2013-05-23T04:55:29-04:00 John R. Coats http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=john-r-coats Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for John R. Coats Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.853842 2011-04-28T20:15:01-04:00 2011-06-28T05:12:01-04:00

John R. Coats http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-r-coats/ the boat. Designed and built by an engineer who'd emphasized functionality over looks, she was not pretty, but she was spacious above and below, had the structural integrity of a tugboat and possessed a waste recycling system that was "as good as you'd find in most small towns." I was in love.

She seemed to have her own intelligence, and I suppose I'd projected that same evaluation onto Fred, the current owner, who did not disappoint -- that is, until the tour was done and the price haggling had given way to small talk and a complaint about his recent troubles with the utility company. Having received a notice that he'd underpaid, he was asked to please remit payment, by check or money order, in the amount of $16.66. He'd phoned to say that, no, he absolutely would not. He would, however, send a check for $16.67, or come by and pay $16.67 in cash, provided they issued a cash receipt in that amount, but no way would he pay a bill for $16.66 because the number contained "the Mark of the Beast."

Numbers are language, and John of Patmos, author of The Revelation of John, loved numbers. Sixes, obviously, in triplicate, a few 10s, and sevens -- especially sevens: Seven messages to seven communities, seven seals, seven trumpets, seven bowls. It is the author's "single most insistent motif," writes Jonathan Kirsch. Adele Yarbro Collins calls it "an organizing principle" of the whole of the work." But why sevens? Why not twos, eights or nines? Collins tells us that the late Pythagoreans as well as Philo of Alexandria, Jewish biblical interpreter and philosopher, agreed that "all reality is ordered and that order is expressed in patterns of seven ... [because] ... [t]he symbolic significance of this number is cosmic." And, as Kirsch points out, it was God's resting on the seventh day that signified creation's completion, making seven a "symbol of divine wholeness in Judaism."

All this would have made sense to the seven communities John had in mind and as he took up his pen, around the year 95 C.E., he was writing to them, not to us, and in a language of symbol and imagery that were as current and familiar to them as it is ancient and weird to us. Which brings me back to Fred, an obviously bright fellow, yet whose assumption about the meaning of 666 is characteristic of the inevitable flattening-out that results when ancient, complicated texts are read as if they are stories from old newspapers.

Where seven typically represents completion, six represents incompletion. But why three sixes? Think cryptology, John writing in code to those in the know. Craig R. Koester tells us that the author employed gematria, a system of Kabbalistic numerology. In fact, in the third chapter of Revelation, verse 18, it seems obvious that John assumes his audience will be familiar with the system: "Here is the key, and anyone who has the intelligence may work out the number of the beast. The number represents a man's name, and the numerical value of its letters is six hundred and sixty six." The numbers, Koester says, point to Nero, Emperor of Rome from 54-68 C.E., as the likeliest candidate.

But why the code? Why didn't John just name Nero? After all, Domitian now sat on the throne. And yes, Nero was five emperors back, 30 years dead and a ruler so vile that Rome had proclaimed him an enemy of the state. But he had been Emperor, a Caesar and Rome had decided that its Emperors were Gods, which was less about theology than state unity. To acknowledge the divinity of the Emperor, though as a God, not the God -- the Romans were polytheists -- was a way of saying "I'm for Rome," rather than "I'm against Rome." The slightest accommodation would have been enough, explained Kirsch in an interview with Beliefnet, "nothing more than casting a pinch of incense on a little brazier of hot coals set up in front of an image of a dead emperor." But the Christians (and the Jews) refused even to do that much. Already Domitian didn't like them, so for John to have named Nero as the third beast, he may as well have spit in the Emperor's eye and declared to his face that he was the Beast, too, sort of. Which he did, sort of, but in code and on the page, copies of which went to cities on the far eastern edge of the Empire. John, however strange he may seem, was not stupid.

Finally, a bit of fun. "With a little ingenuity," says Koester, "people in every generation seem capable of finding an adversary who can in some way be linked to the numbers." Of today's candidates, one may surprise you. Drawing from The New Millennium Manual, A Once And Future Guide, Koester writes the following: "Start with 'Cute Purple Dinosaur,' then change the U's to V's [as in formal Latin inscriptions] and extract all the Roman numerals in the phrase (CVVLDIV). Convert these to Arabic numerals (100 5 5 50 500 1 5) and add them up." Yes, it's Barney. There is a precedent in pop-culture, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters, who became the vessel for the evil Gozer. Whether his numbers put him in Barney's class, I can't say.
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.788897 2010-12-06T13:25:17-05:00 2011-05-25T18:15:22-04:00

John R. Coats http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-r-coats/
Right. I was 26, newly ordained, had just completed my Masters' Degree and this poster-boy for the naive hubris of youth had other ideas about the best use of his time and presence -- and wisdom. If you'd all just listen, I thought, I could give you the answers to all these problems. Or I think I just thought it. There've been times in the last decade or so of wondering if, maybe, I'd said it out loud, then suppressed the memory of the moment when I became an anecdote.

Joseph would have said it out loud. Those familiar with the Joseph narrative in Genesis may already have noticed in my story elements of the same arrogance and know-it-all grandiosity of youth. Like the enduring characters of all great literature, Joseph is archetypal, a character representative of something universal in human experience. You might even say that, in that moment, I was the young Joseph, just as so many young men and women, passing through the same phase of life, have likewise been Joseph.

Despite the lingering adolescence, I was on the move toward being a grown-up. Two years earlier, with only a year to go before graduation, ordination, and a life I wasn't sure I wanted, I'd asked for and was granted a year's internship at St. Mark's Episcopal Church on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. One of the most progressive parishes in the country, it was there that I was introduced to the method of biblical interpretation that I would use throughout my eight years in parish work, and that I employed in writing my book, Original Sinners: Why Genesis Still Matters, and that continues to be significant in my own development.

When my article "Adam and Eve and the Gender Divide" appeared in The Huffington Post on June 28, one reader's response was to ask, "Is there anything more pathetic than all the effort that goes into reinterpreting these ignorant myths?" Each posting drew similar fire. While it's tempting to return fire, age and religio-cultural atmospheres lend urgency, and it's more productive to look beneath the complaints, to the genuine, weary and fearful concern for a society in which so much of the national conversation is defined and controlled by ideologies that are weaponizing the Bible, fitting it to anti-democratic, pro-theocratic notions of what is, or ought to be, the will of any right-thinking deity.

But, what to do? For starters, accept the fact that, like it or not, the Bible is here to stay. It will remain at the center of our national conversations about who we are as a people and who we will become. Next, consider an invitation from the old rabbis to join in the process of biblical interpretation. The most enduring tradition in the 2,500 year history of biblical interpretation is that there is no one "correct" interpretation, but an infinite number. Moreover, the old rabbis said that it is the task of every generation to interpret the Bible in the light of its own circumstances, and the task of each individual to do the same. That is, not to know, but to go to the text with questions about being a human being in the world, the same questions that lie at the heart of all great literature.

Some interpretive methods assume belief. The method I use doesn't require the reader to believe anything other than her own experience of being human. But it does require re-framing, setting aside one's ideas about what the Bible is or isn't. To be sure, this is easier said than done, but if you read the stories simply as stories about people, sooner or later you may catch a reflection of your own story. Writing my book, my closest identification was with Jacob's penchant for playing the trickster and manipulating outcomes. Trying to understand the post-flood Noah's treatment of his son led from one thing to another until, to my surprise, I discovered that I'd worked out a knot of resentment almost 40 years old.

As with any serious method of interpretation, this one requires an educated interpreter. Start with a careful reading of Genesis in a modern translation. Because Genesis is really a patchwork of several sources, you'll need a guide through the maze. In addition to my book, I recommend the following scholarly, but accessible commentaries: Genesis, Translation and Commentary, by Robert Alter; Commentary on the Torah, by Richard Elliott Friedman; and The Torah, A Woman's Commentary, edited by Tamara Cohn Eskenazi. Also, Karen Armstrong's The Bible is an easy-to-read overview of how the Bible evolved over the centuries.

Finally, a bit of American irony: Given the Bible's influence on Western civilization, and given that the frontier-populist pieties derived from it continue to influence our public discourse and private lives, we can only conclude that the Bible belongs as much to the agnostic- or atheist-American as to the most ardent believer. So, whether you are religious or not, however you choose to participate in the conversation -- and you can't not participate -- your place at the table is a given.
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.716688 2010-09-16T09:34:32-04:00 2013-02-05T12:15:35-05:00

John R. Coats http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-r-coats/ Everyone believed. "Is there really a God?" would have been as silly a question as "Is there really air?" While separation of church and state was non-negotiable -- no one would tell them what to believe -- that was not to say that individual or community life should, or even could, be divided between secular and religious spheres. The Psalmist had said it, "Wherever I go, You are there," and even the town's worst sinners knew that God (both a Protestant and a dead ringer for Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel rendition) was watching, listening, judging their every thought and action, that Judgment Day was coming, and that redemption, so long as they could draw a breath, was never more than a prayer away.

Sunday mornings brought Sunday school followed by a church service, about three hours in all. After a quiet afternoon came Training Union followed by another service. Wednesday nights were for Prayer Meeting, a service that, like the first two, came complete with Bible readings and a sermon. Summer revivals meant one or more services per day, these delivered with the revivalist's particular, sometimes peculiar, nuance of evangelical showmanship. More than half of every summer of my childhood was immersed in that river of old-time religion with its certainty that Jesus would come again at the end of time. Yet from all the prayers, all the Bible readings and lessons, all those sermons, and all the hammering about sin, final judgment, and the fires of Hell, I have no memory of anyone mentioning anything called "the Rapture."

In fact, before 1830, no one had heard that "[i]n one cataclysmic moment, millions around the globe disappear," or that "those left behind, terror stricken, are desperate to determine what happened," which is what you'll find on the back cover of Tribulation, volume two of the Left Behind series. Authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, along with the likes of Hal Lindsay, the late Jerry Falwell and others, are proponents of the work of English clergyman John Nelson Darby. It was around 1830 that Darby, having selected scripture passages from Daniel, Revelation, 1 and 2 Thessalonians and elsewhere, pasted them together, called them a whole, and invented the Rapture, a word not found in the Bible.

While Darby's ideas found little traction in Great Britain, they received a predictably strong reception when he toured the States between 1859 and 1877. But it was Cyrus Scofield who kept Darby and his ideas from falling through the cracks of history. A follower of Darby and, apparently, an avid note-taker, Scofield made his study notes into Biblical annotations for what became The Scofield Reference Bible, a bestseller in early-twentieth-century America that is still in publication.

The narrative is pretty straightforward: We live in the End Times. Soon, on a day when the world situation has become so critical that it could blow at any moment, Jesus appears in the sky, visible only to right-believing Christians who, in an instant, are bodily beamed up to be with him. Driverless cars, vans, pickups, semis, buses and other vehicles suddenly careen out of control (hence the bumper sticker that reads, "In case of the Rapture, this car will be unmanned"), and pilotless airplanes crash. What follows is seven years of Tribulation, with its earthquakes, plagues, famines, wars and the rise of a charismatic, power-happy, and murderous Antichrist (all of which might leave even the most casual observer of the first decade of our new millennium to wonder how we'd tell the difference). Finally, Christ returns a second time, defeats the Antichrist and reigns over the earth for 1,000 years.

Out of favor during the middle decades of the twentieth century, Rapture advocates, also known as Dispensationalists and Premillennialists, now are center-stage in American life and government. In his book God and Empire, Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan writes, "The full Rapture program cannot be readily dismissed ... [because] ... there are very specific connotations to American foreign policy in the volatile Middle East." Why the Middle East? Because Rapturephiles believe that their moment will not come until just before the final conflagration between the Jews and the Arabs. So Middle East hatreds and violence must be allowed, even encouraged, to escalate to the point of no return. Moreover, since the Rapture is God's plan, any attempt at peacemaking, such as the current Middle East peace talks, which Secretary of State Clinton frames in terms of a "last chance" for peace, are against God's will. But not the invasion of Iraq, nor any future action intended to drive the Middle East -- and the world -- to the brink, and over.

To the observer, the ironies can be overwhelming. However, having myself stood at the door of true-believerism, I know how its self-absorption can mask the ironies obvious to others. Take, for instance, my copy of The Scofield Reference Bible. It's a red-letter edition (the words of Jesus are printed in red), the irony hiding behind the realities of Rapture theology, which has little to do with the teachings and actions of Jesus. Where he voiced a radical vision of a humanity founded on the dual principles of agape (love) and koinonia (communion), Left Behind theology seems to be more of a Save Your Behind theology, one in which Jesus is more of a shill, a name appropriated in hopes of gaining legitimacy.

So, what's real about the Rapture? Its roots are in the nineteenth-century rebellion against Modernity with its scientific rationalism. Beneath the glare of uber-left-brain logic, the stories and myths that had carried the larger truths about being human in an overwhelming, frightening, awe-filled universe were declared to be nonsense -- which is nonsense, and begged an equal and opposite reaction, which came in the declaration that the Bible was literally true -- every word. The idea of the Rapture, then, is Modernity's shadow, the unexpected, unscientific, and nonrational child of the rationalism that made it inevitable. Its adherents don't care that its Biblical evidence comes from pasted-together passages written by different authors at different times in history. To them, inside their belief system, it is a coherent narrative that is to be followed to the letter.

And therein lies the problem. We are all living witnesses to what religious true-believers are willing to do to the rest of us. Terry Jones and his Dove World Outreach Center stood ready to burn the Quran regardless of the consequences, which promised to be bloody. Thankfully, they didn't go through with it, but others did, and still others will. Should the more sophisticated but equally zealous advocates of a Middle-East-cum-worldwide holocaust gain sufficient voice in the making of American foreign policy, we may discover that questions about the flux of history that delivered us to this point, or whether the Rapture can be defended Biblically, or the ongoing banter about who's crazy and who's not, have become irrelevant. We could say, then, that the realest thing about the Rapture is that it's an idea with the potential for making the earth into a graveyard.

Click through the slideshow to view a list of the most and least Bible-minded cities in the United States:
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.681843 2010-08-18T21:53:01-04:00 2011-05-25T17:20:22-04:00

John R. Coats http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-r-coats/ really satisfy that urge but will prove to be important steps on the way to understanding what it is and to finding what will satisfy it. Then, I'll do that. Of course, I might be pretty old by then." A calling can, and often does, work just that way.

I grew up a Southern Baptist. Once in a while, toward the end of an otherwise typical Sunday morning service, our pastor would invite a young man from the congregation to join him on the dais. There he would announce that this "fine young man" had been called by the Lord into the Baptist ministry. The pastor would be glowing, the young man, his parents, the congregation -- a veritable light show of pleasure. As for me, I regarded the poor fellow as having contracted some awful disease that mutated normal guys into religious stiffs. Yet, always, I envied what I perceived to be their grasp of a purpose for their lives. Though I considered everything about church to be a grinding, suffocating bore, privately, jealously, I wanted to know what they seemed to know.

Whatever numinous, dogmatic or otherwise meaningful cloth we wrap the idea of calling in, the word itself is a noun that, not so long ago, referred to the singling out of an individual who'd been "chosen" for divine service. But that context is too small. Calling has to do with spirit, and both in biblical Hebrew and Greek, the word "spirit" can be rendered as "breath," or "breath of life," the breathing in and breathing out of that which inspires (from Latin, inspirare), and in human experience, that sort of transaction overflows the confines of what we've come to think of as religion. For instance, were you to ask a physician to explain what she meant by, "Medicine is my calling," her initial response might be that she was drawn by an interest in the field. Push a bit harder and you might see her expression soften, and hear her speak of having been compelled, so much so that nothing else had mattered.

So we could say that calling is a name we give to that need, that hunger, that longing that urges one's life toward greater clarity of meaning and purpose. In his book The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, James Hillman, Jungian analyst and the originator of post-Jungian archetypal psychology, writes, "Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path ... Despite early injury and all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, we bear from the start the image of a definite individual character with some enduring traits ... Each person enters the world called." Yes, but to what? And at what price?

By and large, we are a people of the great middle way. When one of our own becomes obsessed, it throws our normative world out of balance -- and we don't much like imbalance, or the oddballs who create it. For instance, had the guy joining the pastor on the dais been a plant foreman with three kids, two cars, and a mortgage, about to ditch that life for the ministry, an unspoken chorus of "What the ... ?" would have dimmed the light show. In fact, the few middle-aged members of my seminary class, each of whom had left a successful career, reported reactions from skepticism to disbelief to hostility. Each said he'd tried to satisfy the urge through more involvement in his parish or another type of service, but couldn't. It was all-in or nothing.

Actually, it was all-in or the funny farm. Each had found himself caught in a rather splendid web of catch-22 irony: While total commitment practically guaranteed that most friends, family, and colleagues would assume he had lost his mind, each had discovered that to do anything else guaranteed that he would lose it. While I knew what they were saying was true, I couldn't say why until I heard it from a poet.

In 1904, Rainer Maria Rilke, writing to a younger man who'd sought his advice, suggested that the authenticity of one's calling can be found only inside oneself. "[A]sk yourself this: Must I write? Dig deep into yourself for a true answer. And ... if you can confidently meet this serious question with a simple, 'I must,' then build your life upon it. It has become your necessity." Substitute work with the poor, forestry, law enforcement, the stage, the military, religion, painting, banking, coaching, law, politics, teaching, or another pursuit, and the answer remains the same: If you can live a full, satisfying life without doing it, it's not "your necessity," it's not your calling. Not even if you're really good at it. Not even if your parents, their friends, your friends, teachers and religious leaders all want you to do it and think you ought to do it and would be nuts not to do it, would it be wrong not to do it -- not even if you think you should want to do it but in fact don't. Rilke might agree that the presence of any language of obligation would be all the evidence you would need to differentiate the true calling from the false. To say I must because I should implies an obligation, not a calling. I must because, if I don't, I'll die inside is quite another matter.

How do you discover your own calling? You don't. But pay attention, make room for it in your life, and "your necessity" might make itself known. Will it make you rich? Maybe, maybe not. (Ask the ghost of Van Gough, or the currently starving artists!) Then again, even should you follow your calling, and even get rich, you may, from time to time, find yourself wishing that you'd been called to do something else. You have to appreciate the irony in that.

So if at some point in your life you begin to hear the whisperings of a new voice, and if that voice will not be ignored or diminished, but grows stronger, manifesting itself in your life as, say, some gravitational or magnetic force tugging you toward another life from the one you've been living, or the one you've planned, or the one planned for you and expected of you, and if you begin to imagine that other life as the only life worth your life, then it might be some deeper, wiser you coming to call. Say yes and you, too, can be one of those norm-breaking oddballs, in for trouble, having the time of your life.
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.656178 2010-07-26T15:57:23-04:00 2011-05-25T17:10:24-04:00

John R. Coats http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-r-coats/
No.

For a more detailed answer, I'll begin with an overview of the fable: Two messengers, or angels (Hebrew ma 'alak, Greek angelos), arrive at the gates of Sodom. There, Lot, Abraham's nephew, greets them and invites them to his home for the night, where a meal has been prepared. Soon, a mob gathers outside Lot's door and demands that he serve up his guests for a gang rape, which appears to be something of a local tradition. Lot, a relative newcomer to Sodom, goes out and asks that they leave his guests alone, and offers his two virgin daughters in their place. But the mob, incensed by the new guy's uppity attitude, decides it'll just start with him. As the crowd surges forward, the messengers open the door, grab Lot, and pull him in. Outside, an intense light leaves the crowd temporarily blind. Inside, the messengers tell Lot to gather up his family and get out of town immediately because they plan to destroy it. Sure enough, just after dawn, the whole valley explodes.

Back to motive. "Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known," says Kurt Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim. "The world was better off without them." No argument there. But, exactly what about them was vile? Was it that they were homosexuals? The text itself makes no such claim. In fact, James Kugel, Starr Professor Emeritus of Classical and Modern Hebrew Literature at Harvard, and currently chair of the Institute for the History of the Jewish Bible at Bar Ilan University, Tel Aviv, writes that the early interpreters were "perplexed about the city of Sodom. God destroyed it because of the terrible things that were being done there -- but what exactly were those things? Strangely, the Genesis narrative does not say."

In other words, what homosexuality? Richard Elliot Friedman, professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego, tells us that there is "no basis for this whatever. The text says that two people come to Sodom, and that all of the people of Sodom come and say, 'Let's know them.' The homosexuality interpretation apparently comes from misunderstanding the Hebrew word 'anasim to mean 'men,' instead of people."

This is an ancient story, created for an audience in a time when few could read and write, when a people's knowledge and culture were passed between generations through the medium of storytelling. The author(s) of this story assumed an audience versed in the nuances of the language and culture of their time and place, not ours. What if the author(s) of this fable intended the mob's behavior to point beyond itself, to be understood as symptomatic of something far more ominous -- that is, a breach in the social contract that, if allowed to stand, could threaten the fabric of desert culture? Kugel points to a tradition claiming that the flaw in Sodom's character was its failure of hospitality. While life in the Jordan valley was easier than that of the desert, its culture was nevertheless shaped by the experience of the desert, one of the harshest and deadliest climates on earth. The tradition of hospitality -- the obligation to welcome both friend and stranger with an offering of food, water, shelter, and protection -- was among the highest of virtues, without which life would have become untenable. So rooted was this obligation that one theory explains Lot's bizarre offering of his daughters as the demands of hospitality trumping the host family's well-being.

About the origin of the story, Kugel writes that it "looks like an etiological narrative, that is, the recounting of some incident from the distant past that serves to explain the way things are 'now,' at the time of the story's composition, when Sodom was a ghost town." Because ancient cities were located where water was sufficient and the land fertile, a new settlement would often be built atop the ruins of previous civilizations. People in the Jordan Valley of biblical times would have seen in the ruins of ancient cities the scars of some unexplained, fiery catastrophe that seemed to have engulfed a huge area. Being story tellers, they'd have created stories about these mysterious, long dead places, about how and why they were destroyed, and why new cities were never built atop their ruins.

As for what may have been the actual cause of the catastrophe, Gerhard von Rad, writing some 40 years before Kugel, speculated that "Perhaps a tectonic earthquake released gases (hydrogen sulfide)," which, ignited, would have made it seem that the air itself was ablaze. This story, then, may have been born in the wake of some bizarre geological event. Survivors and witnesses, like all ancient people, would have assumed the causal force to be the same divine energies behind all the mysteries pervading their world, and that the divine motive would have been punishment for something done or not done. As the memory of the event was passed on to new generations, the story as it appears in Genesis may have evolved.

William Sloane Coffin once wrote that "[i]n reality, there are no biblical literalists, only selective literalists." The truth of that is found in simple observation. Its denial begs the asking: what of those who labor on the Sabbath (Numbers 32-36)? And the idolaters (Deuteronomy 13:7-11, 17:1-6)? The defiant sons (Deuteronomy 21:18-21)? Adulterers (Deuteronomy 22:22, Leviticus 20:10)? The young women found not to be virgins when married (Deuteronomy 20:21)? Unlike the effort required in attempting to make a case for Sodom's fate, each of these violations is quite specifically written into the biblical text. As is the mandatory punishment of death by stoning -- that is, execution by members of the community who, having surrounded the condemned, hurl rocks until the man, woman, or child is dead. For anyone to claim Sodom's fate as evidence of divine punishment for homosexuality while remaining silent on these and other matters in the Bible assumes a position wholly without integrity -- and a rather convenient one, given the bloodbath that would be required. Yes, required. None of the texts referenced above allow for promises not to do it again, only for the execution of the guilty, and by the method specified.

Try wiggling out of any part of that and the whole structure of literalism evaporates. Moreover, if the fate of Sodom is to be the expected fate of all human settlements in which wicked things occur -- these being violations of divine commands either implied (supposedly) or written into the biblical text -- and if Hurricane Katrina was God's judgment on New Orleans for its sins of corruption, drugs, and general immorality, then what city, town, or village on the planet would not long since have been reduced to cinders, or laid waste by natural disaster?
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.636187 2010-07-06T10:15:52-04:00 2011-05-25T17:00:24-04:00

John R. Coats http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-r-coats/ What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. -Koheleth, Ecclesiastes (About 300 BCE)

Maybe not under his sun. Under ours, new arrives with ferocious velocity -- tomorrow's breakthroughs are yesterday's news. It is exhilarating, sexy, and dizzying, and maybe there is a moment here and there when it's all just a bit much, when a touch of solace is needed from things that don't change. If that's you, then take heart, because under both the ancient sun of Ecclesiastes and ours can be found the unchanging human technologies of deceit, corruption, small-mindedness, toxic sibling rivalry, dysfunctional families, infidelity, betrayal, and stupidity. Which, given Koheleth's iPodless, iPhoneless, iPadless age, was more to his point, I think. See for yourself -- pick up most any translation from the last sixty years and start reading the book of Genesis. But see it for what it is. Read it not as history, or as a "religious" book about "religious" people (it isn't, and they weren't, not in any modern sense of the word) but an ancient text written in the language of myth and metaphor. That said, I'll add that when Sunday school teachers talked of how we should emulate the biblical characters, it occurred to me, as it may have occurred to you, that some of what they did could draw some serious jail time, or worse.

Jacob, for instance. Even if you've not touched a Bible since grade school, you know him better than you think, given the likelihood that in the last few years, some of the current iterations of Jacob's early character have, with the élan of the best high society grifters, slipped a great deal of your money into their pockets without so much as a pause to ponder the ethics of their behavior.

His name -- Ya 'akov, "heel-holder" -- refers to his grasp on his twin brother's heel as they slid from the womb. This sounds sweet until you get to know Jacob and that fantastic obsession with being first, and start to question whether the image is less about brotherly love than about trying to pull his brother back in. Jacob was the smart one: conniving, ambitious, the obvious and best choice to assume his father's place as patriarch of the clan. But Tradition had another idea. Order of birth, it said, trumped brains and competence. Their father's blessing, therefore, with all the inherited perks -- supremacy in the clan, control of its property and wealth -- would pass to Esau, older by seconds, a doofus that Jacob, would be obliged to address as Lord. That is, unless he could outmaneuver his brother, which he'd already done once without breaking a sweat.

Getting around his father could prove another matter, though not insurmountable. While Tradition could be a cornerstone with which to build an orderly life for all, or a rock against which an upstart would smash in his willfulness, it could also become, in the hands of one clever enough, soft as sculptor's clay, remolded into little more than suggestions. Not unlike, say, the ethical responsibilities of banks and brokerage houses to their clients, and to the societies which give them leave to conduct their affairs. Jacob's wanting more is hardly an ambition that we in the 21st century could condemn with a straight face. Where it gets both morally murky and strikingly familiar is that the path he chooses for acquiring more is to steal from his brother by defrauding his father.

In broad outline, the story goes like this: When the time comes for the passing of the blessing, Jacob must fool his father into thinking he is Esau. First, his mother, Rebekah, determined that he would get the blessing, tells Jacob to slaughter two lambs so that she can get the jump on making the stew that Isaac has requested from Esau. But Jacob folds. Two reasons: One, Jacob is what's called "a man of the tent" -- think Late Bronze Age metrosexual -- while Esau is a far rougher sort, "a man of the field," meaning not just the physical, outdoor type, but a hunter, a guy used to blood-letting. Two, his brother is hairy, he is not, and their voices are hardly the same. Isaac might be old and nearly blind, but he's not stupid. Were he to catch on, it could mean banishment, even death. Saying she'll take the blame, Rebekah dresses Jacob in Esau's best clothes, wraps his hands and neck with the lambskins, gives Jacob the stew, and pushes him into his father's tent. After a moment's hesitation, Isaac lays his hands on Jacob and says the words of the blessing. Jacob is in, Esau is out. The future that was to have been Esau's evaporates.

Periodic plundering by high-level grifters is an American tradition. However, measured by lives ruined and the near collapse of the world economy, the current gaggle has pretty much put its predecessors in the shade. They and the generations of thieves before them knew what the young Jacob knew: that with brains, ambition, a plan for maximizing results while minimizing personal risk and, finally, being possessed of that certain amphibian sensibility that relieves one of giving a damn about collateral damage, one can get what one wants.

So, three thousand years later, is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new!"? Well, sure -- iPods, iPhones, iPads, organ transplants, nukes, computers computing at the speed of light, the internet. The other stuff, the human stuff, it was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.

]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.624831 2010-06-28T22:49:00-04:00 2011-05-25T16:55:19-04:00

John R. Coats http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-r-coats/ writes Hanna Rosin in "The End of Men," her recent piece in The Atlantic, the emerging economy is indifferent to all that, valuing instead the more female attributes of "social intelligence, open communication, [and] the ability to sit still and focus." Not exactly manly stuff.

You'd think the ancient scribe who first imagined Eve had seen this coming -- certainly she is the more interesting of the pair, more resilient. But in that before time she became a sort of canvas on which centuries of the learned and the brainless felt free to sketch their interpretive portraits, an accumulation that leaves the actual woman in the story almost unrecognizable. One of the more damaging images is the result of a misreading of the second creation account. It's the one in which Yahweh fashions the man from the soil (earth, adama), then the birds and animals. Then, seeing that the man needs a companion, a mate, Yahweh puts him to sleep, takes a rib, and creates one. But, one what, exactly?

In Hebrew, the phrase is 'ezer kenegdo, which, for centuries, has been translated as "helper," or "helpmate" -- the little woman. But biblical scholars Robert Alter and Richard Elliot Friedman, their arguments convincing, translate the phrase, respectively, as "sustainer beside him [the man]," and "a strength corresponding to him." In other words, the woman was created in order to be a partner -- an equal partner. Moreover, given that adam is the Hebrew word for "human," not "man," Eve is as much an adam as Adam. In fact, regarding the first creation story, scholar Tamara Cohn Eskenazi writes, "By referring to adam, the text is not describing an individual but a new class of beings that comprises female and male from the start, both of them in God's image. ... Our humanity comes first; our sexual identity next."

So we're left with nothing in either creation narrative that places the woman in an inferior position to the man -- not her sex, not her place in the order of creation, and not the reason she was created. So, why the long history to the contrary? The short answer is that in the flux and flow of history, there came a moment when a fall-guy was needed, and those making the choice were all men.

Known in Jewish history as "the great divide," the year 586 BCE witnessed the fall of Jerusalem, the destruction of the first Temple, followed by half a century of exile from the promised land. Then, in 532 BCE, after the Babylonians fell to the Persians, Cyrus granted the Israelites the option to return. Those who chose to go back were haunted by the idea that, somehow, their ancestors had tweaked the divine nose and lost the protective shield. But how? Nobody had a clue. The elders who might have remembered were dead, along with their deep, nuanced understanding of the sacred texts and the old, pre-exile Hebrew in which they'd been written. With no place else to look but their sacred writings, when answers weren't forthcoming with sufficient clarity, the role of the interpreter was born. None was a woman.

Grabbing their attention was the story of Adam and Eve thumbing their noses at the divine command not to eat the fruit of that tree. Some interpreters concluded that the fault lay with Adam and Eve, at least in part. And they saw an obvious order of guilt. First place went to the serpent, of course. Eve took second: while either human could have just said no, she could have said it first. Among the many ironies in this real-world drama is how it underscores Adam as a victim, a position he'd claimed already with, "[T]he woman ... gave it to me and I ate it." Exactly the point they seemed to miss! He ate it -- an act of free will! Yes, Eve tried passing the buck as well, but they wouldn't allow it. By failing to hold Adam to the same standard of responsibility demanded of her, Eve's vilifiers made him not more than her, but less. His becomes an image not unlike what Rosen calls the "omega male," that product of American pop culture who "can be sweet, bitter, nostalgic, or cynical, but he cannot figure out how to be a man."

Had early interpreters been content to say that scripture proved Eve to be an inferior, and leave it at that, there'd have been little about her to capture the imagination. Guilt made her infamous. The image of this Inferior-Guilty Eve as the woman who brought us all down would define her and her gender for the next 2,500 years, right up to the modern era, when fluid attitudes about religion and morality would transmogrify her guilt into naughtiness and take her into pop culture. In the decades following the Second World War, secular interpreters -- creators of imagery in advertising, for instance -- began tinkering with Eve's likeness, taking liberties that most would not dare with the Virgin Mary.

Enter Hooker Eve. You've see her, the barefoot hottie from TV commercials and magazine ads, holding the apple with the missing bite, wearing minimalist cave-girl couture, all of it a barely subtextual suggestion that "if you want some of this, buy some of that." This iteration of the biblical character attempts to represent a modern, hip, liberated view of women, but is only another expression of the same, millennia-old idea about women, their value and place in society. She's Inferior-Guilty Eve with less clothing, and disposable.

Beyond the religious and secular interpretations is the original character, Genesis Eve, the woman as the writers, and particularly the author of the second creation story, imagined her: strong, vulnerable, neither apologetic about her womanhood nor tempted to cheapen it. She is carnal, and she is neither afraid of sex nor only about sex. Her partner never says or implies that her sex is inferior to his own, or that she bears more, or less, responsibility for the incident at the tree, or for the consequences that enveloped their lives as a result. And if you like irony, you'll want to notice that, unburdened by Bible-based standards, this Eve is naked as a Jaybird right up to the point that she and Adam are busted.

While women in the emerging world are discovering new, empowering answers to the question "Who and What are We?" many men, the old, foundational answers not evolving so much as crumbling beneath their feet, are discovering a trackless present and future never imagined by their fathers. These findings in Rosen's article reveal a gender migration hardly imagined forty years ago, and that is now upon us. Upon us -- the men and the women. As Eve steps forward, as the monopoly on power slips away from men, I hope she'll be the partner he was not, that he'll find the grace to take his place beside her, and that we humans, male and female, together will find the wisdom not to pass another few millennia so out of balance.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.619432 2010-06-21T16:39:00-04:00 2011-05-25T16:50:20-04:00

John R. Coats http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-r-coats/
Lesson 1: Nursing anger is a fool's game: Cain

If you've ever offered an idea that was snubbed, or given a gift that was ignored, then you and Cain share something in common, even if you didn't kill anybody.

In the story, Cain, a farmer, and Abel, a sheepherder, each present an offering to Yahweh. Abel's offering is acknowledged, Cain's ignored. Family systems theory might interpret what happens next as part of a pattern of alienation. Imagine Cain in that moment: angry, hurt, and confused, he stands there, watching, listening, his mood shifting, darkening, familiar, a silent scream building, wanting release, to shout, "What is this? Am I invisible?" And yet, what could he do about it? Take a swing at Yahweh? Probably not. But Abel, his little brother -- now, he was another matter.

We've all done it. With too much frustration at work, at school, too much traffic, too much heat, we share our darker side with whomever is down the food chain and handy -- subordinates, the kids, younger siblings, the dog, the cat. Why? Because in that moment, beneath all the reasons, like Cain, we'd rather behave like that than not behave like that. Cain's anger, nursed and self-justified over time, had become a character in his life and, no doubt, in the life of his family. Vibrating just below critical mass, unable to absorb another real or perceived slight, it erupts, which, ironically, gives a forensic framework for making sense of Cain's actions while making Abel no less dead.

Lesson 2: You reap what you sow, and that thing you want more than anything might arrive with more than you bargained for: Jacob

The Jacob we first meet in the narrative wants, and is determined to have, the blessing that would make him patriarch. But he is the second-born son, and such blessings go to the first-born. No worries, he'll steal it. Being ethically challenged, he could avoid the angst others might feel about absconding with a brother's life and focus on the door of opportunity. When it opened, with his mother's help, he fooled his old, nearly blind father into thinking that he was Esau. Suddenly, the goal that had defined and energized his imagination was realized! What a moment! And what a bummer when his mother came to say that Esau, his brother, a tough, dangerous individual "is consoling himself by planning to kill you." Oops.

So he goes to live with his mother's brother, Laban, where he is smitten with Rachel, Laban's daughter. He wants her, she wants him, and since Jacob is broke and can't pay the bride-price, "How about I work for you for seven years, after which Rachael and I will marry?" Done. After seven celibate years, a few days of wedding celebration -- What a night! And what a bummer when he wakes up to discover that it had been Leah under that heavy veil! Jacob was outraged, but Uncle Laban reminded him that tradition required that the oldest daughter be married first. The irony, of course, is that Laban had pulled the same bait and switch that Jacob had pulled on his father. A man could have multiple wives, so Laban tells Jacob that he can still have Rachael -- in exchange for another seven years.

He wanted the blessing, he got the blessing, plus his brother's hatred and twenty years of exile. He wanted Rachel, he got Rachel, and her sister, and their handmaidens (surrogate wives), eleven sons, a daughter, and a sleazy father-in-law.

Lesson 3: There are people who just don't get it (and never will): Laban

Biblical sleaze par excellence, even the sages of the Midrash didn't like Laban.

First he tricks Jacob into marrying his oldest daughter. Then, he tries it a second time. After years of indentured servitude, Jacob is owed a substantial severance package. When he tells Laban how little he wants, Laban, surprised, had only to hold up his end of the bargain, and that would have been the end of it. But Laban wants more. Like Jacob, he is greedy, deceitful, and clever. Unlike Jacob, he does not evolve. All those years before, when he'd substituted Leah for Rachel, Jacob had been starry-eyed with love and lust. Now clear-headed, wary, and watchful, he sees Laban coming, and turning the game back on him, leaves him and his family in a state of near financial ruin. The last we see of Laban is an attempt at saving face, a confrontation with Jacob in which he proves himself to be a dedicated fool.

Lesson 4. Even if Mommy and Daddy say it's not you, if everyone else hates your guts, it's probably you: Joseph

Either you know him, knew him, or you are him -- I mean the self-absorbed little creep at whom everyone has wanted to scream, "Who the hell do you think you are?" If pop psychology is anywhere near the mark, and such outrage is evidence of projection onto another of some despised, denied part of the self, then Joseph's brothers harbored some serious self-hatred, given how they despised the ground he walked on and the air he breathed. He ratted on them every chance he got, then told them of the dreams in which they'd all bowed down to him. But he was daddy's favorite, and no brotherly beatings or threats were allowed. Moreover, none of the nonverbal hostilities beamed his way could penetrate his certainty that everyone loved him more than they loved themselves.

In time, Joseph, the gifted, self-absorbed boy, will morph into the gifted, consciously aware grown-up who saves the known world from starvation. The crisis that sets it all in motion is his showing up in that gorgeous, expensive coat. That being the proverbial straw, they jumped him, stripped him, tossed him into a pit -- and broke for lunch. As they were eating, they spotted a caravan and, deciding it would be less traumatic for them to sell him into slavery than kill him, they made a deal for 20 pieces of silver.

Lesson 5: There are certain experiences that we humans are not designed for: Post-flood Noah and his family

First of all, follow the dimensions given for the ark and what you'll build is not a boat but a huge cargo container-like structure with one smallish opening in the roof and a door on the side. Second, what the people inside that thing endured was not a slow filling up of the world. The notion of 40 days and nights of rain is from a single sentence inserted into a larger narrative in which, as scholar Richard Eliot Freedman writes, Yahweh unleashes "a cosmic crisis in which the very structure of the universe is endangered."

In other words, stuffed into a huge box, the whole of what remained of life now finds itself in the midst of a catastrophe of such violence that existence itself is threatened with non-existence.

Physically, they survive, but they are not the same, and their world is not the same. A slow deterioration sets in, the sort we see time and again in survivors of airline, train, and car crashes, in the victims of natural disasters, in combat veterans -- the dazed countenance, the depression, the quick anger, and the unutterable sadness of our fellow human beings who've seen, done, experienced things for which we humans are not designed to endure. ]]>