Happy Halloween, dear readers!
As a bit of terrifying Halloween fun, here’s a short online comic strip for you:
Bongcheon-Dong Ghost
written and illustrated by Horang
I ran across this several years ago (the link was messaged around my classroom at the time and you could tell who had clicked on it by the flinches and stifled shrieks) but all the text was in Korean. When I went looking for it again, I found it translated into English. It remains really well done.
In honor of the approaching Halloween, I’ve been reading some extremely good graphic novels, that seemed seasonally appropriate. Although possibly more thematic to a more traditional concept of All Hallow’s Eve than to the modern concept of Halloween, per se. This is a time when the barriers between the living and the dead are the weakest and who knows what could be roaming the streets… you’d better prepare to be scary, too, to fit in.
Anyway, the artwork for all three of these are just gorgeous, which can possibly go without mention, since I don’t read graphic novels if I don’t like the art. But still, the art is really gorgeous.
East of West
written by Jonathan Hickman
drawn by Nick Dragotta
This is a futuristic western based on an alternate past with a whole lot of mystical beings thrown in for good measure. I love it.
One of the main characters is Death. The three other horsemen of the apocalypse are also wandering around, and there’s some sort of evil prophesy that a scary number of the world leaders are fanatical believers of. No one is really good or nice in this, by they’re all really dedicated to their various (and generally conflicting) causes. And there’s something very appealing about competency, good or evil, and something fascinating about manipulative people attempting to manipulate each other.
The back sums it up well:
“We would tell you to pray. But it wouldn’t do any good. You have earned what is coming to you.”
Anna gave the first one of these to me for Christmas last year and then I bought the second one for myself last month, and the third one has just been released a couple of days ago but I haven’t gotten it yet. I’m still going to review this whole series as awesome.
Pretty Deadly
written by Kelly Sue Deconnick
drawn by Emma Rios
This is another mystical western, although minus the science fiction aspect of East of West. Instead, the whole story has a surreal quality as it is structured as a fairytale told by a bunny (or rather the skeleton of one) to a butterfly (who might be part of death’s daughter) and there are stories within stories. I still need to read it again (probably a few more times) to really track down who all is who and what their intents are, but it’s fascinating. It’s also a complete story, which is nice. There are plenty of other characters who can be developed in the next volume, whenever it comes out (and that I’m looking forward to getting when it does), but the main plot arc following the girl in the vulture cloak is resolved at the end of this volume, and thus ends the story told by bunny to butterfly.
Peculia and the Groon Grove Vampires
by Richard Sala
This is a stand-alone single story, and a much quicker read than the others. The story-line is extremely straight-forward without any real surprises. The plot-line sort of reminds me of a Nancy Drew story, although with even fewer surprises. In that way, it seems like something for a fairly young reader.
On the other hand, a lot of characters die, some in relatively gruesome ways. The focus on the gruesome deaths is actually the opposite of gratuitous, though. They’re shown quickly and casually and it all comes across as fairly light. It reminds me of the some of the older Grimm’s fairytales where, say, children push witches into ovens and then go home to celebrate with their families. So, you know, maybe it is intended for youngish children, but cheerfully bloody-minded young children.
And me, too, because I liked it a lot.
The art is also interesting in the way it’s all in black and white, with the appearance of woodprints.
In honor of approaching Halloween, I present you with some short horror stories.
The background is: about a year ago, a Reddit user asked “What is the best horror story you can come up with in two sentences?” The response was tremendous and there are currently 3397 comments in that chain (admittedly, a lot of them are responses to the responses, so there are fewer than 3K stories, but still.)
To see nine of them, nicely formatted, go here.
To see all of them, with the original formatting, go here.
Warning: these really are terrifying. Oof. Who needs sleep anyway?
This is an extremely short book, only four chapters long. In some ways it reminded me of the Book of Job, since it’s a single story with more developed individual characters. For the first time, this is really a more focused story about family love and loyalty; goodness on the scale of individuals.
It was a much appreciated palate cleanser from the previous few books.
In this story, Naomi was a married woman with two adult sons who had each married. Over time, though, both her husband and her two sons died. While she directs both of her daughters-in-law to return to their families as being better able to care for the widowed women, one of them, Ruth, insisted on staying with Naomi.
Where you go, I will go: where you lodge; I will lodge; your people shall be my people; and your God my God — Ruth 1:16
I had known this quote, of course, but it had always seemed the epitome of romantic and I’d assumed it was spoken by a woman to her husband or lover. I’m actually rather pleased to discover that it is spoken by the widowed Ruth to her mother-in-law. This isn’t about marriage, it’s about found family.
Naomi returns to her homeland accompanied by Ruth but are poor beggers. They work together to identify and then seduce for Ruth a new husband, so that Naomi can have an heir and Ruth can have a household. And they succeed in finding a nice older man who is both wealthy and kind (and flattered at being approached by a younger woman.)
And they all live happily after.
It was nice.
Summary: Widowed Ruth follows her mother-in-law Naomi home to a strange land and, with Naomi’s assistance, finds a kind and wealthy second husband to take care of them both.
Moral: Loyalty and kindness can pay off in a happy ending.
Next up: Samuel 1
So in Deuteronomy I complained about how Moses gave this lecture about how the people of Israel would betray the Lord and be punished for their sins, etc, and it really irritated me. Well, here’s the start of all the crap that’s going to happen to them, and sure enough it’s pretty thoroughly their own fault. Once more, I am reminded of Game of Thrones (a show that I actually don’t watch, but keep up-to-date on via summaries) in the way a bunch of unpleasant people wander around doing awful things to one another.
Plus, this should probably have an NC-17 rating, and more likely just be banned, because it is gruesome. And while previous books have been all pro-genocide, this one is pretty pro-rape.
Four nations* were left alive in order to provide a lesson in warfare to the generations of Israelites, and thus we have a timeline made up of conquerings and rebellions, covering the various “Judges” of Israel. There is no particular explanation of how a Judge is chosen or found, and very little information on some of them. (Footnotes mark the six who actually got stories.)
Bad guy: King Cushanrishathaim of Aram-naharaim conquered for 8 years
Judge: Othniel son of Kenaz judged for 40 years
Bad guy: Eglon of Moab conquered for 18 years
Judge: Ehud son of Gera, the Benjamite judged for 80 years**
Judge: Shamgar son of Anath judged (killed 600 Philistines)
Bad guy: King Jabin of Canaan conquered for 20 years
Judge: Deborah wife of Lappidoth judged for 40 years***
Bad guy (nation): Midian conquered for 7 years
Judge: Gideon, called Jerubbaal, son of Joash judged for 40 years****
(Judge? Bad guy?): Abimelech son of Jerubbaal, conquered? judged? for 3 years+
Judge: Tola son of Puah son of Dodo judged for 23 years
Judge: Jair the Gileadite judged for 22 years
Bad guy (nation): Philistines and Ammonites conquered for 18 years
Judge: Jephthah the Gileadite, bastard son of Gilead judged for 6 years ++
Judge: Ibzan of Bethlehem judged for 7 years
Judge: Elon the Zebulunite judged for 10 years
Judge: Abdon son of Hillel judged for 8 years
Bad guy: Philistines conquered for 40 years
Judge: Samson judged for 20 years +++
After Samson we trail off away from judges and get a random story about Micah who gets wealthy in chapter 17 and then gets it stolen away from him by a bunch of other Israelites in chapter 18.
Then comes the really rape-tastic story of the Benjamites (chapters 19-21), which starts out reminiscent of Lot’s situation in Genesis 19, where he offers his daughters to a mob in Sodom in place of his angelic visitors. Except that in Genesis, Lot’s daughters were not accepted as suitable replacement, while in Judges a mob of Benjamites do wind up accepting a Levite’s concubine in his stead. So they gang rape the concubine to death. In the morning, the Levite cuts his dead concubine into 12 parts and sends the parts to the different tribes of Israel to call up an army. The Benjamites refuse to give up to justice the actual participants in the gang rape and thus a series of remarkably even battles takes place, with the Benjamites eventually losing to the extent that their entire tribe was killed with the exception of 600 soldiers who fled into a particularly inhospitable area. Victory was declared but then they had the problem of 600 males left in the tribe of Benjamin and no women and all the other tribes of Israel had sworn not to give any wives to Benjamin but were also unwilling to just let them die out.
The army that had just slaughtered all the women and children of the Benjamites figured out that they could fix this by invading a Canaanite town, killing all the males and the adult females and delivering the young females to the remaining Benjamites to be their wives. This plan provided 400 young girls to “marry” but wasn’t enough to give each Benjamite soldier a wife of his own. So the army told the remaining Benjamites to just kidnap sufficient girls from the religious celebration happening Shiloh, north of Bethel, and then explain to their unhappy fathers and brothers that at least the oath not to give wives to the Benjamites hadn’t been broken, because the Benjamites had taken the wives by force.
So everything worked out?
Blech.
Summary: There were a bunch of people who weren’t as great as Moses or Joshua, but still somehow acquired the title of “Judge.” Occasionally they did stuff (ie, killed people.) Some other people did a lot of raping and sometimes it was bad and other times it was good.
Moral: Hahahahahahaha! “Moral,” you say. Hahahaha! The very last verse in the book is:
In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes. — Judges 21:25
* Philistines, Cananites, Sidonians, Hivites (Judges 3:1-4)
** The Moabite king he killed was so fat that Ehud left the sword in his body, hidden by the layers on fat, as he wandered out past the servants after his assassination of their king.
*** Deborah gets a song in addition to a rather convoluted story of manipulations.
**** Gideon makes God prove himself and then raises an army of some 20,000 people, but God decides that it’s too even a battle to really show God’s might, so has Gideon send 19,700 of them away, keeping only the soldiers who lap up water from the river like dogs.
+ It didn’t even seem clear to the narrator whether this guy was a good guy or a bad guy. He’s the son of Gideon, a previous judge, but he also killed his 70 brothers in order to inherit and winds up getting cursed and dying.
++ First occasion of human sacrifice: Jephthah sacrificed his daughter as a burnt offering.
+++ Samson gets four whole chapters (13-16) and is an idiot and an ass. Among other things, he makes a bet that he can’t afford, and when he loses, he goes out and kills some local townspeople to take their stuff so he can pay off his bet. And, of course, there’s the famous story of him and his hair and his wife Delilah who cuts it off to weaken him. Four times (4 times!) Delilah asks Samson what will weaken him, and then does it, and calls his enemies in. The first three times, Samson lies to her, breaks his bindings and kills his enemies. The fourth time he decided to tell the truth???
Next up: Ruth
I had not expected reading the bible to be such a strong argument for atheism. I can certainly understand why there was such a long time when priests prevented their congregations from reading it themselves and insisted that a priest had to interpret it for them. Because this is just sort of miserable.
Current events are not helping, given:
Generally speaking my faith in humanity is at a definite low point right now, and Joshua did not help at all.
The Book of Joshua
Joshua is a warlord. This book starts off with the details of the battles Joshua led as the Israelite army crosses the Jordan and starts to take over the land.
After the first few battles, though, the descriptions change to just lists. Here are all the cities who were invaded and the people who were killed, because there were too many to describe.
The third and largest part of this book gives detailed descriptions of how exactly the conquered land is divided among the people of Israel.
There’s also a call-out to the magician Balaam, mentioned in Numbers. In Numbers, he was hired to curse the Israel people but blessed them instead, and then gave a speech about the greatness and virtue of God. (It made me laugh.) Well, in Joshua, the army of Israel killed him. “Along with the rest of those put to death, the Israelites also put to the sword Balaam son of Beor, who practiced divination.” (Joshua 13:22)
Since the rest of my description is rather long, I’m going to put the rest under a cut: Continue reading
On my last fanfic post, it was pointed out that the characterization of Bucky Barnes in one story felt a bit off. One of the great things about fanfic, though, is that there are a gazillion different takes on any given character. On AO3, at the time of writing this, there are 9323 fics that have Bucky Barnes as a character.
Since I’ve gone a bit crazy recently with how many of these I’ve read, I figured I would share with a selection of stories covering a range of different Bucky-recovering-from-Winter-Soldier characterizations.*
All of the following stories are fanfic based on Captain America: Winter Soldier.
Bucky Characterization: Fragile
[untitled Bucky-on-a-bus fic]
by WinterSoldierFell
Summary (aka the first line of the story): It’s hot on the bus, and Bucky’s trying hard to keep away from the people next to him.
Why I like it: The story is a reminder that along with all the other evil things that were done to him, his surgery and prosthetic were also done without consent. And yet, this story is hopeful. Bucky is still very much lost but there’s hope that even if he doesn’t manage to discover himself, he will be able to create something new.
Bucky Characterization: Cold-blooded
Stone Cold
By Sassaphrass
Summary: There had maybe always been a part of Bucky Barnes, that was a stone cold killer… the history books may have forgotten that, but Steve hasn’t.
Why I like it: A lot of Bucky-recovering-from-being-the-Winter-Soldier stories stress the differences between Bucky and the Winter Soldier, reassuring everyone that Bucky was in no way responsible for his actions as a brainwashed assassin. Fair enough. This fic, though, focuses on the way Bucky and the Winter Solider are the same. This is also a character study of Steve Rogers as much as it is of Bucky Barnes.
Bucky Characterization: Long-suffering
Too Late to Apologize
By Verity
Summary: Bucky goes to the big Trader Joe’s in Union Square for toilet paper and peanut butter cups. When he gets out, his minder is across the street, conspicuously reading a newspaper in the middle of the sidewalk. Bucky has to squint to make out the headline, which is CAPTAIN AMERICA ARRESTED IN ZUCCOTTI PARK. “Oh, come on,” he mutters beneath his breath.
Why I like it: The whole super hero business takes a back-seat in this story, to just the tasks of regular life. Bucky is still piecing together his life but he’s always going to be there for Steve. (And Steve is still going to get himself in trouble standing up to bullies.)
Bucky Characterization: Determined
Soft Spot for the Hell Raisin’ Boy
By ifeelbetter
Summary: The Winter Soldier takes an interest in Sam Wilson. Bucky Barnes wants to tell him how to be Steve Rogers’s best friend.
Why I like it: This is kind of ludicrous but I like it, because while Steve Rogers is desperately trying to find Bucky Barnes, Bucky thinks Sam Wilson will make a better best friend to Steve than he will. Sam is clearly a saint to put up with this.
Bucky Characterization: Laid-back
Four times an Avenger met Bucky and didn’t know who he was, and one time they were all introduced
By Odsbodkins
Summary: What it says on the tin. In which Tony is kidnapped, Clint is a fangirl, Bruce sees echoes of the past and Thor is Thor.
Why I like it: All of these people have had seriously messed up lives and for any of them to be functioning at all, they have to have learned to just roll with it. Here is a Winter Solider/ Bucky who basically fits right in with the rest of the Avengers.
Bucky Characterization: Robot
Clint Barton’s Home for Wayward Mind Wiped Assassins
By roguewrld
Summary: “Where ever you were, whatever you did and whoever you did it for, it’s over. You need to pretend to be a person now, okay?”
Additional comment: This is the Clint Barton from the recent Hawkeye comic books. You don’t actually need to have read them to enjoy this, but it does add depth to the story if you have.
Why I like it: This is almost more of a Clint Barton character study than a Bucky Barnes ones, and yet, I do think it does a wonderful job of showing Barnes’ recovery from being a brainwashed assassin to being a human being who gets to make choices and have friends.
Bucky Characterization: Feral cat
That Kind of Day
By Neery
Summary: Carolyn Brown’s having one of those days. Her truck’s been stolen, she’s about to lose her job, and now a crazy Hydra assassin has broken into her apartment to ambush Captain America.
Why I like it: First of all, it’s an outsider perspective which is always hilarious because regular people have a very different take on the craziness that is superheroes. Second, the Bucky in this is like a really dangerous feral cat. He wants to come in, but he’s not quite sure how to.
And finally some complete crack,** just in case you didn’t think any of the previous characterizations were too ridiculous:
Bucky Characterization: Domesticated maybe? Flirtatious definitely
I once started out to walk around the world but ended up in Brooklyn
By suzukiblu
Summary: Captain America is not in New York, so the Winter Soldier is.
Additional comment: The other main character in this is Darcy Lewis from the Thor movies. I’m not sure how comprehensible this fic would be if you don’t know Darcy Lewis or Jane Foster.
Why I like this: A story doesn’t have to have good characterizations in order to be a whole lot of fun. This story is absolutely ridiculous but still makes me grin.
* It was really hard to narrow this down. I kept on wanting to recommend ALL THE STORIES!!!
** In fanfic circles, “crack” describes the really ludicrous stories that no one is even going to pretend is likely or makes-sense, but it still a whole lot of fun. I’m not sure where it came from, but I’ve also run across the phrase “[the author] smoked crack so you don’t have to” in reference to some stories.
First: urg, this is literally Moses giving speeches recounting the events and rules of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. It is called Deuteronomy because it’s the second telling. Urg.
Second: There is more than a bit of revisionist history going on here, not so much regarding the major events themselves as the motivations and details of intent and blame.
Third: Some of the rules that hadn’t been mentioned before are surprisingly specific. For instance:
Deutronomy 25:11-12:
If men get into a fight with one another, and the wife of one intervenes to rescue her husband from the grip of his opponent by reaching out and seizing his genitals, you shall cut off her hand; show no pity.
It sounds to me like there’s a story there, possibly involving Moses fighting with a married man and getting grabbed by the wife.
Fourth: Oh the genocide. The amount of genocide that god is demanding is more than a little disturbing. It is explicit that God is “giving” the Israelites land that is already inhabited by other peoples and plans to either kill or enslave the current inhabitants. The killing of all the current inhabitants is a recurring theme throughout the whole book, but chapter 20 is particularly specific. For instance:
Deuteronomy 20:10-13:
When you draw near to a town to fight against it, offer it terms of peace. If it accepts our terms of peace and surrenders to you, then all the people in it shall serve you at forced labor. If it does not submit to you peacefully, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it; and when the Lord your God gives it into your hand, you shall put all its males to the sword.
And
Deuteronomy 20:16-17:
But as for the towns of those peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them – the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites – just as the Lord your God has commanded,
Fifth: In the U.S. we have (in theory at least) a rule of “innocent until proven guilty.” In Deuteronomy 31-32, by contrast, there appears to be the rule of “guilty even before you are guilty.” Moses, and in his recounting God as well, do this thing that I find extremely irritating: They go off on what their audience is going to do and how mad they (Moses and God) are with their audience regarding what they (the audience) are going to do. Moses is giving this speech to the Israelites before they cross the river Jordan in order to take over the lands (and commit a minimum of six different genocides*), but apparently they’re going to get rich and fat off the land and forget the lord their god and worship other idols and God is going to be so furious with them that he’ll cast them out of the land and let their enemies defeat them, while sending plagues and disasters to bring the Israelites down. Moses even makes up a song all about the disasters God is going to bring down on the disrespectful heads of the Israelites after they betray God after they’ve grown fat and forgetful in the land that they haven’t even entered yet.
I’m not quite sure how this message is supposed to be taken: Don’t worry about the future? Because the immediate future is going to be so wonderful that you’ll forget about your extremely temperamental God and in the long run he is going to beat you down into the dirt?
Anyway:
Sixth: God treats the Nation of Israel as a single entity rather than as a group of individuals. It’s possible (likely) that I’m biased by living in a society that focuses so much attention on individuality, but it’s kind of disturbing how little the concept of individuals seems to mean to this god, as anything other than a part of the whole. Thus, one person acting in a displeasing manner can cause God to abandon the whole Nation, while one person acting in a pleasing manner can cause God to change his mind. But, even more to the point, God has promised to make of Israel a great nation, but also seems to think that as long as there is one survivor, it doesn’t matter how many of them he kills, because he can just rebuild the bloodline from the single survivor. Not only does this point towards the necessity of unpleasant levels of incest (something that God had just made illegal!), but also seems to imply that God figured the whole flood/Noah/ark thing was a great idea and could definitely be repeated, by means of plague this time, because he wouldn’t be breaking any promises as long as there is a single surviving descendant.
Summary: Moses is about to die and so he gives three sermons on the past, the present, and the future of the Israeli tribe: how God rescued them from Egypt, the rules of society and sacrifice, and their future of wealth, betrayal, and punishment.
Moral: You (yes: you) are too stubborn to be blindly obedient like you should be, so you’ll be beaten down into the dirt for your sins.
* (1) Hittites, (2) Amorites, (3) Canaanites, (4) Perizzites, (5) Hivites and (6) Jebusites
Next up: Joshua
While not neatly divided into sections, there are really two themes in the book of Numbers*: ledgers and travelogues. Plus a really disturbingly positive view on genocide.
First: Ledgers
This book is appropriately named Numbers because it’s chock full of them. We have the results of two census, instructions on camp layout, a donation ledger, descriptions of a bunch of maps, plus a lot of additional instructions for how to make sacrifices.
The camp layout and census information was long and detailed enough that I thought it would be useful to create an info graphic, to get a sense of what all the numbers mean. You can see the results below:
The donations ledger was both detailed and incredibly repetitive. Each day for twelve days, the exact same offerings/sacrifices were made, in the same order and for the same amounts. And over the course of 77 verses, those offerings/sacrifices were listed twelve times. I decided that this needed an infographic too, so I’ve included one below:
Second: Travelogues
There are also a bunch of stories about different characters. These stories are each so complex and yet so concise that there’s not much point in summarizing them. They include several failed rebellions against Moses’ leadership, several stopped (or at least restricted) massacres by God of the Israelites**, and a foreign magician who is repeatedly hired to curse the Israelites but blesses them each time instead.
The one story that really stood out to me*** was in Numbers 20:14-21. This is the first time I felt any real sense of apprehension about the events. Moses sends a message to the King of Edom requesting permission to pass through the lands of Edom. The message is all nice and sweet, asking for permission and promising to do no harm, and I just thought to myself: say ‘no’, something terrible will happen to you if you say ‘yes’. And luckily Edom said ‘no’—politely, firmly, and without insult or excuse—and the Israelites traveled a different way and I felt so much relief for Edom managing the avoid so many travesties.
Not many other people were able to avoid the repercussions of coming into contact with them.
Keep in mind that at this point the Israelites are a landless, traveling army-nation of between 603,550 and 601,730 warriors along with their families and their herds of cattle, sheep, and goats. God is appearing to them as a fire at night and a dark cloud during the day. When the dark cloud moves, the whole army nation packs up and moves too, settling down only when the dark cloud stops and they can settle the temple around/under God.
And this God has given them many rules to live by but also promised them a land of milk and honey that already belongs to other people, with the instructions that they will simply take that land from those other people.
Which brings us to the prevalence of genocide.
While there’s many examples of genocide in this book, Numbers 21:3**** and Numbers 21:34-35***** are good examples of casual slaughters, Numbers 31 contains the one I find the most horrific because it’s the most specific.
Back in Numbers 25, we discover that some of the men of Israel had started to date some of the women of Moab and been invited into Moab homes and temples. God was infuriated and started a plague that killed 24,000 Israelites and only ended when one of the Israelite priests skewered an Israelite man and a Moabite woman on a spear in the man’s tent.
Well, in Numbers 31, God demands “revenge” on Moab, apparently for their women dating the men of Israel. So Moses calls together a war party of 12,000. These soldiers go into Moab kill every last man and burn to the ground every last town, but took back with them all the treasure they could carry, all the herds of animals, and all the women and children.
When the war party returns to the Israelite encampment, Moses is enraged because the soldiers hadn’t killed enough people. They weren’t supposed to take the women and children captive, they are only allowed to take the female children captive.
Numbers 31:17-18: Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves.
And because this is the Book of Numbers, we know the numbers: once the soldiers were done slaughtering their prisoners, there were still 32,000 virgin girls as prisoners to distribute to the various tribes. Making the (somewhat dubious) assumption that the Moab population consisted of equal numbers of adult men, adult women, male children, and female children, this means that the soldiers invaded and killed 32,000 Moab men in the land of Moab, and then killed an additional 64,000 of their prisoners (adult women and male children) at the border of the Israelite camp.
I’ve actually been researching various genocides of the 20th century for my day job and there are some pretty horrifying details. And knowing the details of some of those genocides gives me a more realistic perspective on these biblical genocides which I might have been able to skim past when I was much younger.
I really want some door-to-door missionaries to come around soon so I can ask them about their take on the Old Testament and then possibly yell at them.
Summary: God is a micromanager and the Israelites are a landless army-nation that is traveling across the land killing wherever they go.
Moral: You want as little to do with God as you can get away with.
* I’ve switched translations from the English Standard Version Bible (that I was reading on my kindle) over to The New Revised Standard Version Bible (for which I have a hardcopy.)
** The argument that really seems to hold weight with God regarding why he shouldn’t just kill all the Israelites is that so many people saw God claim the Israelites as his own and God would be seen as weak and ungodly if they were to all die. (Numbers 14 and 16)
*** Although Numbers 23:19 actually made me laugh out loud, because Balaam (the magician) speaks his prophesy and talks about how God never changes his mind. God changes his mind all the time, mostly about whether or not to kill all of his chosen people.
**** Numbers 21: 3 The Lord listened to the voice of Israel, and handed over the Canaanites; and they utterly destroyed them and their towns; so the place was called Hormah.
***** Numbers 21:34-35: But the Lord said to Moses, “Do not be afraid of him; for I have given him into your hand, with all his people and all his land. You shall do to him as you did to King Shihon of the Amorites, who ruled in Heshbon.” So they killed him, his sons, and all his people, until there was no survivor left; and they took possession of his land.
Next up: Deuteronomy
This is a short post, just to let you know that Abe Books has posted a reader-generated list of the 75 greatest living female authors. Everyone should go check it out:
75 Greatest Living Female Authors
I’ve read books by only 21 of them, and really enjoyed the ones by 18 of them.
Also, if you don’t know Abe Books, they’re a super useful resource. If (when) Amazon lets me down regarding finding some esoteric book or I’m looking for a specific edition of a book, then Abe Books is extremely helpful.
Biblio-therapy 