Susanna

When I think of musical Biblical characters, I tend to think of David. I do not think Susanna. I hadn't read Susanna till now, though, so I never think Susanna. In the religious studies classes I've taken, we never dealt with deutero-canonical works. I'm Catholic, so we have them in our Bibles, but we don't read any of our Bibles, so that doesn't matter. For some reason, Wallace Stevens thinks Susanna.

He compares the way he feels to the way the elders felt toward Susanna. Then he retells the story--but only so far. He stops abruptly just before the elders attempt to seduce and blackmail Susanna. It seems to me as if the narrator of the poem is about to commit such acts as those, but he tries to cover up his intentions.

I wonder if God ever sent a Daniel to stop Wallace Stevens.

Scrubs

Today in class, we were talking about The Gospel According to John. Tonight I was cleaning my room with Scrubs playing on my TV. It was the Christmas episode, and as I was peeling dirty clothes from the floor, I was distracted by Turk saying, "lovest thou me, then feed my sheep." He goes on with the metaphor. "We are not only gonna feed his sheep, but we gonna clothe them. And we gonna bathe them. And we gonna cut 'em open, and then we gonna stitch 'em right back together."

Turk obviously recognizes that Jesus isn't asking Peter to look over ovine nutrition for Him.

After John, the lecture moved to the death of Socrates. As Socrates dies, he turns to Crito and says, "we owe a cock to Asclepius." The dying man here also employs figurative language. Crito isn't to pay off some bookie. Asclepius is the practitioner of medicine in Greek mythology.

I thought it especially interesting that not only did television quote the same Biblical passage as lecture did today, but that the line was delivered by a surgeon, a human counterpart to Asclepius.

Following these topics, Professor Sexson told us the idea of realized eschatology. He told us that all there is to look for in paradise can be found in Lit 240. To me, it seems that anything else certainly can.

My terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day

This blog has nothing to do with the Bible.

In class I was asked about my bad day. I'm going to write about that. It was a Saturday. I woke up earlier than I normally do on Saturdays because I had to take the LSAT. The ticket to get into the test said I had to show up by 8:30 AM. I know that LSAC (the organization that runs the test) stickles. That is, they are sticklers. I figured it started then, and exactly then, so I wanted to be sure I was early. I got there around eight.

Now, I live in the dorms here on campus, and on weekdays, Food Service begins their day at seven. On weekends, they don't start till eight. I always forget that, though, so this particular Saturday I went to get breakfast and found only locked doors.

Then I went to the test. The ticket said to report to Reid Hall, room 243. The signs all over the building, however, directed me to a lobby on the fourth floor. It's not fun climbing all those stairs. It's not too bad, of course, but it isn't good, and all these little things add up.

When you take the LSAT, you are allowed to have pencils, erasers, pencil sharpeners, tissues, and a juice box. You may have nothing else. Everything you have must be in a clear zip-lock bag. I happened to find one of those in the trash the night before, so I washed it out and was able to keep my stuff there. That was a good thing, but it happened the day before, so it doesn't count towards my bad day.

I got to the test room, and there were two women there who reminded me that once I came in, I would not be allowed to leave. Where else could I go? They didn't accept my driver's license because they had never seen one from Virginia. I had to present a military ID and a passport before they let me in. I was the first person actually taking the test in the room. Remember when I said I thought it started at 8:30? Well, we waited until 9:30 to start. They showed me my seat, and I waited nearly an hour and a half. I took a few pencils from my bag. You can keep the pencils on your desk. You cannot access your baggie during the test.

We were filling out that part of the test where you write your name, sex, race, social security number, etc. when I realized I didn't know my LSAC identification number. I would have to check my ticket stub. One of the proctors came over and gave me a harsh looking at. I showed her that all I had in my baggie, apart from a number of government issued identification cards, was the stub. I was the only person whose baggie had so little in it. The woman said that now it's okay to have the stub on the desk, so I did that. She also told me to keep my IDs on the desk. It turns out I didn't need my baggie.

After that part was the part when you have to write, "I hereby certify that I won't talk about the contents of the test, yada yada, the answers, yada yada, the questions, yada yada. For some reason, they insist that this is written in cursive. When I was in fourth grade, we learned e's and l's because in Kansas they learn cursive in fifth grade. Then I moved. In Hawaii, they learn cursive in fourth grade, and I almost failed the fifth grade because I hadn't learned how to do it.

I still can't do it. I think writing the honor code was the hardest part of the whole exam. I very slowly scribbled something that looked like I probably should have failed fifth grade. Then the proctors asked if anyone needed more time. I was about halfway done.

Around 2:30, the test finally ended. I was hungry. I hit up the cafeteria. This is, of course, between meal times, and they have very little food. I had some macaroni and cheese that I think had gone bad and a blob of cottage cheese that had been out since eight.

When I made it home, I found that my mother had called me several times during the test. I called her back. Then I had to talk to Mom for an hour. That means that for an hour, she told me how things my brother was doing (about 2000 miles away) were my fault, how I should have done better on the test, and why didn't I answer her when she called? Then she tells me she loves me. Then I get to hang up.

Later I went to a friend's house. The idea was that we could hang out and have a few drinks. I had bought a nice cigar the day before because I was expecting I would want one around then. It turns out his roommates also wanted a few drinks. By the time I made it there, there was quite a party. It was not the relaxing environment I was looking for.

A little while after the keg ran out, we heard that Jack, one of the roommates, had passed out out front somewhere. When we went looking for him, we found that really he just kept falling into walls in the living room where he was trying to pick fights with people waiting for the bathroom. Jack gets pretty fisticuffs when he drinks.

Sometimes Jack was very happy to see me. Other times he headbutted me. Still, he told the other guys that I was the only one he'd listen to. He didn't listen to me. He mostly just used me to stand. We did trick him into going into his room, though. All we had to do was get him to go to sleep. Instead he kicked his desk apart and threw DVDs around. Then he would try to fight me. I just kind of contained him for maybe half an hour, when Trevor, another roommate, came by to relieve me. At this point, my shirt was bloody from Jack, and my face was bloody from bleeding, and my shoe wasn't bloody but it was lost.

I decided to cut my losses and go home. It's like a fifteen to twenty minute walk that is not enjoyable when you're punch-drunk with only one shoe. When I made it back to the dorms, there was this girl who lives on my floor who was very upset, so I had to listen to her story about the drama she and another girl on the floor now have. Then Kevin couldn't get into his room because his keys were in some guy's car. I had to help him look through the parking lot (though we weren't sure it was in that parking lot) wearing only one shoe for a car I didn't recognize. On top of this, the guy who had seen the car once before was thoroughly intoxicated.

I took a shower because my foot was disgusting, and eventually I made it to bed. While I slept, my floor was vandalized by the residents of another floor.

Predeluvian commentary

Before I say any of this, I'd like to point out that a lot of this is only speculative. Don't believe these things if you aren't looking for literal Biblical foundations for belief. Often, a lot of these are just fun ways to see things in the Bible.

Creation. The first time through. An interesting thought here: Science claims the age of the universe is around fifteen and one half billion years old. Genesis says the universe was created in six days. However, according to Einstein's theory of relativity, at the beginning of the universe, before it had expanded all that much, time would have passed much more slowly. If you look in any astrophysics textbook and apply the necessary constants into the appropriate equations, you'd see that the first "day" would have lasted about 8 billion years. I'm not going to make a graph of exponential decay here, but I am going to give a ballpark estimation to show the point I am making. Because of the expansion of the universe, time travels twice as quickly after each "day." That means the second day takes 4 billion years. The total so far: 12 billion. After the third day at 2 billion, the fourth at 1 billion, the fifth at half a billion, and the sixth at one quarter billion years, we get a total of 15 3/4 billion years. Compare that number again with the 15 1/2. But when time is seen in this way, we find science and the Creation in Genesis 1 also agree on the placement of when a great many of God's creations first appear....

Moving on. Where was it that had the snake in the Adam and Eve story moving about as a spring? It happened somewhere. Was it Milton? I'd like to know, but that is all I want to say about that story. Most of all the classes I've taken at university have covered the Fall of Man, and I'm sick of it. Great story, but it's told to death. I do like the image of the spring, though.

Cain and Abel. Did anyone else read Ishmael, that novel about the gorilla who teaches the man about the Bible? I once bought Life of Pi at a bookstore, and the lady working there suggested Ishmael, too. I wasn't much of a fan of Ishmael, but it does deal with the idea that I shall call likely often call 'eponymous ancestors.' These are the Biblical characters who usually share names with tribes in the surrounding areas at the time the stories were written (not always: Esau represents the Edomites, for example). They have the stereotypical qualities of the peoples they personify. Essentially it's much like saying that Texas was a small but hardworking cowboy who had an older brother named Mexico, and Mexico was a pot-smoking gunslinger who attacked his younger brother one night. Texas was able to defend himself because he was just that cool, and now everyone likes him best.

In Ishmael, the gorilla talks about Cain and Abel representing two different tribes. Abel represents the early semitic peoples because he is a shepherd. The story shows that something is inherently wrong with the people Cain personifies.

I don't know too much about this, but I do know that these kinds of stories are good at saying the people like us are the good guys, and everyone else is bad. It's a good way to tell that kind of story, and that is a definite theme throughout the Hebrew Bible. In this class we say Hebrew Scriptures; I say Hebrew Bible. It's the same.

Up to the Flood, though, um, people in the Bible are living very, very long lives. They continue to do so for a while afterward as well, but not quite as long, and I'm not to quite to that yet. However, even today as people age, they do tend to turn into funny shapes. Certain parts of their bodies, especially including their brows and some other parts continue to grow their entire lives, and they become more and more hunched over, as well. Methuselah lived to be 969 years old. As Master Yoda says, "When 900 years old you reach, look as good you will not." Imagine what Methuselah looked like when he died. Exactly. Let's pretend that we found Methuselah's skeletal remains. We've done this. Maybe not his, but we've found not quite erect humanoids with these huge crania (craniums?). That happened, by the way; we have found skeletons that shape. You should be thinking evolution. We said we evolved from them--Cro-Magnon, Neanderthal, and whatnot. Cavemen. Then we find fossils of people less and less hunched, that is, more and more erect and more and more "modern," less "old," as the levels of depth in the earth decreases and the time approaches the present. Moses was something like 120 when he died, btw. He would have looked closer to us but not, and he would have been pretty deep but much more similar to us than Methuselah. We came up with this idea of evolution....

Actually, I do believe some of that. I've got some leanings toward a belief in something like evolution. I am not an evolutionist, though, especially when Stephen Jay Gould is involved. I don't like him to be honest. Staircases and what not. Also eyes spontaneously generating. That ain't me. Human evolution can be explained this way. I am NOT saying this is how it happened: just that it is an interesting way to look at it, and Stephen Jay Gould is not necessarily sensical when he says that there are staircases of evolution. He just isn't sensical sometimes. Look it up. He was often the authority on the evolution, btw, and he can't hold water lots of times.

That's where I am right now, inasmuch as I won't follow Gould and also inasmuch as I've now read in the Bible this far for class.

Also, Nephilim to me, as the Catholic, are a big reason God destroyed the World that time. I'm past there as well. They are not to be seen, as I had read in another blog, (who was it, by the way, who suggested this?) other cultures' gods as those would not have existed or have even been conceived in a postdeluvian world. They'd have been completely forgotten before the Greeks, Trojans, Romans, etc. had they been these cultures' gods. Jupiter, Zeus, Apollo, Dionysis, Eros, Aphrodite, fucking Titans. No. Not Nephilim. No. Absolutely not.

It might have something to do with my Catholicism. I don't say 'Apocryphal,' rather 'deuterocanonical,' but in these books, these guys are the children of fallen angels and whatnot. They cannot be gods of other cultures. I'm pretty sure that that would have been anachronistic anyway, regardless of word-choice, because only Noah's progeny and posterity and whatnot could have reïnvented the Nephilim as gods, and that just simply doesn't make sense.

It's a fun idea, and I thought about it for quite some time, admittedly, but it holds water like Gould does. It holds water like a very dogmatic but atheistic sieve.

I am writing a blog.

I left all my stuff at a friend's house over the summer. I got it back yesterday, so I'm no longer living out of a suitcase. My Bible was with the rest of my stuff, and I hadn't started reading yet. Actually, I still haven't started, but for me the intention of this blog is more to understand how to blog than to provide my commentary on the Bible. Additionally, I mean especially to comment on my experience with it in the past. Also, I haven't read anyone else's blogs; I haven't figured that out yet.

My dad was raised in something like the Presbyterian faith. He's not very religious. Mom is Catholic. My siblings and I were raised in this tradition. We Catholics are known for our lack of emphasis on the Bible in our religion. I was a little familiar with the Bible through the programming of the History Channel, but even I knew this wasn't how the Bible really is. Still, I never read much of it until after I left for college. Once though, in high school, I went to a lecture a non-denominational protestant friend invited me to at her church that discussed what I now know to be the Hebrew Bible, but which was at this time and in this setting fittingly called the Old Testament. Actually, Professor, you would have enjoyed it. They taught this sequence of hand gestures that represented certain things in the Bible, and it helped you to remember the order of all the events. I wasn't too familiar with the Bible, so it was difficult to remember it, anyway. Also, at that point I had decided that it would be better for me to read the Bible on my own. I thought I could remember it better that way and that it would be more meaningful. Come on. I was young. I could do anything. I was invincible. I was naïve. That summer I tried reading the Bible for the first time. I started at the Beginning. This was not because it's a very good place to start, but because I knew enough to know that Genesis was a bunch of stories--something I could handle. I skipped over who begot whom and which people know each other, but otherwise I read into Leviticus. I decided that this part wasn't something I was interested in and that it wasn't worth working through. I also decided to take a break from my Bible.

Not much later I came back to it. I enrolled in some religion classes here at MSU. Most of them were my favorite classes I had. I almost majored in religion. Sometimes I didn't do too well because I can't physically write fast enough to do as well as I'd liked to on the tests. Still, I realized the Bible classes I took were a good fit for me. I liked the historical approach we took towards the material. I'd never been exposed to that. Not even the History Channel does it. I'm Catholic. I don't read the Bible for the same reasons protestants might. I'm not looking for how everything is like Jesus's life and how Jesus's life is like my own. It only makes sense to me that the writers of the Bible would write something that means something in their own culture--their own lives. Not ours. Not mine specifically. We don't read other myths for this. Fortunately.

My religion classes and these kinds of viewpoints led me to adopt a point of view that interferes with that taken in English 240. The way I've always seen the Bible is nonlinear. It wasn't written in the order it is now. The writers didn't even necessarily recognize the existence of other books when they wrote what they wrote. In fact, they weren't even 'books.' Books weren't invented until relatively recently. Reading the Bible from start to finish simply is not the way it was meant to be read, and I am reluctant to take that approach. I strongly doubt that I shall be able to commit fully and accomplish the task of reading the Bible cover-to-cover.

Having said that, I also recognize the fact that there are other viewpoints as legitimate as my own, and I can respect some of them. My approach is to see the Bible as a reflection of the creators' cultures. Another would be to see it as a reflection of our own culture. Admittedly, this makes sense, too, because the Bible is probably the most influential (collection of) work(s) in our culture and literary heritage. I think this is a good approach from a literary perspective because we can see how it has affected our literary heritage. A straight through reading is good here, but I would recommend starting with the Gospels, going through Revelation, and then reading the Hebrew Scriptures as a preëmptive commentary on the first parts you read. I'm not sure why we start in Genesis--unless it's for the same reason that I did. Maybe we just have to start with something interesting. Maybe it's because it's important to recognize that what we think is in the Bible isn't quite what is in the Bible. Even with these thoughts in mind, I think that if we are looking for the basis of our culture's literature, we should probably skip ahead after only a few chapters of Genesis.

One more thing I'd like to add is this. Last class we ended talking about how different cultures have had different creation myths. I think four different major kinds were written on the board. Could we not say that the universe starting as nothing and then suddenly exploding and becoming something which is exploding kind of belonged on the board, too?