23:4-16 - These verses relate the story of Abraham's purchase of the Cave of Machpelah, for the purpose of burying Sarah. Why was it so very important that Abraham pay for the site? Ephron had offered to give it to Abraham free of charge. I can guess that, by paying for the land, there was an implied contract that would have been more difficult to go back on, but the reasons aren't given in the text.
24:2-9 - Abraham's wish that Isaac not have a Cannanite wife makes sense, but it seems odd that Abraham was so insistent that Isaac not travel there to find that wife: "On no account must you take my son back there!" (JPS translation). Rather than simply send Isaac, he sends a servant with a set of code words and instructions concerning how to find the woman and bring her back...but wouldn't it have been a bit more straightforward -- not to mention gentlemanly -- for Isaac to have gone on his own?
25:1-6 - Yet another odd figure... Abraham took another wife after Sarah and Haggar, one named Keturah?!? Never even heard of her.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
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You're trying to analyze ancient mesapotamian characters as if they grew up in middle america in the 1950s. I reccommend you study up on ancient near eastern literature and culture, it might help your understanding of the bible.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment.
ReplyDeleteOn the one hand, your points are well taken. I have a lot to learn about the Bible, its history and interpretation. And I suppose you're right as well, that my "first take" on the parashot is a bit out-of-context. Fair enough.
My dilemma is that I have to "start" somewhere, and the place I have chosen to start is with me being the person I am, reading the Torah as I read it, reacting, thinking and trying to approach it on its own terms. When it comes to the Torah, for my entire life I've pretty much been fed chunks of text along with what other people say they mean -- people who often know a lot more about Torah than I, but are, in the end, not me. So rather than begin with what other people have to say, I'm trying to start with what I myself see. Maybe it's not the "best" way to start, but then I'm not sure what would be.
A more important reason is that I come from a Reform Jewish background in which almost everything in Judaism is taken with a grain of salt. No one in my family is observant, no one thinks the Torah was really dictated to Moses at Sinai (well, maybe one family member does, but that's for another time...), and no one takes the Torah as an accurate historical account of anything. That has been my starting point. Part of what I'm trying to do here is take seriously the illiberal aspects of Judaism in an attempt to figure out, to put it bluntly, what I'm missing out on by not "believing" certain things or "observing" certain commandments. I'm also trying to find out what it means to observe and believe in a Jewish context.
The point is that if Torah is the true and enduring word of God as it relates to the moral behavior of the Jewish people, then yes, it does make a difference that these, as you put it, "ancient mesapotamian characters" act in ways that seem alien and (for lack of a better term) immoral to my deilcate modern sensitivities. One of the things I struggle with mightily is how to personally reconcile (a) my liberal mindset that things can, do and should change with (b) my identification with a Jewish religion/nation that has significant aspects that are supposed to be timeless and universal. How can the route to happiness be to hold fast to the Tree of Life that is Torah if it says things that are, to my mind, wrong? But what, then, is the meaning of being Jewish if I "pick and choose" things from it to live my life by?
All of this is a long-winded way of saying that I'm trying to work through what my relationship to Torah is and should be. My posting "Torah Tidbits" wasn't intended to constitute some kind of a flip "critique" but rather to catalog the things that, on this my first blog-reading, jump out at me. Some of those things are jarring (e.g., passing off your wife as a sister), but others are just unexpected to me (e.g., I didn't even realize Abraham had a third wife). Also, it's less interesting (to me and, I assume, any readers that find this blog) to catalog the run-of-the-mill moral interpretations of parashot, which are all over the blogosphere and surely more insightful (and interesting) than anything I can offfer here.
Does this make sense?