Finished reading: Including the Stranger: Foreigners in the Former Prophets by David G. Firth 📚

This managed to be both a quick read and an excellent depth of study — one, in fact, much more biblically scholarly than anything I have read in a while or that I expected to find here. I don’t recall how I came across this one, but the title attracted me for what should be obvious reasons.

Here’s Firth on why he focuses on the narrative materials of the Former Prophets rather than the legal texts:

There is value in a more focused study that considers the contribution of the Old Testament’s narrative materials. Walter Houston has pointed out that laws can change a society’s behaviour only when justice is taught and not only enforced, and one of the key ways in which this teaching happens in the Old Testament is through its narrative materials.

There are, however, more fundamental reasons for turning to Israel’s wider narrative traditions. One important point is that the law provides not an ethical maximum but rather a minimum. That is, law recognizes a problem that needs to be addressed, but what it provides is the least that should be done, not necessarily the ethical goal towards which a people should aspire. By contrast, [Gordon] Wenham has argued that the narrative texts of the Old Testament are didactic and so try ‘to instil both theological truths and ethical ideals into their readers’, and that therefore the narratives offer a form of paradigmatic ethics. […]

In the end, although there is no one method and there are some figures whose status is never entirely clear, many foreigners are mentioned in the Former Prophets, with many of these included among the people of God so that the boundaries of this people is constantly being challenged.*

While I wish Firth had said more in the closing pages, what he has done — what he draws out of the text and into proper attention — is remarkably important.

A few summary take-aways:

• Ethnicity itself is never a problem. (Hear ye, hear ye, fellow descendants of those belligerently god-awful — but sometimes fun — “New Atheism” debates: Ethnicity in the Bible is never a problem.)
• Often within the narratives, groups of people or even prominent characters themselves who we today might assume to be ethnically Israelite are not.
• Not only are “foreigners” generally viewed in a positive light, but they are often, and in some narratives usually, the ones who understand Yahweh and his purposes much better than “God’s people” do.
• The only Israel in the text that matters — and by extension, for Christians, the only church that matters — is neither ethnic nor geographical nor national. The only one that matters “is the the one that is continually reminded that their existence is for others, for foreigners.”

Bonhoeffer (from prison, of course) describing hilaritas: more than “classic jocundity,” it should be more widely appreciated “as optimism about one’s own work, as boldness, willingness to defy the world and popular opinion, as the firm conviction that they are doing the world good with their work, even if the world isn’t pleased with it, and a high-spirited self-confidence.”

Imagine it’s nearing springtime.

Everything outside is melting and mucky.

Slushy puddles abound.

You’re 14 months old…

…and you have a stick.

W. J. Hennigan (<—gift link):

Thanks to Mr. Trump’s words and actions, the perceived value of acquiring nuclear weapons among allies appears to have quickly gone up, while the confidence in extended deterrence has gone down.

To once again quote Charles Krauthammer in 2016, this time at length:

We are entering a period of unprecedented threat to the international order that has prevailed under American leadership since 1945…

At a time of such tectonic instability, even the most experienced head of state requires wisdom and delicacy to maintain equilibrium. Trump has neither. His joining of supreme ignorance to supreme arrogance, combined with a pathological sensitivity to any perceived slight, is a standing invitation to calamitous miscalculation.

Two generations of Americans have grown up feeling that international stability is as natural as the air we breathe. It’s not. It depends on continual, calibrated tending. It depends on the delicate balancing of alliances and the careful signaling of enemies. It depends on avoiding self-inflicted trade wars and on recognizing the value of allies like Germany, Japan and South Korea as cornerstones of our own security rather than satrapies who are here to dispatch tribute to their imperial master in Washington.

It took seven decades to build this open, free international order. It could be brought down in a single presidential term. That would be a high price to pay for the catharsis of kicking over a table.

Predictable and predicted, as they say. Yet has any of this required even the slightest prophetic vision?

Nate Hagens:

In a materially rich, modern world, the habituation of the action of consumption leads to the wanting of things culture-wide being stronger than the reward we get from having them. This is a fundamental problem for an economic system built on turning billions of barrels of oil into microliters of dopamine. […]

In a culture of vast material wealth, information overload, and social media it’s increasingly difficult for us to separate fantasy from reality. When these individual virtual worlds connect with the virtual worlds of others, the result is widespread shared beliefs that money is real, that our current widespread wealth is due mostly to our cleverness, and that technology will lead to limitless growth.

I’ve been listening to The Great Simplification for a while, but I hadn’t listened to Nate’s Film on Energy, Environment, and Our Future. Though he doesn’t capture me entirely, I appreciate nearly everything he’s about.

Here’s an example of one reason why I’m not entirely captured. In the middle of what is surely a crucial description of what’s going on all around us, he says this: “Computer algorithms optimized for profit are splintering our society by reducing attention spans, accelerating addiction, apathy, and mistrust in science.” I’m not saying that that sentence is wrong (it isn’t), but it seems really, really obvious to me that “mistrust in science” does not belong in that list in the same way or as seemlessly as addiction and apathy and loss of attention. The trust we struggle to place, and insist the public place, in science is its own beast, and surely optimized computer algorithms can just as easily result in misplaced and even harmful trust in something-called-science.

(I mean no offense to anyone who has one of these, but I am certain that a flag on my lawn declaring “As for me and my house, we believe in science” will help neither me, nor our politics, nor our science. Surely the ubiquity of flags of this sort reflect an algorithm much more than they reflect the truth or something meaningfully called trust.)

Anyway, I fully endorse the work Nate Hagens does and highly recommend his podcast. I mention my little complaint only because I think it is hindrances like these — which are not occasional but instead soak almost everything that gets said — are part of what keeps people from getting on board with what is otherwise fascinating and essential information for us today.

Osip Mandelstam:

Dietrich Bonhoeffer on stupidity… and contempt for humanity.

Sometimes, love squishes.