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:

• The modern country of Israel is bombing Gaza. Here is some background reading on the Israel-Palestine conflict, and here is some advice on how to criticize Israel without being anti-Semitic.
• There are apparently death squads roaming the hills of Iraq, and I don’t even have the heart to figure out the detailed right now.
• A police officer shot and killed an unarmed teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, and the police department reacted by going above and beyond in victim-blaming and starting teargasing the entire community. For some reading on that, here is a master post of NPR reports and here are some more on-the-ground reports.

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 →