The Bad Day

I've had to think about this blog for a while actually. It's not that it was difficult to pick out a day among all the horrible ones that I've faced in my life but quite the opposite. I'm almost like Job in the fact that most of my life has been extremely happy. I've been very fortunate to be able to gothrough life without many of the hardships that I know others have had to face. So I guess the hardest part is for me to type this as a "bad day" when I know that there are others who have suffered far more than I have, who have had to endure as I have not, and yet who still manage to make it through each and every day with a smile.

That being said, here's what I've come up with: I first thought that I might write about the death of one of my mother's parents. However, my grandmother died when I was very young and I only remember her from flashes. My grandfather died several years later when I was in eighth grade, but he had been very sick for a long time and, although the moment in and of itself was very sad, I think that I had already come to the realization that there was nothing that I could do when he finally did die.

My worst day, then, was actually when my first dog died, a little less than a year before my grandfather. Her name was Montana by the way. My parents had gotten her after they had visited the state for the first time and fell in love with the place. Anyways, I don't remember the exact day, but I remember that it was cold. Of course, this is an Alabama cold we're talking about so I guess that it probably wasn't as cold as I've experienced to date, but at the time I thought it was freezing. I remember that it was my turn to feed her, and so I "bundled up" to take a large bowl of food out to the old shed where she slept at night.

The first thing that I noticed when I got out there was that she wasn't in her usual spot. At this point, I'm kind of anoid because I have to go to school and I can't find her. There was a main opening to the shed that had plenty of room for her to lay down and have tons of food and water, but around to the side there was a smaller door that she sometimes went into when she was hiding or feeling playful. So I went to the side door and sure enough she was laying there, but something struck me as odd. She seemed peaceful, but there was something that didn't strike me as right. I remember at that point thinking for the first time that she might be dead. I bent down to touch her, and that's when I knew.

A long, sad story short, my dad had to come home from work to bury her, and I still had to go to school that day. Something that I am still kind of bitter about to this day. The whole time I kept thinking about Montana. She had been there for twelve of the thirteen years of my life and so it was disconcerting to know that something so stalwart in my life could be so easily taken away. I can remember so many of the times that we had together, all the memories and fun. I can remember what she looked like, what she felt like, how she sounded when she barked. But every time that I think about her now, another image of her laying perfectly still comes to my mind now, and the image of me reaching out and touching that still form will probably remain one of the saddest moments of my life.

Judges: The Best Stories (and the saddest)

Judges deals with the fact that Israel seems to suffer from constant short term memory loss, or maybe its longterm. I don't know. Either way they are some of the most forgetful people that I've ever even heard of. Basically, here is the pattern:

1. People forget to worship God.
2. God sends nation x to conquer Israel.
3. People pray to God for forgiveness.
4. God sends judge (aka man or woman that totally kicks ass) to save Israel.
5. Rinse and repeat.

The entire book of Judges deals with the fact that Israel constantly turns from God and then remembers that he's the one who actually got them to where they are in the first place. Eventually God sends someone to save his people and while that person is alive the Israelites are good, but once he or she dies they instantly revert to their old "heathen" ways like they just forgot the fact that they had prosperity while they were following God.

While the pattern and repetition become rather tedious after about five or six judges, the stories themselves are anything but. From Deborah who is the first powerful woman since probably Ziporah to Ehud, the guy that Plotz calls the left handed assassin to Samson, all of the judges deal with the oppressors in different and often violent ways.

However, none of these stories is more heartwrenching than the story of Jephthah's daughter. Jephthah, as the current judge of Israel, is in a war with the Ammonites and in order to assure victory he asks the lord for favor in exchange for the sacrifice of the first thing that greets him when he returns home. He wins, of course, and returns to his house only to be greeted by his daughter whom he must now sacrifice. In a show of faith unlike almost anything I have ever read the girl accepts her fate. She asks only that she may go and morn the fact that she is a virgin for one year, which her father grants. (Gee how nice of him.)

At this point I have to stop and admit that I thought for sure that God would show back up and save her just as he had done for Isaac when he commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son. After all, how can a loving God ask for the only child of his most faithful servant of the time? Surely he will step in as he did before and release Jephthah from his bond.

Sadly that reprieve does not come, and I was forced to read in horror as the girl was killed in honor of battle. There is no crying mentioned, no condolences given, just a young girl murdered in honor of all the killing that had been done a year ago.It is a tale that disturbs me more than any other in the entire Bible if only because there is no dissent given. Where are the kind hearted individuals that follow a kind-hearted God? What is this bloodthirstyness that seems to crop up so often? And what of the law that says there shall be no sacrifice of children because that is abhorrent? If it's so disgusting to you than stop it. God saves a male child but not a girl, where is the fareness in that?

Before I go off and decide to ramble on this forever, I thought that I would connect it to another form of daughter sacrifice that many of us have seen before when Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia in order that his ships might sale to Troy. Both are virgins. Both accept their fate meakley and with a courage that I find hard to fathom and both are sacrificed by fathers who love their only child more than anything to gods that seem to not give much of a damn.

We've already talked at length about the rest of the book so I won't go into that, but if you haven't read Judges, do so. There are some very good if sad stories that you can enjoy.

Joshua: God's General

Okay, so I don't ever remember going to bible study and being told that Joshua was a general, but that's really the only thing that makes sense when you get down to it. After all, he's the one that lead's Israel into the promised land to take what God has "given" them, which is another interesting point considering the fact that there were other people already occupying the land so they couldn't have been to happy about that.

Anyways, Joshua seems like a competent man. He leads Israel to several great victories. Then they must get a little overconfident because they finally lose a battle, and the people just want to settle in what they already have. However, Joshua comes up with a brilliant plan that ends with his enemies outflanked and their city conquered.

The one image that I can't shake from this book of the Bible is the fact that Joshua seems to be an extremely bloodthirsty individual. I can almost understand killing the men that you've been fighting because they represent a threat to the future kingdom that you are trying to establish, even though you are invading someone else's land, but to kill women and children seems like a cold and heartless attack on the innocent. Hell, it doesn't just seem like, it is.

At what point does a God whose so powerful that he can destroy the entire powerful nation of Egypt simply to prove a point become so afraid of women and children subverting his chosen people that he has the Israelites kill all of them? Can God not simply convert these people with one of the many miracles that he has lying around?

I guess the wierdest part about really reading the Bible for the first time has finally come crashing down on me. The first time that I "read" it, I must have just skimmed through this section understanding only the basic concepts that I had been taught since I was a small child, that God had chosen this land for his people and so everyone else must be evicted. The problem is that in this sense evicted comes to the point of mass genocide, an act that the God I grew up believing in, but a God that is not yet present in the Bible, did not believe in. I am beginning to wonder what else I will find on my more careful reading, and some of the possiblilities, to be honest, scare the crap out of me.