My Women class is constantly feeding my thoughts these days, especially in the past week since I began doing some research for a group project focusing on Ezekiel 16. The research I've been doing has made me realize how often I have read the biblical text without actually reading it. This seems to be particularly true when it comes to the prophets because some of the stuff they say is simply grotesque and rather than struggling with the implications of the violence within the text, I have simply skimmed over them. Reading and re-reading the extended metaphor of God as Jerusalem's husband has been more than a little bit troublesome.
I will be posting some more about this in the next few days, but for now, why don't you read it for yourself. Slow down. Let it sink in. Check it out in several different versions. Try to look at it from the point of view of the woman, Jerusalem. Then tell me...how on earth does one teach this?
4 comments:
Well, to me it reads like a traditionalist trying to explain why their society has fallen upon hard times by condemning the abandonment of its traditional ways. Moreover, it's obviously the product of a society where women were viewed as little more than property for man's pleasure; do things to make your husband happy, and you get shiny stuff. Make him mad, and it's his right to treat you like crap.
Yeah, Dan, I'm sort of getting the same thing out of it these days, only you're a lot nicer about it than I am. The conflict for me, which you probably don't encounter, is how this all fits in with my faith or if it even needs to...
Honestly, it's things like this that testify against the Christian faith for me. If the Bible is a holy book that is, to some extent or another, supposed to be the word of God, why is stuff like this in it? And you probably know better than me the rampant examples of horrors and atrocities and other nastiness in the Old Testament.
To me, it all starts reading like a document made by mortals to try and explain their world and justify their actions... much like how Christian scholars tend to explain other faith's holy texts.
Yeah, considering I want to get my Ph.D. in Old Testament, I'm pretty familiar with the terror that exists in the text, but I'm also unwilling to give up on God because humans have done a piss poor job of understanding and communicating what God is like.
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