From the Narrow Desert

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).

If you really want to rip up your mind

If you want to take the lid off your life . . .

Might as well get juiced

Might as well get juiced

I just read William Wright’s September 9 post "Ancient Juice as something that will be brought with the Sawtooth Stone." He discusses how our ability to understand is limited by the nature of our physical bodies and proposes that drinking a certain "juice" can remedy this, speculating that Moses and maybe even Jesus had to drink this juice before they were able to do what they did.

The juice is designed to change his body, quite literally. . . . On the cosmic scale of intelligence, we here on Earth are morons, I think, and it is the extreme limits and fallen nature of the bodies we inhabit that makes this so.  Our brains are part of these bodies, and though our spirits can and do shape these brains to our use the best that we can, still we can't get past the fact that the hardware we are working with is pretty bad.

Thus, I think without this juice, the interaction between [Heaven and Earth], at least for purposes of transferring complex thought, ideas, words, etc., would probably be as effective as me trying to transmit what I consider complex thought to my dog. My dog might understand that I love her, and even gather general words and meaning, but would be unable to fully grasp what is being said.  She would need a significant change or boost in how her mind operates for that to be possible. . . .

Another example would be Moses and his interactions with God, in which a change was needed for Moses to be able to both abide God's presence as well as understand what was being said.  It is likely, in my opinion, that although not recorded in any account we have, Moses likely also needed to drink this juice-nectar as part of his own experiences.

[Smith] counseled patience about understanding intelligences, for "there are many things that we will know when we receive the resurrection," things "which we cannot understand in this mortal state even if they were revealed to us."

Islam seems so Old Testament sometimes, that it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking it is essentially a 7th-century revival of the religion of Moses and Joshua, a throwback to pre-Christian (and pre-Talmudic) times. In fact, though, some of the central concepts of Islam are distinctively Christian rather than Mosaic. Here I want to look at some of the main Old and New Testament currents in the thought of the Quran. I refer to books of scripture rather than to religions because both Christianity and Islam have long histories and many sects, embracing a variety of ideas and emphases. I will also be looking only at central concepts, not surface-level details like circumcision and not eating pork. As a final caveat, I should note that I haven't actually read the Quran in nearly 15 years and will be going by memory here.

Very strange, meaningful-seeming dream:

I was part of a group (I just thought of them as "my friends") that met twice weekly to share ideas and creative output. The dream consisted of a few disconnected scenes having to do with that group.

In the first scene, I was preparing to go to one of our meetings and then suddenly remembered that it was actually scheduled for the next day. While I was preparing, I was aware that there was some major disturbance going on outside -- perhaps a war or something like that.

In the second scene, one of the members, a woman, had created a short animated film that progressed very quickly from playful to "edgy" to deeply -- and I do mean deeply -- obscene. No one raised any objection. I didn't either, though I wanted to, because there was just this feeling that we were all supposed to be too cool to take issue with that sort of thing.

In the third scene, another of the members, an older man, was telling a story about some third party (not part of the group) who had made a shirt for himself and "decorated it with the bric-a-brac of the Right -- a slice of pizza, a Torah scroll, other such things. And this of course made him guilty of both the sin of fragmentation and the sin of creating a coherent story."

I thought of the "bric-a-brac of the Right" as being something like the "secret symbols" in Bizarro comics (recurring random items, such as a slice of pie or an upside-down bird, which the artist adds to his cartoons), and I was pretty (but not entirely) sure the man was using "sin" ironically -- saying that the public disapproved of these so-called sins. I took the slice of pizza to be an allusion to the conspiracy theory associated with that foodstuff and the inclusion of a Torah scroll to be some kind of anti-Semitic thing. 

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Upon waking, I thought of the incongruity of characterizing the Torah as bric-a-brac, of all things, and it reminded me of something. Back in the days of daily newspapers, my father and I used to share the hobby of creating what he called "subliminal comics." The idea was to cut out three or four panels -- each from a different comic in the same paper -- and combine them to make a new strip that sort of made sense. One time (it was, apparently, on the palindromic date of October 2, 2001) I bent the rules of the game a bit, by combining a headline with a comic-strip panel. The headline, from the Style section of the local paper, said "Crosses are once again popular, but some see wearing a religious symbol for fashion's sake as a desecration" -- and I juxtaposed it with this panel from that day's Dilbert strip.

Before looking up the comic just now, I had forgotten that it featured a 2020s-style surgical mask and that the creature with which Dilbert is conversing -- a flubbed clone of his boss -- is half horse, as in a recent birdemic joke.

Later that day, I was out on the road. When I stopped at a red light, the motorcyclist in front of me was wearing a shirt decorated with the letters of the alphabet, each accompanied by two associated words and illustrations. This made for a pretty random assortment of pictures -- what the dream in its not-quite-normal use of English would have termed "bric-a-brac."

Of the 20 or so words I could see on the back of shirt, three were misprinted, and they were all in the same area. I snapped a photo.

With a large "letter Q," do we now have not mere common or garden bric-a-brac, but specifically the bric-a-brac of the Right? Notice that both of the words associated with Q are misprinted so as to omit the key letter. Instead of a question, a ruestion; instead of a quail, a uail. Of course, "No Q" is also a Q thing. There's the NOQ Report, and included in the boilerplate at the beginning of every Anonymous Conservative post is the disclaimer "No Q." Just below these two Q-less Q-words, we have V for wolcano.  I remember reading some symbolic interpretation of the alphabet in which W stood for the Roman god Vulcan (since historically W = VV = VU), and volcano comes from Vulcan. (Thinking of such words as uomo, uovo, buono, and ruota, I checked if perhaps vuolcano might be Italian; it isn't.)

Having mentioned "a uail," and also noted that U and V used to be interchangeable, I am reminded of my first mention of Joan of Arc on this blog, in this comment:

I have recently been reading Scott Alexander's novel Unsong. One of the running gags is "biblical pun correction." One of the characters mentions Joan of Arc and is "corrected" by another: "Jonah whale; Noah ark." Later in the conversation, someone says "to no avail" and received the converse correction: "Noah ark; Jonah whale."

The correction is based on hearing "avail" as "a whale," echoed by the V/W confusion seen in wolcano.

All of the items in the photo above also have Torah connections. In Exodus 16, the Israelites are fed with manna and quail, and the word manna is said to derive from the question "What is it?" Mount Sinai, with its fire and smoke, is certainly suggestive of a volcano. (Freud and a few other fringe critics have concluded that it literally was a volcano, but that seems geographically unlikely.) And, in the archaic spelling of the King James Version, Moses "put a vail on his face" (Ex. 34:33).

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What does it all mean? Well, that's the point, isn't it? I've been collecting coincidences like bric-a-brac, like a Bizarro reader playing find the secret symbol, only occasionally discerning a coherent message. Maybe it's time to stop amassing data and start trying a little harder to understand it. I always tag these posts with a line from Dylan; maybe I should pay more attention to the rest of the verse:

The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense
Take what you have gathered from coincidence
The empty-handed painter from your streets
Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets
This sky, too, is folding under you
And it's all over now, Baby Blue

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Update: I thought, "Give me a hint. What's the core meaning of all these syncs?" and drew a single card from the Rider-Waite. It was this one.

And I thought, It's the wolcano! -- a mountain-like structure with fire coming out the top of it, with a W-shaped lightning bolt. "The Tower" is also an anagram of "two three," and W is the 23rd letter of the alphabet. The card features 22 little yellow flames, with the 23rd being the W-shaped bolt from the black.

The image also punningly suggests bric-a-brac -- the Tower of Babel was built with bricks (apparently a novel construction material at the time), and the Hebrew word for "lightning" is baraq. It is even "brac of the Right," since the baraq comes from the right side of the card. Brique à baraq -- brick for the lightning!

Bric-a-brac is b-a-b, -- bab, "gate," the first morpheme in Babel, "Gate of El." El, besides being a name of God, is how a Cockney would pronounce hell -- as in "upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it" (Matt. 16:18). The tower on the card is built on a rock, and the Tarot de Marseille calls it not The Tower but La Maison Dieu, "the House of God."

Babel is also synonymous with the confusion on tongues -- exemplified by, say, ruestion, uail, and wolcano.

Bric-a-brac also contains the string abrac, as in abracadabra.

I have recently stressed the complete absence of any afterlife teaching from the Torah of Moses. Kevin McCall left a comment pointing out that (according to a tradition reported centuries later by St. Stephen) "Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians" (Acts 7:22) and thus must surely have been familiar with the afterlife beliefs that played so prominent a role in Egyptian religion.

This made me ask the question, Just how Egyptian was Moses, really? I have often assumed, from his being raised in Pharaoh's palace, that he was almost entirely Egyptian by upbringing and had little direct knowledge of his ultimately Mesopotamian heritage. (Abraham was from Mesopotamia.) When God spoke to him from the burning bush, Moses said,

Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, "The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you"; and they shall say to me, "What is his name?" what shall I say unto them? (Ex. 3:13)

His name was El, of course -- El Elyon, El Shaddai -- but Moses didn't know that. When the voice from the burning bush identified itself as "the God of thy fathers," Moses had to ask, in essence, "The God of my fathers -- uh, which God is that again?" He comes across in this passage as fundamentally deracinated -- and, presumably, thoroughly Egyptianized.

When you ask what about Moses was distinctly Egyptian, though, it's hard to come up with much. The miracles, certainly, feel far closer to Egyptian than to Babylonian magic, but is there anything Egyptian in his teachings? Genesis 1-11 is of course indisputably Mesopotamian in nature, with many parallels to the Enuma Elish and Gilgamesh, and the Law of Moses itself has its closest parallel in the Mesopotamian Code of Hammurabi. One can see how secular scholars would conclude that the Torah was written during the Babylonian exile, but the other possible explanation is that these were traditions preserved from the time of Abram of Ur.

The golden calf of Aaron has always seemed Mesopotamian to me, too, a symbol of El or Adad. The Egyptians had bovine gods as well (Hathor, the Apis Bull), but Aaron seems to identify it as a non-Egyptian deity -- "These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt." I don't think the Hebrews could readily have imagined any Egyptian god taking their side against Pharaoh, the manifestation of Horus.

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I think that, while Moses was indeed raised as an Egyptian and "learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians," he deliberately rejected that heritage, tried to learn about the traditional (broadly Mesopotamian) religion of the Hebrews (collecting the stories we now have in the Book of Genesis), and tried to interpret his own experiences through the Hebrew lens. The afterlife is not passively omitted from the Torah, as if it "hadn't been discovered yet," but was actively excluded by Moses as part of the Egyptian tradition he rejected. I think this has more to do with the individual personality of Moses than with anything else; it is interesting to speculate how the development of the Hebrew religion might have been different if Moses had been less of a purist.

Despite this active effort to be un-Egyptian, did something of the Egyptian spirit nevertheless come through in Moses and his work? If so, I have not noticed it -- but perhaps that is simply because I am less familiar with Egyptian thought and religion than with its Mesopotamian counterparts.

But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.

And the people stood afar off, and Moses drew near unto the thick darkness where God was.

As I've mentioned in other posts, I recently listened to the whole Torah read aloud over the course of a few days. I've continued on and am in the middle of Judges now, but it is the Torah of Moses that has occupied my meditations.

In An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Jeremy Bentham famously wrote, with reference to our moral duty towards other animals, that

a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

Read the scriptures, fast and pray,

Go to church, and don't be gay.

Every time I go through the Bible fast (omitting the first comma from the couplet), I make new connections.

And for that the dream was doubled unto Pharaoh twice; it is because the thing is established by God, and God will shortly bring it to pass (Gen. 41:32).

And it shall come to pass, if they will not believe thee, neither hearken to the voice of the first sign, that they will believe the voice of the latter sign (Ex. 4:8).

Prophetic dreams . . . the hand of Moses, "leprous as snow" . . . It reminds me that I still haven't resolved this:

I'm sure that "Hand of the King" reference in the Bidenette meme also has some significance. Last night, between dreaming and waking, the White Hand of Saruman came to mind and seemed to be connected to lots and lots of things in the contemporary world. I can't remember any of the links, though -- if there were ever any real links to begin with; it was a dream. Perhaps something will come back to me.

All that has come back to me since then is that the dream involved connecting Q with the White Hand -- because (I thought in the dream) the Hebrew letters Kaph and Qoph originally represented the two hands. I forget which was the right and which was the left. I thought of Kaph as a red hand -- the pierced palm of Christ -- and Qoph as a white one. There were lots and lots of other connections, too -- but, as Nebuchadnezzar said, "The thing is gone from me."

Kaph is the palm, but Qoph never represented a hand at all. It has been variously interpreted as a needle, a monkey, the sun on the horizon, the back of the head, and the nape of the neck. Neck, Bert!

The constant carnival of intense control (Card by Jean-Pierre Payen of Avignon, 1713)

I'd just listened to about half of the Book of Exodus when it crossed my mind that I hadn't checked out Jonathan Pageau on YouTube recently -- so I did so, and found a fairly recent video called "Now Is A Great Time to Understand the Plagues of Egypt." He really only talks about one of the plagues, that of the hail mingled with fire. Here, lightly edited, is the comment that most struck me.

Think of our day, think of our age, where you both have the most intense level of control that has ever existed -- the greatest police state that has ever existed in the history of humanity, with the most control and quantification and calculation that has ever existed -- and at the same time, this sense that we live in a constant carnival, and that anything goes and that anything can happen. It's like the Beast and the Whore together; somehow they shouldn't be together, but they're together, and so this is the image of hail and fire at the same time.

And thus we saw, in the heavenly vision, the glory of the Telestial, which surpasses all understanding; and no man knows it except him to whom God has revealed it.

-- D&C 76:89-90

For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who was preached among you by us, even by me and Silvanus and Timotheus, was not yea and nay, but in him was yea.

-- 2 Cor. 1:19 

Eternity is in love with the productions of time.

-- Blake

Warning: This is going to be one of those posts -- yet there is method in't.

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Degrees of glory

Joseph Smith, the Prophet, wrote of three "kingdoms" or "degrees of glory": the Celestial, the Terrestrial, and the Telestial. Celestial is self-explanatory: Heaven. Terrestrial refers not to the Earth as we know it now, but to the Earth as Moses tells us it was first created: Paradise, the Garden of Eden. "The world in which we now live" is a fallen one, no longer truly Earthly, and is given the designation Telestial. If this coinage of Smith's is not simply an arbitrary one made by analogy with Celestial and Terrestrial, it is presumably intended to evoke the Greek tele or teleos -- the Distant Kingdom, the Last Kingdom. The very outskirts of God's creation.

These "degrees" are not to be thought of as specific places, but as kinds of worlds, states of existence. People, and even entire planets, can and do pass from one of these states into another.

After death, some "go to Heaven" -- a Celestial glory. Others inherit a Terrestrial glory, perhaps along the lines of the Elysian Fields of Homer or the Paradise of Muhammad. Liars, adulterers, and other such riffraff go to the Telestial. This could be, but traditionally is not, interpreted as reincarnating back into "the world in which we now live"; at any rate, they remain at this world's general niveau -- and even this Last Kingdom has a glory "which surpasses all understanding."

Beyond the Telestial, "a kingdom which is not a kingdom of glory" -- for "the light shineth in darkness," and God and God's creation are not in the last analysis truly omnipresent. The nature of this "outer darkness" is not known -- that's kind of what they're getting at with that term darkness -- but might be conceptualized as chaos, or nothingness, or an illusory dreamworld of untethered solipsism -- if those are indeed not three ways of saying the same thing. Only the very damnedest of the damned wend their way there -- those "wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever." None has been observed to return. Are they well and truly lost, those "sons of perdition" who sail off the edge of the cosmos and disappear into the black? Will nothing of value ever come bubbling up from that vasty deep, world without end? It is my rather unorthodox opinion that not even God knows the answer to that. They, no less than the rest of us, are sailing uncharted waters, and "it doth not yet appear what we shall be." I know what my own hunches on the matter are. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio -- yes, and in outer darkness, too. Even in outer darkness, Horatio, even in the abyss.

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Worlds without number

The Book of Genesis is traditionally attributed to Moses -- but how did Moses, who by his own reckoning lived 24 centuries after Adam, know anything about what happened "in the beginning"? Joseph Smith must have asked the same question as he was doing his "translation" of the Old Testament, and the answer came in the form of an inspired prologue to Genesis, in which God appears to Moses and reveals the Creation to him. This has since been canonized as Moses 1 -- one of the most important and idea-rich documents Smith ever produced, and well worth reading in its entirety.

At first God says, "And now, behold, this one thing I show unto thee, Moses, my son, for thou art in the world, and now I show it unto thee" -- just this one little thing, the world! But after Moses has seen "the world and the ends thereof, and all the children of men which are, and which were created," God decides he is ready for a glimpse of the big picture.

And he beheld many lands; and each land was called Earth, and there were inhabitants on the face thereof.

And it came to pass that Moses called upon God, saying: "Tell me, I pray thee, why these things are so, and by what thou madest them?" . . .

And the Lord God said unto Moses: "For mine own purpose have I made these things. Here is wisdom and it remaineth in me. And by the word of my power, have I created them, which is mine Only Begotten Son, who is full of grace and truth. And worlds without number have I created; and I also created them for mine own purpose; . . . And the first man of all men have I called Adam, which is many."

And the Lord God spake unto Moses, saying: "The heavens, they are many, and they cannot be numbered unto man; but they are numbered unto me, for they are mine. . . . and there is no end to my works, neither to my words. For behold, this is my work and my glory -- to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man."

At first the reader thinks the "many lands" must be the many populated regions of our own planet, and that each land is called Earth for the same reason that every tribal people calls itself The People. Or perhaps the reference is to the innumerable other planets with intelligent life which must exist somewhere out there in space. As we read on, though, it seems more and more as if God is talking about parallel universes.

Many "Earths" -- inhabited planets -- is understandable enough, but many heavens? This surely means more than the trivial fact that each planet has its own atmosphere. Heaven, in this context, means "outer space." And there are many of them? Explain that without invoking parallel universes. And what are we to make of the strange statement that "the first man of all men have I called Adam" -- clearly a unique individual -- "which is many"?

The first man is called Adam, Moses -- but there are many Earths that have an Adam. Millions of them, quadrillions, numbers you can't even begin to fathom. Many of them have an Abraham, many a Melchizedek, many a Moses. Thou art Moses, but there is a larger Moses -- one who, like me, belongs to many worlds. For ye are gods, and all of you are children of the Most High.

Remember the old legend of Jacob, and the mysterious man who wrestled with him until the breaking of the day? (You should probably write that down, by the way, for posterity.)

And Jacob asked him, and said, "Tell me, I pray thee, thy name."

And he said, "Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name?" And he blessed him there.

And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: "for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved."

Now why would Jacob say that? Surely he didn't think he had beaten God in a wrestling match! And notice what the wrestler said: "Wherefore is it that thou" -- thou of all people! -- "dost ask after my name?" Give it some thought, Moses. It shouldn't be too hard for a folklorist like yourself to figure out the man's name, and who he was, and what it all meant, and in what sense Jacob had seen God.

And it came to pass that it was for the space of many hours before Moses did again receive his natural strength like unto man; and he said unto himself: "Now, for this cause I know that man is nothing, which thing I never had supposed."

"O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children," said the learned Egyptian, "and there is not such a thing as an old Greek."

"O Moses, Moses," the Lord had said, "you learned Egyptians are also children. Come and enter into the kingdom of God."

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God's friends, God's enemies

God has called many people his servants but only Abraham his friend. Ever wonder why? Because he pled for Sodom. Sodom! -- a city so cartoonishly wicked that when they were visited by heavenly messengers, the very angels of God, their first thought was, Let's gang-rape them. But when God announced that he was going to wipe them out, Abraham didn't say "About time! Deus vult!" Instead he said, "That be far from thee to do after this manner! Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?" and he started bargaining. Sodom, Lord, I know, I know, it's a horrible place, corrupt beyond imagining -- but isn't there some good even in Sodom? A few dozen righteous men, perhaps? Okay, probably not that many, but maybe ten? Five? And how heroically righteous they must be, to remain uncorrupted even in Sodom! Isn't that something beautiful, something that adds to your glory? Doesn't the city deserve to go on existing for the sake of that?

Well, God still ended up destroying Sodom -- sometimes these things have just got to be done -- but he thought, This Abraham guy really gets it! And that's the story of how God and Abraham became friends.

Those who harp on the Problem of Evil -- Voltaire and all his myriad spiritual progeny -- aren't they (aren't we) sort of anti-Abrahams? Abraham looked at Sodom -- hideously foul Sodom, the earthly City of Dis, the very embassy of the bottomless pit -- and said, "There is still good in it. It should be spared." We look at this vast, beautiful universe -- this Telestial world whose glory surpasses all understanding -- and say, "There is still evil in it. No good God would have created it." When God wanted to destroy Sodom, Abraham played the role of counsel for the defense. And we -- well, we play the other role, that of prosecutor, accuser. There's a Hebrew word for that role, a rather memorable one. It later came to be used as a proper name. The word is satan.

Peter was the first of the disciples to suss out that Jesus was the Messiah. So, after charging him and the other disciples to keep the secret, Jesus laid out his grand Messianic plan: Step one, ride in triumph into Jerusalem. Step two, get stripped naked, beaten bloody, and nailed to a cross. Step three -- but I see Peter's raising his hand. Yes, Peter, did you have a question?

Peter took Jesus aside and said -- in language strangely similar to Abraham's when he pled Sodom's case, as if subconsciously aware that he was playing the anti-Abraham -- "Be it far from thee, Lord: this shall not be unto thee!"

That didn't go over so well. "Get thee behind me, satan," said Jesus. "Thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God."

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What the whirlwind said

But don't we Voltaireans after all have a point? As wonderful as this universe of ours is, shouldn't a perfect God have created a better one -- a perfect one, even?

Well, in the context of Moses' vision of worlds -- universes -- without number, the obvious answer is: Yes. He did. And he created this universe, too. Should he not have done so? This is the essence of the Lord's reply -- as imagined by Scott Alexander in Unsong -- when he spoke out of the whirlwind to Job.

It is true that I could have limited myself to creating universes where no one ever became covered in boils, and I did not do so. For the universes where some people get covered in boils also have myriads of wonders, and joys, and saints, and I will not deny them existence for the sake of those covered in boils. . . .

Have you beheld the foundations of the Earth? Seen its footings and its cornerstone? Watched as the sons of God all sang together and the morning stars shouted for joy? Have you seen the doors of the sea? The chains of the Pleiades and Orion's belt? The lions, the ravens, the young of the doe and the bear? Behold the Behemoth, which I made beside you, and the Leviathan who resides in the sea. Can you say that all these wonders should not be, so that you could avoid a case of boils? Shall I smite them for you? Speak, and I shall end the world with a word.

For a nominal atheist, Alexander can be remarkably serious and sincere when it comes to theodicy, and I find his reading of Job a compelling one. The Book of Job as we have it is a bit of a letdown. Job asks an important question and steadfastly refuses to take sophistry for an answer -- but then he is satisfied by a reply from God himself which seems to be nothing but bluster: "I'm much more awesome than you. Do you know any science? Can you catch a whale? Have you ever even seen the doors of the sea? How exactly do you think you have the right to question anything I do?"

But what if all that rhapsodizing about Behemoth and the morning stars wasn't bluster? What if it was context? "And now, behold, this one thing I show unto thee, Job, my son, for thou art in the world, and now I show it unto thee."

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And Supergod is back in the game

When I wrote my anti-Supergod manifesto -- my explicit rejection, as a Christian, of the all-powerful, all-knowing God who created absolutely everything out of absolutely nothing -- the main reason I gave for rejecting Supergod was the Problem of Evil -- to which, I asserted, "every proposed solution is pure, unadulterated sophistry."

But in my brief and (justifiably!) dismissive survey of theodicy, I had missed something essential. Like almost everyone else who approaches the question, I had been asking why Supergod would have created this world rather than a better one. It didn't cross my mind to, as the popular cliche has it, "embrace the healing power of and." It is supremely ironic that I should be guided by Joseph Smith (a believer in Mere God) and Scott Alexander (an atheist) to the one theodicial argument that -- maybe -- lets Supergod off the hook.

That argument is this:

1. Supergod is not limited to creating just one universe.
2. There are many possible universes that, though far from perfect, are "net good" -- that is, the good in them outweighs the evil.
3. For any such net-good universe, it is better for it to exist than for it not to exist.
4. Therefore, Supergod (who is perfectly good and thus always chooses the best possible course of action) would have created them all -- including this very imperfect universe in which we find ourselves.

One may reject this argument -- I think on balance I do reject it, and in any case I have other reasons for not believing in Supergod -- but it is more plausible than any other defense of Supergod I have encountered, and makes the Supergod hypothesis, if not necessarily true, at least intellectually respectable.

When I looked up the Job episode in Unsong so I could quote it above, I was surprised to discover something I had forgotten: that it, too, refers to the story of Abraham and the destruction of Sodom, but gives it a very different interpretation from my own.

"How many wonders and joys and saints is one case of boils worth, God?"

"Be careful, Job. I had this conversation with Abraham before you. He asked whether I would spare my judgment on Sodom lest fifty righteous men should suffer. When I agreed, he pled for forty, thirty, twenty, and ten. But below ten he did not go, so I destroyed the city. And if I would not restrain myself from destroying for the sake of a handful of righteous men suffering, how much less I should restrain myself from creating."

In Alexander's reading, the point of the story is the number ten. (Not five. I had misremembered the final figure in my own retelling.) Whatever good was accomplished by destroying Sodom, it would have been outweighed by the premature deaths of ten -- but not nine -- righteous men. God replies to Job's sarcastic question as if it were not rhetorical, as if it had as the correct answer some particular finite number -- as if there were some equation into which one could plug the numbers of wonders, joys, saints, boils, and so on, and which would then output the correct decision as to whether or not that particular world ought to be created.

No. This is as far as I am willing to follow this line of reasoning. If you wish to continue, you'll have to go on without me. Einstein famously resisted the idea of God playing dice; how much more should we resist imagining him with a calculator! King David was an adulterer, a murderer, and a man after the Lord's own heart; which of his many sins did he feel the guiltiest about?

And David's heart smote him after that he had numbered the people. And David said unto the Lord, "I have sinned greatly in that I have done: and now, I beseech thee, O Lord, take away the iniquity of thy servant; for I have done very foolishly"

"Net good" is a category error. Good and evil can't be thought of as if they were the same sort of thing as weight or income. There are infinitely many qualitatively distinct goods and infinitely many qualitatively distinct evils. Few of these can be measured at all, and those that can are mutually incommensurable. Even in the super-simplified Utilitarian version, where all good is reduced to pleasure and all evil to pain, the "felicific calculus" of Bentham remains a pipe dream. Good and evil cannot be expressed mathematically and are not susceptible to mathematical operations. "The good in this world outweighs the evil" is not a statement of a mathematical fact; it is an expression of a moral choice -- the choice we all made when we chose to incarnate into it, though some of us later have second thoughts. We, each of us, choose to exist and choose what worlds to enter. That -- not math of all things! -- is the foundation of the justice of God, and the only theodicy with which we have to do.

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Note added: As a draft, this post went through many provisional titles before I settled on the one it has now. I chose it simply because it suggested the scope of what I was discussing -- something for which even Douglas Adams's famous phrase "life, the universe, and everything" was too narrow unless pluralized. (Pluralizing such familiar expressions as "eternal life" is also a classic Joseph Smith move; see D&C 132.)

Not until I received an email from a reader -- "By the way, happy birthday. Is the title of the post a pun on this particular birthday?" -- did I realize the full appropriateness of the title I had chosen. In the Adams story, a supercomputer thinks for seven and a half million years and concludes that "the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything" is the number 42. And, yes, it just so happens that the day I finally finished and published this post was my 42nd birthday.

Furthermore, the conclusion I reach in the end -- that numbers can have nothing to do with answers to ultimate questions -- is eloquently expressed by Adams's joke.

Finally, even the name of the author I allude to in my title is relevant -- the plural of Adam.

None of this was on purpose. I take it as a gesture of encouragement from the synchronicity fairies.

My first mention of Joan of Arc, which set off the present chain of synchronicities, was a reference to "biblical pun correction" in Unsong: "One of the characters mentions Joan of Arc and is 'corrected' by another: 'Jonah whale; Noah ark.'" That is, one of the characters deliberately "mishears" the name "Joan of Arc" as "Jonah ark."

The first mention of Jonah in Unsong is when a girl meets a rabbinical student in a bar and gets him to agree to kiss her if she knows something about the Bible that he doesn't. She then asks him, "How long did Joseph spend in the belly of the whale?" -- and he walks into the trap, replying "three days and three nights" without noticing that the question is about Joseph rather than Jonah.

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The more usual form of this joke is "How many of each animal did Moses take on the ark?" And the punchline, more often than not, is, "None. Moses wasn't on the ark." But of course Moses was in an ark. Here is Exodus 2:3-6.

And when [the mother of Moses] could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river's brink.

And his sister [Miriam] stood afar off, to wit what would be done to him.

And the daughter of Pharaoh came down to wash herself at the river; and her maidens walked along by the river's side; and when she saw the ark among the flags, she sent her maid to fetch it.

And when she had opened it, she saw the child: and, behold, the babe wept. And she had compassion on him, and said, This is one of the Hebrews' children.

Ark -- flags -- maid -- remind you of anyone? Many of my recent posts about Joan have centered on her distinctive banner or flag, and I have even had occasion to write (without any thought of Moses), "The word flag, of course, can also refer to a lilioid flower." In fact, when the word flag occurs in the King James Bible, it always refers to a riverside plant, never to a banner.

Joan's flag bore the names Jhesus and Maria. While the intended referents were of course Jesus Christ and his mother, these are also the New Testament forms of the Old Testament names Joshua and Miriam, respectively. Joshua was Moses' lieutenant and successor; Miriam, his elder sister who watched over him while he was in the ark.

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But the main biblical ark is the Ark of the Covenant, created under the direction of Moses. Like Joan's banner, it features God between two angelic beings. Here is Exodus 25:22.

And there I will meet with thee, and I will commune with thee from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubims which are upon the ark of the testimony, of all things which I will give thee in commandment unto the children of Israel.

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In the previous post, I mention my pleasure in discovering that Joan of Arc has had what is described as a "boat-shaped church" built to her name in Rouen (even though the church itself is an outrageous eyesore), because it recalls the joke about Joan of Ark being Noah's wife.

And then I realized that, if a boat-shaped church counts as an ark, "Jonah ark" isn't a mistake after all. Check out Chapters 8 and 9 of Moby-Dick. While the chapel Ishmael visits isn't technically "boat-shaped," it's certainly much more boat-like than your average house of worship. The pulpit is made to look like the prow of a ship, and is ascended by means of a rope ladder "like those used in mounting a ship from a boat at sea." The preacher begins by shouting out nautical commands to the congregants -- "Starboard gangway, there! side away to larboard -- larboard gangway to starboard! Midships! midships!" -- and then, addressing them as "shipmates," proceeds to deliver a sermon on -- Jonah.

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While I was in the process of writing this post, and had already made the Moses-Joan connection, Frank Berger left a comment on my previous post: "Check out my comment from your June 17, 2019 post in which you linked a gallery of your sister's fine drawings. The gallery featured thirty drawings, yet I comment on only one . . ."

The one drawing he had commented on was, of course, the portrait of Joan of Arc.

As for myself, in the 2019 post referred to, I had selected two of my sister's drawings as my favorites: one of an unidentified young woman, and the other titled Moses in the Court of Pharaoh.

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After writing all of the above, I suddenly had the idea that I should check Bible passages numbered 20:21 to see is they had any applicability to the year that has just begun. Remembering how my uncle William John had based his interpretation of 9/11 on Revelation 9:11, I thought I'd try Revelation 20:21 -- but there is no such verse. Psalm 20:21, then? No such verse. Genesis? No such verse. Exodus, then? Jackpot.

And the people stood afar off, and Moses drew near unto the thick darkness where God was.

You and me both, Moses.

When God spoke to Moses from the burning bush, he proclaimed "I AM THAT I AM" and even gave his name as I AM. An appropriate choice of pronouns, since God is, in the later Christian schema, the First Person of the Trinity.

"I am," said God, and waited for a reply from humanity. He had to wait for a long time, but around a millennium and a half after this epoch-making announcement, mankind had finally composed its response, in the person of a man named Yeshua -- Yes, you are. And this, of course, was the Second Person.

(I'm not a Trinitarian myself, just a coincidence-noticer.)

Walter Kaufmann is probably best remembered as a translator and biographer of Nietzsche. What most people don't realize is that, among his other accomplishments, he also created not one but two perfect puns on the word "Mosaic."


The traditional belief regarding the origin of the Torah/Pentateuch is that it is largely the work of one man, Moses. This is of course the Mosaic theory, and it is no longer considered academically respectable.

Since the 19th century, the orthodox "scholarly" view has been the documentary hypothesis: that the Torah was cobbled together from a number of (hypothetical) older documents. This began with fairly reasonable suggestions -- such as that Deuteronomy was by a different author, or that the two creation stories with which Genesis opens came from different sources -- but evolved into something increasingly ridiculous, with different verses in the same chapter, or even different clauses in the same verse, being ascribed to different authors. In Genesis 25, for example, we are meant to believe that vv. 1-4 are from the Elohist; vv. 7, 9-10, 13-18, 20, and parts and 8 and 11, from the Priestly source; 21-34 and the other parts of 8 and 11, from the Jahwist; 12 and 19, from the Book of Generations; and 5-6, added by the Redactor. This would make the Torah resemble nothing so much as one of those ransom notes created by cutting out individual words and letters from magazines, and so Kaufmann dubs it -- with reference to the art form which it also calls to mind -- the mosaic theory.


Elsewhere, in a discussion of the prophets of the Old Testament, Kaufmann classifies them into two broad groups. First come the leaders and miracle-workers in the tradition of Moses himself, including such prominent figures as Elijah and Elisha. These are, naturally, the Mosaic prophets.

Later a different sort of prophet would arise -- independent and unorthodox, often scathingly critical of the religious establishment and the Temple cult, and focused on what used to be called "social justice" back in the days when that term referred to something good. Isaiah and Jeremiah are the most illustrious members of this group, but the first of them all was Amos, and so Kaufmann refers to them as -- wait for it -- the Amosaic prophets.