TL:DR: The Genesis Question part thirty-six

Hi, Everybody!

Sunday:

5 October 14

Hi Troy & Mia; David & Marie!

Awoken this morning by the sound of buzzing.

Hornet crawling on my drinking glass.  Uh.  Okay.  Hornet crawls INTO my drinking glass.  Grab my dictionary and put it on top of the drinking glass.  Notice another hornet is crawling on the coaster under the drinking glass (not really a coaster, actually the computer disk for THE ANIMATED CEREBUS which I use as a coaster).  Uh. Okay.  Hornet number one still working his (or her) way to the bottom of the glass.  So I take the dictionary and carefully position it over hornet number two and crush it.  It drops onto a newspaper lying on the floor.  Put the dictionary overtop of the glass again and carry both into the "kitchen" alcove.  Remove the dictionary and pour tap water into the glass, drowning hornet number one.  Carry glass and newspaper into the bathroom and dump both hornets into the toilet. 

Fortunately, that proved to be "it" for Day of the Hornets.

Anyway:

A possible "other YHWHistic layer" to the story of the man blind from his birth in John's Gospel. 9:18 says "Not believed therefore the Jews about him that he was blind and he saw again…"  "he saw again" is  single Greek term.  What caught my eye was the "again".  If he was blind from his birth, there would be no "again" to it.  The same verse concludes "…until when they sounded for the parents of him the having seen again" ("having seen again" is also a single Greek term).

9:13 says "They are leading him toward the Pharisees the ____ sometime blind."  Here "sometime" catches my eye.  "Sometime blind"?  Theoretically he was always blind.  Although, as long as he was seeing now, it would be forensically accurate to say he had been "sometime blind".

9:27 reads "He answered to them I said to you already and not you heard; why again are you willing to be hearing?"   If they didn't hear the first time, here should be no "again" to it:  except in the sense of "willing" themselves.  They willed themselves to hear and didn't and were now willing themselves to hear AGAIN.

Interesting.

Ezekiel 37

The hand of the YHWH was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the YHWH and set me down in the midst of the valley which full of bones,

This "conveyance" ultimately reiterates itself in John's Apocalypse 1:9. 

The reference to "bones" continues the narrative of Ezekiel 36, hearkening back to "first causes" in Genesis and the creation of woman, which is really a metaphor for the creation of the YHWH.  The seminal YHWH, as I read it, bore the same relationship to God that A Dam's rib bore to A Dam:  a body part and not a terribly significant one.

[it's worth noting that only the Johannine Jesus account mentions the crucified Jesus' side being pierced, as I read it, a metaphorical enactment of the creation of woman]

 The "YHWH God" infers that he/she/it accomplished the creation -- actually the "building" -- of the woman in 2:21, but I think I'm safe in saying that the YHWH was just an observer, misconstruing what he/she/it saw. 

A Dam, says in 2:23, "This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man."  It's difficult not to infer "Woe man" from the context.  Woman is the "woeful man" or the "woe of man". 

There is a definite relationship there:  between A Dam's bone/rib and the woman, A Dam's flesh and the woman.  The demonstrative act of "building", accomplished by God, seems to me a very simple and lucid explanation of what a woman is:  a metaphor for the YHWH and having the same relationship to man that the YHWH has to God. 

In Genesis 3:19, the YHWH pronounces judgement upon the A Dam: "…till thou return unto the ground: for out of it wast thou taken, for dust thou and unto dust shalt thou return."

Well, yes, but -- by God's design -- there is an intermediary step.  Before we return to dust, we are reduced to bones. 

And caused me to pass by them round about, and behold very many in the open [valley/champian], and lo, very dry.

And he said unto me, son of man, can these bones live?  And I answered O Lord GOD, thou knowest.

This is reiterative throughout the Torah and John's Apocalypse and is the proper response on the part of a prophet when queried by God about anything.  God asks a prophet a question, not to get an answer, but to get confirmation that the prophet is aware that ONLY God knows the true answer to ANY question.

This incites the YHWH to interject with a suggested prompt:

Again he said unto me, Prophecy upon these bones, and say unto them: O ye dry bones, hear the word of the YHWH.

Which God takes up:

Thus saith the Lord GOD unto these bones, Behold I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live.

This is another Genesis reference, as I read it -- 2:7 -- another misconstruction on the part of the YHWH of an Act of God to which the YHWH had been a witness and which the YHWH inferred he/she/it had effected:  "And the YHWH God formed man dust of the ground & breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul."

Which the YHWH remembers, evidently, quite vividly as a spectator:

And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live, and ye shall know that I, the YHWH.

So I prophecied as I was commanded: and as I prophecied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone.

This, metaphorically, reiterates A Dam's assertion:  "This is now bone of my bones…" and suggests a Larger Metaphorical enactment:  reconnecting the metaphorical rib to A Dam, that is, uniting God and YHWH.

And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above; but no breath in them.

It's a significant point.  This was the specific order of man's creation in Genesis 2:7.  The flesh and the sinews come first.  The breath -- as God, Lord GOD, now asserts -- comes later:

Then said he unto me, Prophecie unto the [wind/breath], prophecie, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord GOD: come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.

As it says in my NEW BIBLE DICTIONARY "The supremacy of the fourfold gospels which Tatian's work attests is confirmed a decade or so later by Irenaeus.  To him the fourfold character of the Gospel is one of the accepted facts of Christianity, as axiomatic as the four quarters of the world or the FOUR WINDS of heaven."  This was really, all preordained here in Ezekiel with the reference to the four winds as that which breathes life into the dead bones.  Everything -- besides God -- is contextually preexistent and reiterative:  it's a story that tells itself over and over and over in the history of our world.  All God need do is allow His creation to explain itself to itself.  The danger at the end of the 1st century that John's Gospel would be excluded from the Christian canon -- which, I infer, was seen as a real possibility with John's exile to Patmos -- was really no danger at all:

So I prophecied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army. 

Then he said unto me, son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold they say: Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost, we are cut off for our parts.

As we have seen, this is what concerned the YHWH most:  having enacted he/she/its judgement upon the men of this epoch, and the Jews in particular, there seemed to be no way forward:  no way to undo what had been done or to revive that which had been killed and was now wasted away -- not yet to dust -- but to bones.  The Jews in Ezekiel's time were indeed "cut off for our parts" -- those parts, like the rib "builded" into a woman, which the Jews (and mankind generally) had allowed to lead them astray.

Therefore prophecie and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD, Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel.

This is a real jaw-dropper and game-changer of an assertion.  Nothing is dead permanently if God wills it to be alive.  The YHWH has to opportunistically reiterate the assertion just to keep up:

And ye shall know that I, the YHWH, when I have opened your graves, O my people, and brought you up out of your graves,

And shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land: then shall ye know that I the YHWH have spoken, and performed, saith the YHWH.

And that's all, for the moment, that God has to say about that. 

[Even when it comes time to fulfill a part of the prophecy -- the resurrection of Lazarus -- God only goes so far as, through the Johannine Jesus, to resurrect someone who had been dead a few days.  Not nearly as ostentatious as reviving an entire army that had decomposed into a valley of bones but significantly more impressive than the Synoptic Jesus' resurrection of those who had been dead -- or, rather, "dead" -- only an hour or two.]

Which the YHWH appears to mull over for a period of time, trying to figure out Where God is going with this. And, more important, how the YHWH is going to turn this idea to the YHWH's own advantage:

The word of the YHWH came again unto me, saying:

Moreover, thou son of man, take thee one stick and write upon it, for Judah and for the children of Israel his companions: then take another stick and write upon it, For Joseph, the stick of Ephraim, and for all the house of Israel, his companions.

This requires explaining what I see as the YHWH's model of reality:  the "perceived" younger has been ill-used by the "perceived" elder (YHWH by God).  So that story enacted itself, by God's permission: Jacob (the younger) usurped Esau's (the elder's) birthright and blessing. And then further enacted itself with the twelve sons of Jacob.  Six sons by his wife, Leah and two sons each in Jacob's adulterous relationships with Bilhah, Zilpah and Rachel (he, she, it). Basically, God saying, okay the younger has replaced the elder, Jacob has replaced Esau. Not really, but for the sake of argument, let's go with that.

Now Jacob has twelve sons.  Which son does the YHWH see this enactment continuing through? And, for a variety of reasons, the YHWH most identifies with Judah and with Joseph just about equally.

[the actual construct of using a stick to establish preeminence is actually Levitical in nature, a reference both to Moshe's staff which took the form of a serpent -- in its turn a metaphor for the YHWH and devoured the illusions of the Egyptian magicians -- and to Aaron's Rod (Hebrew: Matteh) which was put with the rods of the other 11 tribes after Korah's rebellion and, the next morning, Aaron's rod had put forth buds, blossoms and ripe almonds]

Judah, I suspect, because he was forced to admit that a harlot was more righteous than he was (a Patriarch and a harlot being a more accurate version of God and YHWH than any of the other relationships between Jacob's sons and the outside world chronicled in Genesis) and Joseph -- well, I always have a question about that. 

The obvious answer is that he was the youngest son of the twelve.  But he wasn't actually the youngest.  Benjamin, his younger brother, was the youngest.  But Benjamin came late in the proceedings, I suspect, when the die had already been cast with Joseph (who, you will recall, saw in a dream that his brothers would all bow down to him -- definitely a YHWH fantasy fulfillment both literal and metaphorical).  The YHWH doesn't want to "let go" of either Judah or Joseph.  Judah produced King David -- the youngest of seven brothers, it's worth noting -- which is the YHWH's ideal among what the YHWH sees as irredeemable mankind.  That adherence ultimately caused the primary Judaic schism, between Judah and Israel, an irresolvable (as the YHWH would have seen it in Ezekiel's time) schism. 

And Jacob blessed the younger of Joseph's sons -- Ephraim -- at the expense of his elder brother, Manasseh.  So, you basically have these two YHWHistic "fulfillments" one in Judah and one in Israel.  So, it's no big surprise that the YHWH infers from "join bone to his bone" that this is what is needed:  uniting Judah and Ephraim into one, thereby uniting Judah and Israel and thereby establishing the YHWH's preeminence: 

And join them one to another into one stick, and they shall become one in thine hand.

[in it's Largest Metaphorical Construct, as I read it, it's impossible.  You can't make one thing into another thing that it isn't by joining them.  You don't, as an example, make a half man half woman by sticking A Dam's rib back inside of him.  Which is basically what the YHWH is proposing to do here.]

[In the same sense, the ultimate nadir of the Christian Revelation, I read as the crucifixion which attempts to unite A Dam and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  You can nail the man to the tree, but that doesn't actually join them.  It just means that you've misconstrued what they actually are as metaphors]

[I infer that this process hasn't come to an end.  In our own world, two of the Largest Constructs are also from the Garden of Eden -- Apple and (the nature of womankind after the expulsion of A Dam) (your own employer, David!) Amazon]

And when the children of thy people shall speak unto thee, saying, Wilt thou not show us what thou by these?

"Meanest" is interpolated into the KJV text:  "Wilt thou not show us what thou MEANEST by these?", but that, it seems to me, misses the full poison of the intended question.  "What thou by these?"  Given Judah (and the fulfillment through King David) and given Joseph (and his fulfillment at the apex of political power in Egypt which, presumably, he passed on to his son, Ephraim), "What thou?" is the nature of what is being asked by the YHWH of God (and not in a good way). 

To the YHWH it establishes the YHWH AS God, if both fulfillments exist and have happened and they are (SOMEhow) united. So, given that, what does that make God?

And the YHWH leaves off with the prompt of that question dangling, assuming (as I read it) that God won't dare unite Judah and Ephraim or even answer the question of what their uniting would mean.  It would just be too potent a YHWHistic incarnation, leaving God no role in the Larger Construct of Reality. 

I don't think God hesitated a moment before answering the challenge:

Say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD, Behold I will take the stick of Joseph which in the hand of Ephraim, and the tribes of Israel his fellows and will put them with him, with the stick of Judah, and make them one stick, and they shall be one in my hand.

And then addressed the YHWH directly

And the sticks whereon thou writest, shall be in thy hand before their eyes.

God has no problem taking up the YHWH's poisonous challenge and dispensing with it just that easily.  But the larger point God is making with the resurrection of the dry bones (and the problem with the YHWH, always, is the YHWH endeavouring to change the subject), needs to be established:

And say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD, Behold I will take the children of Israel from among the heathen whither they be gone, and will gather them on every side, and bring them into their own land.

And I will make them one nation in the land upon the mountains of Israel and one King shall be king to them all: and they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms any more at all.

I infer from this, personally, that God is asserting His own preeminence.  God is the one King of Israel.  It seems to me also worth noting that God's metaphor with the bones is to create a powerful army out of Israel.

The compelled inference, however,  -- which I see is foundational to the Christian Revelation -- is that Jesus is the King referred to. This is why the incarnation of the Synoptic Jesus and the Johannine Jesus was so significant.  They both fulfilled the promise of the tribe of Judah, and Judah as a man, a further escalation of the lofty plateau to which King David had attained and which  (I would gather -- until the coming of both Jesus) a lofty stature upon which the YHWH couldn't imagine there being any possible improvement. 

Basically, God saying to YHWH, "You hang onto those two sticks with the names of Judah and Ephraim and see if I don't fulfill all that you imagined they could effect in tandem -- and more."

Which is, I'm sure, what happened.  Just read the Gospels.

The unanimity continues for some length of time after the incarnations -- essentially the YHWH seeing his/her/its self validated in all particulars and watching that Revelation sweep across the world.  Missing the point that God had essentially turned the poisonous question back against the YHWH:  "What THOU by these?" 

In a world being transformed by the Synoptic Jesus and the Johannine Jesus, both being proclaimed as God's son -- and their two sticks, ultimately, so firmly united that every Christian believes them to be one individual -- what does that leave for the YHWH?  Not very much.  The Name of Jesus usurps the YHWH's place, the YHWH's self-perceived context and the YHWH's differentiation as an entity.  The YHWH is pretty much universally believed just to be another name for God.  A complete loss of unique identity.

It's God's point, as I read it, but it isn't God's Larger Point, here at the apex of the Judaic Revelation which, naturally enough, concerns the Jews themselves.  The "sticks" will be united, the YHWH's imagined fulfillment will take place -- but in such a way that the YHWH won't recognize -- literally for centuries -- how detrimental it is to the YHWH's self-perceived stature.  But God's Larger Point is the disposition of the long-suffering Jews:

Neither shall they defile themselves any more with their idols, nor with their detestable things, nor with any of their transgressions: but I will save them out of all their dwelling places, wherein they have sinned, and will cleanse them: so shall they be my people, and I will be their God.

The YHWH, deeply suspicious of all this, attempts to cross all the t's and dot all the i's:

And David, my servant, King over them, and they all shall have one shepherd: they shall also walk in my judgements, and observe my statutes and do them.

Which, God is perfectly amenable to including.  With a couple of qualifications, the significance of which the YHWH won't realize for centuries.  The Synoptic Jesus and Johannine Jesus both, in different ways, fulfill the Davidic promise.  David is the servant of the YHWH but David is also the servant of God. In the sense that an incarnation of David, a reiteration of David, a metaphor for David just as David is a metaphor for God, yes, David will be King over them (Jews and Christians -- metaphorically, the literal King David for Jews and Jesus-as-the-incarnation-of-King-David for the Christians: God as Ultimate King).  Definitely one shepherd:  God (with the Johannine Jesus as the metaphorically preeminent earthly incarnation shepherd: see last week's commentary). 

And, yes, the Jews will continue to walk in the YHWH's judgements and observe the YHWH's statutes and do them.  In a far more observant way than they were doing in the time of Ezekiel.  The notion that Jesus was the meschiach will be so abhorrent to observant Jews that it will serve as a great cleansing of Judaism itself, Christianity (quite understandably) being seen by the Jews as a judgement upon them that they, indeed, have to "walk in" and to suffer the consequences of for thousands of years.  For the Jews, Christianity is one of the ultimate forms of suffering to which they are continually subjected (although that certainly isn't the Christian conscious intention) -- which has a way of "getting your mind right" (apologies to Strother Martin) with God. And making you more observant as a people.    

And they shall dwell in the land that I have given unto Jacob my servant, wherein your fathers have dwelt, and they shall dwell therein, they and their children, and their children's children forever, and my servant David their prince forever.

Note that the YHWH refers to "David, my servant, King over them" while God refers to "my servant David, their prince forever".  God doesn't want to detract from the royalist perception of David, which is central -- and remains central -- to the Judaic faith.  But there is only one King over Jews and Christians:  God.

The YHWH rejoins (still crossing t's and dotting i's but now more fully acquiescent in the prophecy enunciated):

Moreover, I will make a covenant of peace with them, and I will place them and multiply them, and will set my Sanctuary in the midst of them for evermore.

Well, THAT wasn't going to happen in the sense that the YHWH meant it:  that there would always be a Jewish Temple with ritual blood sacrifices feeding the YHWH in Israel.  God sidesteps the issue:

My Tabernacle also shall be with them: yea, I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

In the time of Ezekiel, the original Tabernacle was a thing of the past, replaced by the One Temple.  So, God can be reassuring and forensically accurate at the same time:  in the same sense that God's Tabernacle still existed (even though it no longer existed physically), so would the YHWH's Sanctuary exist in their own most meaningful respective senses:  as inward constructs, the idea of the human body itself as a Temple of God.

And the heathen shall know that I, the YHWH, do sanctify Israel, when my Sanctuary shall be in the midst of them for evermore.

The heathen AND the devout, will be far more aware of God than they will be of the YHWH and not much concerned with the YHWH's Sanctuary, per se, as the Larger Enactment unfolds.  But God can afford to just let the misapprehension go:  the Sanctuary won't be in the midst of Israel, it will be within each individual Jew to the extent that he or she chooses to grant God sanctuary within him or her and to nurture their own awareness of God.  Strict observance of the YHWH's statutes and adhered to find favour in the sight of God, I infer, being as good as any other form of God worship.  The key is motivation and self-sacrifice: choosing Good as one infers Good and eschewing Evil as one infers Evil. 

And then waiting to find out on Judgement Day how you did in the "inferences, choices and actions sweepstakes".  

Next week: God willing, Ezekiel 38.

Best,

Dave

Next Time: Well, it's Kevin's birthday, so if he's doing "Reading Cerebus",  "Happy Birthday!" and if not, "Burn in Hell Clerk!" Paaaaaassssssssttt Maaaaaatttttt!!!!!!!!!!!!!