Canter Bridge

The Pentateuch’s development of a world where murdered Abel’s blood cries out from the soil into which it has poured imposes a severe legal mercy upon its organized inhabitants.

What is one to do when blood pollutes the earth beyond redemption unless it is taken seriously enough to be avenged? How will a community keep vengeance from becoming an absolute virtue in the light of the blessing it allegedly maintains?

The Levites, liturgical odd men out that they are, will play a part in the legislative balance that Israel achieves in its constituent documents. We read in Numbers 5 that they will serve as the custodians of a half dozen cities of refuge, enough for each pair of tribes to have claim on one. Proximity, when one is fleeing for one’s life, is not empty promise. Continue Reading »

Zelophehad’s audacious daughters cast a remarkable shadow as they stride to the Tent of Meeting to plead their case before Moses. Through pages of genealogy, land assignment, and guild-establishing, the book of Numbers has not been a text eager to name a woman’s name.

Yet one would probably be wrong to sense incipient feminism or even gender egalitarianism in this text. It is all about preserving the father’s name, one unfortunate enough not to have left sons and therefore vulnerable to erasure from Israel’s memory. That would be a fate at least as bad as sonlessness and death itself. Continue Reading »

The whimsied story of Balak’s hired prophetic gun firing blanks still entertains. It also ventures a sly tale about magical religion.

In his trouble over the Israelite masses who are passing through is land, the Moabite king Balak contracts Baalam, a highly regarded speaker of curses, to put the whammy on these well-herded Israelites before they consume his grain like locusts or make it safely out the other end of his pasture. Ancient shepherd-kings, it seems, could be cranky about such intrusions onto the metaphorical pasture. The upkeep of that turf, after all, is what in part underwrote a regal authority that often had little else to stand on.

Baalam famously misfires, pronouncing blessing after blessing upon Moses’ people when he should have been foreshadowing their skewering with fiery words that would turn in good time into swords, dripping with real blood in answer to the prophet’s crimson words. Continue Reading »

It only takes a generation of ease for a people to forget that the world is perilous.

Men and women who know what a rocking chair is are ill equipped to imagine wolves. We are capable of doing so, of course, when pressed by adversity into action. Yet that observation confirms the point that pressure is required for us to imagine threat, let alone to rise against it at the risk of life, limb, and torn bodies.

In his brilliant work, Shepherds After my Own Heart: pastoral traditions and leadership in the Bible, Timothy S. Laniak argues that the ancient shepherd’s role is something other than we moderns suppose. Its quintessence, Laniak persuades, was to protect and provide for the flock in a context rich of scarcity and danger. Continue Reading »

The beautifully balanced blessing that is placed upon the lips of Aaron and his sons for as far as the genealogical eye can see is remarkable on several counts.

First, it appears—at least to the Western reader’s eye—as a clearing in the woods of what can at times seem a very dark literary forest. Indeed, some literary critics find the Aaronic blessing so profoundly dissonant with its surroundings that they venture an origin for it that is far from the cultic and architectural prescriptions of its surroundings.

It may, one imagines, have been the brilliantly polished anchor of some lost liturgy, here placed as a jewel onto a setting that seems tarnished and even tawdry in contrast. Alternatively, it may have shone so brightly that Israel’s writers might have composed a rambling aetiological explication for its aesthetic glory, failing perhaps to measure up to the kernel with which they began. Continue Reading »

A burst of light interrupts the rigorous monotony of the priestly manual as Numbers chapter six draws to a close.

The Lord instructs Moses to train Aaron and unseen generations of Aaronide sons to bless Israel by speaking good things to them in the presence of YHWH.

The language of blessing is among the richest of dialects in the biblical material. Its echo lives on in our reference to ‘material blessings’. Even if entire lines of religious kitsch have taken up the word in promotion of trinketry, the notion itself is pervaded by a strenuous application of will to the shaping of human experience. Continue Reading »

Modern psychological profiles based on birth order and gender have ancient precedents. The firstborn was and remains a singular preoccupation of many cultures. Perhaps nowhere does the firstborn male fall under particular and sometimes tragic attention than in Israel’s biblical literature.

No living author has written more compellingly of the mysteries in which the biblical first son finds himself enveloped through no choice of his own, unless the grasping of a twin who is second in the birth queue be taken as conscious self-assertion, than Harvard’s Jon Levenson. Continue Reading »

Bible readers who care enough for curiosity about the book’s two large ‘testaments’ sometimes sprain hermeneutical ankles on differences between the Old and the New. Indeed, the alignment between them is not always easily discerned, an observation that will seem vastly understated to Jewish readers.

Yet alignment there is, an organic relationship that made the anthology of Christian memoirs, sermons, letters and apocalypse that emerged as a ‘new’ testament compelling to readers since the first and second centuries of the present era.

The pungent aroma of skandalon wafts over those who observe Jesus himself defining the change of times that he believed to have been coming upon humanity in his historical moment. I do not mean ‘scandal’ in its modern sense, but rather an ‘occasion for stumbling’ that is placed before those who walk in a certain direction and proves itself an obstacle to those who will not or cannot in good conscience step over it and continue the journey. Continue Reading »