"Bible Week" continues.

 “Bible Week” at The Ambiguities 

Thursday’s child has far to go. A story of Daniel, who will later be thrown into the lion’s den.

This is about Daniel when he was a servant of Cyrus of Persia and a favorite of the king. And it’s about a voracious Babylonian god, called Bel, who ate enormous quantities of food, who drank enormous quantities of wine, and who managed to die before he’d lived. It happened this way.

Bel the Great, after supper, feelin' good.*

     The king worshiped the great Bel; he went to see it every day; but Daniel never went with him. The king wondered why, and Daniel said it was because he didn’t worship idols, created by human hands but the God of all that created hands, bodies, brains, the heavens and the earth, God of all because he created all things – the living God.

     Then the king said, “Do you think Bel is not a living God? Don’t you see how much he eats and drinks every day?”

          “He doesn’t eat or drink anything,” Daniel said. “Ask his priests.”

So the king sent for the priests and told them what Daniel had said that Bel was eating or drinking nothing. If so, where was it going?

     The priests asserted that Daniel was a blasphemer, if Bel wasn’t eating and drinking all that was brought to him, Daniel should die. And the king agreed. “Only,” he said, “if Daniel is somehow right, you die.”

The king went with Daniel into the temple of Bel, and Bel’s priests went with them – there were 70 priests and all had families, and the families came into the temple, too. And the chief priest said to the king, “Here is the meat and the bread and the wine for Bel. We’ll leave it hear with him; we’ll go out; you can seal the door and mark the seal with your signet. Come back tomorrow, and see what you see.”

     And so it went, and they went out, first the priests, then the king and Daniel. But the king and Daniel did not go out before Daniel had spread a fine coating of ashes on the floor around Bel and his feast. But when all were out and the door was shut, the door was sealed with the king’s signet.

Night came, and the priests with their wives and their children entered the temple through a trap door, and they ate and they drank as they always did. While Bel looked on, they ate till they were full and more than full. Then they went out the way they had come in.

     And morning came, and the king came to the temple with Daniel. And they saw that the seals had not been broken. The broke them, opened the door, and the king saw the table, empty except for plates and cups and bones and crumbs soaking up spilled wine.

     And the king said, “See.” And Daniel laughed. “Yes, see,” he said. “Look at the floor.” And there the king saw the smear of foot-prints and buttocks-prints all around Bel’s table. These led Daniel to the trap door, which he opened for the king.

What happened next to the priests of Bel and their wives and their children, what happened to Bel and his temple, is it not written in the annals of Cyrus of Persia, kept by his servant Daniel?
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* artist's misrendering

04.21.16

"Bible Week"

 “Bible Week” at The Ambiguities 

Wednesday’s child is full of woe. Three stories from 2 Maccabees.

It happened when Antiochus was retreating from Persia. (He had made the mistake of trying to take Persepolis, rob the temples, and rule the city.) He had come to Ecbatana, where he heard about the defeat of Nicanor and Timothy by the Jews. And he was (in what has become common parlance) pissed. And he decided he’d take out on the Jews the shame the Persepolites had put on him. So he ordered his charioteer to drive on, no stops until they got to Jerusalem, which, he said, he was going to make “a cemetery of Jews.”

     But the God of Israel, who sees all and hears all, saw Antiochus and heard what he said, and he struck him “an incurable and unseen [and obscene] blow.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Anti was “seized with a pain in his bowels,” for which there was no relief and no let up. It was torture. “And that very justly, for he had tortured the bowels of others with many and strange inflictions.”

It was a different Antiochus, the son of Antiochus, that the wicked Menelaus, who kept hoping to be chief priest, “with utter hypocrisy” goaded on against his own people. But God, “the King of kings,” got into that, too, arousing “the anger of Antiochus against the scoundrel,” based on information Lysias had. So Antiochus ordered them to take him to Beroea “and to put him to death by the method which [was] the custom in that place.”

     So they did. And the method was this. There was a tower in Beroea, “fifty cubits high” (or about 75 feet)* “full of ashes, and it [had] a rim running around it which on all sides [inclined] precipitously into the ashes,” like a funnel. And they punished men “guilty of sacrilege or notorious for other crimes” over the edge. Naturally, they died, smothered in the ashes, and they were left there; they were not buried in the earth.

     And that was the fate of “Menelaus the lawbreaker” finally, and it was “eminently just, because he had committed many sins against the altar whose fire and ashes were holy.” So he “met his death in ashes.”

The same Nicanor that served the first Antiochus served the second. His long and inglorious career ended this way.

J. M.

     He came after the Jews with a ton of stuff, though his “abominable design” to attack them on the Sabbath failed. Still, a ton of stuff, and Judas Maccabeus saw that, that Nicanor had ranks and ranks of soldiers and a “varied supply of arms” and elephants. So Judas prayed to “God the righteous judge,” saying, “O Lord, thou didst send thy angel in the time of Hezekiah king of Judea, and he slew fully a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the camp of Sennacherib. By the might of thine arm may these blasphemers who come against thy holy people be struck down.” By “struck down,” he meant annihilated.

     Nicanor must not have heard Maccabeus prayer, for “his men advanced with trumpets and battle songs, but “Judas and his men met the enemy in battle with invocation to God” and more prayers. And, of course, they prevailed, though they killed only thirty-five thousand men not one-hundred and eighty-five thousand. Still, they “were greatly gladdened by God's manifestation,” and when the action was over they turned toward home “with joy.”

     But on the way, they saw Nicanor. He was in full armor but dead. And interrupting, the army’s “shouting and tumult,” their blessing “the Sovereign Lord in the language of their fathers,” Judas, “the man who was ever in body and soul the defender of his fellow citizens, the man who maintained his youthful good will toward his countrymen, ordered them to cut off Nicanor's head and arm” so they could take them with them back to Jerusalem.
     And when they got there, he called everyone together, including the priests at the altar and those that were in the citadel. And he showed them “the vile Nicanor's head and that profane man's arm, which had been boastfully stretched out against the holy house of the Almighty.” Then, holding up the head, he cut out the “ungodly” Nicanor’s tongue, saying that he was going to feed it to the birds. And he was going to hang his head and arm, “these rewards of [the ungodly man’s] folly” opposite the sanctuary. And all looked to heaven and blessed the Lord “who had manifested himself” in the battle. And Judas did hang Nicanor’s head from the citadel, as “a clear and conspicuous sign” of the Lord’s help.

     This was the thirteenth day of the Adar, and it was by decree “by public vote never to let [the] day go unobserved, but to celebrate it as Nicanor’s day. And so it was.

Here endeth the lesson.

04.20.16

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Quotes are from the Revised Standard Version.
 
 * This is really cool. (It may be found here.)

6.06

 6.06 

Writing, Philip Roth is right, is always a lie. It puts in order what has none; or it changes the order of things that said they wanted to be in a row. It fills in gaps that we once fell through, so that we can come through to an imagined end, when for us there is no end but death or paralysis, which comes abruptly.

Six years and seven days ago, Maureen Mastick, from whom Roz bought our house, died. It was a Monday, like today. End of story, except for the ragged arrangements made for her burial that Wednesday. The purpose of burial services, besides consolation, is to tie up loose ends. But Maureen's loose ends were Maureen's, no one else's. And she was dead and gone; she was absent from the dénouement, from the French for "untie," so originally the untying of a plot, not the tying up of loose ends.

On the day between her death and her burial, a train running blithely along the track from Mals to Merano crashed between Latsch and Kastelbell-Tchars when it ran into a landslide, the mud falling at the moment the train was passing. Nine people were killed; the stories they were telling themselves – constantly doubling back to tuck in a stray line or snip a loose end – went black like a movie theater in a power outage. Even the exit signs may fail. A child whimpers, a man curses, the lovers in the corner of the balcony freeze just as he was about to        her

04.12.10 & 04.18.16

Fore

Four from Uncle Albert:

          ¤ No matter how hard we all try, not everyone can be a victim.

          ¤ When we are alone, we crave company as if the meal that made us ill might cure us.

          ¤ Run away from those determined to be their best, truest selves. You have embarrassments 

            enough of your own without joining in others'.

          ¤ In time of plenty, the prophets threaten want; in time of want they threaten plenty. 

Another parable

If Gaspar Stephens continues to poke at me, especially about matters of religion, that's a good thing, I think. But if I become provoked and write as I did to him recently that I find myself reading Scripture more and more as parable, is that (a good thing)?
    Consider the story from The Ambiguities of April 6th , "Phineas the Impaler." How could it be a parable? What lesson would it teach - that is, if parables are lessons!

               A man came to The Teacher. "I have heard that you say that we should never kill, or 

          even become angry with others, lest we judged. Can the past ever pass away?" The man 

          said this not because he was anxious about his past but because feared the future.
               The Teacher said: "The kingdom of God was once compared to a man who brought 

          a foreign woman to his tent. And a priest, when he saw it, went and fetched his spear; 

          and he followed them, and when he had found them, the man on top of the woman, 

          he ran the spear through both of them, the man's back and the woman's belly, and 

          into the bloody ground.
               "Who has ears, let him hear."

Carping about the day

 Carping at the day                                                                           

After three days sick to death, I’ve forgotten how to get out of bed. Instead, I daydream, fantasize, listen to the radio, read; I belch, fart, drink the coffee the dog brought me, and consider not remembering – the Proust fantasy without all the friends dropping by: I have no desire to “receive”; I am completely happy with my imaginary playmates. But, I’ve promised to get to work at least by this afternoon.

     Eventually my bowels will force me out. Then, the day – as distinct from the night before – will begin. “One at a time!”

Uncle Albert thinks that, “one day at a time,” is a selfish philosophy. He may be right; it’s certainly not an expansive one.

          Or, it is. This day will come and go like many others in a jagged series of small, restless movements, stuttering like a wind-up clock, quivering like a rabbit, looking back over its shoulder at Easter, and ahead as far as it can sniff, then lurching off sideways in a hop borrowed from the Ministry of Silly Walks.

04.07.16

By the Numbers

 By the Numbers                                            

It’s a job he relishes. Crying “peace” but waging battle, Gaspar Stephens makes me aware again and again of the hypocrisy of the church, an institution he both disdains and holds in very high regard or, at least, to a very high standard.

          I didn’t remember this story – I don’t think I ever knew this story – until I joined a group of like-minded church fools reading, for reasons none could explain, 1 and 2 Maccabees. There the furiously angry Mattathias* is likened to Phinehas, with whom God made “the everlasting covenant of priesthood,” from which Mattathias – and his sons – descended. But with Phinehas also God made an everlasting covenant of peace.

Here it is, then, Phinehas’ story, from the TRV.

04.06.16

For links to other TRV stories, click here.

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* On Mattathias’ anger, no his fury! see 1 Mac 2:23-26 and 2:42-48, where after swearing neither he nor his sons would be turned aside to anything other than the way they should go, when a “a Jew came forward . . . to offer sacrifice upon the altar in Modein, according to the king’s command,” Mattathias “gave vent to righteous anger” and ran to kill him upon the altar, which he then tore down – dammit! – because “he burned with zeal for the law, as Phinehas did “against Zimri the son of Salu.” After this, Mattathias and the sons flee into the wilderness, where they decide the laws of the Sabbath can be violated, so they can go to war on the Sabbath day; and they organize an army to strike “down sinners in their anger and lawless men in their wrath,” to tear down Gentile altars, and to forcibly circumcise all the uncircumcised boys that they find within the borders of Israel. It must be so, because you can “never let the sinner gain the upper hand,” lest he become filled with arrogance. “It is a time of ruin and furious anger,” Mattathias says, again and again.