The Old Testament: Judges I – While the Cat’s Away, The Mice Will Play and Writing First Appears.

Posted on April 4, 2013 by virgowriter

Like most high school kids, I may have had a friend or two whose parents were incredibly trusting and, when they went out of town and left said friend to manage himself, would casually mention that there was a key to the liquor cabinet.  They trusted that there was no need to hide it. Silly parents.

You’d think that our first hangover would have taught us a lesson.  Or the seventh? I stopped counting. It didn’t occur to me to think that I (along with my friends) was betraying the trust of our good parents.  After all, we knew our limits and could decide for ourselves how to enjoy our weekends, especially when parents happened to be away. I was responsible. I always made it to work (even if I felt like crap and was in an awful mood, which made work painful). This was my responsibility gauge: I never called in sick.

If I had kept a journal I could have recorded my mistakes. I could have recorded all the details of my weekends—the good and the bad—to remind me of what happened so that I could learn a lesson.  Instead, I relied on memory and like most teenagers, I recalled the fun vividly and ignored the penalty.

The Book of Judges is filled with people who thought like I did, which is why much is made of the fact that, during this stretch, the Israelites lacked their own king.  Left to their own governance, they lived as they pleased.  Shockingly, this turned out badly.  Since their actions routinely garnered God’s wrath, they found themselves under the thumb of harsh outside rulers.

When they couldn’t take their situation under these rulers any longer, they prayed for God’s help, promising obedience, etc. (much like people who pray for a hangover to vanish with the promise that they will never drink again). Give it to God, though; for the most part, he gives them ANOTHER chance (and another, and another, and another…) by eradicating the people who control them.  Maybe they had no worthwhile way of recording their history so they could brush up every once in a while.

You’d think he’d just wipe THEM out and be done with it.

This is why I felt a bit bad when their oppressors were slaughtered—and this happens to several people.  Seems like the Israelites—to some degree, at least by God’s standards—deserved their harsh treatment.  Yes, no one deserves to be enslaved or treated as harshly as they were. However—and perhaps this is the point—this seemed like the only way they learned a lesson, for the moment they got comfortable, they forgot their morals and which God they served.

To some extent, this makes for a boring read—you know what’s going to happen, like watching a cheesy horror movie.  That’s why the most interesting point in Judges (in the beginning of this Book) is the first mention of writing.

Returning from a battle, one of God’s chosen judges of Israel, Gideon encounters a stranger from Succoth, from whom he asks for a list of the 77 officials of his town.  The stranger writes this information down (8:14).  Gideon uses this information to then hunt down and punish these men.  If you’re one of those men, the punishment is the integral detail.  For me, it’s the stranger’s action.  It signifies something massive: apparently people could write.

The power of the written word cannot be over stated.  As I’ve read the Bible, I’ve wondered: since most of it is based on stories passed down orally, how much has been shaped?  I assumed this was unavoidable, for people didn’t know how to write.  This book proves me wrong.

I do wish that someone would have embraced this skill and put to tablet or scroll, etc., everything they’d been through so that people would remember lessons with a bit more clarity.  Moses did it, right? But he was in a position of power.  So if average people could have also done this, then perhaps they would have had a better shot of avoiding the same mistakes repeatedly.

It’s easy to forget things when stories are told.  But if you have a text, you can review these any time you wish.  If you only rely on experience, you end up in a situation I found myself when I was growing up and had the opportunity to drink: the last time couldn’t have been as bad as I’d remembered, could it?

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The Old Testament: Joshua II– Complete, Rounded Characters

Posted on April 2, 2013 by virgowriter

When I was an undergrad writing major, I spent a lot of time in workshops discussing how the use of flat, underdeveloped characters work against a story.  Often times, writers (perhaps unintentionally) incorporate these flat characters because they are easier to foist an idea onto.  If you wanted to write a story about how underfunding education in this country is a problem, you might use a stereotypical teacher who has his or her hands tied in the classroom due to scant resources.  Those pesky complex nuisances people possess make it more difficult to make a clear, easily-understood point. But easier doesn’t equal better, as a reader of a story populated with only flat characters can tell you.

In fiction though, a story (as Robert Olen Butler discusses in his book From Where You Dream), should be more about the character and less about an idea.  Writers decide for themselves how they feel about this point.  In general, though, you know when you’re being force fed an idea rather than experiencing a character.  Readers, in general, don’t like to be preached to. Well, okay, some do.

One of the issues I anticipated about reading the Bible for the first time would be dealing with a bunch of flat characters upon whom a series of life lessons are foisted.

Thankfully, like other sections of the Old Testament, Joshua contains a healthy amount of interesting, complex characters who act like people and not merely flat characters who exist to illustrate a tidy point. They’re not developed to the level you would find in a novel but they feel like real people nonetheless.

Take Joshua. Although he didn’t ask to be the one to fill Moses’ shoes, he gets right to work planning the conquest of neighboring lands. And he executes his plans with a deft hand (all of chapter 12 lists his victories).  He has his doubts, sure, but he knuckles down and leads his people.

He also is humanized well. When the Gibeonites fear they’re on Israel’s radar, they devise a plan to be spared (9:6).  Through a trick, they get Joshua to forge a treaty with them.  Even when he learns he’s been duped, he honors this treaty (9:26-27).  They get stuck being slaves, basically.  (Though this is better than death, right?) Even though much of the Old Testament thus far suggests that these tricksters would have been struck down once discovered, they’re handled here by a man (Joshua) who feels bound by his word, something a real, complex person would experience. A flat character would have merely punished them and reneged on the deal in the face of the trick.

Joshua is also bold enough to command the lord, ordering God to halt the sun and the moon (which he apparently does) (10:13). So we see another complex layer to him: stupidity mixed with brazenness.  He’s also a bit of a braggart.  In his dying speech to the Israelites (wherein he reminds them to keep God’s rules—which, silly Joshua, they will probably not), he makes mention of all the nations he’s conquered (23:4).  (Though, he doesn’t give any credit to the soldiers, who had a lot to do with this too.  Oh, God too, don’t forget, right?)

So clearly Joshua is a mixed of positive and less-than-positive traits.

But what’s also nice is that, for a change, a woman is shown in an active role.  While on a scouting trip to Jericho (a town the Israelites will demolish), two spies fall under the protection of one of the town prostitutes, Rahab.  (Given how many prostitutes have inhabited these stories, it makes sense why people refer to this as the oldest profession.)

It’s a bit unclear how she knows of the lord’s promise to Israel (the land is theirs); however, she does what she feels is right and devises a plan by which they can hide out and then escape Jericho… or maybe she’s just smart enough to know what’s about to happen and sees an opportunity. She makes them a deal: I’ll protect you if you spare me and my family.  Bold choice.  By putting the life of her family and her own in jeopardy, she exhibits the fortitude the bible has thus far reserved for me. Even better: she pulls this off.

Seeing the stories inhabited with characters like this remind the reader that these were people at the heart of these tales, not merely concepts upon which to hang ideas and moral lessons.

The Book of Judges is next.  I wonder if Judge Judy built her personality of this book.

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The Old Testament: Joshua I – The Holy Wars.

Posted on March 31, 2013 by virgowriter

When I worked at a restaurant in San Diego (while I was in college), I worked with a girl who, liked most of us, was really busy.  She worked full time, was in school and ha d a social life.  She tended to burn the candles at both ends; though unlike most of us, this had nothing to do with partying. She would get sick at least three times a year.

Like a good American she went to the doctor and scored a prescription. She was really bad at following one of the most important directions: take ALL the pills.  She was quite thankful that the pills worked for the first few days, but then when she was more herself, working at full speed, she forgot about them, leaving (I’m told) half full prescription bottles in her medicine cabinet.  She tended to relapse.

We Americans tend to take our foot off the gas when we feel better, rather than see something through as directed—after all, she isn’t (or wasn’t) the only person to have this attitude towards convalescence—which is why news reports keep reporting an uptick in super bugs.

This was one of the things I thought of while I read about the holy wars chronicled in Joshua: God mandates that NOTHING BREATHING be left from the towns/civilizations he orders the Israelites to wipe out (there are two exceptions made—more on that in a minute).  Turns out God understood how infectious rebellion and animosity could be—his antidote: wipe it out completely.

One of the issues I’ve had with all this wholesale slaughter of people is that Joshua (this book, not the character) provides scant details about the severity of what these people did to deserve this harsh punishment.  I’ve heard from a few people that a number of details are not in the Bible because back then, when these stories were passed around, certain things were common knowledge, making preserving certain elements of a story unnecessary.

Why thousands of people deserved to be slaughtered seems necessary.

Their major crime seems to have been that they worshipped another god (or in some cases multiple gods).  Their secondary issue was where they lived: God decided to give the land on which their homes stood to the Israelites. That seems fair, right?

I can appreciate why an enemy should be eradicated, especially if this enemy threatened your existence.  Since Israel seemed to inspire deep hatred, their enemies were very real. But, unlike disease, people can be reasoned with.  Okay, some can’t—some people like to go to war and tear other cultures down.  But most can, right?

Seems like a harsh lesson: the best way to handle the people with whom you disagree is complete annihilation. I would hope that people who engage with this section of the Bible at least consider that what appears to be an enemy might just be someone sticking up for themselves and not some virus just looking to attack you because it can.

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