R.P. Nettelhorst's Blog, page 83
April 3, 2014
Sleep
My graduate work at UCLA was difficult no matter how you might care to look at it. The subject matter was obscure and mostly useless: Semitic languages—specifically, Akkadian (two dialects: Assyrian and Babylonian; written in cuneiform, a writing system consisting of about 600 polyvalent logographic symbols), Aramaic (three dialects: Imperial, Biblical, and Syriac—and two separate alphabets); and Hebrew (Modern, biblical, and a closely related Canaanite dialect, Ugaritic, written with a cuneiform alphabet). On top of that, I managed a year of Ancient Greek, a couple of quarters of Ancient Egyptian and two full years of Sumerian. Not to mention having to learn French and German, since a master’s degree in my field required a familiarity with one modern European language and the PhD required a familiarity with a second. There was also a course in epigraphics where I somehow managed to also study some Phoenician and become fluent in Moabite (no great feat: all that survives of the language is one short text, which happens to be very similar to Aramaic; once you’ve read that text, you’ve learned pretty much all the Moabite that still exists).
I was usually taking between fifteen and seventeen units at a time and it was not uncommon for me to be studying four different languages at the same time. This was not as confusing as one might think: I never once got mixed up, though admittedly I occasionally had trouble coming up with the words I needed for the class I happened to be in. For instance, I remember once in a German class needing to say something and only being able to remember how to say it in Hebrew. But I knew it was Hebrew, not German.
At the same time I was torturing myself in this way, I worked thirty to forty hours a week at the Burbank Airport driving a shuttle bus to and from a parking lot. And remarkably, during the three years of graduate work, I somehow met my future wife and dated her. Many of our dates consisted of late nights at Denny’s eating French fries and drinking coffee while we both studied—she was studying to become a school teacher.
Now, think about the time requirements for this madness: five days a week in class at UCLA for fifteen to seventeen hours per week, commuting time to and from UCLA, home and work I was spending two or more hours a day just driving to where I needed to be. Obviously I was still young and foolish.
Unsurprisingly, sleep deprivation and I became close friends over the course of the three years of graduate study. I averaged just a bit over four hours sleep a night during the school year, though I managed a bit better during the summer and holiday breaks. Somehow I avoided falling asleep for any extended period while I was driving, though it was a close thing.
When my wife and I got married, we took a two week honeymoon in a cabin next to Lake Tahoe. I spent the first week of that honeymoon mostly sleeping: I had a lot of sleep to catch up on and it had been years since I’d had a vacation.
I have learned since then about the dangers of sleep deprivation. We tend to think of sleep as wasted time—I know I did when I was at UCLA. I had hopes that coffee would somehow keep me from feeling exhausted but I learned it was completely ineffective for that. Sleep deprivation can cause depression, heart problems, high blood pressure and weight gain. Sleep is not a luxury, it is not laziness: it is necessary and I was crazy to keep the sort of schedule I kept. It’s a wonder I survived, let alone successfully graduated and got married to my wife of now thirty years.
I had hopes that once I had completed my graduate work my days of going without adequate sleep would be behind me.
I forgot to reckon with children.
When they were infants, they would require attention at the most unpleasant hours of the night and so I became reacquainted with the feeling of graduate school, stumbling through my days.
Since they have become teenagers, they mostly stopped awakening me in the middle of the night—until my youngest began manifesting the mental illness that she still suffers from.
Now, she is generally well-medicated, but she still has mild episodes that are problematical, and she requires more care and supervision than a normal teenager would, given that her overall maturity level is that of a child of somewhere between eight and twelve, even though she is seventeen.
During much of the day, I have to help her with her school work: she’s on independent study and only goes to her high school once a week for testing. This means sometimes my writing work has to be done during the early morning and late evening.
But now I’m aware of the dangers of inadequate rest. I no longer view sleep as time wasted. I recognize that it is as important as eating right, exercising, and work. Despite the temptation to stay up longer or get up earlier, I have trained myself to never get less than an average of seven hours of sleep per night. I refuse to reignite my relationship with my old friend, sleep deprivation
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April 2, 2014
Remembering Tomorrow
This is what the LORD says:
“I will give Jerusalem a river of peace and prosperity.
The wealth of the nations will flow to her.
Her children will be nursed at her breasts,
carried in her arms, and held on her lap.
I will comfort you there in Jerusalem
as a mother comforts her child.”
When you see these things, your heart will rejoice.
You will flourish like the grass!
Everyone will see the LORD’s hand of blessing on his servants—
and his anger against his enemies.
See, the LORD is coming with fire,
and his swift chariots roar like a whirlwind.
He will bring punishment with the fury of his anger
and the flaming fire of his hot rebuke.
The LORD will punish the world by fire
and by his sword.
He will judge the earth,
and many will be killed by him. (Isaiah 66:12-16)
Why can’t we be happy today like we will be tomorrow when God makes everything okay? As human beings, we can only respond to what we can see, whether it is the pain of the moment, or our anticipation of whatever we think is likely to happen tomorrow. Pain overwhelms us more than joy ever can; the suffering we experience goes deeper than our pleasures, affects us more deeply. No one goes into counseling to uncover repressed memories of happiness. No one endures flashbacks of good times, or finds their current circumstances circumscribed by memories of ecstasy gone by.
The words translated “earth” and “world” in context refer to the lands of Mesopotamia, the “world” of the Assyrians and Babylonians. God promised the Israelites that he would avenge their pain against these tormenters who had destroyed their homeland and taken them away into captivity. God’s promises of tomorrow were intended to bring joy in the midst of today’s problems.
Only with God can we come to a place of optimism, of recognizing that the future memories we will have of eternal bliss can deeply constrain our experiences of today. Likewise, the satisfaction of God’s yet-to-be certain judgment on our enemies should be able to render aid to us as we endure their blows today.
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April 1, 2014
Death of a King
While Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon and all his army and all the kingdoms and peoples in the empire he ruled were fighting against Jerusalem and all its surrounding towns, this word came to Jeremiah from the LORD: “This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: Go to Zedekiah king of Judah and tell him, ‘This is what the LORD says: I am about to hand this city over to the king of Babylon, and he will burn it down. You will not escape from his grasp but will surely be captured and handed over to him. You will see the king of Babylon with your own eyes, and he will speak with you face to face. And you will go to Babylon.
“‘Yet hear the promise of the LORD, O Zedekiah king of Judah. This is what the LORD says concerning you: You will not die by the sword; you will die peacefully. As people made a funeral fire in honor of your fathers, the former kings who preceded you, so they will make a fire in your honor and lament, “Alas, O master!” I myself make this promise, declares the LORD.’”
Then Jeremiah the prophet told all this to Zedekiah king of Judah, in Jerusalem, while the army of the king of Babylon was fighting against Jerusalem and the other cities of Judah that were still holding out—Lachish and Azekah. These were the only fortified cities left in Judah. (Jeremiah 34:1-7)
There’s good news and bad news. Which would you rather hear first? Zedekiah’s sons would be executed in front of him. Immediately afterwards, he was blinded and then he was hauled away to Babylon in chains. Meanwhile, the city of Jerusalem was torched and burned to the ground, along with God’s temple. All this God had told Zedekiah before it happened, warning him that unless he changed his ways, this is how it would turn out. Instead of heeding God’s words, given to him by the prophet Jeremiah, Zedekiah had resisted God’s will and attempted to achieve his own will by rebelling against Nebuchadnezzar. The outcome was just as God had predicted.
But, despite his poor choices, despite resisting God’s will, despite the terrible suffering he endured, the promise God gave him was fulfilled. God did not let Zedekiah die by the sword. Instead he died peacefully—but far from home. And as the last king of Judah to ever sit on David’s throne, when he died he was mourned by the people of God.
The outcome of Zedekiah’s life was because of the choices he made. God is in control of the universe, but he exercises that control through the choices we make.
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March 31, 2014
March 30, 2014
Pardon
“Then you will know that I, the Lord your God, live in Zion, my holy mountain. Jerusalem will be holy forever, and foreign armies will never conquer her again.
“In that day the mountains will drip with sweet wine, and the hills will flow with milk. Water will fill the streambeds of Judah, and a fountain will burst forth from the Lord’s Temple, watering the arid valley of acacias.
But Egypt will become a wasteland and Edom will become a wilderness, because they attacked the people of Judah and killed innocent people in their land.
“But Judah will be filled with people forever, and Jerusalem will endure through all generations.
“I will pardon my people’s crimes, which I have not yet pardoned; and I, the Lord, will make my home in Jerusalem with my people.” (Joel 3:17-21)
At the beginning of his prophecy, Joel predicted that the land of Israel would be devastated by a locust plague. It arrived like an invading army. Perhaps the locusts served as a picture of the Babylonians, God’s punishment for Israel’s disobedience.
Though the Babylonians and their allies, Egypt and Edom, served as God’s instruments of judgment, they slaughtered the innocent, not just the guilty. So God promised he would punish them, too. This happened within seventy years, when the Persians conquered Babylon and much of the rest of the Middle East. The Persians then issued a decree ordering that both Jerusalem and the Temple be rebuilt and that the Jewish captives should go home.
God then promised that he would live with his people forever. God fulfilled this promise with his New Covenant—a covenant that would be written on the hearts of his people. God intended to make his people his temple, the place where he really could live with them forever. As Paul the apostle would later write, his people are now God’s temple and God’s Spirit lives in their midst.
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March 29, 2014
March 28, 2014
Artifact
I spent two summers working on a kibbutz in Israel, specifically Kibbutz Massada which is located just south of the Sea of Galilee on the Yarmuk River bordering Jordan. In the mid-1970s when I was working there, the kibbutz had about three hundred residents; it was a communal farm. They held all their property in common, ate their meals together in a cafeteria, and raised their children collectively.
Today, the kibbutz movement—as a communist system—is over. Those that still exist—like Massada—are no longer communal. They have privatized and turned capitalistic. Many are no longer even farms. Today, Massada offers tourists a nice hotel with reasonable rates.
But in the seventies, Massada was mostly about farming: milk, chickens, citrus fruits, alfalfa, dates, olives and bananas. I frequently worked in fields along the Jordanian border, which was marked by barbed wire and minefields. Many of the mines were clearly visible: over the years, the dirt had been washed away by rain. Wild boars roamed the area. Occasionally they would find their way into the minefield. A loud thump would indicate a boar had discovered a land mine—and if you looked quick, you could actually see a pig fly.
One week our task was to clear ten acres of rocks so that it could be turned into a banana field. A ditch perhaps three feet deep ran along one edge of the area and we were instructed to dump the rocks into it. The mountains surrounding us in that part of Israel were mostly volcanic, and so the stones were black basalt. There were lots of boulders the size of a man’s head, a multitude like overgrown potatoes, and a handful that required two or sometimes even three of us to lift. But some of the rocks were something more than just shapeless black stones. Some had clearly been worked by human hands.
We found millstones that had been used for grinding grain: they were roughly saddle-shaped and perhaps three feet long by a foot thick; it took two of us to lift them. We found grinding stones—cigar-like cylinders perhaps a foot and a half long and maybe five inches at the thickest point in the middle. These all went into the ditch as well.
The most common artifact was much smaller, however. They looked like donuts, about five inches in diameter and three thick, with a two inch diameter hole in the middle. We found dozens of them—and we chucked them all into the ditch.
I knew that these tools were ancient things, the sort of objects one might expect to see in a museum, rather than just rocks to be dumped in a ditch in order to make way for another banana grove. But the Israelis seemed completely uninterested in them, even after we showed them what they were. “Into the ditch,” they insisted.
The reason for their cavalier attitude became obvious to me as time went on. Just about any place you went in that country you stumbled over the sort of objects that archaeologists normally hunt. For instance, along the beaches of Caesarea, rolling in the surf, were bits of marble from the long demolished Roman harbor constructed more than two thousand years before. Standing and looking out at the horizon in any desert, one would inevitably notice large, flat-topped mounds. Called tells, they were the destroyed remains of ancient cities. There were dozens, more than anyone had time for excavating. Walking across any open area in Israel, one could find pottery shards just lying on the surface of the ground like pebbles.
Since the basalt donuts in that future banana field were not so large, I took one of them away with me at the end of the week and tucked it into my suitcase. I would have liked to have brought back one of the millstones, but they were simply too big and heavy.
In the final days of my stay in Israel I visited the museum in Jerusalem. Among its many exhibits, I found one that contained ancient artifacts gathered from the kibbutz next door to the one I had worked on. Inside that glass case were a dozen or more of the basalt donuts like the one I had in my suitcase.
It turned out that these objects that we had unceremoniously dumped in a ditch by the dozens had been manufactured by ancient Canaanites six thousand years previously. They dated from about 4000 BC, making them already old when the Egyptians had first started building their great pyramids.
So what were these basalt donuts? The label on the exhibit described them as “weighting stones for digging sticks.” Canaanite farmers had slipped them over the curved sticks that they used as hoes to prepare their fields for planting. That field we were clearing for banana trees had once been cultivated by Canaanites. The discarded basalt donuts are such common objects around Israel that I suppose one could fill warehouses with them.
So I brought one of them back to California with me. And today, that ancient Canaanite artifact sits on my desk. I use it as a pencil holder.
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March 27, 2014
March 26, 2014
Refuge
The LORD spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to the Israelites, and say to them: When you cross the Jordan into the land of Canaan, then you shall select cities to be cities of refuge for you, so that a slayer who kills a person without intent may flee there. The cities shall be for you a refuge from the avenger, so that the slayer may not die until there is a trial before the congregation.
The cities that you designate shall be six cities of refuge for you: you shall designate three cities beyond the Jordan, and three cities in the land of Canaan, to be cities of refuge. These six cities shall serve as refuge for the Israelites, for the resident or transient alien among them, so that anyone who kills a person without intent may flee there. (Numbers 35:9-15)
Revenge is a dish best served cold. In ancient Israel, there were no police officers, no detectives, no CSI, no FBI. Instead, family and friends were responsible for avenging the victim of a violent crime. Justice was dependent upon the victim’s family. Unfortunately, vigilante justice is notoriously imprecise. The wrong person all too frequently was fingered for a crime. Accidents were magnified into malevolence. An injured party was not interested in believing that the accused was innocent until proven guilty. They just wanted satisfaction: string him up now and ask questions later.
Therefore, God established refuges for those accused of violent crimes. An accused person could flee to any one of six cities where they would be protected from vengeance. Once there, the vengeful relatives could do nothing more than bring charges against the person before the city leadership. Ideally, those leaders could then dispassionately investigate the matter. If found not guilty, then the accused could stay in the city indefinitely, safe from a vengeful family, who might not be satisfied by a pronouncement of innocence. The law of refuge was the same, whether you were a citizen or not. God decided that justice was best served by those not lost in the heat of their emotions, so that only the guilty would actually be punished. Revenge is not just about making the victim feel better. All too often, our emotions can get in the way of what’s right. God wants to protect us, and those around us, from ourselves.
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March 25, 2014
Daughters
The daughters of Zelophehad son of Hepher, the son of Gilead, the son of Makir, the son of Manasseh, belonged to the clans of Manasseh son of Joseph. The names of the daughters were Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah and Tirzah. They approached the entrance to the Tent of Meeting and stood before Moses, Eleazar the priest, the leaders and the whole assembly, and said, “Our father died in the desert. He was not among Korah’s followers, who banded together against the LORD, but he died for his own sin and left no sons. Why should our father’s name disappear from his clan because he had no son? Give us property among our father’s relatives.”
So Moses brought their case before the LORD and the LORD said to him, “What Zelophehad’s daughters are saying is right. You must certainly give them property as an inheritance among their father’s relatives and turn their father’s inheritance over to them.
“Say to the Israelites, ‘If a man dies and leaves no son, turn his inheritance over to his daughter. If he has no daughter, give his inheritance to his brothers. If he has no brothers, give his inheritance to his father’s brothers. If his father had no brothers, give his inheritance to the nearest relative in his clan, that he may possess it. This is to be a legal requirement for the Israelites, as the LORD commanded Moses.’ ” (Numbers 27:1-11)
God likes women. The five daughters of Zelophehad wanted to protect their father’s name and they wanted to protect themselves. It was important for the Israelites that their names and property were passed down to future generations. In their patriarchal society, if a man had no sons, then some other male relative gained his inheritance. Zelophehad’s daughters thought that was wrong. They were his children, as much as any son could be, so why couldn’t they get the inheritance? God agreed with them. God told Moses that children, regardless of gender, took priority over other relatives. Only if there were no children at all, could some other member of the extended family inherit a dead man’s property.
What mattered to even the least powerful individuals was important to God. He was concerned with such mundane details as the inheritance rights of children. God was concerned with protecting those who might otherwise have been taken advantage of. In a patriarchal society, the rights of women were regularly trampled upon. God saw to it that daughters could not be deprived of what was rightly theirs. Gender does not trump and individual’s humanity. Regardless of what Moses or the other men might have thought, God insisted that women mattered. No one was unimportant to God.
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