da bible, God

(4): standard view is that Torah was divine word mediated by Moses, but narrative indicates otherwise (instances pointing to authorship later than Moses)

(4-5): modern theory is that Toran is not a unified whole—rather, composed of four sources that were redacted together (earliest source 10^th century BC, latest was sixth century BC)

(7): claims that Moses wrote Genesis appear only in Greco-Roman period—originally anonymous

(8): earliest parts of Genesis were written by scribes in the context of monarchies of early Judah/Israel, but later parts were written as late as after fall of monarchy in 586BCE

(8): in short: “Genesis was written over centuries by multiple authors…” [what are the implications of this, for the religious? for the sociological?]

(8): divided into two sections: I. the primeval history, chs 1-11; II. ancestral history, chs 12-50

(10): not scientifically accurate, butthis is a modern concern [hmm]. treat it metaphorically or allegorically [OK—what does this mean? take an example]

Genesis

(12): humanity is made in the image of God [what does this imply about our status? about good/evil? about free will?]

(14): two stories about creation, side-by-side [compare/contrast]

(15): the serpent and Evil, and God’s humanity [good place to raise problem of omniscience/omnipotence]

(19): the wickedness of humanity, and God’s commitment to destroy them [again, the problem of Evil]

(25): God fears the unity of humanity [God’s pettiness in nipping a rivalry in the bud? what’s this all about?]

(32): God demanding sacrifice after sacrifice [why? God as petty, jealous, craving attention]

(35): God sometimes in the plural, sometimes in the singular [the evolution of monotheism]

(35): God asking about whereabouts of Sarah [omniscience?]

(36-37): raining hellfire on Sodom and Gomorrah [genocide and destruction. what kind of God, again?]

(64): Onan spills his semen on the ground, and is put to death. 

(65): making slaves of the Egyptians

(80): Joseph’s brothers are not morally culpable, because his explusion was all a part of God’s plan [This raises some very thorny questions about morality and responsibility. In fact, it suggests that there can be none. We’d have to find some way to distinguish between this action, and others—so?]

Exodus

(81): similarly, “best understood as a composite of traditions shaped over many centuries by an unkown number of anonymous storytellers and writers.” clearly not written by Moses. 

(81-82): explusion of Pharaoh’s workforce, figure like Moses, mass emigration—none of this is mentioned in nonbiblical sources. likely that it drew on some sort of liberation of ‘West Asiatics’

(84): God is rewarding the midwives’ fear of him [again, God as petty, vainglorious, etc.]

(85): God ‘remembers’ his covenant, after decades of their being oppressed! [it took long enough—again, what kind of omniscient, omnipotent God]

(87): God gives Moses evidence of his authority, via miracles [what does this imply, for faith? Isn’t faith supposed to be precisely the opposite?]

(88-99): astonishing--God keeps hardening the Pharaoh’s heart, but then holding him and the Egyptian people responsible for the Pharaoh’s intransigence [sadism, pure and simple]

(91): referring to his future crimes as ‘wonders’

(97): the mass murder of Egyptian firstborns

(98): and Passover, to consecrate this ‘blessing’

(101-102): Pharaoh was going to let them be, but God hardens his heart so that he pursues Moses. Motivation is to ‘gain glory for myself’[Anything to give Him an opportunity to murder dozens of people, of course. ]

(109): the Chosen people (“you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples”)

(110): “I am a jealous God” [damn right]

(110): collective punishment (“punishing children for the iniquity of parents”) 

(111): God, again, demanding that the people ‘fear’ him

(112): injunctions regarding how to handle slavery

(114): you shouldn’t charge interest to the poor [shall we take this one to heart, then?]

(116): injunction to demolish and expel the Amorites, Hittites, Perizittes, Canaanites, Hivites, Jebusites.. 

(129-130): where Moses convinces God not to commit genocide, once again. though Moses returns from the Mountain and orders the death of three thousand brothers, sons, etc. 

(131): again, collective punishment (“visiting iniquity of the parents upon the children and the chidren’s children”)

- - - - 

(1) The problem of evil: whence does it arise?

(a) On the one hand, if God is omniscient/omnipotent, he’s caught in a contradiction. Surely you can’t hold people responsible. 

(b) But let’s say he’s not, and that we allow humans free will. Interestingly, there’s plenty of evidence for his not being, throughout what we read. Doesn’t this mean we’re working with a different conception of God than many of us probably imagine the Semitic tradition as defending? Maybe that’s OK. 

(c) This doesn’t, though, free God of the obligation to respond to much of how he deals with Evil, in what we read. Tare several instances where he is clearly responsible for the actions of certain humans (cf. Pharaoh), yet he punishes them nonetheless. There are also clear examples of punishment being levied against those who are responsible only because they have the misfortune of being linked, by blood, to the ‘criminal’ (cf. the Egyptian people). What is the principle being advanced here, then? [Hint: it is totalitarian]

(d) And the awfulness of punishment? Genesis and Exodus show a God running roughshod over civil liberties. In other words, even if we think there is free will, and we argue that certain humans sinned, the punishments are fierce. 

(2) The question of the Bible’s historicity. There are a whole host of laws and edicts that we would deem insane, by today’s standards [Examples?]. We might explain these by arguing that the Bible ought to be set in its historical and social context (punishments are severe, but they’re par for the course; endorsing slavery, yes, but it was a modal social institution at the time). But we’ve then stripped the text of its sacred character. It becomes a historical document. This raises a few questions. 

(A) Doesn’t this spell trouble for believers? Why follow injunctions laid down in this text, versus others, if it’s not actually the work of God, but of any number of anonymous humans working over centuries to codify common wisdom? (Related: if not sociologically, what might it mean for a believer to interpret this text allegorically/metaphorically [I have no idea])

(B) It raises a whole new line of questioning: why are certain parts of the text are emphasized, and others de-emphasized. Politicians may appeal to God, but they’re not discussing God’s injunction that you can’t charge interest on loans to the poor. Why do certain ideas get picked up at certain times, and not at others? In other words, if we accept that organized religion is historically embedded, what explains its character, and its evolution? 

(3) The problem of Faith. What is it? Here God ‘proves’ his authority by appealing to a series of miracles, in the presence of Moses. But if the people’s faith is grounded in miracles (and, what’s a corollary, God’s destructive power), is it really Faith? Isn’t Faith what prevails in the absence of evidence, not in the presence of it? 

(4) The principle of ‘a Chosen people.’ What is the principle being advanced here? And to what extent do we expect the chosen people to be favoured over others? At what point does it become wrong? 

(5) Emancipatory possibilities. Corradi spoke about the Bible as inaugurating a sense of social justice. Do you see this, in the liberation of the Israelities, from Egypt? [As a weak claim about ‘liberation’ in the abstract, this is bizarre (i.e., that a general sense of justice is produced by this incident): how do you highlight this specific instance (since there are probably plenty of others that could be adduced as general origins), how do you substantiate the causal chain (this weak sense is supposed to become a strong sense, somewhere down the line)? As a strong claim, God save us from this definition of social justice (since it coincides with his Wrath against the Egyptians). And there is the absurdity of all the counterfactuals raised (had this not been written down by any number of scribes, we would not have had a sense of ‘social justice’?!). Surely it’s sufficient to say that appeals to social justice emerge wherever we see a concrete clash of interests. 

(6) Looking at religion ‘sociologically.’ Corradi discussed this at length, in lecture [What did he say? Durkheim, etc.] . This follows from stripping the Bible of its sacred character (though it’s not necessary to do so, to examine this angle of religion). We look at its role, in this world, in creating a sense of community through ritual, shared belief, etc. Compare, for example, what it means to celebrate Passover sociologically, and what it means ideologically/religiously [community ritual vs. commemoration of the slaughter of Egyptian firstborns]

(7) The Western tradition. The purpose of this class is to substantiate the claim that there is something universal, in the particular. We’ll talk about this more, with Pericles. But do we see anything in the Bible that we would identify as either factually universal (i.e., it actually prevails universally), or desirably universal (i.e.,  part of what we think a good society should have)? 

(8): The question of monotheism. Corradi discussed observing the evolution of this sense of God’s oneness. And indeed, there are several moments in the text that hint at a plurality of Gods.