From the Narrow Desert

I’ve been sailing all my life now
Never harbor or port have I known
The wide universe is the ocean I travel
And the earth is my blue boat home. 

Praise ye the Lord from the heavens:
    praise him in the heights.
Praise ye him, all his angels:
    praise ye him, all his hosts.
Praise ye him, sun and moon:
    praise him, all ye stars of light.
Praise him, ye heavens of heavens,
    and ye waters that be above the heavens.

And the Lord spake unto Moses and unto Aaron, saying, "When Pharaoh shall speak unto you, saying, Shew a miracle for you: then thou shalt say unto Aaron, Take thy rod, and cast it before Pharaoh, and it shall become a serpent."

And Moses and Aaron went in unto Pharaoh, and they did so as the Lord had commanded: and Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh, and before his servants, and it became a serpent.

Then Pharaoh also called the wise men and the sorcerers: now the magicians of Egypt, they also did in like manner with their enchantments. For they cast down every man his rod, and they became serpents: but Aaron's rod swallowed up their rods (Ex. 7:8-12).

And Moses answered and said, "But, behold, they will not believe me, nor hearken unto my voice: for they will say, The Lord hath not appeared unto thee."

And the Lord said unto him, "What is that in thine hand?"

And he said, "A rod."

And he said, "Cast it on the ground."

And he cast it on the ground, and it became a serpent; and Moses fled from before it.

And the Lord said unto Moses, "Put forth thine hand, and take it by the tail" -- and he put forth his hand, and caught it, and it became a rod in his hand -- "that they may believe that the Lord God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath appeared unto thee" (Ex. 4:1-5).

And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover (Mark 16:17-18).

Behold, we lay a tool here and on the morrow it is gone; and behold, our swords are taken from us in the day we have sought them for battle. Yea, we have hid up our treasures and they have slipped away from us, because of the curse of the land. O that we had repented in the day that the word of the Lord came unto us; for behold the land is cursed, and all things are become slippery, and we cannot hold them (Hel. 13:34-36).

And now, to the boys' amazement, Ta drew from around his neck the beautiful necklace of stones and flung it up to them -- and as it came slithering and swerving upward through the green air, it seemed almost like something alive. "You must divide the stones between you," said Ta, "and because of them, you will always remember me . . . . Those stones were taken from our Sacred Hall in the depths of the mountains, and are given only to the kings of our people" (p. 117).

And like some marvelous rainbow-colored serpent the necklace of Ta poured from his fingers and hung there, swaying back and forth in the bright air (p. 168).

I looked down into one of those little rock pools, and I thought, 'What a beautiful crab.' And then I thought, 'But there's never been a crab as beautiful as that!' and I got down on my knees and put my hand in the rock pool -- and pulled out Ta's necklace (p. 168).

There's an echo of Moses here, too. Reaching for a crab in a rock pool may be considerably less foolhardy than taking a serpent by the tail, but in ordinary circumstances you would still be risking a nasty nip. When he grasped the "crab," though, it became a necklace of stones in his hand.

Given all the brilliant colors of Ta's necklace, I almost think that the crustacean Chuck saw in the pool must have looked more like this:

Keep me as the apple of the eye, hide me under the shadow of they wings (Ps. 17:8).

Ascend, O moon

Into the sun

Eclipse's eye

Thy will be done.

Lo, Abraxas!

To thy pupil cometh sight,

For from thy shadow shineth light!

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.

Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.

Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race (Ps. 19:1-5).

In many Protestant churches, the word saint is used more generally to refer to anyone who is a Christian. . . . The use of "saint" within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) is similar to the Protestant tradition.

"When through the deep waters I call thee to go,

The rivers of sorrow shall not overflow;

For I will be with thee, thy troubles to bless,

And sanctify to thee thy deepest distress."

Last night, I began working on the next installment in my notes on the Fourth Gospel, starting from John 8:12:

Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, "I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life."

I spent quite a lot of time ruminating over this verse, noting the ambiguity of "the light of life" -- the light produced by life, or the light that illuminates life? -- and also various passages elsewhere in the Gospel where Jesus suggests that this "light of the world" will be a temporary thing -- e.g. "As long as I am in the word, I am the light of the world" (John 9:5), but "the night cometh" (v. 4).

After nearly an hour of chewing on this one verse, I put my Bible down and picked up something else I have been reading: Open That Door! (1916) by Robert Sturgis Ingersoll, a book about the meaning and value of reading. The very first sentences I read -- mere minutes after leaving John 8:12 -- were these:

Without disparaging those with whom I sit before the fire, and chat, and smoke, I must confess that I value equally with them the friends of eternal character that exist there in the book-case. They lighten the path of life; they are ready for converse when my spirit calls.

Go to the greatest books for your most enduring friends, but upon having formed their friendship do not leave them in the study, but carry them within your spirit to your business and the marts of men, and in holding their confidences burning in your heart you will find yourself a more thorough human being.

Ingersoll's "friends of eternal character" are actually mortals (Whitman, Tolstoy, Burns, Villon, Byron, Lamb, Carlyle, and Emerson), called "eternal" only because they live on in their books, but one would more naturally associate such an expression with Jesus, and "lighten the path of life" is remarkably similar to Jesus' statement about how his followers "shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life." This is followed by a reference to "burning in your heart," which also suggests Jesus: "Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures?" (Luke 24:32). The scriptures are, of course, "the greatest books."

The chapter of Open That Door! from which the above quotation comes begins with the observation that "the most potent inheritance, that books vouchsafe, is the personalities of the great authors who have inscribed their souls within them. Personal character affects our lives as does nothing else." Whitman is quoted: "This is not book; / Who touches this, touches a man." This of course suggests the Johannine "Word made flesh," but isn't it also a succinct expression of the value of the Gospels, and of scripture more generally? Isn't that what keeps us coming back to the Bible again and again and again? Not for "doctrine," but to spend time in the presence of such gigantic personalities as Moses, David, and above all Jesus Christ.

Did "the night come" when Jesus left this world? Perhaps, to a degree. But the midnight Sun of the Holy Ghost still shines for those whose hearts are open to it, and even the light of Christ's mortal life still shines as reflected moonlight, the pale fire of the Holy Bible -- dim and uncertain at times, but still invaluable to those who would not walk in darkness.

Who is among you that feareth the Lord, that obeyeth the voice of his servant, that walketh in darkness, and hath no light? let him trust in the name of the Lord, and stay upon his God.

Behold, all ye that kindle a fire, that compass yourselves about with sparks: walk in the light of your fire, and in the sparks that ye have kindled. This shall ye have of mine hand; ye shall lie down in sorrow (Isa. 50:10-11).

Here's a complete list of Bible passages where consecrate is used with the preposition to or unto -- thus excluding those passages where consecrate means "to ordain a priest": 

For Moses had said, Consecrate yourselves today to the Lord, even every man upon his son, and upon his brother; that he may bestow upon you a blessing this day (Ex. 32:39).

And he [a Nazarite] shall consecrate unto the Lord the days of his separation (Num. 6:12).

But all the silver, and gold, and vessels of brass and iron [taken in the pillage of Jericho], are consecrated unto the Lord: they shall come into the treasury of the Lord (Josh. 6:19).

And who then is willing to consecrate his service this day unto the Lord [to help build the Temple]? (1 Chr. 29:5)

Then Hezekiah answered and said, Now ye have consecrated yourselves unto the Lord, come near and bring sacrifices and thank offerings into the house of the Lord. And the congregation brought in sacrifices and thank offerings; and as many as were of a free heart burnt offerings (2 Chr. 29:31).

And concerning the children of Israel and Judah, that dwelt in the cities of Judah, they also brought in the tithe of oxen and sheep, and the tithe of holy things which were consecrated unto the Lord their God, and laid them by heaps (2 Chr. 31:6).

Arise and thresh, O daughter of Zion: for I will make thine horn iron, and I will make thy hoofs brass: and thou shalt beat in pieces many people: and I [the Lord] will consecrate their [the conquered heathen nations'] gain unto the Lord, and their substance unto the Lord of the whole earth (Micah 4:13).

Noticing a pattern here? Now here's the corresponding list for the Book of Mormon (also including passages with for, of which there are none in the Bible):

Wherefore, I, Lehi, prophesy according to the workings of the Spirit which is in me, that there shall none come into this land save they shall be brought by the hand of the Lord. Wherefore, this land is consecrated unto him whom he shall bring (2 Ne. 1:6-7).

Wherefore, if ye [Zoram] shall keep the commandments of the Lord, the Lord hath consecrated this land for the security of thy seed with the seed of my son [Nephi] (2 Ne. 1:32).

Nevertheless, Jacob, my firstborn in the wilderness, thou knowest the greatness of God; and he shall consecrate thine afflictions for thy gain (2 Ne. 2:2).

And may the Lord consecrate also unto thee [Joseph] this land, which is a most precious land, for thine inheritance and the inheritance of thy seed with thy brethren, for thy security forever, if it so be that ye shall keep the commandments of the Holy One of Israel (2 Ne. 3:2).

Wherefore, I [God] will consecrate this land unto thy seed, and them who shall be numbered among thy seed, forever, for the land of their inheritance; for it is a choice land, saith God unto me [Jacob] (2 Ne. 10:19).

But behold, I say unto you that ye must pray always, and not faint; that ye must not perform any thing unto the Lord save in the first place ye shall pray unto the Father in the name of Christ, that he [the Father] will consecrate thy performance unto thee [the worshiper], that thy performance may be for the welfare of thy soul (2 Ne. 32:9).

And I know that the Lord God will consecrate my prayers for the gain of my people (2 Ne. 33:4).

For I [Jesus] will make my people with whom the Father hath covenanted, yea, I will make thy horn iron, and I will make thy hoofs brass. And thou shalt beat in pieces many people; and I will consecrate their gain unto the Lord, and their substance unto the Lord of the whole earth. And behold, I am he who doeth it (3 Ne. 20:19).

The King James Version will always be the Bible I know and love best, but reading a different translation from time to time can be helpful, too, as it makes the familiar unfamiliar and helps one to see it in a new way. Such has been my recent experience reading the Penitential Psalms in the Vulgate translation of St. Jerome. My attention was particularly arrested by the 10th verse of Psalm 32 (called Psalm 31 in the Greek numbering used by Jerome). This is the King James Version I have always known:

Many sorrows shall be to the wicked: but he that trusteth in the Lord, mercy shall compass him about.

And here is the Vulgate, followed by the Douay-Rheims, which is an English translation of the Vulgate rather than of the original Hebrew.

Multa flagella peccatoris, sperantem autem in Domino misericordia circumdabit.

Many are the scourges of the sinner, but mercy shall encompass him that hopeth in the Lord.

Insofar as I can judge, the sorrows, wicked, and trusteth of the King James are more faithful to original Hebrew than the Vulgate's flagella, peccatoris, and sperantem. However, Jerome sticks closer to the Hebrew when he translates the first clause without a verb, literally "many scourges to the sinner." This is not really grammatical in English, though, so the King James inserts shall be, italicized to indicate that those words are not present in the Hebrew, while the Douay-Rheims instead uses are. I think both are justifiable from the Hebrew, which has no verb at all.

I've always read the KJV Ps. 32:10 as one of those contrasts between the righteous and the wicked that one associates more with the Proverbs than with the Psalms: one type of person will suffer, while a contrasting type will be encompassed with mercy.

The Vulgate suggests a different reading: not a contrast between two types of people, but between the present state of sinners and (what may be) their future state. All sinners suffer, but those (sinners) who trust in the Lord will be encompassed about by his mercy (chesed, "lovingkindness"). I think this is a much better fit for the overall tenor of the psalm, which is not about how much better it is to be righteous than wicked, but about a sinner who suffered, acknowledged his sin to the Lord, and found forgiveness.

I acknowledge my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the Lord; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin. Selah (v. 5).

The idea of confessing to the Lord sheds important light on what it really means to confess one's sins. It cannot primarily mean admitting that one has in fact performed this or that action. God obviously already knows what you have done! Acknowledging or hiding one's sin cannot be a question of letting God know or trying to prevent him from knowing. I think confessing to God does not mean telling him what you have done but rather recognizing that what you have done was sinful -- rather than making excuses or trying to justify or rationalize it.

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Minor synchronicity:

When I said that obviously no one would literally try to prevent God from knowing what they had done, Cain came to mind as a possible exception. When God asks him where his murdered brother Abel is, doesn't he lie and say, "I know not"? Then I realized that, while this was clearly an evasion, it was probably not actually a lie. Cain really didn't know where Abel had gone, only that he was no longer in his body.

Just after thinking that, I checked Bruce Charlton's blog and read this in his latest post: "Men die and their spirits leave the world, and go... nobody knows where."

As a further synchronicity, the title of the post is "Tolkien's Elves and Men both need to trust in God." The pre-Christian David's trust in God is similar in nature to the kind of trust Tolkien's Men, similarly ignorant of Christ, would have needed.

Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, "To The Unknown God." Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.

God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; neither is worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; and hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: "For in him we live, and move, and have our being" [Epimenides, Cretica]; as certain also of your own poets have said, "For we are also his offspring" [Aratus, Phenomena].

Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man's device. And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent: because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead.

[T]hey despised the words of plainness, . . . and sought for things that they could not understand. Wherefore, because of their blindness, which blindness came by looking beyond the mark, . . . God hath taken away his plainness from them, and delivered unto them many things which they cannot understand, because they desired it. And because they desired it God hath done it, that they may stumble (Jac. 4:14)

I recently read Jonathan W. Tooker's 2001 book The Time Travel Interpretation of the Bible, which is available as a free pdf at the link. I do not in the end find it at all convincing, but it certainly was a stimulating thought experiment.

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God as the time traveler with the last word

Tooker begins with the assumption that at some time in the future time-travel technology will be developed, at which point a variety of people with a variety of motives will go back into the past to attempt to rewrite history, with changes undoing and overwriting other changes again and again indefinitely. Therefore,

The real course of immutable history which we all share, then, must be the limit of an infinite number of changes. The history that we all share is the final word once all the time travel work has been done. Since there will always have been a finite number of human generations following the construction of the first time machine, and since the men of each generation will work only a finite number of shifts [as time travelers] during their lives, humans will never be able to write the last of an infinite number of changes. If the last word cannot be had by any mortal, then it must be had by some supernatural entity. . . . Here, we seat God on the throne of his eternal glory at timelike infinity [in Minkowski space], the end of time, a place that no mortal can ever reach.

It is not spelled out why no time-traveling mortal can ever reach timelike infinity, especially since time travel is generally conceptualized as "teleporting" from one time to another without any need to pass through the interval (finite or infinite) between them. Anyway, it is assumed that no one can. But them, confusingly, Tooker goes on to posit that the God of Abraham is actually a flesh-and-blood man from the future, possibly even the inventor of the first time machine. How then did he reach timelike infinity, which ex hypothesi no man can do? Tooker attempts to deal with this by invoking his version of the Trinity:

In the preceding sections, we have made the point to put God in the seat at timelike infinity but now we will seat the Holy Spirit there to assign God as a human man. Jesus is God as a younger man before he completes the mission of the Messiah. God is Jesus as an older man after the harvest has come and he has affected the final defeat of Satan . . . .

Note that this does not mean that the man born as Jesus grew up to be God. Rather, God is assumed to be born in the post-Einsteinian future (since he must have access to a time machine), and Jesus is one of this future man's relatively early ("as a younger man") ventures back into the past. Jesus as such is assumed not to have been born at all (as hinted at in some of the Gospels; like me, Tooker gives priority to the Fourth Gospel, but does so because it says nothing about the birth of Jesus).

Among all the changes enacted by all the [time-traveling] agents, after all the generations of mankind have come and gone, whose intention for what history ought to have been will dominate at infinity? We propose that the intentions of the man God are those which survive until the end. For this reason, the Holy Spirit is called by God's name. When all was said and done, it was his intention which survived to infinity. As the winner of the time travel war, God is the greatest and winningest warrior of all time. This is the nature of the trinity: God as a younger man fighting for victory, God himself having attained absolute dominion, and God's intention: three parts of a whole.

As best I can make out, this means that God is not enthroned at timelike infinity, and that the "Holy Spirit" that is said to be enthroned there is only a figure of speech -- not an explanation of why God has the last word in the editing of the past, but a metaphorical way of expressing the fact that he does have the last word.

Why, then, does God have the last word? This is a rather important question since, in Tooker's model, having the last word is what makes God God. The answer seems to be simply that God is good, that evil inherently leads to destruction, and that therefore only God's intention leads to eternal life.

If there comes a day when the last human dies, then life will not have been eternal. . . . Beyond that day, there would never again be someone using a time machine. Some human would have had the last word about what history was. There would be no future generations through which God's intention might propagate all the way to infinity. To the contrary, if extinction never comes, then the limit at infinity which we have associated with the Spirit of God is generated . . . . The Sovereign Lord is separated from false gods [i.e., rival human time travelers] because the timeline passing through God's ultimate victory in his Messianic mission is the only timeline that does not lead to extinction. . . . The road that leads to death is broad but the road that leads to life is narrow. All futures apart from God are doomed.

No real metaphysical reason is given for this. God is just some guy, and his way just happens to be the only way to "eternal life" -- meaning, apparently, the temporally infinite continuation of the human species and time-travel technology, not personal immortality. (Personal immortality apparently consists in being taken out of the time stream altogether, into the "elsewhere" regions of Minkowski space.) I don't know why we would assume there would be exactly one way to attain this; many ways or no way seems more likely. Actually, I'm not  clear on how "a day when the last human dies" could even be an issue in a world with time travel, since pre-extinction human could travel into the post-extinction future and restart the species. Nor do I know why we need to assume that our species does in fact survive indefinitely, approaching a limit at timelike infinity, rather than some human having the last word. None of this is clear to me, and I don't think the problem is entirely my own.

Anyway, this is the model you have to entertain in order to proceed with the rest of Tooker's thesis.

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The water/earth/heaven metaphor, and miracles

Tooker proposes that in the Bible, "water" is often used as a metaphor for the past; "earth," for the present; and "heaven," for the future -- with God being the "Most High" because he (or, rather his intentions, reified as the Holy Spirit) is located in the "highest heaven," which is timelike infinity. When Satan is cast down from heaven to earth, for instance, this is taken to mean that his time-travel privileges are revoked and he is confined to his own "present." (Satan, too, is a time-traveling mortal man, as we shall see below.)

Tooker is generally reluctant to countenance any sort of "magic" or miracles beyond those that involve manipulating time through a technology to be developed in the future. Events such as the Flood of Noah and the parting of the Red Sea are reconceptualized on the assumption that "water" and "dry land" are references to the time stream. Since it is obviously impossible for the whole earth to be submerged under physical water, the Flood is understood to be God undoing his creation by going back in time and altering the past that led to it, and the ark is some sort of temporal "bubble" (whatever that would be) which is unaffected by this. It is within this framework that Tooker understands God's promise after the Flood:

I will not again . . . smite any more every thing living, as I have done. While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease (Gen. 8:21-22).

As Tooker points out, a flood of water has nothing to do with the progression of summer and winter, day and night -- but meddling with the fabric of spacetime does. God is promising never again to play fast and loose with the timeline to the extent that he did in this metaphorical "flood."

Smaller scale temporal editing is still permitted, though, and the passage through the Red Sea on "dry ground" (another temporal bubble) is understood in this way. God's "jamming" the Egyptians' chariot wheels (as many translations give Ex. 14:25) is also understood to be a temporal effect.

Although no water metaphor is used, the extension of Hezekiah's life (Isa. 38) is understood as a small-scale manipulation of time. Time is rewound a bit, which is why the shadow on the sundial goes back 10 degrees, so that Hezekiah can be placed on a timeline in which he lives 15 years longer than he would otherwise have done. Apparently a minor adjustment like this is not considered to be a violation of the promise to Noah since it is not enough to disrupt the cycle of day and night or the seasons.

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Israel as Satan

I have noted before some of the similarities between the biblical figure Jacob, a.k.a. Israel, and the serpent of Eden. Jacob means "he seizes the heel," a name he was given because "he took his brother by the heel in the womb" (Hos. 12:3). To the serpent, God says, "Thou shalt bruise his heel” (Gen. 3:15). The serpent deceives Adam, and Jacob deceives Edom (basically the same name in Hebrew). Jacob is even described as being physically serpent-like -- a smooth-skinned man in contrast to his hairy brother -- and the account of his life in Genesis is just one deception after another. Even the name God gives him, Israel, means "he contends with God."

Why, then is Israel God's chosen? Tooker makes the rather shocking proposal that Israel is literally Satan. Satan, like God, is a time-traveling human being, and the specific human being he is, is Jacob the son of Isaac. But Israel and his descendants are nevertheless "chosen" for special protection because they are the ancestors of the man God himself, and he cannot therefore destroy them without destroying both himself and the one true timeline that leads humanity all the way to timelike infinity. Although a large part of the Bible consists of diatribes against the wicked Israelites, God is forced to continue protecting and helping them. This is the meaning of the parable of the wheat and the tares (Matt. 13): the tares (Israelites) cannot be destroyed yet without destroying the wheat (future Messiah, who becomes "God") with them. Once the Messiah has been born, though, the long-awaited time for burning up the tares will have arrived. Yes, I realize that this is, like, super anti-Semitic.

According to Tooker, Israel is explicitly identified as Satan in the Bible, but you'll only pick up on it if you compare two different verses. We are told that "Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel" (2 Chron 21:1). But we are also told, "And again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them to say, Go, number Israel and Judah" (2 Sam. 24:1). Tooker maintains that the "he" in 2 Samuel cannot refer to the Lord, since 2 Chronicles says Satan moved David to number Israel, and that therefore the only possible antecedent is "Israel." Tooker's reading is, "And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel [the person, Jacob], and he [Israel/Jacob] moved David against them [Israel, the nation]."  Compare that with Chronicles, and you find that Israel must Satan, because that's who moved David to number the people. I think it's a ridiculous reading, which relies on the same noun being the antecedent of both "he" and "them," but that's all he's got.

Surprisingly, despite saying he prioritizes the Gospel of John, and despite his belief that "children of Israel" is literally synonymous with "children of Satan," Tooker does not mention the episode in John 8 where Jesus calls the Jews children of the devil while at the same time conceding that they are also children of Abraham. Those who do not interpret the whole thing metaphorically tend to arrive at some version of the Fake Jew Thesis -- that the "Jews" of Jesus' time were not really Israelites at all but Edomite conversos or some such. Tooker's interpretation would be that they were children of the devil precisely because they were Israelites -- and that Jesus himself was just as much a (genealogical if not spiritual) child of the devil as they were. Both Jesus and the Pharisees were descendants both of the righteous Abraham and of Satan himself, though they varied as to which of these ancestors they took after.

All Jews are children of Satan. Jesus was a Jew. Jesus is God. It's not often that you find one person asserting all three of those things! It's hard to reconcile with the wheat and tares model -- where once the Living God has been born, all the "tares" (Israelites) will be destroyed -- all the other tares, I should say -- because it seems that in Tooker's understanding God himself is not really wheat (the product of a different seed) but rather one of the tares, one that happened to turn out good, atavistically taking after Abraham more than Jacob. If the fruit of the family tree of Israel is God himself, on what grounds can we call it a bad tree that must at some later date be hewn down and cast into the fire? "Either make the tree good, and his fruit good; or else make the tree corrupt, and his fruit corrupt: for the tree is known by his fruit" (Matt. 12:33).

Coming back to the man Jacob himself, how did someone born in the Bronze Age, long before time travel technology, end up becoming the time-traveling devil? Tooker suggests that the incident of Jacob's Ladder refers to a chance encounter with time travelers and their technology (angels are generally seen as time-traveling agents from the future), and that Jacob thus got access to this technology and decided to use it to rewrite history so that he, not God, would be the last man standing at timelike infinity (not understanding that this was impossible because, well, reasons). Satan is supposed to have made many attempts to kill God or God's ancestors (the "false gods," Satan-affiliated time travelers, demanded child sacrifice because they wanted to eliminate certain bloodlines), and the crucifixion of Jesus is one such attempt that succeeded -- at least until it was undone by more time-travel shenanigans, resulting in the Resurrection.

The command to sacrifice Isaac is presented as a similar attempt by God himself, to erase the devil from history by having his father killed. When God realizes (remember he is just a man from the future, not omniscient) that he would be grandfather-paradoxing himself, he sends another agent back to the past to stop Abraham from going through with it. 

Jacob's wresting match with God is interpreted as another aborted attempt to stop Jacob from becoming Satan. The "wrestling" is assumed not to have been literal grappling but a "time fight," a struggle for mastery over the timeline. In the end, God perceives that despite everything, allowing Jacob to proceed is preferable to the alternative, and he lets him win.

Ultimately, though, God and his agent Michael win the "war in heaven" (that is, in the future), and Satan is cast down to "earth" (that is, to his own time in the Bronze Age, no more to wander through the spacetime manifold for the ruin of souls).

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Oh, and you need to keep the Law of Moses

We have seen that in Tooker's model, God is just some dude from the future and is not Good in any transcendent sense. (He rejects "God is love" as a "dehumanizing proverb," preferring Moses' definition: "The Lord is a man of war; the Lord is his name.") God's way is the right way for essentially Darwinian reasons -- because, as it happens, it is the only way that takes the inclusive fitness of the human species all the way to timelike infinity. And Satan is not an imp on your shoulder egging you on to succumb to vice; he's a dude from the past trying to kill the dude from the future. Whether you yourself are sinful or virtuous, whether you inwardly align yourself with God or the devil, doesn't ultimately seem to make much difference in this war, the outcome of which has already been determined by the ineluctable fate that decrees that straight is the way that leadeth to life.

With that as the metaphysical background, it is odd to find that Tooker's book ends with a little diatribe against "Paulism," and particularly against Paul's teaching that the Law of Moses has been superseded. Pork remains absolutely forbidden, Tooker insists, and circumcision absolutely required -- for what exactly? Because, as the butterfly effect would have it, some critical mass of humans must do those things or else the species is doomed to extinction? But we know that future history has already been written -- and rewritten for the final time -- and that the species does not go extinct. As for personal immortality and the afterlife, Tooker barely mentions it, contenting himself with a passing reference to the possibility of "going to heaven" by being shunted off the timeline into the Minkowskian "elsewhere," and leaving us to guess whether or not going there has anything to do with not eating pork.

The whole "Paul is bad because we have to keep the Law of Moses" thing almost seems like a separate theological hobby-horse, left over from before the Time Travel Interpretation had been formulated, and included here as a sort of palimpsestic holdover.

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Assessment

Tooker's thesis is undeniably fun to entertain. It's fascinating to revisit all the familiar Bible stories from this entirely different perspective and see how everything might be reinterpreted in its light. In the end, though, it fails in some very important ways. Here, aside from the specific problems detailed above, are its main flaws.

First, though perhaps not foremost, it bases everything on "time travel" without coming up with any rigorous theory of the same. The idea of time travel cannot even be coherently formulated as a hypothesis in the four-dimensional world of Einstein and Minkowski, and naive attempts to do so -- the H. G. Wells style thinking that if time is just another dimension, we should in theory be able to travel in it -- are ill-conceived. To travel from Point A to Point B means to be at Point A at one point in time and at Point B at some later point in time. For example, if I was in Chicago Heights at 2:00 and Buffalo Grove at 3:00, I traveled from Chicago Heights to Buffalo Grove. "Time travel" would mean that Points A and B are not places but times, though -- leading either to tautology ("I was at 2:00 at 2:00 and at 3:00 at 3:00") or to contradiction ("I was at 2:00 at 2:00 and at 12:00 at 3:00"). I don't see any way to think at all clearly about the possibilities of "time travel" except from an explicitly Dunnean standpoint, where dimensions of meta-time are recognized. Wells unconsciously smuggles in Dunnean assumptions.

More importantly, the whole model is too "cosmic," and not personal enough, to really serve as a religion. God and Satan had a time war, and God won -- which is good, because it means the human race will survive to timelike infinity. This has all in some ill-defined sense "already" been done, and that's why all those things in the Bible happened. Fine. Now what? How does this relate to me as an individual and how I should live and what gives my life meaning? If God's ultimate victory is what really matters, then nothing I do really matters, since nothing I can do can affect that. (If it did, God would just go back in time and undo what I had done.) As for my own personal destiny, Tooker barely touches on it, except to mention in passing that it would be technically possible to "go to heaven" in the "elsewhere" regions of Minkowski space. Will God come back and manipulate spacetime to do that for me if he wins in the end? Is that why it matters? "I don't know, just remember to get circumcised and lay off the pork."

Overall, Tooker's "theology" reads like some history lesson (about things in some sense "already done") about how the good guys defeated the bad guys and made the world safe for democracy or something. Yes, very inspiring, three cheers for the flag and all that -- but if that's your answer to the Bible, are you really sure you've understood the question?

And when ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have ought against any: that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses. But if ye do not forgive, neither will your Father which is in heaven forgive your trespasses (Mark 11:25-26).

Discussions of the "unforgivable sin" usually focus on the sin against the Holy Ghost, but this passage from Mark (also Matt. 6:14-15) seems to indicate that being unforgiving is also unforgivable: If you don't forgive others, God will not forgive you.

Isn't that surprising? Failing to forgive is such a relatable sin, something that comes so naturally to just about everyone, that it is counterintuitive to say that it is less forgivable than other, seemingly more serious, sins. For example, if a rapist repents, he will be forgiven; but if his victim fails to forgive him, she will not be forgiven. Isn't that a bit shocking?

I suppose the most natural interpretation of this passage is that if you want God to forgive you, you have to forgive others, because it's only fair. I don't think that cuts it as an explanation, though. We're talking about forgiveness here, which is by definition not about being fair, but about extending mercy to those who deserve condemnation. "I can't forgive you, because it wouldn't be fair"? But it's never fair. If it were fair, it would be vindication, not forgiveness.

My best guess is that forgiveness is an absolute requirement because Heaven is not an individual state, like Buddhist enlightenment, but membership in the Family of God, and as such it inherently involves relationships with other former sinners. It's not that God views unforgiveness as "the worst sin" and insists on "punishing" it; it's that, as a matter of spiritual and psychological fact, one simply cannot participate in Heaven until one can freely and fully forgive.

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Sync note: Opening up BibleGateway to look up this post's text led to the syncs that resulted in the post "Many sparrows, again, and other sync links." That post prominently features figs and mentions my finding figs growing on the wall of the abandoned restaurant, as related in "Owl time, and cold noodles." In "Owl time," I said that the figs made me think of Mark 11:13. The passage I was looking for for this post also turns out to be from Mark 11.

Here is a passage in the King James Version of 2 Samuel that rather arrests one's attention.

And David gathered all the people together, and went to Rabbah, and fought against it, and took it. . . . And he brought forth the spoil of the city in great abundance. And he brought forth the people that were therein, and put them under saws, and under harrows of iron, and under axes of iron, and made them pass through the brick-kiln: and thus did he unto all the cities of the children of Ammon. So David and all the people returned unto Jerusalem (2 Sam. 12:29-31, KJV).

This certainly makes it sound as if King David practiced the most barbaric tortures on the civilians of an already-conquered city -- one thinks of Genghis Khan executing prisoners by pouring molten silver into their ears, or King Manasseh having Isaiah stuffed into a hollow tree and cut to pieces with a saw -- and there is not the slightest indication in the text that this was sinful or that the Lord disapproved.

Here's the Douay-Rheims version of the pertinent part of v. 31.

And bringing forth the people thereof he sawed them, and drove over them chariots armed with iron: and divided them with knives, and made them pass through brickkilns.

And here's the Wycliffe version.

And he led forth the people thereof, and sawed them, and did about them iron instruments of torment, and parted them with knives, and led them over by the likeness of tilestones.

However, most modern translations render the passage very differently. Here's the now-ubiquitous New International Version. (A footnote warns, "The meaning of the Hebrew for this clause is uncertain.")

and brought out the people who were there, consigning them to labor with saws and with iron picks and axes, and he made them work at brickmaking.

Recent translations almost universally follow this interpretation -- that the people were enslaved rather than tortured and killed. The New American Standard Bible followed the KJV as recently as its 1995 revision, but the 2020 revision follows the NIV.

Does this change represent some advance in the understanding of the Hebrew text, or simply a desire to put a more palatable interpretation on a shocking passage? My default assumption would be the latter, since recent decades have been rather more notable for their sensitivity and willingness to bowdlerize than for their sound linguistic scholarship.

I know basically no Hebrew, but based on an interlinear translation with grammatical notes, I think a literal reading is "and put them in a saw and in iron 'cuts' [also 'things cut' or 'cutting instruments'] and in iron axes and made them pass through in a brick-mold."

In defense of the enslavement reading, I note that Exodus 1:14 uses the same preposition-prefix ("in") to describe the kind of work the Hebrew slaves did in Egypt: "they made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar, and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field."

In defense of the torture/murder reading, the various Old Testament references to idolators making their children "pass through the fire" to Molech -- pretty clearly a reference to human sacrifice or a ritual simulation thereof, not child labor -- use the same Hebrew verb for "pass through" as 2 Sam. 12:31. It's difficult to think what this verb could mean in the enslavement reading, even considering that it can also mean "pass over" -- maybe passing over the Jordan from Ammon to Jerusalem? Did David set some of the captives to labor with saws and axes in Ammon or elsewhere in Transjordan (perhaps because there was timber there?) and bring others back to Jerusalem to make bricks?

There's also the parallel passage in 1 Chronicles 20:3 to consider, but it is less helpful than it might be in resolving the question. The KJV reads, "And he brought out the people that were in it, and cut them with saws, and with harrows of iron, and with axes." (There are no brick-kilns in this version.) The verb cut seems to clear things up, but in fact it is a hapax legomenon, occurring nowhere else in the Bible, and the translation "cut" is just a guess. Strong's says it means "saw, cut," but also says it is identical to the word for "have power, reign"  -- saying that the original sense of the latter was "vanquish," which is connected to sawing "through the idea of reducing to pieces." To me, though, the connection between reigning and forcing people to work is even clearer, so the ambiguity remains. English Bibles always translate it in keeping with their translation of 2 Sam. 12:31.

So, no final answer. I lean toward the KJV interpretation but have little confidence in that judgment.

What brought this passage to mind was 1 Kings 11:33.

Because that they [Solomon and his people] have forsaken me, and have worshipped Ashtoreth the goddess of the Zidonians, Chemosh the god of the Moabites, and Milcom the god of the children of Ammon, and have not walked in my ways, to do that which is right in mine eyes, and to keep my statutes and my judgments, as did David his father.

And I thought, Is this saying that worshiping pagan gods is worse than torturing people with saws and axes and burning them in a brik-kiln? Or just worse than enslaving them?

As it happens, the iconic six million figure long predates the existence of the German National Socialist Workers Party, and even predates the existence of Germany, Charlemagne, and the Holy Roman Empire, as it goes back to at least 136 AD. Forget Nazis and death camps, we are reliably informed that six million Jews faced starvation in 1931 after another six million Jews died in the Bar-Cochiba Revolt during the Third Jewish-Roman War.

What's the significance of six million to them? Does it have occult symbolism or something?

I think the 6 million choice for a number is based on some kind of kabbalistic principle. There is a consistent belief that there were 600,000 Jewish souls at Mt. Sinai, based on the number of letters believed to make up the Torah.

There's yet more significance to the idea of inverse letters. The 600,000 letters correspond to the 600,000 souls of Israel. Although there are many more than 600,000 Jews, there are 600,000 general souls which divide into the individual sparks that become each of our souls.

This eight-meter statue represents the country's first president.

Officials said that six people drowned in the flood.

On my first day of freshman Intro to Philosophy class, the instructor opened with this: "What is truth?" -- pause for effect -- "What is truth? Do you know who first said that? Jesus. He was on trial at the time, charged with a capital crime, but that's what he said when he stood before the Roman governor: 'What is truth?' I know, I know, Pilate must have been like, You're on trial, man! I get to ask the questions! But Jesus had the right idea . . ."

And then he segued into whatever philosophical topic was first on the agenda. And no one said anything. Even I, who I'm sure was well above the average in terms of biblical literacy -- and who was generally that annoying kid who just had to raise his hand every single time the professor said anything wrong -- didn't say anything. Fact is, he rattled off the story so smoothly and naturally that for the moment I wasn't entirely sure it was wrong. The thought, "Wasn't it Pilate who said that?" did cross my mind, but not with sufficient conviction. I even entertained the idea that maybe one gospel put the words in Pilate's mouth and another in Jesus'. All in all, I just wasn't sure enough the lecturer was wrong to risk making a fool of myself by contradicting him. And neither was anyone else.

Nor do I think the lecturer was an idiot or was intentionally misquoting Jesus. He was simply telling a Bible story as he remembered it. The question "What is truth?" made him think, Hey, that's in the Bible, isn't it, when Jesus stands before Pilate? -- and he didn't bother to look it up because he knew it.

It's surprisingly easy to remember lines from a dialogue, and remember who is involved, but misremember who said which lines. (See my post "Socrates doesn't have feathers," and the self-correction in the comments, for an example of my making the same kind of mistake.)

And I don't think these errors are random. There's a natural predisposition to attribute the most memorable lines to the most memorable people. We tend to assume that Jesus, not Pilate, would produce quotable quotes that you can incorporate into an Intro to Philosophy lecture.

It's something to keep in mind when we read the Gospels. Some of the lines attributed to Jesus may well have really been said, in a conversation with Jesus, but Jesus may not have been the one who said them. In fact, it would be astonishing if no such errors had found their way into the record.

For example, consider this passage in Genesis (24:2-3, 9).

And Abraham said unto his eldest servant of his house, that ruled over all that he had, Put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh: and I will make thee swear by the Lord, the God of heaven, and the God of the earth, that thou shalt not take a wife unto my son of the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I dwell: but thou shalt go unto my country, and to my kindred, and take a wife unto my son Isaac. . . . And the servant put his hand under the thigh of Abraham his master, and sware to him concerning that matter.

This may strike us today as funny, disgusting, indecent, or just bizarre, but that's how things were done in those days. You solemnized an oath by putting your hand not on a Bible (Bibles hadn't been invented yet) but on the party of the second part's you-know-what! Traces of this once prevalent practice can be found in such modern words as testify, testament, and testimony -- linguistic fossils attesting (so to speak!) to the connection, once taken for granted, between solemn oaths and the testicles.

Here's another example, from Exodus (33:11).

And the Lord spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend.

That's right, as disgusting, dangerous, and downright selfish as it seems to us today, in ancient times it was acceptable and even expected for friends -- friends, not enemies! -- to speak face to face, without even wearing masks. What today would convey the message "I hope you get sick and die" was in those days actually seen as a token of esteem and intimacy. We can see linguistic "fossil" evidence of this, too, in such terms as Facebook and FaceTime, dating back to an era when seeing another person's face was actually seen as a positive good!

It is with this cultural context in mind that we must interpret all the seemingly blasphemous references in the Bible to "seeking the face" of the Lord. We must remember that in those benighted days, before even the germ theory of disease had been discovered, let alone the importance of masks and social distancing, "face" had a very different connotation. The face was not then seen primarily as a disease vector which all decent people keep covered up, but simply as another part of the body. Seeking the "face" of the Lord simply meant to seek his presence. We can find a partial parallel in such modern colloquialisms as "Get your ass over here!" in which, without necessarily implying anything unseemly, a rather dirty and indecent part of the body is used synecdochically to refer to the person himself.

Hopefully these little notes have helped to shed light on some of the Old Testament's "hard sayings." We must keep in mind that, no matter how far we may have progressed since Bible times in terms of scientific knowledge and standards of decency, the spiritual message of the Bible remains relevant today!

You cannot underestimate how far people are trapped in modernity. I once watched a nationalist pagan Youtuber who, while talking about population genetics on his computer, noted that an owl had landed on a branch outside his window the night before. For an ancient pagan this would have been an event of enormous import, the only thing worth talking about; the birds were messengers from the gods and augury was central to paganism. But the Youtuber, despite identifying as anti-modern and totally primal, rejecting even Christianity as too modern, mentioned the owl in passing--as if it were a curious and mildly interesting fact. The population genetics on his screen were much more important and real to him, and so he spurned a divine messenger.

Even people who have taken a conscious step out of modernity are still consumed by its frame of reference; when they see a bird, they don't see a sign--just a wildlife fact.