Old Testament Notes
We are studying the Old Testament this year. Here I’ll write my notes on things that I found surprising and/or inspiring. This is an open-ended post so I’ll revisit it and add to it as things occur to me. Latest Blocks on top, but numbered chronologically.
The War against the Giants. You can read the beginning of the Old Testament as containing a long war against the Giants. Starting in Genesis 6, the giants are the hybrid offspring of “the watchers” (fallen angels of some kind). And the next thing that happens is violence fills the earth and all flesh is corrupted, so God sends the flood. Reading between the lines, they worshipped the giants, the ultimate badasses, meat-tanks. Moses 8 is interesting as it goes further to say that Noah’s granddaughters can’t be saved because they married the wrong guys for money (Or they were prostitutes, not sure). Their offspring was inherently cursed.
Then the exterminatus against the Canaanites, that even woman and children should be dedicated to destruction. I think at first miscegenation is the problem, but clearly not as Moses marries an Ethiopian and Aaron and Miriam are chastised for attempting to remove him from leadership for it. And the law of Moses contains processes for naturalizing foreigners, even concubines taken in war. There is even a process for Canaanites to live - surrender without a fight and accept dhimmi status. The Canaanites had giants - “we were as grasshoppers in their sight”. Consider also King Og, whose bed was 15 ft long. Perhaps the surrender meant that that city didn’t have giants or giant blood and so didn’t have an arm of flesh in which to trust?
The reason given for the exterminatus is to prevent idol worship spreading, but is it reasonable to assume children are going to impose a culture on their conquerors? Or after David completed the conquest (more or less), idolatry did infect Israel (see Solomon and princess of Egypt and princess of Tyre, and Ahab+Jezebel), God combats it by dealing with Israel directly, and not eliminating the nations.
Final postscript of the war: David v. Goliath
Some raw speculation: Maybe Christ needed to be born of a pure woman untainted with Angelic chimerism, and this was the reason for the flood and the exterminatus. Adulterous and Idolatrous ancestors were ok, though, and maybe even to the point, as it is abundantly documented. Violence filling the earth seems to be the certain outcome of the tower of babel episode, so as the story stands it is a bit of a headscratcher.
One final speculation: Christ’s ministry symbolically recapitulates the conquest, starting with Baptism in the river Jorad. Maybe casting out unclean spirits was his driving out the Giants, if the reason they were unclean, was they were mixed - the spirits of Angel/Human Giants, and there was no place for them in the underworld (spirit prison) where all the other dead went. New Testament talks a lot about Christ putting the spiritual powers in order beneath his feet, and Peter does talk about those who were killed in the flood. I will keep this theory in mind when I go through the New Testament and see if it holds up.
Genetics of the Patriarchs.
Abram marries Sarai his half-sister. 25% genetically identical.
Isaac marries his cousin once removed 9.37%, as he is related through both parents.
Jacob marries his cousins 12.5% + 9.37*.5*.5=14.84% genetically identical)
Inbreeding depression causes fertility problems (They did seem to have a problem with this), reduced height and IQ (not seeing that, but no strong statement to contrary either, Isaac seems negligible.) First cousins (12.5% genetically identical) is enough for these effects to be noticeable in modern time. As the inbreeding depression is caused by accumulating mutations (genetic load), I suspect it is likely that our first parents had no detrimental mutations, and the average genetic load of Abraham’s time was significantly less than it is now.
Note: inbreeding depression disappears completely with the first outcross, and it does help clean up genetic load a little. (That is too many bad mutations cause the fetus to abort, see fertility problems, so only ones that by the genetic lottery get less mutations, are brought to term and are reasonably healthy.)
I also want to note that breeders will line breed like this in order to concentrate genes for patricular traits they are interested in. I don’t know if that is going on here, and I wonder what traits God would select for in the people that were particularly his? Docility and obedience don’t seem to be it. Perhaps an ability to recall perfectly word for word what was told them - since they were given the job of writing the bible? (and BOM)
That there was over a hundred years between Isaiah and the captivity. I had the impression that following Isaiahs's warnings, captivity followed. I suppose it did for the ten tribes. Did Hezekiah actions grant Judea a stay?
Ezra the scribe. He is supposed to be the compiler of the Old Testament (minus two or three books that were later added on, or more in some traditions.) He is said to be the author of Chronicles as well as some of the smaller books. If so, he is very much a Mormon figure who put whole books into the Book of Mormon, sometimes lifting speeches directly from somebody’s records and putting it into his general narrative of events. Mormon also had someone come along and add a few more things to his record, although that was planned in his case. I suppose Book of Ezra doesn’t really have the same ring to it as Old Testament. And Mormon seems to be a lesser prophet than many that he cites, aside from the job he was given to compile and edit the whole. For example, Moroni writes that he has seen our day, and I wonder if Mormon did. He makes a lot of appeals to history arguments, a history that we simply don’t have except for him. Did he just assume that we would be to the Nephites what they were to the Jaredites?
Still, as for Ezra, it’s crazy that I somehow never heard or understood his role in the Old Testament. I had heard the Septuagint and vulgate; but these were all much later.
Jacob and the rods. This looks a lot like magic to me, of the sympathetic variety. I suppose magic hadn’t been forbidden yet? I remember my seminary teacher telling me that the rods were fences to keep the males and females apart except the pairings Jacob wanted - If so why does the kind of rod used change as Laban moves the goalpost and gives Jacob livestock of a different type of marking? Interestingly I recently read how stripes / spot patterns emergence from resonances and presumably if you could alter the base frequency slightly you could control the pattern that develops. How rods would do that is beyond me - like I say, magic.
Rachel and the mandrake. Rachel gives Leah Jacob for the night in exchange for mandrake (which she wanted to treat her infertility?). I’m assuming Rachel couldn’t wander far from the camp because it wasn’t safe (See Dinah in a few chapters), and she didn’t have any sons to get stuff for her. This whole episode also strongly suggests to me that Jacob wasn’t sleeping with Leah, presumably at Rachel’s insistence. If so this feels like a very pointed reproach of Jacob on Leah’s part.
After Rachel dies in childbirth with Benjamin, Reuben sleeps with Bilhah her maidservant. It doesn’t explain why, so I’m going to list possibilities that occur to me:
Reuben wanted to take over and this was a show of virility and one upmanship - like one of Davids son flagrantly violating one of his concubines.
Him taking Bilhah, the de facto matriarch of that side of the family, was a demonstration that they were of inferior status, and Leah’s side was in charge.
Bilhah was young, Jacob was ignoring her, and she wanted some attention from a guy with similar rank.
In the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die - If a day in heaven is a thousand years, than nobody lived a thousand years after coming to a knowledge of good and evil.
This is not new, but an old insight - that innocence is not the desired endstate. We need to come to know good and evil and pick one. I.E. we need to grow up, and lose our innocence. But everything in it’s proper time and order.
Noahide laws. That murderers should be put to death. Clearly the law before was that they should be exiled/outlawed as per Cain and Lamech. I suppose that really didn’t work out well pre-flood as the exiles would found their own nations and cause lots of problems down the road.
The Tower of Babel. I was always told they built the tower to reach heaven, which was stupid.
Genesis clearly says they built it to create a name for themselves and not be scattered which I take to mean to bind everyone together into one polity. This is a cargo cult copy of the temple and it’s ordinances (though workeable via other means, else God wouldn’t have confounded it). Sealing (binding) is to prevent separation, and a new name. I wonder that they were worried about the separation of the earth? I suppose they had the pre-Flood history and wanted to prevent what had happened before from happening again but without having to humble themselves before God.
The Law of Moses before Moses. The prohibition against eating blood came in with the covenant with Noah, and circumcision came in with the covenant with Abraham. I’m assuming these have been wrapped into the New Covenant or the New and Everlasting covenant and we are not under obligation to keep them anymore, although there will probably be a period where they are practiced again in order to complete the restoration of all things and finish the dispensation of the restoration. Though that seems pretty minor compared to restoring the earth and the heavens to what they were before - ht: Leiland Tanner.
Lot’s wife and the pillar of salt. I was always told that she was punished for looking back, i.e. wanting to go back to Sodom because she loved her wicked life there so much. Someone turning into salt was weird, and I don’t think there is anything like that elsewhere in scripture.
What genesis says is they were commanded not to look at the destruction else they would be consumed (i.e. burnt up). To me this is clearly touching on a very common Old Testament theme that when dealing with the Holiness and presence of God you need to do what you’ve been told exactly or it will destroy you. (See Ark of the covenant stuff for example). I’ve heard it likened to operating instructions for a nuclear reactor which has invisible and deadly forces within it. You can’t see the radiation, but you need to take it very very seriously.
Genesis also makes it clear the Lot pined for the wicked Caanan-city life because he asked for and was granted permission to live in another city, Zoar. He ultimately freaked out that it was going to be destroyed too, and only then went to the mountains. There are plenty of scriptural examples of punishment for longing for the old sinful way of life - Exodus pining for the fleshpots of Egypt. No man putting the hand to the plow and looking back is fit for the kingdom. &c.
As for the salt - in the Old Testament this is symbolic of purity and of that which is lasting - because salt isn’t burnt up, it survives the consuming fire, unlike other organic things. So I would take the story of Lot’s wife to mean that she looked into the face of God when she wasn’t ready, and was inevitably burnt up, all except the eternal parts of her which could survive the fire, symbolized by salt. Perhaps IRL there was a little pile of her salt where she had been, cartoon style, to represent the symbol.
On the other hand, maybe I’m way off here.
Salt representing purity and the eternal are also used in the New Testament - Matthew 5:13, Mark 9:47-49
While on the subject of Sodom and Gomorrah: I’ve had the impression that Job was a write-down of a true story that had been handed down and adapted a long time. The original events feel like they came from Abraham’s era, but not in the same region. I wonder if the destruction that he experienced: fire, war, winds, and disease were second order effects of the destruction of the cities of the plains? Was the means used to cause this mass destruction having effects all over the earth? If so, it provides another answer to why God allows bad things to happen to the righteous outside the text. There is collateral damage to pouring out wrath upon the earth and cleaning up rotten societies. See Matthew 5:45 and Genesis 18:20-32. Lot and family obviously suffered because of the wicked being punished.