Okay, so I'm going to read you something from The Book of Job.
And this is God "harassing" Job.
So I don't know if you know the story of Job, but it's a very interesting story.
And basically what happens with Job is
that God and the Devil have a bet, which seems a little...on the unreasonable
side for God, but he gets to do whatever he wants.
So he has a bet with Satan, roughly speaking, and says, well,
he tells Satan that Job is a good guy and that he is faithful to God.
And Satan says, yeah, let me at him for a while.
I bet you we can do something about that.
And God says, roughly speaking, no, you could torture him all you want.
He's going to stay faithful.
And Satan says, well, we'll have a bet on that.
And so God hands them over.
And what happens to Job?
It's like everything terrible that you can imagine then happens to Job, right?
All his family dies, all his possessions are destroyed.
He gets a horrible skin disease.
And so then he's sitting there by the fire
sort of scraping himself with bits of broken pots.
And all his friends come around and tell
him that the reason all this happened to him was because he deserved it.
So it's perfect, right?
It's like an ultimate suffering story.
It's a precursor to the idea of the crucifix.
That's one way of thinking about it.
And Job has a chat with God and asks Him, like Cain did, roughly, what's going on?
And God attempts to... He's irritated that Job would even dare to question him.
It's like, He's God.
He gets to do whatever He wants.
It's a very strange book. Anyways...
This is one of the things that God says to Job, well, God is trying to justify
himself, I would say to Job, and the reason I'm telling you this,
you see, is because imagine that you're trying to analyze a literary work.
You might say, well, where's the meaning in the literary work?
And the answer is: it's in the words, word by word.
It's in the phrases, it's in the sentences.
It's in the relationship of the sentences to each other.
It's in the relationship of the sentences within paragraphs.
It's in the relationship of the paragraphs within the contexts of the chapters.
And it's in the relationship between the chapters and the whole book.
And then the book in the whole culture.
So it's not easy to localize the meaning.
It exists at all those levels
simultaneously, and they all inform one another and what that means.
And it's even worse in a book like the Bible.
I want to show you a picture.
This is an amazing picture.
So let me tell you what this is.
So the Bible is the world's first hyperlinked document.
That's a good way of thinking about it.
So what you have here,
there's a line along the bottom, and then there's small lines coming down from it.
Okay?
The line has dots on it.
Each dot is a verse.
And then there's a line associated with the verse that's a varying length.
And the length corresponds to how many
times that verse is cross referenced somewhere else in the document.
And then these rainbow colored lines are the cross references.
Now, that's really worth thinking about.
So then you think, well, that book is deep.
Well, why is it deep?
Well, it's because every single thing in it refers to every other thing.
It's connected.
Like your brain is connected, like it's not a linear document.
And the thing is a book is a very strange thing, right.
Or even a story.
Because when you lay out the story in some
sense, you're like God, you're outside of the space and time of the story.
And so you can adjust the end to make the beginning different.
How? If you watch a movie and it's got
a surprise ending, it changes the beginning.
You thought the beginning was one thing, but it isn't.
It's something else.
Well, when you lay out a story,
you can fiddle with the story anywhere in the story.
And you can also make something
that happens before dependent on something that happens after, which is very strange.
And that's what's happened with the Bible,
because people have worked on and worked on and worked on it, worked on it,
trying to synthesize it and make it coherent and make it make sense.
And so they're continually connecting
everything that's inside of it to everything else.
And so you end up with a document map that looks like that. Now...
So, you think about that everything is
connected to everything in that document, not chaotically, but meaningfully,
just like your brain is connected in a meaningful way.
It's not everything isn't connected to everything.
It's connected in a meaningful way.
And then you think, well, what do the stories mean?
And then the answer is, well,
that's a hard question, because all of them are connected with each other.
And then there's all these different levels of analysis.
And so you can pull out meanings at one
level of analysis that aren't self evident at another level of analysis.
Just like if you're listening to a complex
piece of symphonic music, you can follow a bass line,
or you can follow the strings, or you can follow the horns.
And they're all harmoniously interrelated, but they're also separable.
There's an image that lurks
in the Old Testament, and the image is the same image.
It's roughly the same image as the image of Marduk confronting Tiamat.
So, for example, at the beginning, God makes...Here's how the beginning goes:
in the beginning, God created the Heaven
and the Earth, and the Earth was without form and void,
and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light and there was light.
Okay, so we got to look at the first few lines here.
So this is God justifying himself to Job,
he says: "Can you pull in Leviathan with a fish hook or tie down its tongue
with a rope? Can you put a cord through its nose or pierce its jaw with a hook?
Will it keep you begging for mercy? Will it speak to you with gentle words?
Will it make an agreement with you for you to take it as your slave for life?
Can you make a pet of it like a bird, or put it on a leash for the young women
in your house? Will traders barter for it? Will they divide it up among
the merchants? Can you fill its hide with harpoons or its head with fishing spears?
If you lay a hand on it, you will remember the struggle and never do it again.
Any hope of subduing it is false.
The mere sight of it is overpowering.
No one is fierce enough to rouse it.
Who is then able to stand against me?
Who has a claim against me that I must pay?
Everything under Heaven belongs to me.
I will not fail to speak of Leviathan's limbs,
its strength and its graceful form.
Who can strip off its outer coat?
Who can penetrate its double coat of armor?
Who dares open the doors of its mouth, ringed about with fearsome teeth?
Its back has rows of shields, tightly sealed together.
Each is so close to the next, that no air can pass between.
They are joined fast to one another.
They cling together and cannot be parted.
Its snorting throws out flashes of light.
Its eyes are like the rays of dawns.
Flames stream from its mouth.
Sparks of fire shoot out.
Smoke pours from its nostrils as from a boiling pot over burning reeds.
Its breath sets coals ablaze and flames dart from its mouth.
Strength resides in its neck.
Dismay goes before it.
The folds of its flesh are tightly joined.
They are firm and immovable.
Its chest is as hard as rock.
Hard is a lower millstone.
When it rises up, the mighty are terrified.
They retreat before it's thrashing.
The sword that reaches it has no effect.
Nor does the spear or the dart or the javelin.
Iron it treats like straw and bronze like a rotten wood.
Arrows do not make it flee.
Slingstones are like chaff to it.
A club seems to it, but a piece of straw.
It laughs at the rattling of the lance.
Its undersides are jagged, pot shirts,
leaving a trail in the mud like a threshing sledge.
It makes the depth churn like a boiling
cauldron and seethe up the sea like a pot of ointment.
It leaves a glistening wake behind it.
One would think the deep had white hair.
Nothing on Earth is its equal, a creature without fear.
It looks down on all that are haughty and it is King over all that are proud."
Well, so what's God doing?
He's describing what he defeated in order to create the world.
That's Marduk and Tiamat.
Okay, so that's one reference like that.
All right.
Now another reference like that.
This is from Psalms, 74.
"Yet God is my King of old, working Salvation in the midst of the Earth.
Thou didst break the sea in pieces by thy strength.
Thou didst shatter the heads of the sea monsters in the waters.
Thou did crush the heads of Leviathan."
Right? That's the creature that we just heard described.
"Thou gavest him to be food to the folk inhabiting the wilderness."
Now you remember... So, when Marduk defeats Tiamat,
he cuts her into pieces and makes the world out of her pieces.
And here what's happening is that the force that encounters
the Leviathan is able to break it into pieces and feed everyone with it.
The reason I'm telling you
that in relationship to this is because and the Earth was without form and void
and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
Let me tell you a little bit about that, those lines.
Before God begins to create the world is Tohu wa-bohu.
That's from the Hebrew, the word Tohu by itself means emptiness or futility.
So there's a psychological element to that.
And that emptiness or futility in some sense is what you confront when you're
trying to extract your life from the world.
It is used to describe the desert wilderness as well.
Tohu wa-bohu.
Chaos is the condition that bara ordering remedies.
Okay, so there's the idea in the first verse that this initial chaos is being
ordered and the order is what makes the world.
So it's standard cosmology.
Order emerges out of chaos, and the thing that makes it emerge is the word of God.
Darkness and deep, which is Tehom in Hebrew are two
of the three elements of the chaos represented in Tohu wa-bohu.
The third is the formless Earth.
In the Anuma Lich, the deep is personified
as the goddess Tiamat, the enemy of Marduk.
Here it is the formless body of primeval water surrounding the habitable world.
Okay, but we know Tehom and Tiamat are
the same word, or at least Tehom was derived from Tiamat.
So the idea that's presented at the beginning of Genesis is the same.
It's an abstracted and psychologized
representation of the story that the Mesopotamians put forward.
So Yahweh is Marduk, roughly speaking,
going out and conquering the Dragon of chaos and making order out of it.
And then there are these illusions later
saying Job and in the Psalms of him doing exactly that, conquering a primordial
monster and making the world out of its pieces.
Well, so what does that mean exactly?
Well, it means that the highest ordering
principle is the spirit that goes out into the darkness or the deep
that encounters the Dragon of Chaos, because obviously Leviathan is a Dragon
and defeats it and feeds the people as a consequence.
Well, we are hunting creatures after all.
And in order to establish our place
in the world, we had to go out there and conquer the Dragons of the wilderness.
You might wonder, why does a Dragon breathe fire?
There's a bunch of reasons.
As far as I can tell, fire is awe inspiring.
Fire and a terrible predator are the same thing because they both inspire awe.
Fire is transforming.
But...Like, what's a good metaphor for being bitten by a poisonous snake?
Well, have you ever seen the wounds that a poisonous snake produces,
if you're bitten by them? It's like someone took your arm and incinerated it.
And so the idea that a snake has fiery breath is...
Well, let's call it close enough from a metaphorical perspective.
Now, God is claiming to Job that he's the spirit that clears
the wilderness and then builds order out of chaos.
And because he's the embodiment of that spirit, in some sense,
Job has no reason to ever question his moral decisions.
It's something like that in the story of Job.
But that point will leave aside because it's a more complicated issue.
The point is that the writers of the Bible
are trying to dream up a representation of the spirit of civilization.
That's the right way to think about it.
You can think of Yahweh as the spirit of civilization.
And what is that?
Well, it's the thing that encounters the wilderness and makes habitable order,
but then it's also the spirit of the order itself.
And that's, I think, why in Christianity there's
a representation of God the Father, because he's a representation
of the culture that's generated after the chaos is ordered, right?
You have the spirit that goes out into chaos and orders,
and then you have the spirit of the order, and then the spirit of the order
and the spirit of the ordering principle has to figure out how to coexist.
That's partly what the Egyptians were trying to figure out, right?
There's a dynamic relationship between
the culture and the spirit that generates the culture.
And then you might also ask, should the culture be superordinate or
should the spirit that generates the culture be super ordinate?
And the answer seems to be... The emergent
answer seems to be that the spirit that generates the culture should be
superordinate to the spirit of the culture.
It's something like that.
And that's also why I think that one of the brilliant discoveries, let's say,
of Western individualistic civilization is that the group is there to serve
the individual, because the individual is the thing that revivifies the group.
So each depend on the other, integrally.
But if you subordinate the individual
to the group, then the group stagnates and dies.
And so that's a very bad long term strategy.
Even though the group and belonging to the group is clearly necessary.
You need to uphold the values of the group.
But the values of the group should be
subordinated to producing the individual who gives the group vision.
And the Mesopotamians figured that out.
The Egyptians figured that out. We figured it out.
We just don't know that.
We figured it out.
And it's not a mere arbitrary supposition.