not the same thing.”

Envy is when you see someone's pretty girlfriend, and you wish you had a girlfriend that looked like that. jealousy is when somebody sees your pretty girlfriend, and you're afraid she might decide to leave you and go with him instead. jealousy is the fear of loss, and so it's a close cousin to paranoia. From the very beginning, God is devising loyalty tests, putting the serpent and the tree in the garden, ordering Abraham to kill his son, the countless trials through which the Israelites are put in the

desert, I mean the whole law is kind of an elaborate test. When the Israelites inevitably fail

his tests, his reactions often resemble nothing so much as the outrage of a betrayed husband facing public humiliation as a cuckold. The Israelites' talents with foreign gods is frequently compared with fornication, adultery and prostitution, and the punishments that God threatens are those prescribed for a whore, or an ancient unfaithful wife. God thunders, besides all your abominations

“and harlotries, you did not remember the days of your youth, when you were naked and bare and squirming”

in your blood. Then it came about after all your wickedness. Whoa, whoa to you, declares the Lord God

that you built yourself a shrine and made yourself a high place in every square. You built yourself

a high place at the top of every street and made your beauty abominable. And you spread your legs to every passerby to multiply your harlotry. You also played the whore with the Egyptians, your lustful neighbors with huge genitals, and multiplied your harlotry to make me angry. Behold now, I have stretched out my hand against you. I delivered you up to the desire of those who hate you, the daughters of the Philistines, who are ashamed of your rude conduct. Moreover,

you played the whore with the Assyrians, because you were not satisfied. You played the whore with them, and still were not satisfied. You also multiplied your harlotry with the land of merchants, Caldea, and even with this, you were not satisfied. Thus says the Lord God, because your ludiness was poured out and your nakedness uncovered through your harlotrys with your lovers and with all your detestable idols, and because of the blood of your sons which you gave

to idols, therefore behold, I will gather all your lovers with whom you took pleasure, even all those whom you loved, and all those whom you hated. So I will gather them against you from every direction and expose your nakedness to them that they may gaze upon the filth of your nakedness. Thus, I will judge you like women who commit adultery, or shed blood or judged. And I will bring on you the blood of wrath and jealousy. I will also give you into the hands of your

lovers, and they will tear down your shrines, demolish your high places, and strip you of your clothing. They will take away your jewels and leave you naked and bare. I will incite a crowd against you, and they will stone you and cut you to pieces with their swords. They will burn your houses with fire and execute judgments on you in the sight of other women. Zekiel 16. At times, God seems to be of two minds with regard to his own actions.

His motives are multiple and ambivalent. For example, he frequently has his prophets pronounce

“that after Israel has been punished for her misdeeds, he will remember his earlier vow and have”

compassion on the people. Relenting in his anger and restoring Israel to his good graces. In the mouth of the prophet Zekiel, however, God makes no such tender-hearted claims. Recalling the Israelites' time in the desert after Moses led them out of Egypt. God says that the only reason he spared any of them was that if they all died, it would make him look bad to the other nations. He said, "So I said, I would pour out my wrath on them and spend my anger against them

in the wilderness, but I would held my hand, and for the sake of my name, I did what would keep

And then in one of the more shocking passages in a book filled with shocking passages,

“God says this, "So I gave them other laws that were not good and statutes through which”

they could not live. I defiled them through their gifts, the sacrifice of every firstborn. That I might fill them with horror so that they would know that I am the Lord."

And God seems to be saying that he always knew that people would find it impossible to live up

to the stringent requirements of the law. That, in fact, the law had not been given to them for guidance, but as a kind of punishment. The law to which the Israelites were subject did, in fact, technically require families to sacrifice their firstborn child to God. In this God was demanding no more than what bail or molek who were other nearby God's required of their subjects. Abraham's easy willingness to offer up Isaac probably reflected the fact

“that it was standard practice in the Levant in those days. In fact, it would have been strange if God”

had not required Abraham and his descendants to sacrifice their children. This is probably how the story of Isaac's sacrifice was meant to be understood by the ancient Israelites. Not that God's demand of Abraham was extraordinary because it wasn't in those days, nor that Abraham's obedience was extraordinary. Since even the followers of the despise caninite God's perform the sacrifice. What was extraordinary was God's willingness to accept

the sacrifice of a ram in Isaac's place. And God never renounced his claim to the first born

children of Israelite families, but he did show mercy by allowing them to offer substitutes as he had with Abraham. There are hints, though, and even at least one straightforward example, of God requiring men to follow through on sacrificing their own children in his name. In Judges, chapter 11, the warrior Jeff though is preparing to lead the people in battle against the Aminites. The Aminites are strong and victory is uncertain, so Jeff that calls on the

Lord for support. And he makes a tragic vow. Jeff thought made a vow to the Lord saying, "If you will indeed give the sons of Amin over into my hand, then it shall be that whatever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me when I return, it shall be the Lord's, and I will offer it up as a burnt offering." Well, God apparently accepts the terms and gives Jeff the great victory over the Aminites. When Jeff though returns home from battle, the first thing to rush out

the door and greet him is his beloved only daughter. When Jeff thought came to his house at Mizpa, behold, his daughter was coming out to meet him with tambourines and with dancing. Now she was his one and only child. Besides her, he had no son or daughter. When he saw her, he tore his clothes and said, "A last my daughter, you have brought me down in devastated me, for I have given my word to the Lord, and I cannot take it back." So she said

to him, "My father, you have given your word to the Lord. Therefore do to me as you have said." And so Jeff thought killed the girl and burned her body in the name of the Lord. Why would God agree to a bargain like that? Why when Jeff thought made the offer, did he not

“reject it out of hand? Or even refused to help Jeff thought for suggesting a blast for me like that?”

Or why did he not do as he had done with Abraham? And stage Jeff this hand at the last moment, once it was clear that he was going to fulfill the vow. Apologist have tried to explain this troubling story by saying that the loss of his daughter was God's punishment for Jeff that having made such an unacceptable vow.

But I've never found that explanation convincing. I don't think it's in the text.

It's true for sure that throughout most of the rest of the old testament, sacrificing your children is denounced as an abomination. But Jeff, the sacrifice is not framed that way. It's not remembered just as the catastrophic blunder of a thoughtless father. And if it's not remembered as an act of piety and faithfulness, it's not remembered as a sin.

his son Isaac? Did their compliance satisfy his jealousy, but cost them his respect?

“And again, if God wanted robots, he could have made them.”

And being willing to murder your only child and the capricious whim of a distant deity is about as close as you can get to being a robot without being made of metal and silicone. After Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, God said, "The man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil." Doesn't that seem to imply that man's stature was actually raised in God's eyes as a result of their

disobedience, even if he was pissed off about it? Did he really want them to spend all of eternity frolicking around the garden of Eden, picking fruit and playing fetch with the animals? Maybe he thought that was what he wanted. But if God can experience anger and regret and compassion and jealousy and disappointment,

could he also get bored?

“And to return to the topic at hand, what would have impressed God more?”

If Job had continued to sing his praises, even as he tortured him and massacred his family, or if Job stood firm in his defiance? This is the question we're left with as we await Job's response after God's awesome outburst from the whirlwind. I mentioned that there's one thing about which most believers disagree with me,

namely that God changes over the course of the Old Testament. Even many people who might agree that God appears to change, often fall back on the argument that it's not God who changes, but just man's perception of God. And they may be right, but let's continue a little further down the path of reading the Bible, as a book of literature, in which the character God is the protagonist.

The earliest apparent change in the divine nature happens during the creation story.

The first few chapters of Genesis, if taken at face value,

seem to give an account that differs somewhat from the popular version of the universe's first few days. Genesis 1 describes the creation of the universe from the void. Since God did not yet have anyone to hold the flashlight while he worked, his first act is creator was to cause light to appear. The biblical phrase "let there be light" is much more official and imperial sounding than the original

Hebrew. The original Hebrew could be justifiably translated as simply "light." And interestingly, he doesn't create the sun moonar stars, quote, "to give light on the earth until day four." So, I wonder if we're supposed to read something else into let there be light. Consider the creation story in the Indian holy text, the brahadarunyaku ponashad, composed in the 6 or 7th century BC.

In the beginning, there was nothing whatsoever.

Then just as in Genesis came the first act in the process of creation God underway.

The first act in the history of the universe, according to this telling,

“was the only thing that it could be. It could only be one thing.”

In the Upanishad records it as "let me have a mind" or "let me awaken." All of these make the same point that creation commenced with the emergence of consciousness and light is probably the most common metaphor we use to refer to consciousness. The lights are on but nobody's home. Are we meant to read the biblical first act? Let there be light or light?

Not as the emergence of light per se, since the Hebrew's new perfectly well that came from the sun and moon and stars, but as the emergence of consciousness, the Upanishad continues In the beginning there was nothing whatsoever, but only death and hunger covering the whole world for hunger means death. Hunger causes death coming and going, puts every creature on the horns of an eternal dilemma, to kill or be killed, to eat or be eaten.

But how could the world be covered by death and hunger if there was nothing yet existing to die or

there was nothing at all happening except sex and death. Every creature devouring

“every other creature that fell within its grasp and the visceral psychology of hunger is”

no one can call it, ruled what we might call consciousness in the prehuman age. So maybe the beginning in this story doesn't refer to the eternity before the world was formed,

but of the time before the first consciousness emerged to look around and contemplate it.

Now the world we see around us only looks like it does because our nervous system has evolved to perceive it this way. With no one around to behold it, the universe is just energy. The infinitism of particles don't look like anything until they're processed and rendered by consciousness. There are no objects. There's neither time nor space in the sense that most people

“mean by those terms. There's no cause and effect. You know these phenomena are all qualities of”

consciousness. A particular way of perceiving reality that allows an organism like humans to get what we need to survive and grow from the environment. Vick and Stein once wrote, "The limits of my language are the limits of my world, where of one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Homo sapiens didn't come with complex elaborate language right out of the box. It was a time, presumably, way back when our ancestors were just emerging from 8-foot, when humans only possess

a single word. They must have been a first word, I guess, or maybe a few words.

For most of human history, language developed to help us communicate and cooperate within and among groups to secure territory, to avoid and fend off danger and to find and defend food and other resources. An enormous amount of cognitive and linguistic development had to take place before humans could even begin to ask a simple abstract question, like, "How would you feel if you didn't have breakfast this morning?" Ancient languages often resort to metaphor because they

lack the vocabulary to discuss abstract ideas directly. Even we moderns use a term like consciousness, without knowing exactly what we mean by it. Rather we know what we mean, but we have trouble defining it without resorting to synonyms like mind. The tabletop game taboo is built around the difficulty we have describing even everyday words without falling back on synonyms, analogies, and metaphors. Imagine trying to describe the process of evolution, or the physics of the

early universe, or even ideas like good and bad, without recourse to any abstract language or mathematics. What would you do? Most of us would do what the ancients did. We try to explain it by means of metaphor and narrative. We tell a story. This is the reason myth preceded philosophy. It's the reason we teach

children abstract concepts first by telling them stories. And only later by explaining the principles

embodied in the stories. chimpanzees have been observed engaging in rudimentary tool use, like sticking a piece of straw down an until and drawing it back once it's covered with tasty ants. And this is not an instinctive behavior, not all chimps do it. It's a cultural trait for lack of a better term. It is taught to young chimps by their elders. And a chimps of course have no verbal language, so there only means of transmitting knowledge

is by imitation. The same is true of very young children. The easiest way to teach a kid to tie a shoelaces is to just show him, tell him to watch and do what you do. When a child develops a sufficient vocabulary, you can use language to supplement his imitative learning. Some kids are taught a simple story. Bunny years, bunny years, playing by a tree, Chris crossed the tree, trying to catch me. It's a nemonic crutch for shoelace tying if they can't

“remember what it is they saw their parents do. Narrative enables children to learn”

by imitating figures that exist only in their minds. They learn how to handle fear and develop

Research has shown that children before the age of about seven lack the cognitive capacity.

“And I don't just mean the skill or the ability but the neurological hardware”

to work fluently with abstract concepts. Trying to teach them to be good by way of catagorical and parative would be a wasted effort. Obviously, if you tried to do it, you would almost involuntarily start telling them a very short story. Being good is when you see someone who needs help and you stop to help them. Some lessons can't be taught by imitation and require more precision than a metaphor can provide but these are rarely relevant

to a child. In fact, most adults can go through their entire lives and get along just fine without ever having much use for abstract theoretical concepts. Great civilizations were built by men who believed that the son was the wheel of a god's chariot being driven across the firmament.

“The genius of the Greeks was that they took that giant step from understanding the world”

through narrative and metaphor, myth, to trying to understand it by means of abstract concepts,

philosophy. In that sense, the Greeks may have been the first adults in history,

at least in the world west of Persia. The biblical creation story was written down thousands of years ago and was based on an oral tradition that may have gone back tens or even hundreds of thousands of years, who knows. Back when the human vocabulary consisted solely of terms related to practical experience, those of us in the west whose concept of religious belief is based on Jewish and Christian traditions often struggle with the question of whether ancient

pagans really believed their myths. The Greeks could climb Mount Olympus and go see for themselves

that Zeus and his court were nowhere to be found. They certainly believed their myths if belief

means that their behavior was shaped by the stories, but if belief is taken a main that

“taken a mean that they took the stories literally, I think it's probably doubtful that they believed”

them in that sense. The core elements of most mythologies are almost unimaginably ancient. They go back far, far, far, far deeper than the records, any of the records we have of them. And we know that because of people around the world who share motifs and elements of these stories that are unmistakably related and being able to go back and say, well one was the last time these two groups of people had any kind of common contact for they separated, you know,

went their separate ways. Greek myths were not original to Greece. They had their template among Aryan warrior herdsmen of the South Russian staff, the womb of nations, whose conquest spawned civilizations from India to Greece from Persia to Britain. We know the myths of these ancient civilizations had a common source because they share similarities which are otherwise inexplicable. There are myths recounting an ancient battle between the Thunderbolt wielding King of the gods

and an older feminine water dragon or water serpent. And they're found throughout the northern hemisphere pretty much anywhere reached by the proto-Indo European migrations. And so for example in India, there's the story of Indra, King of the gods, using his lightning bolt to strike down the water monster Ritra who was preventing all the rivers and rains from nourishing the earth. Greece had the same story of lightning wielding Zeus destroying the water monster typhoon.

Norse mythology has the Thunder god Thor and combat against the world's serpent, Yorman Gunder. The motif is found in Siberia and even across the bearing straight among some native North American tribes, most notably the Iroquois. And so this last diffusion suggests a very ancient origin for this myth. Since the last meaningful contact between the peoples of Eurasia and North America predates the last Ice Age. The similar motif is also found in submittic myths in the

Levant and Mesopotamia, suggesting some cross-pollination in the ancient Middle East. It's as interesting but not really surprising since Indo European cultures,

they interacted through trade and conquest with the region's Semitic peoples long before

“anybody began to make records of it. In fact, the ancient Armenian homeland was the site of”

two prehistoric tales from the early chapters of the book of Genesis. We find the Babylonian god Marduk casting his lightning bolt at the Sea Dragon Teamot, and the Canaanite Thunder God Bell doing the same against the serpentine Sea god Yam. And even in the Bible there are hints of Yahweh's victory over the primordial sea beast, called Ray Hab and Job chapter 26, Isaiah chapter 51 and Psalm 89.

While the mythological motif I described above is almost certainly an example of cultural diffusion

“there are other examples that pending the discovery of yet unknown cultural exchanges”

can only be explained by independent parallel development. In linguistics this phenomenon is called a false cognate meaning similar words that indicate the same thing and languages that have no known historical connection to each other. The most famous cognate is maybe the most well-known

word on earth and for many of you it might have been the first word you ever spoke.

Ma, you know mother, mama, mom, ma are some close variations such as mama or nana refers to mother in languages as diverse as English and swahili, crossing boundaries not only of

“language but of language groups and there are a few theories why this is so but the simplest in”

most convincing is that ma is one of the first words that a human infant begins to consistently generate. Your ma is just the word that results when you make a sound with your lips closed and then continue making the sound with your lips apart. This became associated with the mother because in every ancient culture mother was the infant's constant companion and the infant's primary

reference point throughout its early development. And first that might be kind of counterintuitive.

You know today we already have the word ma so mothers try to teach their babies to call them mama. But originally it might have been the other way around. You know before humans had a word for mother the baby's most common battle sound might have provided it. The number of languages in which is phenomenon's present and the rich linguistic and religious and philosophical traditions that have grown around that word in so many different cultures indicate that ma is probably

one of the most ancient words in the history of human language. In any case there is a very high likelihood that not only English and swahili speaking kids but also children of paleolithic cave dwellers probably called their female parent mama or Nana. And infant is not born with a self-concept nor any sense of subject object differentiation or even a sense of the world being made up of discrete objects. It has no identity. No sense that the world outside is separate from

its own being. It sees and hears in the sense that its eyes and ears work but it doesn't know what it's seeing or hearing. The experience of one moment has very little connection to the next moment or the one that came before it. The infant has no sense of what is worth paying attention to and what should be ignored. The world of the infant begins as a buzzing flashing chaos with just one

anchoring presence to hold on to. The first separate object of which the infant becomes aware

is invariably the mother and with that first recognition of another the world which had been an undifferentiated whole is suddenly torn into. The infant mother diad is the basis of every human's

self nor the self-mother diad but a much more complex arrangement which mother is just one of countless objects and forces that populate it. But that takes a little while. The Brajadarunyako Panishad mentioned

“earlier a few moments ago it seems to recount this process I think in mythological terms.”

Immediately after the awakening of the divine mind nothing else had yet been created. There's only the mind and the mind was all there was and since nothing else yet existed the mind had nothing to think

about. Nothing to contemplate except itself but then one day the mind had a thought. The first thought

in the history of the universe and that thought was I or I am he indeed what else could it be. There was nothing else but himself to think about and like the baby in the womb the divine mind had presumably floated and unconscious bliss for uncountable eons because time had not yet begun before it became aware of itself as a locus of experience and will. This is the moment early in the infant's life when and it's extremely rudimentary way the child realizes that it is

an individual. Everyone's first thought although they haven't maybe learned the word for it

is I. As soon as that first thought happened it immediately gave rise to a second thought.

“The mind thought well now that I know I exist what if something happens to me?”

The automatic and inevitable consequence of having a self is fear. On the heels of this second thought followed a third equally inevitable and automatic which was wait I don't have anything to be afraid of I'm here all alone.

That caused the fear to subside but it was immediately replaced by a new feeling.

He was not at all happy therefore people to this day are not happy when alone he desired a companion. So the two immediate results inevitable automatic of having a self a sense of I are fear and desire and it was these impulses which caused the divine mind God in our western way of thinking to create the world. This is a central point in later Indian and especially Buddhist mythology according to the Upanishad the desire for a companion was satisfied when he split himself into and

produced a woman who was simultaneously daughter wife and mother. It's a story of Genesis just told as if Adam was not merely an image of the creator but the creator himself. An old Sanskrit the Indo-European language of ancient India.

“The root word ma means to measure. As in the important Indian cosmological term,”

maia which means to measure forth or to measure and mark off the part from the whole. The Sanskrit root ma also means to make to create or to bring forth. And mother becomes even more interesting as she continues to develop. From that root ma we also get matrix which is defined as a situation or surrounding substance within which something else originates develops or is contained. In the typical Bronze Age cosmology the central religious cult revolved

around the goddess as matrix. The goddess was herself the universe. She was time and space. The ma tricks within which we all live and breathe and have our being. The gods were secondary. They existed within the same structural matrix as mankind, just you know much more exalted place in the hierarchy. In ancient Egypt, for example, the great Sengadra, solar disk, passed through the body of the goddess each night to be reborn again each morning.

He said, "If one inquires to know her ultimate origin, the oldest textual remains and images

“can carry us back only so far and permit us to say, thus she appeared in those early times.”

So and so she may have been named and in such and such a manner she seems to have been revered. But with that we have come to the end of what can be said. With that we have come to the primitive

problem of her comprehension and being. She is the primimal bill, the first beginning, the material

matrix out of which all comes forth. Also from ma we get later, which is Latin for mother, as well as matter and material. The generative act of the human mother was seen as a mere shade of the generative act of the earth goddess and the association of the feminine principle with the realm of matter that is of life in the world in time and space,

“you know, the cycle of birth, maturity, death, regeneration, the association of the feminine”

principle with all that, all this is ancient and widespread. I mean across the continents. We shouldn't be surprised. Woman is herself the embodiment of the deep unfathomable mystery of life. You know, woman is the beating core, the actual main event of everything going on around us. The cities that men behold, you know, the art we create, the stories we tell, these are decorative shells that we build around the pulsing heart of life andlessly

beginning life. The 19th century Swiss philologist, JJ Bakhafen, in his study of gyneocracy in the ancient world, wrote, the mother is earlier than the sun. The feminine has priority, while masculine creativity only appears afterward as a secondary phenomenon.

Woman comes first, but man becomes. The prime datum is the earth, the basic maternal substance,

visible creation proceeds from her womb and it is only then that the sexes are divided into, only then does the masculine form come into being. The first earthly manifestation of masculine power takes the form of the sun. From the sun, we infer the father. The existence and nature of the masculine power are only evidenced by the sun. On this, rest the subordination of the masculine principle to that of the mother. The man appears as creature. As a fact, not cause. The reverse is

true of the mother. She comes before the creature, appearing as cause, the prime giver of life, and not as an effect. She is not to be inferred from the creature, but is known in her own right.

In a word, the woman first exists as mother, and the man first exists as sun.

So earlier I mentioned that a mythological motif, calling up the image of Adam and Eve, accepting the serpent's gift, can in fact be found in many Near Eastern cultures besides that of the Hebrews. There are late Sumerian and Akkadian seals, for example,

“that are variously arranged to present that same essential scene, which we described earlier.”

Either a serpent coiled around a tree full of fruit, or a serpent king, or serpent god, in human form, with a serpent crown, or some other identifier to let you know that that's who he is. Handing out a gift, usually a fruit, or a goblet, of the fruit's juicer wine, to a male initiate who is being directed to the serpent's offer by a female attendant. And of course, we're all familiar with the biblical tale of a woman leading a man to eat a piece of fruit at the behest of a serpent.

But there's an important difference, which I'll address shortly. A serpent's are often associated with the moon in world mythologies. There was a Native American tale in which the primordial man forgot to attend a meeting, at which the creator was going to choose which of his creatures would live eternally. The serpent was there. He was present to accept the offer. And so he acquired from the moon,

it's power to shed its skin as the moon sheds its shadow to become new again. On the Sumerian seal pictures, the cup being offered by the serpent king to the initiate

serpent and woman, woman and moon, those associations appear again and again across the world

“over with prehistoric roots that reach back to long before the earliest river civilizations.”

There's a figure of Venus from 20,000 to 20,000 BC, depicting a rotone female holding up a crescent bullhorn which is often in many cultures used to symbolize the moon for obvious reasons and it's got 13 marks on it and she's pointing to her pregnant belly with her other hand. There are 13 lunar cycles in a year and a human female ovulates about 13 times in the same span. A fact which apparently was noticed as far back as the

paleolithic. Cultures that share the serpent, woman, moon motif, make it quite clear what these symbols mean to them. All three are symbols of material regeneration, representing the seething pulsing

“powers of nature, the endless birth and death of generations. Blood sacrifice, temple prostitutes,”

and other rights centered on sex and death predominated in the religious life of all of these societies. All three symbols furthermore are often associated with water. Serpents with their smooth, liquid movements are often found in water. The ancients who noticed the correlation between lunar and menstrual cycles would probably have also observed the relationship between the moon and the tides and that a woman releases water immediately before she begins the sacred ride of

giving birth. So the mother goddess was the supreme being of Bronze Age civilizations. Before they were conquered and wiped out by nomads from the Semitic desert in the Aryan step. The conquerors inhabited the cities and towns of their defeated foes. And their contact with the provincial village was minimal as long as their tax payments were consistently forthcoming. And so as a result, the new rulers were able to impose their own system of religion on the

population centers. But shards of the older system and the older symbols were preserved among the peasants scattered about the countryside. In her prologamina to the study of Greek religion, Jane Ellen Harrison makes the case that the mystery cults of the Mediterranean were the vestiges of the region's pre-Homeric past. She talks about rights that were not performed in the shining opleonian light of day as the Greeks would have preferred. But it twilight or dawn.

And not in a mood of celebration but one of dread for boating.

Offerings were made always by women in a spirit of riddance or pacification

to darken indefinite deities that might be temporarily satisfied maybe but which remained dangerous. Never to be brought under control or made subject to human designs. The beings worshipped Harrison wrote, "We're not rational human law abiding gods, but vague, irrational, mainly malevolent spirit things, ghosts and bogies in the like." Welcome to life in the long house. In one orfic right, offerings of sweet cakes were given to live

serpents and the reaction of the serpents to the offering was studied for signs of whether the coming year was going to bring good or evil. In sacrifices were not offered on sunlight hilltops

as with the Olympian cults of classical Greece, but at first or last light in pits dug into the earth.

“It's important enough to reiterate that the offerings to the serpents were always made by women.”

Just as in the Mesopotamian seals and the Garden of Eden, it's the woman who's in direct contact with the serpent god. Just as Eve's interaction with the serpent began the narrative of biblical history really, so did an eel come to Hina, the moon maiden of Polynesia to make her an offer that would begin their creation story.

slotted in there as a replacement. As I think about it too common, but not universal, but very common

“characteristics of paleolithic and neolithic art come to mind. And the first is that images representing”

women are almost always naked, whether they're statues or paintings or anything like that,

almost always naked while the images of men are always clothed or in a costume adorned with something. And second, the two-dimensional paintings when they represent humans are typically of costume men while the three-dimensional carvings are usually of women. And the meaning of the first point is obvious enough, the images of women with ample breasts and hips usually, and occasionally holding out a breast or pointing to the belly or vulva for viewers who

“required direct instruction, I suppose. They're nude because a woman whose identity is rooted in the”

capacity to generate and nourish new life, a woman has no need of outer investments, you know, of culture, really, to tell her who she is. She carries her own meaning in her body. She requires no

induction ceremonies or rights of passage. Her first menstruation is a more powerful initiation than

any contrived ritual could ever be. Man on the other hand, we rely for our identity on the construction of symbolic social roles. You men are pictured as costumes because men of nothing without a mask to wear. Women needs no language to articulate her purpose or fashion her identity,

“man cannot do without it. Women's destiny is rooted in her being, while man has to fashion his own.”

Oswald Spangler wrote, "Endless becoming is comprehended in the idea of motherhood.

Woman as mother is time and is destiny. All symbols of time and distance are also symbols of maternity.

Care is the root feeling of future and all care is motherly. When the nomadic hunters and herders from the step and desert broke out against the Bronze Age goddess worshiping agricultural civilizations, they brought with them their active masculine warrior gods. These gods were not associated with the ever revolving and ever recurring cycles of life and time. They were not vague representations of natural forces. There were conscious actors, heroes, and seers, and the image of man battling it

out for honor and supremacy. Rather than scratching out all memory of the early myths of the defeated peoples, the conquerors retained them, but they did so in an inverted form to commemorate their victory, I suppose. In the pre-biblical Mesopotamian representations described above, the liaison between the serpent Lord and the woman at the foot of his fruit tree is not portrayed disapprovingly as it is in the Bible. The Bible of the serpent tells Eve that she will

not die if she tries his fruit, but in fact will have her eyes opened and become like God, knowing good and evil. The Bible treats this as an elaborate trick by the serpent to bring down a curse upon all creation. But in the pre-biblical versions, the serpent's words are taken at face value. But as it's not a trick, he really is presenting the fruit as a gift. In the mythology of the conquerors, the goddess and her titanic children were transformed into demons that had been overcome by their

own heroic warrior gods. And so as noted earlier, at the beginning of time, Hebrew Yahweh slaves Leviathan or Rayhab, Babylonian Marduk destroys Tiamat, Greek Zeus kills Typhoon and Indian Indra puts an end to Vritra. In each of these, the Sea Dragon, the feminine Sea Dragon that is destroyed is a vestige of the earlier mythology of a god who destroys her is the hero of

The world was not grown or given birth, it was built, like an artifact, that shithonic goddess

“previously associated reverently with the serpent, was now transformed into a terrifying dragon,”

or a snake-haired gorgon like Medusa. Whereas we see in the biblical version of Eve and her serpent friend into the very source of evil and death in the world. This is our version of the story of civilization. The raw energy of nature is rationally arranged and made to conform to an order hatched by the human mind. The focus of life shifts from nature to culture. Away from the voluptuous nude female to the consciously contrived world of the symbolically

costumeed male. And yet, in the examples of Medusa and the Indian goddess Kali,

as well as many others, those are the two most prominent ones that come to mind,

“the myths of the conquering heroes carry a surprising ambivalence.”

Athena, a warrior goddess born not from the loyons of a woman but from the forehead of her father's Zeus, Athena tells Esquipius how to draw blood from Medusa's corpse and how blood taken from her right side has the power to kill. But blood taken from her left side has the power to heal and even resurrect from the dead. Or again, consider Kali, wife of the god Shiva,

is in India. Shiva's neck is adorned with a serpent. And Kali is his wife. And in images of her

that you'll see universally, she brings death with one set of her arms. But she's offering a gift of some kind with her other set. And surprisingly, even the Bible is a bit ambivalent on the

“question of serpents, which you wouldn't think after how it starts. After the incident with Eve,”

the serpent is cursed by God to go about on its belly, below all the other animals, and to be the eternal enemy of humankind. But just a short time later, we find Moses wielding of all things, a serpent staff, which he uses to carry out his most famous miracles. Once when the Israelites begin grumbling at Moses, for having led them into an endless desert to die, God sends fiery serpents to bite and kill thousands of them.

Appealing to Moses, the people cried out saying, "We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord and against you. Now pray unto the Lord that he might take away the snakes from us." So Moses prayed for the people. The Lord said to Moses, "Fashion a snake and put it up on a pole. And it shall come to pass that everyone who is bitten may look upon it and live." And Moses fashioned the snake of bronze and raised it on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten

by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, they lived. That bronze serpent on its pole was preserved by the Hebrews. And for centuries, was an object of worship to them until it was destroyed in the religious revolution of King Hezekiah, Jerusalem. Hezekiah removed the high places and smashed the idols and cut down the sacred groves and broke into pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made. For unto those days, the children of Israel did burn incense to it. And he called it Nehuston.

Later in the Christian gospel of John, Jesus eludes to his crucifixion when he connects himself to the bronze serpent of Moses. And his Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness. So must the son of man be lifted up. But whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life. The narrative of the Bible, especially if the old and new testaments are taken together, can be read as the gradual development of the idea of the divine

from the tribal war God that we find in the Pentateuch into the more complex, much more expansive even infinite God that comes into view later. In fact, it's worth noting that in the chronological last two books of the Old Testament, Ezra and Nehemiah, God does not speak or appear at all. The books are pure historical narratives.

Just glimpsed in scraps of dialogue from humans who never see him or hear of him anymore.

The book of Job, in fact, is the last time God speaks directly to man in the Hebrew Bible, which means that God's speech to Job was God's final word to man, if you're a Jew, or his final word before making an appearance among us in the flesh, if one is a Christian. The final exchange between Job and God must therefore be considered of most importance. So as we gear up for the home stretch here, I want to restate two thoughts that I have mentioned

a couple times in this series. The first is one I mentioned just a moment ago

“that I think God changes over the course of the Bible, and the second is that the book of Job is”

the pivot on which the rest of the Bible story turns. Taking those two thoughts together,

the book of Job is the critical turning point in the transformation of God in the Bible.

God's speech to Job, as I just said, is the last time God speaks for himself in the Hebrew Bible. It's worth revisiting some of the highlights of the story leading up to God's final message to man. One of the most striking things about the Old Testament is that God, if you read it straight through, God gradually withdraws his presence over the course of the story. The God of Genesis walks in the Garden of Eden. He speaks directly with Adam and Eve.

I mentioned one of my favorite little details earlier, how after the fall when poor Adam and Eve had covered their nakedness with leaves, God made them some clothes before throwing them

“out into the world. It's very intimate, you know, kind of sweet, honestly.”

The creator of the universe probably caused the clothes to appear by snapping his figurative fingers, but I like to picture him taking their measurements and making the cuts and sitting down with his sewing needle. Either way, the God we find in the second book, Exodus, is not a God who would ever condescend to making a human's undergarments. The next four books tell the story of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt to the Promised Land, but rather than eating and chatting with the

people as he had done with Abraham, God appears as a pillar of smoke and fire and manifests his earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. He speaks only with Moses and from this point on, God will communicate with the Israelites only through designated prophets. Even King David, who were told

“the Lord loved like a friend, had to consult the prophet to receive any word from God.”

God never came to him. The messages of the prophets as the story goes on become more and more abstract,

more mysterious and symbolic. And the vast majority of people never hear or see God directly. And finally, as I just said, in the chronological last two books of the story, Ezra and Nehemiah after the Jews have been freed from Babylonian captivity by the Persians and allowed to go back and rebuild the second temple in Jerusalem. In those two books, God's just a whispered rumor. His last direct appearance to a human being in the Hebrew Bible comes in the climax

to the book of Job. After Job calls God to the carpet to account for Job's suffering. And after Job's friends are unable to sway him from his position, God finally shows up. And Job is taken up into a whirlwind and provided with one of the most spectacular visions found in any piece of religious literature ever written. And they only seen, I know, that really compares with it is the Hindu Bhagavad Gita. And Krishna reveals his ultimate form to our Juna.

That Indian text is actually interesting to hold up next to the book of Job. They address similar questions, adjusted for cultural differences between ancient Hebrews and Indians, and they resolve them in a somewhat similar manner. The Bhagavad Gita is the most famous section of a much larger work, the great epic known as the Mahabharata. And it's setting, the Bhagavad Gita's setting is the field of battle just before the climactic confrontation between armies

on two sides of a civil war. The protagonist is Arjuna, a great warrior who is struggling with

he's a warrior, he is a sacred duty to fulfill his obligation to fight. On the other hand,

there are friends and relatives arrayed across the battlefield against him,

“people he respects and loves. What about his obligations to them?”

Arjuna concludes that it must be a greater sin to kill his friends and family than to shirk the duties of his cast, and so he lays down his bow and refuses to participate in the battle. Was chariot driver who unbeknownst to Arjuna is actually the god Krishna in human form. You just thought the blue skin would have given it away, but a Krishna tries to convince Arjuna to fight.

And he tries it using the arguments that would have been common answers to the conundrum in those days.

He provides the answers, Job's friends would have given Arjuna. Some scholars have suggested that the Bhagavad Gita was added to the Mahabharata in order to provide a theological response to challenges raised by the spread of Buddhism. If that's true, this runs parallel to the suggestion of some Bible scholars that Job's friends were making the standard Pat arguments commonly provided for God's apparent abandonment of the Jews

during the Babylonian exile. Krishna's arguments fail on Arjuna, just as the justifications of Job's

friends failed to persuade Job, and after the debates run their course and Arjuna remains unconvinced,

Krishna reveals his true form and gives Arjuna an unforgettable divine vision. In the vision, Arjuna sees both armies rushing into Krishna's gaping mouths and being crushed

“like grapes, rivers of their blood running down Krishna's chin. He's shown that human life is a flash”

in the pan, and that he need not be worried about killing his enemy because everyone on both sides has already been dead a thousand times, and they will die a thousand times more killed not by Arjuna but by the God who devours all without discrimination, whole universes blink in and out of existence in the time it takes Krishna to take a breath. In the end, Arjuna sees that the divine reality whose laws he was attempting to judge is far beyond his comprehension and that the duty of man

is to follow his Dharma by fulfilling the obligations of the cast into which he was born. Like Arjuna, Job is given a glimpse of ultimate reality. Blood crazed war horses,

“snorting and stomping is a lust for battle, lions tearing apart gazelles, ravens,”

desperately searching for food as their young starve in the nest. A passage from a piece in a recent passage prize book captures it, it's a little overwrought, maybe it's very overwrought, but I'm given the author of the benefit of the doubt in assuming that he intended it that way. "All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butchers yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre

to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible, preservable trade, and then still further of the unavailable horrors that fitness or sheer survival itself predominantly entailed. We are a miniscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters,

fist from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants by a pitilist killing machine of infinite appetite. This is still perhaps to put an irresponsibly positive spin on the story, but it should suffice for our purposes here." In quote, "Man is condemned, we are all condemned to live out our days in a slaughterhouse, killing and consuming, simply to survive until our own biomass is consumed and repurposed by nature." This was the way of the world for billions of years, before humans

ever opened our eyes and realized what was happening. We love, we seek meaning, and not only do we

and yet we know we will watch, everyone we love die, or they will watch us die.

“Every meaningful moment of our lives will be forgotten. And even the larger collective projects”

through which we try to steal a small piece of immortality, they will all eventually pass away. Some of us have faith that the end of this world is not the end of everything,

but very few of us are blessed with a vision like Job or Arjuna, so our faith always stopped

short of certainty. And even those who've managed to talk themselves in the certainty would probably do well not to dwell on it too much. But could the universe have been constructed in a manner that would have spared us all this? Is that even possible? Job spends much of his airtime insisting that hell yes, it's possible. It could and should have been made that way.

“This is a heuristic claim, and God lets Job know it in no uncertain terms.”

God's speech to Job has been interpreted as a bullying display of raw power meant to intimidate

Job in the silence. But I don't read it that way. And after all, God Himself chastizes Job's friends

for trying to justify his actions by invoking terms like justice and virtue. He says that they have spoken falsely of him, while his servant Job was the one who had spoken truthfully. And when you go back through chapter after chapter of Job's lament, some of which we read earlier, it's quite an admission to say that Job was the one who was speaking truthfully about the nature of God. See, a universe without change is one which does not grow or evolve. It's just dead matter.

“But to us creatures caught in the wheel of time, change is usually experienced as suffering.”

And God can accomplish miracles, but his power is limited by logical contradictions. You can't create a universe that grows and evolves, but does not change. You're not because he's too weak, but it's just a contradiction in terms. An inventor can build a robot to serve him, but not to love him. To be loved, he must have a child. But children are risky, much riskier than a robot.

Children die of leukemia. They stick their fingers in electrical sockets. They can be obnoxious and disappointing, and despite your best efforts, they often grow up to be very different than you would have made them, had you been designing a robot. And even if everything goes according to plan, even if everything goes perfectly, your children will watch you die. And then they may go before God to say it isn't fair and shake their fists at the sky and demand

to know why he would make a world where such suffering was not only possible, but mandatory. And what could he say? Except that it's not personal. And if I could spare you all this, I would. But, and you'll just have to take my word for this for now, because you won't understand it. It has to be this way. This is very far from the moral platitudes offered by Job's friends. The fact that Job merited a response at all speaks to the nobility of his stand.

All the usual arguments for why bad things happened to good people were tried against him and none of them worked. If Job had accepted those justifications and repented of his or his family's

alleged sins, God might never have taken notice of him. He would have been just another guy who'd

suffered tragedy, his cry stifled by worldly rationalizations before ever making it to God's ear. Just by showing up to answer the charges against him, God is admitting that Job had a valid claim, a valid point. In my reading of the Bible, the book of Job represents the turning point in God's relationship with man because Job's firm stand forced God to recognize, just put it was, his human creations were going through. God had never watched a parent or a child die.

or thirst, or desire, or fear. When Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt,

“the people soon found themselves hounded by enemies and on the brink of starvation,”

and as we discussed earlier in their distress, some of them spoke out of fear.

Questioning whether they'd made the right decision, and God who had never known fear,

never known the terror of seeing one's children shriveled from hunger. He slaughtered them for it. He had no idea what they were going through, because he never experienced anything like it, and he slaughtered them for it.

Job forced God for the first time to reckon with what his creatures were going through,

with how the world looked and felt from the inside. Yet the fact remained that the universe could have been created no other way.

“So what could God do to reconcile himself to mankind?”

Well, I'm a Christian, so you know my answer. He couldn't spare us the suffering without reducing us to machines, but he could come down to experience it with us. He was humiliated, tortured, and publicly executed, knowing in the depth of his being, what Job and the rest of mankind had felt when they cried out, "Father, father, where are you? Why have you forsaken me?"

“The traditional and salmian view of the crucifixion sees Jesus as a blood sacrifice that reconciled”

man to God. It is basically similar to the sacrifices of goats and rams, except one with the power to render all future sacrifices unnecessary. I won't argue with orthodoxy, but I will admit

that that view's never sat well with me. The crucifixion, in my view, reconciles God to man,

and allows him to say truthfully, I understand how you feel. I finally understand, and I'm sorry it has to be this way, but I promise you everything is going to be okay. [Music] [Music] [Music]

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