Judges through 1st Samuel

Judges- 1st Samuel
I was supposed to write up my notes on Judges. I started, but got distracted with the other projects, and when I returned to Judges, I discovered it was just- my brain kept trying to shut down, screaming " I don't want to do this. I don't wanna do this. I donwannadothis!" So I didn't do it.

I have a couple of comments, I suppose. On Gideon: People like to tell and retell the great story of how he won that particular battle, however, they never continue the story, probably because Gideon gets drunk with power and turns into a jerk.

"Ruth"

A nice, romantic story that people say has lesbian undertones but I just don't see it (and I'm usually thrilled to see stuff like that). It also introduces us to the genealogy of David , which will become important for a couple of reasons.

1st Samuel 1-14

A woman is being teased by her husband's other wife, because she's barren. So she goes to the Temple and prays for a son, promising that if she gives birth, the child will be dedicated to God and she will never cut his hair. When she has the child, she names him Samuel.

At the time, the priest's sons are extremely corrupt, but Samuel, who serves in the Temple as a child, is not. Samuel has an experience where he hears God at night, in the Temple.

Because Israel is corrupt, there's a battle and they lose really, really badly to the Philistines, in fact, they lose the Ark. The Philistines take the Ark to their own camp and set it up next to their god Dagon (the Philistines seem to have a lot of different gods at different periods in time). But every morning when they enter the tent, the Dagon statue is on his face before the Ark. The Philistines begin getting tumors (the way you would when exposed to radiation…) and so they move the Ark to another city. But there's another outbreak of tumors.

The desperate Philistines practice a bit of image magic, making golden representations of their tumors to send back to Israel with the Ark as a sort of plea to God.

After several years, the people of Israel begin to beg Samuel (the Judge) and God for a king. But God and Samuel say that the Israelites don't really understand what they're asking for. They go ahead and appoint Saul after a whole complicated story I only skimmed.

Here's something interesting. As I understand what happens next, Saul manages to lose Yahweh's favor by inexplicably attacking the Philistines and starting a whole nother war. So things are really , really awful and so guess what the people's great idea is for solving everything?

"Let's kill Jonathan, the prince. "

I read something once, that talked about this strange compulsion every society has, that is basically a resurfacing of very ancient ideas. In ancient cults, if people felt true disaster had arrived (the gods are displeased) their instinct was "it's not good enough to sacrifice an animal, if we give them one of us, a human, they will forgive us." And it can't be just anyone, it has to be someone important, like children, or a beautiful virgin, or a popular leader. I think this might be the deep down reason for a certain type of high profile political assassination. Logically, shooting JFK in the head caused more problems than it solved, and the people who planned and executed the murder must have known that. But the primitive, unconscious mind doesn't care .