David gets jiggy
I read a funny story in II Samuel 6 today. (I was reading about what a shit god can be. There’s this bit in II Samuel 6 where David and some friends are transporting the ark of the covenant somewhere in a cart, and Uzzah put his hand on the ark to steady it because the cart was shaking – so god killed him. That makes a lot of sense – Uzzah tries to help and god kills him for it. Nice guy. David gets cold feet then and puts the ark in storage, not wanting to get smited, then he runs some experiments and confirms that god helps people who have the ark [apart from Uzzah, but that’s not explained] and hurts those who don’t [reason not explained] so David is happy again and throws a party.) David dances in his underpants in front of the ark and Samuel’s daughter Michal sees him from a window and disdains him in her heart. And she tells him so. ‘Some king you are,’ she says. ‘You danced in your underpants in front of your servants’ girlfriends. What a schmuck.’ David says ‘God likes me better than he likes your father so ha.’ And Michal never had any children, so that (it is implied) was God’s ha.
You have a gift for re-telling Bible stories by boiling them down to their essence, OB. Perhaps a local church could bring you in as a Sunday school teacher?
;-)
Life was fun in the Bronze Age. You were allowed to make up explanations for anything you liked. If only we could recapture that pristine purity… Heck, maybe if we went back further, it would be even better. Vote Sarah Palaeolithic!
It occurred to me just after clicking the ‘Submit’ button that I just used perhaps the most entirely unnecessary “Just kidding!” wink emoticon in the history of electronic communication. And that thought amused me, so I shared.
One of the reasons I am not entirely against RE lessons is that a quick flick through the Bible should be enough to have most people laughing.
It was Judges that did it for me IIRC.
The lesson here is that obediance to God is the most important thing, of absolute importance. Elsewhere in the Bible it says that no-one should touch it bar a particular family.
The other justification is that David has to suffer *more* than Uzzah, because David has to feel guilty for letting it happen.
That sort of God isn’t very persuasive to me, seems a bit like a petty middle manager.
Quite. And a god to whom obedience is the most important thing is an Ockhamist god (in Beversluis’s terms) – a divine command morality god – a god whose will trumps (what we take to be) goodness.
If you read through the first few books of the Bible at one go, you will, I predict, be overcome by the inescapable sense of a very unpredictable and almost (well, perhaps more than) predatory power. The point of the story of Uzzah is to confirm the belief that this power is present in a focused way in the ark, and so to invest that particular material thing with the sense of awesome danger and unpredictability which people experience in their lives, and to contain it within bounds.
The same kind of awesome power is claimed to be corralled within the tabernacle, the host, the holy texts, hallowed ground, etc. If people feel awe in the presence of these local instantiations of what is otherwise capricious, then those who are guardians of the focal points of this power have power themselves, and, like David, have every reason to throw a party. After all, they have taken the very capricious power, before which we can only cower in fear, and tamed it, reined it in.
This is at least one aspect of the way religions work. The world is an unpredictable place. Time and chance happens to us all. Religions claim to have some control over it, and promise that, if you surrender to the sources of controlled and limited cosmic power, all sorts of good and wonderful outcomes will result for you and your loved ones, both in this world and the next. How can you possibly go wrong? Of course, the claim has to be true.
My note crossed yours, OB. As I say in my comment on your note on Beversluis, I don’t think that this god is Ockhamist. I have spoken with lots of religious people over the years, and they simply do not understand the Euthyphro dilemma. The reason is, not that they think whatever God might command would be good, whatever we think, but that only God can know what is truly good.
That is, most Christians, anyway, acknowledge what might be called a Platonic distinction between what is good and what is not, but hold that only God can really know. That’s why we must obey. Ockham, in fact, in my view, undermines this nonsense, by doing away with Platonic entities, and returning questions of value to the human conversation. He wasn’t excommunicated for nothing. Well, he was excommunicated because he defended Franciscan poverty, but this is (I believe) largely because he believed that we could know what is good, quite independently of revelation. Obedience is limited by right reason.
This is something that CS Lewis could never accept, because he had to accept that his wife’s suffering had a good purpose, and that, though he could not know what that purpose was, God did. This is Platonic, not Ockhamist.
It always seemed to me that the Old Testament was entirely unexceptional in the corpus of creation-myths and legendary histories. Apart from YHWH’s distaste for graven idols, he/she/it does nothing you can’t find other gods doing, and the account of the Israelites’ relationship with their capricious deity can only be viewed in a positive light by looking to other, more extreme variations on similar themes – like the Olmec kings who had to let blood from their own penises to keep the world turning, or the later Aztec rites of gruesome carnage, justified by elaborate disquisitions on the role of blood and hearts in creation.
“most Christians, anyway, acknowledge what might be called a Platonic distinction between what is good and what is not, but hold that only God can really know.”
Which, if you accept all the premises involved, makes perfect sense, of course.
But then so, ceteris paribus, does sticking a needle in your knob to make the sun come up…
Eric, see reply on the other post.
“he had to accept that his wife’s suffering had a good purpose, and that, though he could not know what that purpose was, God did”
Part of Lewis’s problem was that he was committed to the view that god is good in our terms. He had defended that view (in his usual robust way) so he was loth to abandon it.
The thing about the ‘only God can know’ gambit of course is that it looks so much like a gambit. It looks so much like what believers would say if cornered by the obvious fact that god had allowed horrible stuff to happen to millions of people. It looks like an excuse, a ploy, a dodge.
Thanks OB, I’ve responded to you there as well.
“David gets cold feet then and puts the ark in storage, not wanting to get smited, then he runs some experiments”
So they had top men working on the Ark, too?
This sounds like a good deal to me, but where can I get one of these arks you speak of? Is it like Noah’s, which was apparently a DIY deal? (Do they sell kits?) And what kind of underpants? Boxers or briefs? And what kind of dance? Ballroom? Pole dancing?
Thanks, OB, I laughed until I had tears in my eyes. And thanks Eric, I always find reading your thoughtful, knowledgeable and succinct posts very rewarding.
A neat summary OB. The part you might emphasise a bit more is the bit where people suppose he is real, and are impressed by this power display. From Von Daniken back to the author of 2 Samuel himself, the point in this story seems to be to wow the audience with uncontrolled power, not create logical consistency.
In this industrial world where we are culpable in OHS law for allowing unguarded live electric wires, this story does not have at all the desired effect.
“And thanks Eric, I always find reading your thoughtful, knowledgeable and succinct posts very rewarding.”
Seconded.
So, the moral of the story is, never to rock the boat, and to keep your trousers up by the braces.
God, then, will reward you handsomely, if you unshakenly and gracefully adhere to its commands.