Sheep and Goats

Category: Genesis

  • Not Giving Up. Not Hardening One’s Heart

    Three times Joseph would have been within his rights to give up. Three times he suffered reversal so serious as to think life had betrayed him. And maybe, since God was in charge of life, that He had betrayed him, too. At each instance, the circuit overseer paused to ask how Joseph would have felt at that moment, what prospects would he have just then assigned to his future. How could he not have become despondent then, and he probably did for a time. But he recovered.

    And then, when the ones who caused him the most trouble came calling years later, had be been hard-nosed toward them, who could not understand it? But he did not. His heart had not hardened over the years. He had not been plotting his revenge. 

    The first occasion, a complete reversal of life for him, was his brothers selling him into slavery. He—his father’s favorite. When you see pictures of him in the publications, the circuit overseer said, it is often with Jacob’s arm around him. No more. Sent out to check on his brother’s welfare, they captured and sold him.

    He adjusted. He worked hard. His new master put him in charge of everything. Life started looking up. Trouble was, the man’s wife was always trying to seduce him. When he refused her, she accused him of attempted rape. The master believed her, threw him into prison. There, would he not have said, “What did I do wrong? I did everything right!” Might it not have seemed another betrayal by God? Could he have been blamed for giving up? It’s not like he could just figure on doing his time and getting out; his most likely prospect was to rot there.

    Then there was the time when the chum he made in prison got released, the pharaoh’s cupbearer. ‘Hey, make sure to mention my plight when you get out,’ Joseph implored him, ‘I don’t belong here.’ Surely, one can could on a chum. Nope. The guy forgot all about him. A third betrayal. How much can a guy take? Somehow, he recovered. 

    Interpreting dreams was a thing then in Egypt. They had huge tomes full of dreams and what they meant. Trouble was, it was tough to do, and there were plenty of frauds and phonies who knew how to string the dreamer along and make a fine living off it. The pharaoh had a dream that greatly troubled him. THEN the cupbearer remembered. ‘Hey, you know, there was this guy in prison who was pretty good at such things. Why don’t you give him a shout?’ 

    Pharaoh did. Joseph told him affairs and gove Jehovah all the credit. It resulted in complete reversal, more thorough than the previous betrayals had  been betrayals. Turned out the dream was of national significance, how to stock up for the upcoming famine. Joseph was put in charge of implementation. It was in while in that role, years later, that his brothers came crawling to him, having no idea who he was. “Oh, so NOW you come seeking my help!” the CO spelled out the drama that could have arisen had Joseph allowed it, but he did not. (He probably didn’t tell Pharaoh, though, the CO tossed in, because Pharaoh would not likely have been as forgiving. Then set a long and convoluted process in which Joseph maneuvered to see if his brothers had changed. Were they still the heartless louts of before? They were not. They had changed.

    The drama comprises nearly 30% of the Book of Genesis. It takes 14 chapters to unfold. It all comes to an end in the next book, Exodus, with a new pharaoh arisen who did not know Joseph. But that’s a reversal for another talk. It was not mentioned in this one. Fast forward a few thousand years to when my mentor would lose a business contract. Trouble is, he would say, a new pharaoh has arisen at the company who does not know Joseph. I had that happen to me a time or two as well. As did the CEO of one of my first accounts, the fellow whose coffee cup meme, “CAN’T a man drink his coffee in peace, for crying out loud?!” would many years later emblazon my tee shirt, a first for me, since I have long stated that I am not a billboard. This CEO showed me all the mounted awards his company had won. ‘They don’t mean a thing,’ he said. ‘Sometimes we get canned the very next year.’ Alas, he himself suffered a betrayal, in the form of a massive stroke that left him unable to function.

    But this all aside that the circuit overseer would not have included even had he been aware of it. I never saw that CEO again. His second-in-command took charge, whom I did not especially like. Today, I would have visited the stricken man. but he was many years my senior at the time, everyone held him in a sort of awe, self included, and the gulf between us was huge. 

    The CO would go on to develop themes of not giving up, not becoming despondent, and not letting the circumstances of life make one’s heart hard.

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  • You Almost Never Have all the Facts

    Lot was a righteous man. The Bethel speaker said so. Three times 2 Peter 2:7-8 says he was. So, he must have been.

    “And [God] rescued righteous Lot, who was greatly distressed by the brazen conduct of the lawless people—for day after day that righteous man was tormenting his righteous soul over the lawless deeds that he saw and heard while dwelling among them.”  

    It really bothered him to see all the riff-raff and how they were carrying on. 

    And yet, righteous is not the first word coming to mind when most think of him. What is? Quarrelsome? Opportunistic? Materialistic? Abraham offered him a choice and he chose the best portion. Just like the circuit overseer was dismayed when Ernie chose the biggest piece of pie. You’re not supposed to do that, he said, you’re supposed to defer to the other person. Well, which piece would you have taken? Ernie countered. He replied that he would have chosen the smaller piece. “Well, there you go,” the slick fellow said.

    But maybe, just maybe, the Bethel speaker said, Lot was older than Abraham—did you ever think of that? It could be. Abraham was probably the baby of the family. Long as their child-producing days were back then, his brothers might have been much older than he, so much so that their kids would also be older than him. So maybe Lot was. This led to the observation that the older man always gets the cushier place, which led to the sacrosanct Bethel practice of bidding on both rooms and apartments. I know this first-hand from our Bethel friends who maneuvered forever to get a fine apartment up there in the Sliver Building that Bethel owned, and there we were after a day of sightseeing in New York, up high in his apartment with wine and cheese and a magnificent view of Manhattan. Alas, soon afterwards, he and his wife were transferred to Patterson. What would they see outside those windows, cows?

    Then, too, since Lot had been kidnapped years ago, swept away, and it took a SWAT team to free him, maybe, just maybe, he suffered shell-shock, PTSD, and Abraham knew that, so no wonder Lot would thereafter avoid the wide open fields. No wonder he would seek out the safety in numbers. So there.

    Could the Bethel speaker prove it? No. But that was his point, he said. You also couldn’t disprove it. In fact, it was all a segue to lead into something else. His talk had nothing to do with proof, he said, nor with Lot, for that matter. His talk had to do with not jumping to conclusions when you don’t have all the facts. 

    We love to do it. We do it all the time. But we shouldn’t. You almost never have all the facts, and instead extrapolate from what you have, which sometimes is very little. The speaker next gave examples, one or two from the scriptures where such is frequently the case, but most from real life, in which it was easy to be hard on someone—until you knew a key missing fact which turned the entire situation around—as it might have with Lot. 

    That’s why it’s so much easier, not to mention more productive, to turn your scrutiny upon yourself, and not the other person. Even with yourself you may not have all the facts but you’ll have 100 times what you do with the other person. Remember what everyone’s mama used to say: when you point your finger at someone else, there are three pointing back at you.

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  • An End of War: What is God Waiting For?

    Q: If God really can bring an end to war so easily, then what is he waiting for? After all, the longer he delays, the more generations live and die in suffering.

    Yes, they do, but it is reversible through the provision of resurrection. In time, former distresses will be forgotten, as though a bad dream.

    One must not rush a trial. One must allow it to play out, distressing as it may be to those under the gun. For Witnesses, the question to be determined arose at the very beginning of human creation, with Adam rejecting God’s right to rule for his own. God could eliminate them and start again, but who’s to say the next pair won’t raise the same point? Better to let it play out.

    The overall Bible tale is that, starting with this rebellion, God allows humans to make good on their claim of independence from him. He allows them to devise their own governments down through the ages, their own economies, justice, ethics, inventions—organize or disorganize any way they will. Only when the results become the absolute trainwreck that human rule is today does the question begin to be answered. Questions answered and precedent supplied, then God can forcibly bring about the rule by his Son.

    It’s the theme of a book I wrote not too long ago, entitled “A Workman’s Theodicy: Why Bad Things Happen.” A theodicy is a theological term referring to the attempts to answer how a God of love would coexist with evil and suffering. It is among the oldest questions of time, and likely the most important:

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    This ‘Workman’s Theodicy’ is centered in free will. Is such a vital component of life or not? Free will does make a bad course possible, but it also makes a good course so much more meaningful. How meaningful is someone’s love if you know they have been programmed so that they cannot respond in any other way? The trial has to play out. The consequences of human independence from God must become manifest.

    God has chosen not to be an enabler, allowing human rebellion but making sure nothing REALLY bad happens. Those who deal with harmful and/or addictive behaviors know that enabling is a dead end. Enablers allow, and even encourage, destructive behavior, charging someone else to prevent the mess that inevitably results. Such ones don’t actually hate what is bad. They just hate the symptoms of what is bad and want someone else to clean those up. There are critics of the Witnesses who complain about “manipulation” and “control,” but appear to want manipulation and control to be woven into the very fabric of life, so that humans never have to face the consequences of their destructive conduct.

    There are no end of negative consequences from going independent of God. Were their wish to come true, that the really bad consequences of independence from God were wiped away, complaints would soon coalesce about the next worst things on the list—why doesn’t God prevent those, too? No. This is just recommending that God be an enabler. It is something he will not do, for our sakes as well as his own.

    “A cat that sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again”—attributed to Mark Twain. “Nor will it set on a cold stove, because they all look hot.” That is the goal: to keep humans away from the “stove” of self-rule, cold that can so easily turn to hot, with all its inherent hobbling consequences.

    A million years into everlasting life, when people have been unshackled from sin to be all that they can be, the intense suffering some underwent during a few of their 70 or 80 years will not be something they hold a grudge over. It is as that illustration goes that Witnesses sometimes use: parents will submit a child to a painful operation if they know that it is necessary to future happy and healthy life.

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  • Jacob’s 12 Sons, Blessings to Each Over the Course of Two Watchtower Studies:

    At first glance, the Watchtower Study for Sunday seemed it be something of a yawner. Jacob’s deathbed prophesy to the last eight of his twelve sons (the first four were last week), and for most he didn’t have much to say. At least it was blessings, the Watchtower conductor observed, and not ‘You kids are driving me crazy! You’ll be the death of me. In fact, you were!’

    But, again, once you mix in the published text with fifty or sixty comments from the congregation, it turns around. What threatens to be dull becomes engrossing. The thing about the meetings, one newcomer told me long ago, is that you can prepare for them. It was a no-brainer to me, but he was contrasting it with his previous church experience, in which you cannot.

    With Gad, someone observed in paragraph 8 that it didn’t go according to plan. The Israelites were all supposed to cross the Jordan and settle west, but Gad wanted to stay on the east, which he did. He didn’t beg off, though. The tribe did cross to aid in conquering the promised land, but when the conquest was complete, they crossed back. This means there’s hope for guys like me, I figure, who does not do everything the conventional way—such as spending inordinate time online—but also fully ‘fights’ in the conventional way of door-to-door and regular meeting attendance. I mean, let your unconventionality extend to forsaking meetings and you become like the ember removed from the center that goes out; it goes out, not as a punishment from men, but as a law of physics. Hebrews says (10:24-25) that you’re not supposed to do that.

    Then there was Benjamin (paragraph 17), the tribe of the 700 men who “could sling a stone to within a hairbreadth and would not miss.” These are the guys you want when you are choosing up sides for dodgeball. It is also the case that when people have special abilities, they can begin to think themselves special and not subject to the norms that guide everyone else. (Sometimes I imagine I see people like this online.) Yet, the Benjaminites were loyal throughout to the cause. Even when their guy got ousted as the first king, they supported the arrangement that saw the prize going to another tribe.

    All twelve sons covered within a two-week period. And no, it was not me who observed that, whereas Reuben lost some privileges that ordinarily would have come his way, he at least got a sandwich named for him. And “gadfly” has nothing to do with Gad. It derives much later as a stinging insect that torments bigger animals. Socrates described himself as a gadfly stinging the ‘animal’ that was Athens, challenging the norms then prevailing.

     

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  • Don’t Go Talking Adam and Eve at the Zoo Reptile House

    Eve found plenty of fault with Adam during their sabotaged marriage but one charge she was never able to make stick was, ‘You never listen to me.’ Nor, for that matter, was a certain snake ever able to say that of her.

    It’s not every day that a snake talks. Even if you are new on the planet, encountering surprises each day, it still seems that a talking snake would knock your socks off, assuming you were wearing any. It’s why I like the snake depiction in Paradise Lost, by the poet John Milton, published in 1667.

    It’s not really the snake speaking; it is a rebellious spirit creature using it as though a ventriloquist his dummy. Milton’s twist on the snake is that it is anything but dumb. Persuading Eve to eat from the forbidden tree, it says, ‘Look what it did for me. And if it can give speech to me, a common snake, just think what it can do for you!’ Oh, yeah. It’s all speculative; you can’t go there with any certainty, but it does make good sense. You can picture it happening this way.

    At the reptile house of any modern zoo, however, you will find no attendants to tell about Eve and the snake. They would be fired if they did, most likely, though it’s a little hard to tell; probably that statement has never been tested. They’ve all been through college and have emerged with degrees in zoology, marine biology, conservation biology, wildlife management, and animal behavior, and the like. They are all strictly evolution-oriented. Every vestige of creation-belief has been pounded out of them. Don’t go telling them about Eve.

    Not that the animals suffer on that account. They do far better than when I found a downed robin chick as a boy and tried to nurse it back to health with grass to sit on, hot dogs to eat, and a few twigs to remind them of trees. The zoo care is first rate, and it was not long ago that I heard a tiny child discussing with its mother about ‘habitat’—a word I certainly never knew as a child. But don’t even think about original serpents pulling the wool over Eve’s eyes here. It is not allowed.

    The wildlife graduates that don’t find zoo employment find it instead in video production. There, they employ powerful AI tools to detect just when you are about to cry out in astonishment ‘Creation!’ ‘Design!’ at some breathtakingly dazzling animal behavior. Heading off the words while they are yet in your throat, the narrator gushes: “How absolutely incredible that natural selection works to produce such amazing behavior!”

    Others present animal packs and herds as though criminal gangs, killing, maiming, and eating each other. ‘Don’t you dare even think of Bambi!’ they glower. ‘The fight for survival is all you need to know about.’

    All the same, zoos are light years ahead of what they were when I was a boy, back when they were essentially jails for animals. ‘They are still jails for animals,’ my brother mutters, who will not visit on that account. But if you take into account their endeavor to save the nature that their fellows destroy, they’re earn one’s appreciation. It’s not everything, but it’s a fine stopgap until Revelation 11:18 is realized and the time comes for God to “bring to ruin those who are ruining the earth.” Zoos slow them down a little bit. Just like my cousin says about the vintage Mustangs he restores. If you put such-and-such a price on them, people come beating down your door, but if you add 20K to it, “that slows them down a little.”

    At the Columbus zoo, the elephants roam through a huge U-shaped enclosure, with spectators peering from the peninsula thus formed in the middle. Zoo workers call them from one end of the enclosure to another—keep them moving, is the idea, just like in the wilds. Also like in the wild is food that requires them to use their ‘problem-solving skills.’ Some is suspended. Some must be unraveled or opened in various tricky ways. They will show their feet on command, and the idea here is so those foot bottoms may be inspected for health. They all respond to their names. The elephant named Rudy has a slinking aspect to its gait that, combined with a bobbing head, makes him look like a teenager trying to act cool. Just a mannerism, the volunteer told me. He does it especially when excited or glad.

    Creative people are hard at work. “How do you know if an animal is venomous?” asks posters in the Columbus reptile house. “If it bites you and you get sick, the animal is venomous” is the chipper heads-up. And when workman were building something or other at the Syracuse zoo, the accompanying legend described their habitat: coffee and donuts during the day; television in the family room during the evening.

    They’ll tempt you with zoo membership upon entering most of them. The fee is more than for a single entrance, but you afterwards get in as many times as you like for free. Moreover, half-price is the fee at any other participating zoo. That’s how we came to be in both Columbus and Syracuse. Periodically, my wife and I have to get away and plot a course to some new locale. We don’t go just for the zoo, but while there we always check out that zoo.

    Are we the only ones to ever have had that idea? Not at all. Here is a site that even undertakes to rate all the zoos.

     

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  • The Instant Answer of Sunday’s Watchtower and What to do About Adam and Eve

    Much was made at Sunday’s Watchtower Study over the Genesis 3:15 prophesy. Instantly, upon the first couple’s fall into sin, Jehovah had the answer as to how he would fix it. The typical response to disaster is to mope, to be bummed, to say ‘poor me,’ for awhile, even to fall into depression. Only after that process do you begin to wonder if anything can be salvaged. God had the answer immediately.

    “I was touched when I learned that Jehovah took action immediately so that mankind would not be left without hope.” said the sis in paragraph 17.  Someone else drew the contrast to how humans routinely screw up during crises, drawing on the worldwide pandemic response as the latest example. What a chaotic mess that was (is)!

    Adam and Eve may be okay for us but they are hard to swallow for the general public in our neck of the woods. When I first came to learn of Jehovah’s Witnesses, I was astounded that here were people who actually believed in Adam and Eve. They didn’t look dumb—yet all my life I had believed that only the reddest of the rednecks believed in Adam and Eve!

    If you dismiss them, you toss away all hope of answering the deepest questions of life. ‘Why is their evil and suffering?’—gone, if you dismiss Adam and Eve. ‘How is it that people die?’ as well as related questions of hope for the dead—none of them can be answered without Adam and Eve. So don’t get too hasty in giving them to boot, regardless of what the learned ones say. The learning of the learned ones is not always the bee’s knees. Sometimes it is the “foolishness” that “catches the wise in their own cunning.” (1 Corinthians 3:19) If, thinking yourself very clever, you have tossed away answers to the vexing problems of life, you have indeed been caught in your own cunning.

    The trick with Adam and Eve is to view them as though you were putting together a jigsaw puzzle. You are trying 
    to replicate the picture on the box top. Nobody cares if the picture is real or not. That concern is shelved if it even occurs to someone.

    Upon completing the puzzle of a Book that was long regarded as a hodgepodge of conflicting ideas, a hopeless mess that one ought not remotely dream of untangling—and yet the completed puzzle is evidence it has been done . . .  Well, then, at that time you just may want to revisit your assessment as to whether the box top cover is real.

    Once you’ve put together the puzzle and have reproduced the picture on the cover, you’re pretty much immune to someone saying you put it together wrong. And when you are cruising down the highway at 60 MPH, even the scientist on the radio telling you your car doesn’t run does not cause undue distress.

     

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  • How Does it Work that ‘Jesus Died for Our Sins?’

    One reason I became and remain a JW is the gift of explaining just how Christ’s death works. Everyone else must settle for a sloppy “Jesus died for our sins to show he loves us.” Pulls on the heartstrings, I guess, but it seems more than a little fuzzy intellectually. Only JWs (to my knowledge) can explain just how that death benefits us. It is right to highlight it:

    https://www.jw.org/en/bible-teachings/questions/jesus-sacrifice-ransom/

    Note how it all hinges on Adam. You can’t throw away Adam to chase after the evolutionists, tempting though that may be. Keep him as a metaphor if you absolutely must, but keep him. Maybe seeing how everything hangs together by keeping him will be enough to reconsider the “science” that says he is fairy tale.

    I’m all for science. I really am. Pour me a double shot of it. E5BE6D8E-3D75-48C2-A2BD-A44A39B42FD3But it is supposed to serve us, rather than we serve it. I hope I can think a little out of the box when “science” says nothing remains beyond the grave. Why the “science” in italics? Because it remains a tool of discovery, a valuable tool indeed, but not the only tool, nor even the most important one.

    Writing of certain branches of alternative medicine, Dr. McCabe states (roughly): “These methods, thousands of years old, are unproven by science not because they are untrue, but because of the limitations of science.” Exactly. When you can gather material into contrasting groups, the only difference between them being a single variable, and perform repeatable experiments upon those groups, science is at its best. Not all things lend themselves to such easy classification and repeatability. “Science” in the absence of such attributes becomes little more than speculation, hardly worth discarding the spiritual things which carry far greater benefit.

    You don’t even have to toss out all that the evolutionists say. Let scientists be scientists and Bible students be Bible students. Micro-evolution, that essentially amounts to variation within a “kind?” Sure, why not? It is little different than animal husbandry, which people have known about for ages. Maybe you can even play with macro-evolution some. More dicey, but maybe some aspects of it can be accepted. But life arising from non-life, “abiogenesis” it is called? No.

    Just make sure you keep Adam in the mix some way, some how, and you retain the key for unlocking just how Christ’s death works to save humankind.

     

    ***The bookstore

  • Metaphors, Genesis, and Adam & Eve

    If someone starts giving me a hard time over Adam and Eve in the ministry, I tell them its okay to treat it as a metaphor, and on that basis, see what can they draw from it. I am even proactive on the point, suggesting metaphor before they can get around to objecting to it.

    A certain type of person almost takes that as a compliment—that you are not rubbing their nose in ‘Adam & Eve’ but you are deeming them smart enough that to figure out a metaphor. I even briefly won over my return visit Bernard Strawman on this point.

    I used to call such people ones who suffer from “We are wise and learned adults, far too clever to be sold Adam and Eve. What’s next—Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck?” syndrome. But now I drop the derisiveness, for it doesn’t do any good, and I just invite them to treat it as a metaphor. After all, science is pretty universal that Adam & Eve is for dumbbells, and we are all taught that science is the be-all and end-all. Training like that doesn’t turn around on a dime.

    Sometimes when people see how well the metaphor works out they forget all about “science” and they put their “cognitive dissonance” on the shelf as something to work out later. You don’t have to know everything. It’s the antithesis of humility to think that you do—or can. Is not the phrase “cognitive dissonance” largely an appeal to pride that overall dumbs us down? It is an idea worthy of a pamphlet, probably, but not the volumes dedicated to it.

    People cannot simultaneously hold two conflicting ideas at the same time? Of course they can. A little humility solves the problem. Put one or both on the shelf pending more information, which may or may not come, but in the meantime, you can’t rush it. You can’t just check yourself at the door because of a few facts that don’t line up. In the field of mathematics proofs will commence with assuming this or that point is true, and then seeing where that assumption leads. If it leads to a dead-end, the point is disproved. But sometimes it doesn’t lead to a dead-end. You don’t just stop dead in your tracks because you spot an obstacle up ahead. You see where this or that idea leads.

    When I first came across Jehovah’s Witnesses, I was astounded that here were people who actually believed in Adam and Eve. They didn’t look stupid, or if so in no greater proportion than anyone else, yet all my life I had heard that only the reddest of the rednecks believed in Adam and Eve.  I couldn’t figure it out. I decided to shelve it for future resolution. I still don’t know how certain things will align. But the answer to the ‘problem of evil,’—why a loving God would permit it, the answer to the reason for and origin of death, the coherent answer to the question of how Christ’s death could benefit us—all these things were so overwhelming, that I decided to give “science” the back seat, not the front seat it usually demands. Without Jesus as the “first Adam,” a perfect man who, by holding the course, repurchased us from that first perfect man who sinned and sold us out, the question of ‘Why Jesus died for us’ devolves into a mushy and intellectually unsatisfying “because he loved us.”

    To be sure, the head is not everything, but neither is it nothing. There is some sort of reasoning regarding mitochondrial DNA and the number of generations can be counted. It is from this they determine that all people on earth are related through one woman. Maybe that represents the reconciliation of timelines that otherwise don’t reconcile. It is roundly shouted down by majority scientists today. But we ought to know by now that being shouted down by the majority means nothing. Anything can be spun any way, by people who may or not be disingenuous. The majority team gets the ball and then tilts the field so steeply as to tumble the minority team right off it.

    For myself, I am content that the Witness organization in 2010 defined the “days” of creation as “epochs,” their sum total plus all the time before as “aeons.” “It’s about time,” their science critics might cry? As late as 1987, the US Supreme Court took up the question of teaching “evolutionary science” and “creation science,” ruling that if you taught the first in public school, it didn’t mean you had to teach the second. So it takes the Witness organization 23 years to weigh in on an area not their specialty or mission. Is that too long? The world of science has yet to weigh in with any accuracy on the spiritual concerns that Witnesses make their domain.

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  • Notes from Ancient Egypt: Weighing in on Joseph and the Exodus Account: Part 1

    Sitting in on Bob Brier’s Egyptology lecture series for Great Courses, you learn that nations don’t war on their neighbors. They don’t conquer them. They “beat up on them.” If he said it once, he said it a hundred times. List the accomplishments of any pharaoh: he built the temples, he built the tombs, he beat up on the Syrians (or whoever).

    “Beating up” is especially emphasized in Egypt, for with them, there was no place like home. Egyptians warred with their neighbors constantly—“peace was not a virtue in Egypt,” Bob says—but they never established garrisons in those conquered lands. Why—were you to die thousands of miles from home, how could you be properly mummified? And if you weren’t that, what would happen to your chances at the afterlife?

    So they didn’t stay. They “beat up” their neighbors, left demands for yearly tribute, but after a while, people forget. You have to go and “beat them up again,” to remind them they had better pay—carting off “everything that wasn’t nailed down” while you were at it.

    What is it with this guy? Is he from the Bronx? In fact, he is. And even though he’s a professor steeped in Egyptian honors at Long Island University, he still lives in the Bronx. (as of 1999, when he recorded these lectures). Of the supports used to raise a body so mummy wrappings could be wound beneath him—“it’s like jacking up a car,” he adds helpfully, possibly while gazing through his window at a muffler being attached to a jacked-up car). 

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    (Photo by Sam LaRussa)

    What would he do when he comes to Bible accounts? I wondered. He will blow them away, of course, but will he do it with respect or ridicule? He seems like a nice guy. But sometimes people with brains lose it when it comes to spiritual things.

    To my surprise, he does not blow them away. He treats them with great respect and allows that they are probably true in essence. To be sure, the “external evidence” that is archeology is scant. Archaeology corroborates the Bible in many things, says Bob, but it says next to nothing about the Israelites in Egypt. However, what he calls the “internal evidence” is strong, and as an Egyptologist, he has learned how the two must be combined.

    After the Old Kingdom period, during which the pyramids were built, there arose the “Hyksos,” kings who ruled from the north, the delta region. The word means “rulers of foreign lands.” Could Joseph’s family have been the Hyksos? Not much is known of the Hyksos, Brier says, they “didn’t integrate well,” Some have said they were the family of Joseph. Josephus says so. Therefore, I say so, too. I mean, someone has to correspond to Joseph and his brothers. The north is a  damp and marshy region, where archeological finds are meagre, inferior, and badly damaged. It is the dry climate to the south that preserves papyri for thousands of years.

    At this point Bob Brier assigns his listeners homework. They are to read Genesis 37-50. Then he narrates the story—just who was Joseph and what was his involvement with Egypt, highlighting what these “guys” are doing and what those “guys” are doing.

    There is no external evidence for Joseph, but what is the internal evidence? Does the story “hang together?” It does, he thinks. He recounts the Bible story, which ends in a tearful tale of forgiveness—Joseph sold into slavery by his jealous brothers, his quick rise in Potipher’s house, his reversal and hard times, his meteoric rise to fame upon deciphering the dream that had perplexed Pharaoh, and how those same brothers approach and bow before him decades later—he, the one now in charge of alleviating famine.

    In a dream that nobody can figure out for Pharaoh until someone remembers that Joseph in prison had a knack for that sort of thing, he is brought to interpret the dream. Seven lean cows are preceded by seven fat cows. The lean ones eat up the fat ones! They are years of famine following years of plenty. During the years of plenty, preparation can be made for the years of famine. “Based upon Joseph’s interpretation of dreams, the economy of Egypt is planned for the next 14 years.”

    Joseph shows what a “sharp businessman” he is during the famine period, is how Bob Brier puts it (perhaps as he is buying a used car from a sharp businessman on the corner lot). People get destitute enough that they eventually sell him their land in return for food. He makes Pharaoh very wealthy, and Pharaoh rewards him.

    The ring that Pharaoh gives to Joseph—that also is how they would do it in Egypt, a ring to the “right hand man.” A signet ring. A sign of authority. When the Bible says, everybody cried out Abrek after Joseph—that’s “real Egyptian.” Somebody knew what he was talking about. He deciphers the phrase as roughly meeting ‘Let God be with you.’ (Genesis 41: 42-43)

    For a long time, Bob had a problem with Egyptian priests admitting defeat in interpreting Pharaoh’s dream. They never admitted defeat in anything. But later finds cleared it up for him. There is a papyrus in the British Museum which is a book for interpreting dreams.

    All dreams meant something, the Egyptians believed. They were all prophetic. The trick was in interpreting them. When you had a dream, you went to the priest to see what it meant. Everything was written down in a book. The priests didn’t “just wing it.” They looked it up in a book. “If it’s not in the book, you’re stuck,” Bob says. So Joseph‘s account has the ring of truth to it, he says. When they said to Pharaoh, We don’t know, about his dream, it just meant that nothing about fat cows or lean cows was in the book—it didn’t go there. So it wasn’t the fault of the priests, who never would have admitted a fault—it wasn’t in the book. (Genesis 41)

    There’s a Egyptian inscription on Sahel Island of seven years when the Nile did not rise, resulting in famine. Another inscription shows skeletal figures of people who were not slaves. Potipher is an Egyption name. Goshen is where the brothers of Joseph settled—a real Egyptian place in the delta region. Two cities are cited with names they had at the time, and not names they would be given later. Joseph (and Jacob) are embalmed by the Egyptians and mourned for the proper period. The Joseph story is written by someone who knew Egypt, Brier states. Testifying that Hebrews did indeed come to settle in Egypt is the excavation of a classic Israelite four-room house, with its unique floor plan. A full-sized model of one can be seen at Semitic Museum at Harvard University.

    “Internally, we get a feeling for the Joseph story that it fits. It’s not archaeological evidence, but the story fits.” Embalming for 40 days, mourning for 70. For a long time that was not understood, but it turns out that is how Egyptian‘s did it. (Genesis 50:3)

    The Hyksos did not control all of Egypt. Instead, they coexisted with the Sixteenth and the Seventeenth Dynasty, which were based in Thebes, 500 miles to the south. Warfare between they and the pharaohs of the late Seventeenth Dynasty eventually ran the Hyksos out of Egypt. (and Bob approves of this, because the Hyksos are not “his guys”—they are not real Egyptian) Later leaders of them would be portrayed as oppressive and warlike.

    A papyrus of the time, sent by the last Hyksos king to the Prince of Thebes, reads: “The hippopotami in your pool are keeping me awake at night. They have to be silenced.” What exactly does that mean? Dunno, but it’s not friendly. Inflammatory for sure, Bob says. The Prince sends an army in retaliation. How does it turn out? No idea. The papyrus breaks off. The first and the last portions of an ancient papyrus roll is often no good. The inside end is wrapped so tightly that it breaks. the outside end is on the outside where it gets knocked around a lot, torn and scuffed up over time.

    See Part II, Evidence of the Exodus

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  • Shishak Beats Up Rehoboam—From Egypt’s Point of View. And Why did Indiana Jones Search for the Ark in Tanis?

    For 200 years Egypt was ruled by Libyans. That’s not a long period of time but its nearly as long as the history of the United States.

    Head north on the Nile and turn left, Bob* gives the directions, and you will hit Libya. But you will have to traverse 200 miles of desert to get there, so we should not imagine an invading Libyan army riding that far to conquer. No, Prof Brier is sure that the Libyans that ruled were already in Egypt, in fact full Egyptians in all but ethnicity. They had been assimilated previously.

    They were probably descendants of captives taken during the reign of Ramses III, Egypts last great pharaoh, Bob calls him. “One of the things he was proudest of is that he pushed back the Egyptians. The Egyptians were getting a little too populous. It seems that the Egyptians always minded when foreigners become too numerous. It was okay to have a few, but when they became a large body to be reckoned with they didn’t like that. As for example, remember the Exodus?”

    Exodus 1:9-10 reads: “In time there arose over Egypt a new king who did not know Joseph.  And he proceeded to say to his people: “Look! The people of the sons of Israel are more numerous and mightier than we are.  Come on! Let us deal shrewdly with them, for fear they may multiply, and it must turn out that, in case war should befall us, then they certainly will also be added to those who hate us and will fight against us and go up out of the country.”

    The captured Libyans assimilated and, in time, some turned to the military. Sheshonq I was the first of them to assume the throne after a dwindling series of impotent kings bearing the Ramses name. He married the right woman—a sure way to rise in Egypt—the daughter of Ramses XI.

    Fighting is what he knew. After consolidating and appointing his sons in key positions, he look northward. Was not Judah ripe for picking? Solomon had just died, and his son Rehoboam didn’t know what he was doing. Sheshonq is the same as Shishak of 1 Kings 14:25-26. He came to conquer but Rehoboam “bought him off.”

    “And it came about in the fifth year of King Rehoboam that Shishak the king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem.  And he got to take the treasures of the house of Jehovah and the treasures of the house of the king; and everything he took. And he went on to take all the gold shields that Solomon had made.”

    Note what he does not take, Bob says. He does not take the ark of the covenant, “the box, that held the Ten Commandments. That’s not mentioned.” A helpful footnote from movie lore: “That’s why Indiana Jones goes looking for the ark of the covenant at Tanis, in the delta, in Egypt, thinking maybe Shishak brought it back.”

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    While he’s at it, Bob Brier eludidates ark: “It’s called a ark, by the way, because ark means box. That why you get Noah’s ark. It’s really a big box that floated on the water, basically.”

    You know, it’s not a big point, and certainly Bob does not extrapolate on it here, but in a way it is. Artwork of Jehovah’s Witnesses invariably portray Noah’s ark as a floating box. Church artwork almost never does. To them, it is a storybook boat with bow and stern. When my wife and I stayed in the Cincinnati Best Western because we’d been hurricaned out from our original destination, that morning in the breakfast bar nearly everyone else, family groups all, were headed to the Ark Encounter across the state border in Kentucky. A huge ark replica—with bow and stern. (and dinosaurs!)

    These are not people who think the ark is fairy tale, for the most part. These are people who think the Bible flood account is true. If they are willing to remold such an obvious facet of the ark, who knows what else they are willing to remold?

    *Notes from The History of Ancient Egypt: Bob Brier, part 19

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