From “Faith, Snow & Government” by Skip Oliva:

It’s often said that libertarians have “faith” in free markets. I don’t think that’s the case. What we have is an understanding of the division of labor and the law of comparative advantage. Some people mistakenly confuse that with religious fanaticism. …

Government, in contrast, is an attempt to violate the natural laws of economics. The division of labor is irrelevant, claim the faithful, because we have elections to install leaders who will provide all manner of services, regardless of the leaders’ actual knowledge of experience. If we just elect the “right” people and have faith in them, the political system will outperform individual action and voluntary exchange.

In reply to my post “taking the Book of Job seriously,” author Robert Sutherland left this comment:

You might be interested in this online commentary “Putting God on Trial: The Biblical Book of Job” (http://www.bookofjob.org) as supplementary or background material for the Book of Job. It is not a sin to question God, to demand answers from God. There is a time and a place for such things. It is written by a Canadian criminal defense lawyer, now a Crown prosecutor, and it explores the legal and moral dynamics of the Book of Job with particular emphasis on the distinction between causal responsibility and moral blameworthiness embedded in Job’s Oath of Innocence. It is highly praised by Job scholars (Clines, Janzen, Habel) and the Review of Biblical Literature, all of whose reviews are on the website. It is also taught in 262 US high schools in 40 states through Chapter 17 in The Bible and Its Influence. The author is an evangelical Christian, denominationally Anglican. He is also the Canadian Director for the Mortimer J. Adler Centre for the Study of the Great Ideas, a Chicago-based think tank.

…and it’s not even romantic:

And Ruth said, Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the LORD do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me. (Ruth 1:16–17)

That’s probably my favorite passage in the Bible, the widowed Ruth refusing to abandon her widowed mother-in-law.

The same book also contains what might be the sexiest scene in the Bible (outside the Song of Songs):

And when Boaz had eaten and drunk, and his heart was merry, he went to lie down at the end of the heap of corn: and she came softly, and uncovered his feet, and laid her down.

And it came to pass at midnight, that the man was afraid, and turned himself: and, behold, a woman lay at his feet. And he said, Who art thou? And she answered, I am Ruth thine handmaid: spread therefore thy skirt over thine handmaid… (Ruth 3:7–9)

From Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible), Lecture 20, November 15, 2006, “Responses to Suffering and Evil…” (available in MP3):

Professor Christine Hayes:

… I think the most important thing about the Book of Proverbs is its almost smug certainty that the righteous and the wicked of the world receive what they deserve in this life. There’s a complacency here, an optimism. God’s just providence and a moral world order, are presuppositions that it just doesn’t seem to question. The wise person’s deeds are good and will bring him happiness and success. The foolish person’s deeds are evil and they are going to lead to failure and ruin. The key idea is that a truly wise person knows that the world is essentially coherent. It’s ethically ordered. There are clear laws of reward and punishment that exist in the world.

Proverbs 26:27: “He who digs a pit will fall into it / and a stone will come back upon him who starts it rolling” [RSV translation]. Or 13:6: “Righteousness protects him whose way is blameless; Wickedness subverts the sinner.” If the righteous suffer then they are being chastised or chastened by God just as a son is disciplined by his father. He shouldn’t reject this reproof, he should welcome it.

This insistence, on the basic justice of the world, and the power of wisdom or fear of the Lord to guarantee success and security was one strand of ancient Israelite thought. It reaches crystallization in the Book of Proverbs. It was available as a response to or an explanation of the catastrophes that had befallen the nation. We’ve seen it at work in the Deuteronomistic school, unwilling to relinquish the idea of a moral God in control of history and preferring to infer the nation’s sinfulness from its suffering and calamity. Better to blame the sufferer Israel and so keep God and the system of divine retributive justice intact.

But it’s precisely this formulaic and conventional piety that is challenged by two other remarkable Wisdom books in the Bible: the Book of Job and the Book of Ecclesiastes. In Job we find the idea that suffering is not always punitive. It is not always a sign of wickedness. It’s not always explicable. And this is the first of several subversions of fundamental biblical principles that we encounter in the Book of Job.

The Book of Job — we really don’t know its date. It’s probably no earlier then the sixth century BCE, but scholars disagree and there are portions of it that seem to reflect a very old and very ancient tradition. It’s one of the hardest books of the Bible for moderns to read, and I think that’s because its conclusions — to the degree that we can agree on what the conclusions might be — its conclusions seem to fly in the face of some basic religious convictions.

You have to allow yourself, I think, to be surprised, to open your mind, to allow yourself to take Job’s charges against God seriously. After all, the narrator makes it clear that God does take them seriously. God nowhere denies Job’s charges and, in fact, at one point the narrator has God say that Job has spoken truly. So no matter how uncomfortable Job may make you feel, you need to understand his claims and not condemn him.

[Read more.]

I’m very much enjoying “auditing” this course:

This is the third Hebrew Bible course I’ve listened to. (The first two were from Modern Scholar and the Teaching Company, respectively.) This is the first one to teach me more than Asimov’s Guide to the Bible did.

I’m very unhappy to learn that all three of these books are out of print.

I’ve posted many times about Asimov’s Guide to the Bible.

I’m now very much enjoying Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare.

I’ve just ordered a used copy of Asimov’s Guide to Science.

It’s starting to seem to me as if I could build much of a classical homeschooling curriculum out of these three books.

I regularly want to give them as gifts.

How can they be out of print?

“Hannah gave birth to a son whom she named Samuel, saying,
‘Because I asked Yahweh for him.’”

The canceled TV show Kings (which I discovered this week on Hulu.com) has me revisiting the books of Samuel, especially because, while most names map directly (e.g., the shepherd David to David Shepherd, Jonathan of the tribe of Benjamin to Jack Benjamin, Michal to Michelle, the prophet Samuel to Reverend Samuels), King Saul’s TV equivalent is named Silas.

Well, apparently Silas is a Greek form of Saul by way of Aramaic. Clever TV writers.

But Hannah’s explanation of the name Samuel — “Because I asked Yahweh for him” — confused me. So here’s the fascinating tidbit I learn from Wikipedia:

According to 1 Samuel 1:20, Hannah was the mother of Samuel and named him in memory of her requesting a child from God and God listening. Samuel is translated as Heard of God or possibly as a sentence “God has heard” (from ‘Shama’, heard and ‘El’, God — with “Shama” as the verb and “El” as the subject).

However, some textual scholars think that the passage originally referred to King Saul, whose name means “asked” and was later changed by an anti-monarchial editor, so that Saul would no longer appear to have a divinely appointed birth.

Two weeks ago, I “tweeted” the following:

Was Jesus a hologram? Or was he a human possessed by a noncorporeal extraterrestrial called Christ? This was the division within Docetism.

I have to say, studying the ancient heresies is the perfect geek hobby. Better than Star Trek. Similar, in some ways, as my Docetism tweet should illustrate. (By the way, the two varieties of Docetism are called phantasmal and separationist respectively.)

And as with any new obsession, once you start to learn the ins and outs, you start seeing it everywhere. Recently, I’ve been seeing signs of the heresies in Doonesbury:

(click to enlarge)

This distinction between God and His son smacks of Arianism. I suspect a lot of present-day Christians are Arian heretics without realizing it.

There’s also this past Sunday’s strip:

(excerpt from this full strip )

All my life, I’ve heard this observed distinction between the Old Testament God of wrath and the New Testament God of love. Without building an explicit theology from it, many modern Christians — especially religious liberals, I suspect — see the old Jewish God and the new Christian God as different gods. This isn’t a new phenomenon. In the 2nd century, Marcion of Sinope, led a very large and influential rival movement to proto-orthodox Christianity. Marcion

argued for the existence of two Gods: Yahweh, who created the material universe, and the Heavenly Father of the New Testament, of which Jesus Christ was the living incarnation. Yahweh was viewed as a lesser demiurge, who had created the earth, and whose law, the Mosaic covenant, represented bare natural justice: i.e., an eye for an eye. Jesus was the living incarnation of a different God, a new God of compassion and love, sometimes called the Heavenly Father. The two Gods were thought of as having distinct personalities: Yahweh is petty, cruel and jealous, a tribal God who is only interested in the welfare of the Jews, while the Heavenly Father is a universal God who loves all of humanity, and looks upon His children with mercy and benevolence. This dual-God notion allowed Marcion to reconcile the apparent contradictions between the Old Testament and the tales of Jesus’ life and ministry. [Wikipedia]

I mention this “lesser demiurge” of the Marcionites in this earlier blog post of Calvin & Hobbes:

When I was kid in an Episcopal choir school, attending services 2 or 3 times a week, I think I was guilty of both Arianism and Marcionite dualism. I was also guilty of the heresy of Patripassionism, the belief that God the Father was incarnate and suffered on the cross. I guess I’ve never grokked the Trinity.

One of the reasons I’m reading, studying, listening to the Bible is to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of my own civilization, culture, history. I love reading or hearing a passage that makes me think, So THAT’s where that comes from. The starkest example so far is John 15:15, where Jesus tells his disciples

Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you.

I heard that while driving to Philadelphia on Thursday night, and I thought So THAT’s why the Quakers call themselves “Friends”!

But while I felt confident that my guess was right, I wanted to confirm it. I figured I’d get online at the hotel that night and look up the chapter and verse on Google, combined with the word “Quaker” and see who said what. A little later in the drive, I reported this hypothesis and plan to my wife, who said she was at a computer and could look it up for me. I walked her through the steps I had planned — first find chapter and verse at newkreation.com, then Google the rest — and sure enough:

They thought of themselves as friends of Jesus and referred to themselves as “Friends of Truth” (from John 15:15). Later, they became known simply as “Friends”.

I learned a new word today from the Gospel of Luke.

(It’s in Matthew 11:18–19, too, but I somehow missed it.)

Luke 7:

33. For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine; and ye say, He hath a devil.
34. The Son of man is come eating and drinking; and ye say, Behold a gluttonous man, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners!

Does that remind anyone else of Professor Long’s guide to arguing with libertarians?

From Luke 14:

28. For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it?
29. Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it, all that behold it begin to mock him,
30. Saying, This man began to build, and was not able to finish.

(ABCT == “Austrian Business-Cycle Theory”)

I continue to find wonderful (and much less stuffy than you might expect) Bible resources online, e.g.,

www.TheBrickTestament.com

I love the first 12 lines of Mark 12. In it, we have (it seems to me) Jesus summarizing the Gospel of Mark itself:

1. And he began to speak unto them by parables. A certain man planted a vineyard, and set an hedge about it, and digged a place for the winefat, and built a tower, and let it out to husbandmen, and went into a far country.
2. And at the season he sent to the husbandmen a servant, that he might receive from the husbandmen of the fruit of the vineyard.
3. And they caught him, and beat him, and sent him away empty.
4. And again he sent unto them another servant; and at him they cast stones, and wounded him in the head, and sent him away shamefully handled.
5. And again he sent another; and him they killed, and many others; beating some, and killing some.
6. Having yet therefore one son, his wellbeloved, he sent him also last unto them, saying, They will reverence my son.
7. But those husbandmen said among themselves, This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and the inheritance shall be ours.
8. And they took him, and killed him, and cast him out of the vineyard.
9. What shall therefore the lord of the vineyard do? he will come and destroy the husbandmen, and will give the vineyard unto others.
10. And have ye not read this scripture; The stone which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner:
11. This was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes?
12. And they sought to lay hold on him, but feared the people: for they knew that he had spoken the parable against them: and they left him, and went their way.