Those who are capable of tyranny
are capable of perjury to sustain it
--Lysander Spooner
In the previous chapter, Mnemonics For Antiquity: Part Three, we have continued to examine the Old Testament with a focus, fashioned after the thoughts of Louis Althusser, of the mechanisms put in place which have been built upon, like a canon, resulting in the duplication of itself, through the worker, creating the world as we know it today.
In Part Four, I shall continue to analyze the Testament continuing from the last segment of Part Three.
ECCLESIASTES
This chapter follows closely behind Proverbs with an almost last ditch attempt by a remaining elder to guide those that did not live in his time. It appears too that this is a personal account of life and experience, rather than words handed down from an unseen entity (God). Are we seeing man come to the conclusion that speaking from the self, relaying the personal may be more meaningful, have more impact and result in better persuasion than empty threats?
Solomon also concedes that it is natural for man to chase and want the material things that life has to offer, but that in the end, we all die and none of these materials can be taken with us. From this concepts we know of the proverb: You can't take it with you. This a a big turn around from our earlier chapters where we have seen hard admonishments put forth to those that had their own ideas. Solomon is giving way to the pursuit of wealth and material things; conceivably these are the seeds of capitalism. Slowly God is receding to the background and man is stepping forward with their own conclusions learned from life.
SONGS
Songs, formatted as poetry, is a modest gentle way to discuss sex, offspring, (the continuation of a religion, language and its subsequent growth), within the confines of marriage. There is a special note from Solomon to women. He tells them to go forth and gaze upon the crown of that he wore when he got married. He is no longer suggesting anyone follow God but he himself, the king, as well he is encouraging women to go forth and multiply. Again, I would like to stress that women as mothers are primarily responsible for the upbringing of children. That within the confines of marriage there are no bastard children and that lineages therefore will remain somewhat intact. Mothers always know who their children are, but fathers do not. The seeds sown here are many. The right to inheritance, who can claim a surname, who can be called a Jew, a Muslim, and even further down the line in history, who can be freed from slavery and who can't. Under American slavery all offspring of slaveholder and enslaved remain the property of the slaveholder and children became nothing more than additional property with never a worry that the child could one day claim rights to inheritance. In this scenario the visual was important too. Dark skinned children could not be imagined as human or worthy of entitlement; the laws of the time that insure the enslaved were property, perceived as sub-human and to remain in bondage had to be upheld thus children under bondage remain with the mother.
ISAIAH
How to you keep a racket going on and on? How do you keep people interested when they'd rather build chariots or sleep? You invent something to look forward to, far in the future, that promises bigger and better things. You do this when you see interest beginning to wane. And what better way to excite a crowd than to tell the weary that in the future there is going to be an even better God. And he's going to be seen on a donkey, and get this, he's going to be born of a virgin birth! He's also going to remodel Heaven and Earth! Holy Smokes! But, and here is the 'but', if you don't heed God now you won't believe the misery headed your way. Isaiah paves the way for the concepts of heaven, hell, sin and an afterlife spent in one or the other of places. Before threats from God were limited to the time period of a life: plagues, disease, etc. Now the threats encompass the time after your death which is a new type of concern and mechanism. Not only do you have to worry about the here and now but even after you are ten feet under. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; a return to the earth is no longer a satisfactory conclusion. You must now be threatened and chased in the afterlife too.
I once asked an imam why these so called miracles were so prevalent in sacred texts and his answer was straightforward. He said: Because sorcery was what people believed in wholeheartedly during these times. People were illiterate and didn't have science or knowledge of how things worked at the time so trickery, magic, and the like were used as teaching tools. Of course there were those that knew it was trickery but just like today where anything can be found on the Internet it takes research, comparison, and a basic understanding of what a qualified resource is. Everything on the Internet is not true. Learning to discern fact from fiction is not as easy as one might think and as time marches on it becomes harder. Information is power. It was in biblical times and it is now. If you are lucky to have gone on to higher education you will have learned things that you thought you knew to be true in high school. Higher education in some ways doesn't teach you more but what it does teach you is how to be better adept at discerning fact from fiction and most importantly it allows you access to information that one can not find easily sitting at home with a computer. You gain access to original texts, scholarly publications which your mind can build upon; research that has already been done that you can take further.
JEREMIAH
Most of the threats and warnings in Jeremiah are no longer coming from God. They are coming from kings and let me say it plainly: Kings are men but they are men with a vested interest in power, who have power, and within their kingdoms, have power over you. Look up the word 'lord'. Research the use of the word historically. God is no longer talking. The lord king is.
LAMENTATIONS
This is a chapter about despair and it is in the form that we know so well today. We are in despair right now as we speak. War rages someplace, somewhere on any given day. Peoples, nations, art, whole cultures are being destroyed on a daily basis. What was once this, has now become that, with soon a time coming when no one to remember what once was. Go to a museum. There you can see what once was in bits and pieces. If you go to The Smithsonian you can see yourself as you once were just yesterday.
People are starving to death while piles of food go uneaten, water is being purchased by corporations so that in the future only certain people can afford to drink, we are preoccupied with the end of the world. Global warming, uncontrolled viruses, bodies made susceptible to diseases once common and controlled, animals becoming extinct, languages becoming extinct, pollution, crops and food becoming suspect. Lamentations is a worry bead. We have worried since the beginning of time and in some ways I would say we like to worry. Some things are suitable for worry but when you worry about the end of life or the world you are worrying about something that is cyclic and will come again, anew, fresh, all over again. There is really no need to worry. It is sad this cycle. It is sad that we repeat ourselves never seeming to learn. but we do learn but in tiny increments, never all at the same time, and hardly noticeable. And it may be sad to see a polar bear go, another animal will take its place. Perhaps something better or cuter. I don't know. All I know is that I do not lament that what is here now may be gone once day.What takes it place will be carried on the shoulders of those better equipped than I to handle a future I do not know. I can only lament that I will not be a part of the future that swells before us all.
EZEKIEL
He's a priest. He's a doomsday prophet and he isn't too crazy about women. He also hallucinates. And he himself has bought into the concept of the prophet of the future. He is the seed of misogyny. He is also a seed for the New Testament. How come none of these prophets, and the like, have visions of peace and joy? Of food for everyone? Of babies arriving speaking 8 languages? Why all the gloom and doom? Why is joy only to be had after death? As humans we share laughter and despair. We have a range of experiences that result in a range of emotions. Why do sacred texts focus on the misery? Are we only orderly when threatened? Do we only get it right when cattle prods are implemented? There is so much to be said about sugar attracting sugar. When you are sweet that is the time for me to approach you when I want something. Everyone knows this. Even if we claim that the sweet is sweeter when followed by heartache then I still ask: where is the sweet in sacred texts? God only threatens. He's not sweet anywhere in these texts. He's only sweet if you get with the program. There will be no laughing or smiling or showing your teeth with God unless he says so and that very premise forces you and me to obliterate our natural instincts. Even with God we must find the joke.
DANIEL
Daniel is the very first Self-Help guru. Here is a guy who spent years in captivity, was released and spends his days lecturing on how he survived the ordeal. He tells us about what he eats and doesn't eat, and when he prays and doesn't pray, and in defiance of what others are doing. At the end of each lecture he takes on the perfunctory: I did it all in God's name. He does this all with his cohorts and others who are in position of power. All he does in this chapter is self promote.
HOSEA
Hosea is instructed to marry a woman that is known to be unfaithful. (Hosea finds a woman who likes sex more than Hosea or Hosea marries a woman whom he can't satisfy). But instead of this being about Gomer, (can you believe her name was Gomer?!), the lesson we are to learn here is that women, wanton women, women with sexual needs, need to be under the control of a man, a husband. We don't learn of her charms, we aren't told of her worth, we only are told that Hosea is magnificent for keeping her even though she isn't, supposedly, worth keeping. If we are paying attention to this entire story we also can glean that unfaithful, adulterous men can be in positions of power but women can not. However Hosea does assert that without knowledge people will ultimately be destroyed, (destroy themselves), and even their children will be forgotten. I think it interesting that he mentions the lineage of children. Yesterday I saw an Oxford Union Q&A with Judge Judy Sheindlin. During one part of the discussion she mentions that during her time in Family Court, a place truly incapable of any real change, the biggest heartache she encountered was the fate of children. That we had reached a place in time when children, were used as ashtrays, (her words). She continued on with the importance of being fully prepared with financial and emotional capabilities before we brought children into the world. The world will not get better with children that are not provided with the basic needs necessary to be whole, rounded, educated, and nurtured. That parents that are drug addicted, homeless, uneducated, caught up in abuse cycles of their own, etc., can not possibly provide environments to raise the future. Today there is a culture which abounds that is anti-child. And that says something about Hosea's warning and us today. At this point in the text I am wondering how many prophets were women, gentiles, or of colour?
JOEL
Joel is doing all the talking for God here. He paraphrases Gods words by using his own. His land. His prophesies. God is less and less and more and more an afterthought thrown in for good measure.
AMOS
Amos reminds me of Donald Trump. His rhetoric is familiar. Everyone is wrong, but me. If you don't do as I say, all hell is going to break loose. No one is as religious as me. Only I know how to do things right. Everyone is fake, but me. And I am going to build, build, build and make everything great again like in the good old days… with my name on it all.
OBADIAH
Here's where things get messy and ugly. Now God has decided that because of this that and the other, and the 'other' being people who disobeyed in some way, he has selected a group of people as his chosen ones. People go berserk with those words. Does he mean Jewish people are chosen? Or people in general who obey his command? If it's only Jewish people why in the world would anyone not Jewish read any further? Why would Jewish people want to live in a world where everyone else is a bother? 'Chosen Ones' carries a heap of potential meaning and coming from God it sounds kind of irresponsible and mean. I don't think that's what's going on. I think it is man declaring these words in the same way that man, at another time in history, claimed that Africans should be enslaved and deemed not a man. It's political. It is a sanction, under the guise of God, that insures someone gets something and another doesn't. It could have been anyone but we have construed it to mean Jewish peoples. And no one has to look further than Zionism, Palestine and Israel to understand that five minutes ago people are still under the impression that God is still yammering away on behalf of Jewish peoples. He is not. It is man that is waging war. It is man that uses sacred texts as some sort of textbook for survival. Do you honestly think God hates any country or peoples that are dying and being slaughtered by another people because he wishes for it? Did you really believe Apartheid was God's idea? Or that machete hacked Rwandans was God's idea? Or that American slavery was God's plan? That napalm and children running down roads on fire was God's bright idea? Politics is man's creation and the ideas behind it are specifically designed, by man, to get him what he wants by any means necessary. There is a vested interest in suppression, Apartheid, war, invasion, starvation, and any other type of warfare that transpires around us. Someone profits from it. Period. Obadiah relays many means spirited threats in the name of God here but they are all carried out my man. Do you see the problem here? I can do any kind of terrible thing to you but as long as I say God directed me to do so, I get away with murder. Literally.
In Chapter Chapter Five of this essay I will continue to examine, The Old Testament, beginning with Jonah. We will be moving closer the The New Testament and I will examine the change in language from God to man, the strategies put in place that have more to do with mans advancement of self than God's word, and the introduction of sin, hell and heaven as a new means of control.
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