Sunday School Lesson 12: Fruitful in the Land of My Affliction

Joseph: Prophet or Charlatan?

The story of Joseph, as with so many of the prophets, requires us to make a choice to accept the Christian version.  Joseph, in the traditional view, is blessed by God with dreams of his role as the leader of his elder brethren (and their families), the inheritor of the birthright blessing and the priesthood.  He alone remains righteous and faithful.  As a young man, he shared some divinely inspired dreams with his elder brothers who, rather than be happy with his spiritual insights, become angry with him and sell him to Egypt. Rather than complaining about it, he works hard, and is blessed, only to be brought low through the guile and lust of his master’s wife.  In prison, he again works hard, doesn’t complain, and is elevated. Inspired by God, he interprets 2 dreams that will later work to bring him before Pharaoh.  Again, inspired by God, he interprets the dream and is blessed for his diligence and obedience.  When his brothers come, he forgives them and saves the whole family. His example to us is that out of trials come blessings and our approach to dealing with our hardships is the key to both success and happiness in this life. He humbly serves in every capacity, and is blessed for his obedience, diligence, and humility.

On the other hand, if you do not accept that his actions were guided by God, the story appears otherwise. We see a power-hungry man who tries to dominate his brothers by sucking up to his father and claiming to have divinely inspired dreams of authority. They don’t go for it and sell him to Egypt where his divine authority is less important. He attains power in Pharaoh’s house but tries to violate his boss’s wife; she has physical evidence that he was the aggressor.  (His kids wrote the history, though, so they put down his version.)  He lands in prison, but by kissing up to the warden, is again elevated.  He has an opportunity to tell the butler and the baker their eventual ends (something that he probably heard through his association with the warden), and all he wants in return is to get out of prison. When he meets with the Pharaoh, I’d lay odds that Egypt was on the up-tick from an economic downturn, and thanks to his work at Potipher’s house, he probably had recognized that economics run in cyclical patterns.  He advises the king on sound fiscal policy (levy taxes when the economy is booming, balance your budgets, save for the future, etc.), and makes a big bet that there will be a recession after the growth.  He picks seven years because the Pharaoh dreamed of seven cows and corn, but if the dream had been about five, he would have picked five. It’s even possible that in his elevated position as chairman of the Federal Reserve, he was uniquely placed to bring about an economic downturn at the appropriate time.  He then basically rapes the Egyptian people as they give him everything they own in exchange for food and the famine conveniently ends when they run out of stuff to give the government. When his brothers show up, he tricks them and scares the crap out of them just for fun and so that they will finally acknowledge that he has complete control over their lives.  The end result of his actions is bondage in Egypt for all his descendents for 400 years. 

I won’t tell you which to believe, but it’s definitely true that the victors write the history books, and in their version, they were always in the right. I wonder what Reuben’s children would have written if Joseph had died and they had just bought the food from Egypt and gone back to Jacob’s house and stayed living in Canaan.

The odd thing is, all the prophets have issues.  Abraham went out to kill his own son, for crying out loud. Isaac was duped into blessing his younger son with the blessings he intended to give to his older son, Noah cursed his son and grandchildren because Ham laughed when he saw his dad passed out drunk; how is that fair? 

I suppose I ought to end on some kind of positive note, but I don’t feel like it. If you can be distracted by the problems you find with ancient prophets, there is no way you are going to get past the imperfections your own bishop has; I guarantee he has issues.  Faith in God cannot be dependent on faith in people.  If it is, you will be disappointed every time.

Animal Eating Habits Before the Flood

Is there actually biblical support for the idea that animals did not eat each other until after the flood?

I heard a fellow on the radio today talking about the covenant which God made with Noah in Genesis chapter 9, after the flood. In it, God says he gives the animals to Noah for to be "meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things." The radio pastor reads on to the part where God says he makes his covenant with Noah and with every living creature, and takes these two statements together to indicate that nothing ate meat before this point - no lions, tigers, or bears.

Is that argument scripturally supportable? I went ahead and reread the preceding chapters of the bible, and true enough, there is no reference to animals eating each other, and other than the coats of skins, which God made for them as they were evicted from the Garden, there does not seem to be any reference to men either hunting or eating animals either. It certainly runs contrary to a thousand years or so of European artistic symbolism, which I find to be a fantastic reference for theological interpretation. The Church controlled so much, that you can see details of how the church viewed religion in a lot of the paintings of the middle ages. One very common theme was the fall and subsequent casting out of Adam and Eve. Commonly featured are small carnivores preying on innocent animals as an indication that sin had entered the world. In paintings where Eve is about to partake, there is often a fox looking slightly sinister in the fringes of the painting, eyeballing a fluffy oblivious rabbit or helpless chipmunk. He never eats one until after Eve eats the fruit, though.

Is absence of reference enough to infer absence of act? My answer is no. We have insufficient data to make a claim of this scope. Remember, we're getting about 1,600 years of history between Fall and Flood, all summed up in Genesis chapters 3-9. If you were summarizing God's interaction with man over the course of 1,600 years, would you reference how animals treated each other? I might, if it changed at a later date, and was different for some reason, but I doubt I would take the time to mention something that did not change, and I do not read the reference in Chapter 9 to indicate any kind of change in the relationship the animals had with each other, but rather, to indicate a grant of stewardship and rank over the animals to mankind. I read the covenant with Moses to be mostly a restatement of the covenant God made with Adam, with a promise not to flood the Earth again as an added bonus.

On an unrelated note, I did think it was interesting to note that God mentions that Noah should take "clean and unclean" beasts with him into the ark. Prior to today, I would have said that the distinction between clean and unclean arose with Moses, but I was mistaken. I'll have to do some more research on that one. It may simply be that Moses felt the need to state it that way because he was receiving it and passing it out to post Egypt Israelites.

Sunday School Lesson 10: Birthright Blessings; Marriage in the Covenant

Genesis 24:3 - Swear by the Lord...that thou shalt not take a wife unto my son of the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I dwell. The lesson manual indicates that this is a demonstration of the importance of marrying in the covenant. But really? What covenants had Abraham's family made that they had not discarded? His own admission is that they had turned from following God to the worship of idols. He may have been concerned about the ramifications of the curse that Canaan bore, and it's impact on his posterity.

Genesis 24:6 - Beware that thou bring not my son thither again. After making his servant swear that he would go find a wife for Isaac from among his own kindred, Abraham freaks out when the servant suggests that he might have to take Isaac back. If it was so important that he marry someone from there, why would it be so bad for him to go there? Is it just because he is trying to act on the covenant that the Lord would give him the land of Canaan? Because don't forget, his grandkids are all going to walk away from the land of Canaan and go to Egypt for 430 years.

Genesis 24:17 - And the servant ran to meet her. After praying to the Lord, and proposing his sign - whoever he asked for water, if she also offered to get some for his camels, she was the one for Isaac, he hangs out far enough away that he has to run (in the desert) to the well to ask her for water. Wouldn't she think that was a bit odd? Some guy has all his camels kneeling down within sight of a well, and himself hanging out with them, but not close enough to get a convenient drink? And would he have ran to ask her if she was not fair?

Genesis 24:30-31 - When he saw the earring and the bracelets...he said, come in, thou blessed of the Lord. Was Laban motivated by a true conviction that the servant was on the Lord's errand or by greed when he noticed the gold? Remember, this is the same Laban who would screw Isaac's son, Jacob, over when he would come to work for him later; he tricked him into marrying Leah first, and he also changed his wages multiple times.

Sunday School Lesson 9: God Will Provide Himself a Lamb

Abraham 1 - This chapter serves as background to the story of Abraham and Isaac. We learn here that Abraham was an ordained High Priest; that his own parents had departed from the ways of God to follow the heathen gods, particularly the Egyptian gods, Elkenah and Pharaoh; that his father gave him to be offered as a sacrifice to the god of Pharaoh; and that he was saved at the last instant by an angel.

Abraham 1:21 - Now this king of Egypt was a descendant from the loins of Ham, and was a partaker of the blood of the Canaanites by birth. A few weeks ago, there was a comment in Sunday School that equated Adam's son with Noah's grandson. I wanted to make a clear distinction between Canaan, the son of Ham, and Cain, the son of Adam. Both were cursed, but Canaan and his subsequent generations was not Cain, and any supposition that the dark skin of the Africans were related to Cain is faulty logic. Canaan was cursed to be a servant to his brethren due to his father's disrespect of Noah. He had a granddaughter (or possibly a great granddaughter, the genealogy can get a little confusing at times) who discovered Egypt and was its first queen. Cain was cursed to wander the Earth and that the Earth would not yield to him its fulness. I can find no scriptural support for him not being dead, and no promise that any of his seed would survive in perpetuity. Though the scriptures do not talk about it, there are apocryphal references to his death by the hand of Lamech, and even if Lamech did not do it, the timing would be right for him to have been an extremely old man at that time.