The Hebrew Bible: From the Righteous to the Ribald
First Universalist Unitarian Church
Wausau, WI
February 11, 2007
Richard E. Olson

 

 

 

“These are the descendants of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation: Noah walked with God.”        

Gen 6:9

 

“And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside.”                                            

Gen 9:22

 

“He went over to her at the roadside and said, ‘come, let me come in to you,’ for he did not know that she was his daughter-in-law.”                                             Gen 38:16

 

“And three months later Judah was told, ‘Your daughter-in-law Tamar has played the whore: moreover she is pregnant as a result of whoredom.’”                       Gen 38:24

 

“The overall story is about being lost and found, about leaving and returning, about a dance in which God let’s us swing as far away as we can stretch, before bringing us back full circle into a tight embrace.”

From Our Home is God’s Home by Dr. Rick Blum

 

 

 

STORY                  Balam Acab’s Bow 

 

          In the village of Zubinal there is a great drought.  It has not rained in a long time. The rivers seem to have turned to sand.  The young corn plants are wilting in the fields. The thirst is immense. 

 
          The priests organize an expedition to the sacred mountain of Memchuyá, from which all rivers were born.  Upon arrival at the great crater filled with water the priests offer the Gods plates of corn and other delicacies.  The satisfied Gods answer their prayers and instruct them to cut down trees around the crater and to ignite a great fire.  Little by little the water in the crater starts to boil and clouds form and these clouds float toward the village. But it doesn’t rain. The people begin to despair.  The Gods then send word that they need to use the sacred bow of Balam Acab and shoot arrows into the clouds in order for it to rain.  Balam Acab is one of the semi Gods of the Mayan pantheon. Two warriors are ordered to climb the temple dedicated to Balam Acab and bring his bow and arrows to the chief.  But even the strongest of warriors lack the strength to pull the bow.
          Later that day a young girl sees a stranger along side the road.  She hurries home to tell her mother who in turn tells the village chief. The chief summons the stranger and asks him to try to pull the bow and shoot the arrows into the clouds. 

           The stranger is able to pull the bow but the only two arrows available both miss the clouds.  So the stranger hurls the bow into the air, it hits the clouds and it begins to rain. After the rain a miraculous image appears in the sky, something the people had never seen before. The town celebrates and the stranger is offered rewards of gold and feathers.  He turns down all of the gifts, asking instead for the hand of the chief’s maiden daughter. The request is granted and another lively celebration ensues.  The chief also give the stranger a nearby ranch where the couple can begin their lives together.  However, during their first night together something very odd happens. The new bride turns to light a fire to prepare the evening meal. But when she turns around, her new husband is no where to be scene. The next night the same thing happens, he simply vanishes into thin air. On the third day, early in the morning, the wife sets out in search of firewood. While searching she hears a voice but she sees no one. On the ground she suddenly sees a gourd that is split open and filled with water.  From the gourd comes the voice of her husband. The voice asks her if she really wants to be his wife. She says yes. The voice asks her the question again, and again she says yes. He then asks her if she wants to know who he really is. She says yes and he tells her that he is in fact Balam Acab. Later that week the woman dies. The village people find her lying on the ground next to the gourd. 
And that is why sometimes, after a rain shower, we see a rainbow in the sky.  It is the bow that Balam Acab threw there in order to make it rain. 

 

MESSAGE

 

           The version of Balam Acab’s bow you heard this morning is a summarized translation of the myth that I have used many times in my Spanish classroom.  I usually start the lesson by asking my students to think about legends and myths. What purpose do they serve?  Who creates them?  How and why are they passed along?  Do they know any legends or myths? They have little problem with these questions and have several answers.  Some years ago I noticed that one of my students, who was not a strong student of Spanish, was quite adept at drawing. I hired him to illustrate the story.  The illustrations you saw today are his.  As you might imagine, some of my students scoff at the Mayan story.  They find it too supernatural. They, as teenagers, say things like “that’s dumb” or “that’s lame.”   But then I remind them, in a public school teacher disclaimer sort of way, that some might have the same reaction after reading or hearing the flood stories in the Hebrew Bible. Their criticism tapers off. Their heads tilt. They begin to understand my point.

           We discuss how legends often arise out of the need to explain something natural in a supernatural way because of a lack of scientific knowledge to do otherwise. We discuss how the ancient Mayans, while they were quite advanced in science and astronomy, had not yet discovered light refraction.

          

           One of the reasons I chose to compare this legend to the flood stories of the Hebrew Bible, and I do mean flood stories, is because in the Mayan myth and in one of the flood stories, the creation of the rainbow is explained.  At the end of that flood story God promises that there will be no more apocalyptic floods and he sets his bow in the sky as a reminder of that covenant. That is the first covenant God makes with humans. Others are yet to come.
 
           What I particularly find reassuring with both the Mayan myth and the flood stories is that humans are called upon to act.  In the Mayan myth, why don’t the gods just make it rain?  Why must humans build a fire and try to shoot an arrow into the clouds?  In Noah’s case, why doesn’t God just build the boat and stock it with animals himself?  Did the people in these stories depend on God or did God depend on them?  I think so.  While there certainly are images of fear and submission in the Hebrew Bible, it really is less about passive subjects depending on God to get them through life then it is about active and responsive human beings. 

           When we discuss the Hebrew Bible we need to remember that it is a human
 product. It is not God writing to or about humans. It is instead about humans, humans
 writing about other humans, humans writing about their relationship to their God.

           Another thing we need to remember is that the Hebrew Bible is a compilation of tales and passages that are woven together from different time periods and different sources.  It was created over a period of some thousand years by a countless number of storytellers, scribes and lawgivers.  It is a collection that was complied and edited by generation after generation.  It is not a history in the sense that we might study any given history in chronological order.  In fact, it reminds me of Wikepedia, or open source soft ware, whereby any one can add or delete as they wish.

 

           One of the best known stories of the Hebrew Bible, probably thanks to Hollywood, is the story of the Jewish people escaping bondage in Egypt. We can probably all evoke an image of Charleton Heston as Moses.   After the enslaved Jews fled Egypt, somewhere around 1700-1600 BCE, they headed for Canaan, their promised land.  As they roamed the desert they began to have a feeling of nationhood.  After their invasion of Canaan, a conquest some liken to genocide or ethnic cleansing, the Jews lived in a society with little law and order.  They then began to see the need for a king, some degree of central authority to unite the people.  During the reign of Kings Saul, David, and Solomon, the Jewish people developed a collective consciousness as a nation.  While they had stories of Abraham, Sarah, Moses, and of course, God, they had no creation story.  So they set out to write one.  Both the creation stories and the flood stories that they wrote and that we read today imitate preexisting myths from neighboring cultures, which is not unusual.  Their stories naturally included bigger than life, righteous human beings.   

 

           The word tseh’dek appears more than 500 times in the Hebrew Bible.  From that word the word ritwis arose, which could be translated into English as ‘rightway’ or ‘rightwise’ .  However, a 16th century religious reformer by the name of William Tyndale, coined the word righteous when he translated the Bible into Early Modern English. 

           But the notion of righteous during Biblical times was different than our current notion of righteous.  It did not refer to a moral code or religious law.  Instead, it referred to those who preserved peace, who acted out of the wholeness of the community, and who acted in accordance to the demands of communal life.
         

           On one hand Moses could be called a righteous man.  After resisting God’s call to return to Egypt to lead the enslaved people to a promised land, he does in the end rise to the occasion.   His struggles to maintain peace in a factious community are indeed admirable. In fact, his righteousness in the eyes of God makes him the grand patriarch of the Hebrew Bible.

           Another righteous figure is Abraham. True, he did twice pass off his wife as his sister to save his own skin.  Not to mention that he was willing to sacrifice his own son Isaac at God’s demand.  It is through Abraham and his nephew Lot that readers are treated to one of the most famous stories of the Hebrew Bible, Sodom and Gomorrah.

           Before destroying the towns, God sends two messenger angles to earth to warn Abraham and Lot.  Abraham disagrees with God’s plan to destroy all of the people.  He bargains with God, trying to convince him that if a certain number of righteous people are found in the town, then the entire town would not be destroyed.  While Lot, Abraham’s nephew, and his family will be saved, Abraham is still concerned that innocent people from the community will be destroyed.  He seeks a more peaceful solution, or at least one with less collateral damage.  

           For most of us who grew up in a Jewish or Christian tradition the story we were told most likely ended with Lot’s wife turning to salt.  But there is more.
           Lot and his two daughters continue on.  The two daughters, believing that they are the only three people remaining on the earth, and believing that it is their womanly duty to procreate,  get their father drunk and have sex with him. We call this incest today. 

 

           Since the word ribald is in the title of this service I decided I better look it up. Ribald often refers to someone’s language or sense of humor, as in vulgar or obscene.  But it can also refer to someone’s actions, as in indecent, unclean, unchaste, promiscuous or wanton.

 

           So would I call the actions of Lot’s daughter ribald?  Yes.  But, and we might find this hard to accept in our modern times, I would also call their actions righteous.  Their intentions were not sexual gratification but rather the need to procreate, to continue the community.  Desperate times take desperate measure, which often puts us in a gray area.  The Hebrew Bible is not the black and white document some point to today when they hope to support their religious and social agendas. 
           Several characters in the Hebrew Bible are considered righteous but only one is entrusted with the survival of the entire population of the planet.   

 

READING              Genesis 7: 1-12

 

Then the Lord said to Noah, “Go into the ark, you and all your household, for I have seen that you alone are righteous before me in this generation.  Take with you seven pairs of all clean animals, the male and its mate; and a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and its mate; and seven pairs of the birds of the air also; male and female; to keep their kind alive on the face of all the earth. For in seven days I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights;  and every living thing that I have made I will blot out from the face of the ground.”  And Noah did all that the Lord commanded him.

Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters came on the earth, and Noah with his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives went into the Ark to escape the waters of the flood.  Of clean animals, and of animals that are not clean, and of birds, and of everything that creeps on the ground, two and two, male and female, went into the ark with Noah, as God commanded Noah.  And after seven days of the waters the flood came on the earth.

 

In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth and the windows of the heavens were opened. The rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights. 

(end of reading)         

 

           Since we associate Noah with the flood it is ironic that the Bible calls him a man of the soil. But then he was the first to plant a vineyard.  Which leads us to a story few Sunday school teachers included in their lessons.  In this scene, Noah gets drunk and lays uncovered in his tent.  His son Ham, the father of Canaan, enters the tent and sees his drunk and naked father. He reports this to his brothers who grab a cloak and cover their father’s body.  The following day, Noah condemns Ham’s son Canaan.  Cursed be Canaan he says, the lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers.  This is to say that the nation of the Canaanites has now been cursed by one of God’s righteous.  

 

           I have struggled with the inclusion of this story in the Hebrew Bible, wondering why someone would have contributed this story.  Nakedness in the Hebrew Bible sometimes refers to the sexual act.  Was Noah with someone else in that tent?  Was this someone his son Ham and did they know each other in the biblical sense?  Is this a story about incest?  Is that why Ham’s descendants deserve to be cursed?   Or it this a metaphorical story about a son finally seeing his father’s  true colors?  Is it simply a story about privacy?  If so, isn’t the consequence of invasion of privacy a bit severe? 

 

           Or, and this seems most likely to me, was this story contributed in order to demonize the polytheistic idol worshiping Canaanites, and to justify the conquest and persecution of them by the descendants of the other sons of Noah, the same sons Noah blessed at the same time he cursed Canaan?

 

           Another righteous man from the Hebrew Bible is Judah, whose blood line traces back though Jacob, Rebekah and Isaac, Abraham and Sarah, and ultimately to Adam and Eve. Even though Judah does marry a Canaanite women by the name of Shua, he professes to a strict adherence to the Jewish law of the times.  With Shua, Judah fathers three sons, Er, Onan and Shelah.

 

           As is the tradition Judah chooses a wife for his eldest son Er.  Her name is Tamar, and she is also a Canaanite.  Before Tamar is with child her husband dies.  At that time a practice called ‘Levite marriage’ was a tradition.  It called for the oldest brother of Tamar’s first husband to lie with her in order to produce a child.  Being the law-abiding citizen that he was, Judah orders his second son to know Tamar.  But he is reluctant to father a child.