It’s just another case of history repeating

There are three occasions on the book of Genesis where one of the patriarchs pretends that his favourite wife is his sister to avoid being killed as she is added to a local King’s harem.  They are horrible stories from a misogynistic society & they paint the patriarchs as cowardly and utterly unchivalrous.   Abraham was the patriarch in question in the first two of the three stories and Abimelek the Philistine was the local king in the last two.   A friend of mine was reading these stories recently and asking how one family or one king could possibly allow such a monumental moral mess to recur within to space of two generations.

In the mid to late 1800s, scholars began to apply the textual science of source-criticsm to the bible.  They found that the bible was made up of rumours, where stories were repeated and distorted by various sources and editors, Chinese-whisper-style, so that historical truth was at best obscured and art worst unobtainable.  Hard questions would need to be asked about the feasibility of an event like this actually happening more than once in a generation.  Surely this was a biblical - editorial goof? 

Reading about this scholarly criticism at theological college made me wonder who funded it and why they were so desperate to undermine the credibility of the bible.  There is some merit to a source-critical approach: some stories are re-told from different angles and other texts look like they have been edited from multiple sources.   But the subversion or abandonment of the clear meaning of a piece of useful historical literature because it failed to live up to some recently-imagined code of source standardisation always seemed perverse.  It also seemed to me that these hypotheses overlook that fact that somethings happen more than once.  Even really stupid things.

I watch the news. I gather that the US is about to re-inaugurate the self-proclaimed humblest, most knowledgeable, most orange president in history.   This time, he’s not just a self proclaimed p***y grabber, but a convicted p***y grabbing hush money concealer.  Not just a showy businessman with no interests other than his own, but a former president whose unpresidential lies, insinuations and failures cost lives in the capitol building & encouraged conspiracy theorists, bigots and tyrants the world over. On this side of the pond, critics of the man and his MAGA movement from all backgrounds look on agog.  How can this be happening again?  This is the second time in a decade.

Mercifully biblical criticism has moved on from endless source hypothetical naval gazing to ask questions like: “what did the author or complier of this text mean?”  or “how is this useful for people today?”     And the bible has survived and continued to be a useful moral resource to folks committed to truth and decency and to resisting tyrants and popularists.  I guess POTUS 47 will be hoping that no-one actually reads or understands the GBUSA edition he is sponsoring (the 1611 language it uses should help him in that respect).  If they did, they might read that human beings make really bad mistakes repeatedly & that God’s way seems to be to confront and correct these things rather than repeating them.