Othniel and Achsah
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome.
Today we have come to one of Greg’s favorite stories in scripture, or so it would seem, because he tells this story and gives a fabulous lecture on it every year in chapel at school. This is like your Valentine’s Day thing.
Oh, really? I don’t remember that one as much, but somehow I feel like I’ve heard this lecture at least four times. Anyhow, we are talking, of course, about the story of Othniel and Achsah, and Caleb’s challenge to the young men of Israel. This is in Joshua 15. Would you like to start with reading the text or do you want to summarize?
Let’s go ahead and read it so we’ll have it out there. I’m actually going to back up a little before their story so that we can remember a little bit about Caleb. This is verse 13 –
And unto Caleb the son of Jephunneh he gave a part among the children of Judah, according to the commandment of the Lord to Joshua, even the city of Arba the father of Anak, which city is Hebron. And Caleb drove thence the three sons of Anak, Sheshai, and Ahiman, and Talmai, the children of Anak.
And he went up thence to the inhabitants of Debir, and the name of Debir before was Kirjathsepher…
And Caleb said, He that smiteth Kirjathsepher, and taketh it, to him will I give Achsah my daughter to wife. And Othniel the son of Kenaz, the brother of Caleb, took it, and he gave him Achsah his daughter to wife.
And it came to pass, as she came unto him, that she moved him to ask of her father a field, and she lighted off her ass and Caleb said unto her, What wouldest thou? Who answered, Give me a blessing; for thou hast given me a south land; give me also springs of water. And he gave her the upper springs, and the nether springs.
Thus far the story of Caleb, Achsah, and Othniel. Now, there actually is a little bit more about Othniel later, but we’ll mention that if time permits or requires. It’s a very simple story. It also appears in Judges chapter 1, more or less word-for-word.
You mentioned that I used to do this regularly as a chapel message. I think I remember the first time I did it as a chapel message, and I asked the young ladies – probably mostly high school at that point, but the others may have been there, I don’t remember – what they thought of this deal, and if their fathers were to put forward such a deal to the potential suitors in their lives, whether they would approve or not and whether they would go along with this or not.
I think the first time around almost everybody said, except maybe one young lady, “No way. No. This is ridiculous. This is dumb. What’s he doing? This is completely unacceptable,” and so on.
When I was done explaining the story I asked them again, and I think almost everyone said, “This would be a great deal! Where do we sign up for this?”
So this is what we’re going to do today. We’re going to try to understand what Caleb was doing, why it was a good idea, why maybe Christian dads shouldn’t necessarily do exactly this kind of thing today. For one thing, there are no cities of giants around, so that kind of complicates the problem here.
But there was a time in Western history, particularly the history of Western literature and fable and myth and all that, when it was not uncommon to tell stories about the king who promises his daughter to the knight/warrior/lord/whoever, who will slay the dragon or solve whatever other problem is upon the kingdom. And there was a time when everyone kind of took that in stride, and for nobility – which nobody really was – that seemed the kind of thing such folk might do, and it would make for good adventure stories.
Then we get to the 50s, 60s, and 70s and actually even earlier, and we begin to get Disney films about princesses waiting for their prince to come – the prince who may or may not do anything at all to win them.
Gives her a kiss when she’s dead, dances with her till she loses a shoe. Later on we do get someone like Prince Eric, who actually takes on a witch and runs a ship with a cross upon it into said witch.
He wouldn’t have had to take on the witch if the girl hadn’t made a deal with the witch to begin with.
Yeah, make a deal with the devil. “Someday my prince will come.” I think too often Christian folk have bought into that in the name of Jesus. We tell our girls, “God has someone just for you, and one day he will come and you should be getting ready for that day,” which is fine advice up to a point, but it kind of leaves big holes in the possibilities.
I have known young women who have waited way into their 30s for Prince Charming to show up, and I know godly ladies, sweet, intelligent, attractive ladies, who are still waiting. The naïve thing is “God has someone for you and he will show up at the right time. You do not need to put yourself out there or visit other churches. You certainly don’t need to do any kind of online dating service, because just trust God to bring someone to our church, although there are no young men here at the moment.”
“And definitely don’t make eye contact with any young men, because that’s flirting.”
Yes. These young men will walk right across the room to your father and tell him that he’s interested in you and would like to prove himself.
Yes, yes, because that would be circumventing the chain of command otherwise. Yeah, we’ve kind of got a little fussy and silly and have tried to put our incompetence sometimes on God’s providence. “God’s going to bring somebody.” Well, he can, and I think we all know stories where he has. That’s not the same thing as God promising that that’s how he’s going to do things.
In the rest of our experience, those things that we want and need for body and soul – yes, he tells us to pray for our daily bread, but as Luther says, God will not therefore make a chicken fly roasted into your mouth. You actually have to do some work here, simple things like learning how to talk to a guy, walking across the room when he won’t, or getting your dad to walk across the room and say, “Come over and have lunch with us and talk to my dau…”
“You know, lots of things in life are embarrassing. Do you want to get married or not?”
A lot of what Disney has done for us – and I like Disney movies as far as they go, they’re fun usually – but trying to set them up as a standard for how Christians ought to behave has some huge holes, including this, that getting married is always going to be surrounded with glowing romance that sets the world on fire.
Now, some relationships do that way, particularly in the West where we’ve come to expect that and kind of wait on them, but there is nothing in scripture anywhere that says, “Fall in love and marry the woman you love.” What the Bible says is, “Love the one you marry.”
There are a lot of good reasons – particularly there are three, but there are some others – and this is another question I ask my students now and then. “What are the three best reasons for getting married?” or I will do it as a multiple-choice kind of thing. Among them I will include mutual help, companionship, propagation of the species, and protection from fornication. When they see that, kids often will laugh out loud. “That’s a reason for getting married? Bwah ha ha!”
Yes, and it’s in the Book of Common Prayer because it’s in the Bible. “It’s better to marry than to burn.”
We could also talk about money and inheritance and security, and some of Jane Austen’s characters were not completely out to lunch when they thought about such things. But of course the greatest reason to get married is to seek God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness, and that can involve lots and lots of things. So with that in mind, we’re going to look at this story and piece some things together.
First of all, Caleb. We know Caleb. He’s the Caleb of “Caleb and Joshua.” He’s one of the two faithful spies who, 40 years earlier, had gone into the Promised Land and brought back a good report. Even before Joshua piped up, Caleb was already saying, “We are well able to overcome. We should not rebel against the Lord. He will give us this good land. Yeah, there are giants. Yeah, there are great walled cities, but they will fall before us because God’s on our side,” and people wanted to kill him.
The children of Israel refused to listen to Joshua and Caleb, and God told them they had to wander in the wilderness for 40 years until that generation dropped dead, but Caleb and Joshua were promised that they would live and that they would see the Promised Land. So Caleb has had 40 years to think about giants and what needs to happen to giants, and how a man who believes God and trusts God’s promises can take down giants.
When he comes into the land, and it’s not included here, although we get the tail end of it, but he comes straight to Joshua and says, “Give me Hebron.” Hebron is where the giants were – the giants they were so terrified of 40 years ago. “I want to take them on.” He’s probably 80-something at this point, but he wants to take the giants on, and he does.
He expels them from Hebron, kills them, sends them packing, and then he moves to a nearby city, Kirjathsepher, which seems to have been a cultural city since its name means “city of books,” so that’s significant to taking down the pagan presence of Canaan. You probably want to get rid of their books, not because they’re books but because they reflect the pagan worldview you don’t need your people buying into.
But rather than taking it himself, which he apparently would be well able to have done, he publishes a decree, a proclamation. “Whoever takes this city can marry my daughter.” This is where the feminists go wild.
“I’m not some prize to be won!” Insert Jasmine here. But there’s some things we need to understand about the whole biblical context. The most important is the Bible never requires any woman to marry a man apart from her own consent. Now, the Bible encourages her to listen to her father and mother and the advice of those who are older and wiser, but to force a woman into a man’s bed without her consent – that’s called rape, and the Bible is absolutely opposed to that.
The one place where this comes to the fore is when Abraham’s servant, Eleazar, has gone and found Rebecca and wants to leave right away, and her family says, “Well, let us ask the maiden, ‘Do you want to go with this man?’”
Here we have a situation where apparently even God himself has spoken, as far as they can tell and in the end they admit, and yet they will not send her without her permission. Now, they probably had some other agendas going on as well, but nonetheless the one that obviously was everyone’s defense was, “She’s got to agree to this,” and of course she does, having never met Isaac. That would be another love story to talk about.
So when we come to this, we have to understand and assume that Caleb has already talked this over with Achsah, and Achsah is okay with this. Now we need to talk about why this would be. What is it in this deal that Achsah says, “Well, that sounds like a good deal. Count me in.”.
It is possible – in fact, probable – that she knew who the frontrunner was. Now, why all this was necessary we’re not told. He probably didn’t have a dowry. We see that later with, for instance, David. But maybe he just needed some pushing. Oftentimes guys are a little slow, a little lame, or don’t know if the girl will accept them, or all kinds of things.
This is Caleb’s daughter we’re talking about. You don’t just go up to Caleb and ask, “Hey, can I date your daughter?” I don’t think so.
Yeah, and in that light you can think of David, when David was encouraged by the king’s counselors, “Is it a light thing to be the king’s son-in-law? I am a poor man and lightly esteemed in Israel.” He’s got no money and no family name. “King? Saul? We’ve got a problem here.” So yeah, there’s a thing.
Caleb is lighting a fire, whether it’s specifically Othniel or whether there are perhaps some others. You could write stories on this, like he’s got a best friend who he really loves who’s also interested in Achsah, so he’s going to back off and let his friend have her – you know, stupid things that people do all the time.
For some reason, Caleb and Achsah agree, “This is the best way to get what we want.” What does she want? She wants a godly husband who’s a whole lot like dad, because notice what the task is. Take out a city of giants, just like Dad did.
Okay. As you say, this is Caleb. Who’s going to dare to say, “I’m as godly a man as Caleb.” No one’s going to do that, but when you reduce it down to one task…
Here are some of the things that would fall out. Obviously, even to take this up the man has got to be physically brave. It’s not completely clear whether or not there were still giants there, but there are at least allies of the giants and there’s some mean nasty baddies there, and there may be giants.
The man who takes on this city is going to have to be physically brave and he’s going to have to have some military prowess. He’s going to have to be good with a sword or a bow or a spear or something and be physically strong and not afraid to hazard his life to accomplish this.
But that’s not nearly enough because lots of people are brave warriors. These are giants. This is Canaan. This is the Promised Land. The Promised Land is acquired by faith, so you can have all of the battle readiness in the world and fail in this job. You need to be trusting God. You need to be willing to put your life on the line for the kingdom of God’s sake, because you believe God’s promise that this can happen. It doesn’t matter how much you love the girl or how brave you are or what your superpower is. If you don’t trust Yahweh, if you do not believe the promise of Messiah, this is going to fall flat real fast.
Achsah is looking for a godly man who is moved by faith – not just has faith and sits in his little corner exercising his faith in his prayer closet…
Yes. She’s not going to get that. She’s going to get someone worthy of the Hebrews 11 Hall of Heroes, people who, because of their faith, did some kind of weird and sometimes challenging and dangerous stuff.
But that said, you don’t take the city on your own, even with God’s blessing. I’m not immediately thinking of any warrior, not even Samson really, who took out an entire city by himself. You need friends. You need battle companions.
So you go to your friends, and you better have some good ones, and they better be godly men, because if they’re a bunch of reprobates, however godly you are, God’s not going to honor this. We’ve seen before what happens when you start letting the wolves run the battle campaign. It doesn’t go well. So this guy’s got to have some godly friends, and he’s going to go to them and say, “I want to be more active in this conquest of Canaan thing.”
Now, what are the guys going to say here? “Oh, somebody’s in love – ha ha ha.”
Or are they going to look at each other and say, “Huh. All right, when do we go? This is a good deal. We’re with you.”
One of the things that you find out – and I’m guessing that you each have found out in time – when you decide to marry and you go to your friends, what you want your friends to be is supportive, not come back with, “You’re going to marry that lame, that…” and start filling in adjectives here.
When I had proposed to Kate, one of her best friends said basically, “No, you can do better than that. He’s too old and other things that disqualify him completely. You can do a lot better.”
On my side I was told afterward – I didn’t know at the time, but I was told afterwards – that some friends from up north wanted to come and talk me out of this. Fortunately, our friend David Farschman said no, because that could have complicated things no end.
You really don’t want that, and you don’t want your friends just humoring you. “Okay, he’s made up his mind. We might as well smile.”
You want your friends to honestly be able to say, “That is a great choice! She’s a little above your league, but okay, you got her. Good move there!”
So this is what Achsah is going to get. Her true love is going to have a bunch of godly guys as friends, who themselves are warriors, who themselves are moved by faith, and who think that she’s worth this, at least for Othniel if not for themselves. They may not want to fight for her, but they think that she and Othniel are a great match and they’re willing to put their lives on the line to support this wedding. Now, think about that.
After the wedding, because they put their lives on the line and if they see Othniel going a little cold or careless in his relationship, they’re going to be in his face. “Hey, we fought giants for this.”
Do you remember White Christmas? This is a real detour. Danny Kaye’s character is always rubbing the place where he broke his arm saving Bing Crosby’s character’s life, so every time something comes up he’s like, “Well, you know, it’s not like I ever did anything for you.”
They’d be pulling that kind of routine, or probably even more forcibly. “We risked our lives for you and for this marriage. You’re not pulling this garbage. You get back in there and you make up to her and you make this thing work,” and Achsah will understand this. “I’m not just getting a husband. I’m getting a husband within a community of supportive friends who will help us make our marriage work.” That’s a pretty good deal.
He also is going to have to have some smarts because this is a city, and that requires some strategy and tactics. It probably means going and talking to some older guys who have a little experience and figuring this out, because although he’s going to have help, ultimately the final battle plan and final plan is his. He’s got to be smart enough to know his limitations, but also smart enough to come up with a plan and implement it and make it work, and delegate. “Okay, you’re taking this gate. You’re going up this wall.” If he doesn’t, if he’s just a stupid lout, again this is not going to work very well.
One thing that I think is notable for fathers is that Caleb hasn’t asked any task that he hasn’t demonstrated himself willing to perform – willing and able. I think sometimes, with the best of intentions, fathers can be very over-protective and demand things of their daughters’ suitors that they could never fulfill. There’s a danger of being a parental Pharisee, of laying a burden that you would not lift a finger to lift yourself.
Or that you still don’t do. My brother-in-law was interested in a young lady, who seemed to be a pretty marvelous young lady, but the father just set hurdle after hurdle after hurdle until finally the elders stepped in, but even they weren’t very helpful. “Yeah, he’s just kind of like that.”
So nothing happened, and they eventually went their separate ways because dad was just pretty much determined that this was not a way of finding her a suitor or a husband, but a way of keeping her from ever having one. So not only is there the danger of being Pharisaical about it, but there’s also the danger of putting up so many roadblocks that nobody’s going to want the girl.
And it’s not protection at that point. It’s not for the daughter’s good to be single for her whole life.
No, it’s not. Apparently I have a reputation for being scary, and yet I don’t think that any of the young men who hang around my daughters have been that scared. Well, I take that back. Actually I did get it once, and it didn’t pan out.
But for young men out there, be men. Go talk to dad when it’s time. Dads, don’t play the ogre on purpose. There’s a time and a place for that.
Generally you are. Your goal, one hopes, is to find your daughter a husband, not to keep her from getting one.
Caleb no doubt looked around and he picked what he thought was doable. He did not say, “Go devise the first textbook on physics. Go paint the Mona Lisa. Go compose a piano concerto and orchestrate it with flute and drum.” There was none of that. He put something forward that was part of what was going on at the time, conquering Canaan, something that these young men should have been up for, at least at some level, and something he knew that Othniel, and perhaps others, were capable of doing. It just needed to happen. There needed to be some action.
And here’s the thing that we haven’t said, but it’s there – the man who does this is almost certainly going to love her. There were other cities you could take. There were other battles you could have fought. This one was particularly tricky and dangerous, and the thing that would have moved young men to take it on would be the girl herself. Othniel must have loved Achsah quite a bit, because he’s risking not only his own life, he’s risking the life of his best friends. That’s huge.
I may have forgotten something, but one of the final things here is that when this is over and when he has taken the city and when they are married, her husband is going to be rich. He owns a city, more than you could possibly imagine.
And yet the amazing thing here is that both Othniel and Achsah, and Caleb, turn their cities into Levitical cities. They surrendered them back to become cities of pastors, to become cultural cities for the kingdom of God, over against what they had been in the past.
Hebron had roots that went back to Abraham and Sarah. Now it’s going to be remembered as a place where God’s Levites and his priests hang out and study the law and minister, and Kirjathsepher, which will now be called Debir, is going to be the same kind of thing. While they may have maintained the fields and the suburbs for themselves, they gave up exclusive control of the city for the kingdom of God. That was more important to them.
And then there’s a last little bit that actually makes up most of the story. I mean the story is –
And Othniel the son of Kenaz, the brother of Caleb, took it: and he gave him Achsah his daughter to wife.
There’s a lot we would like to know there, and when we get to heaven we can ask. There’s something else happening.
And it came to pass, as she came unto him, that she moved him to ask of her father a field.
There seem to be two different requests. First, she gets Othniel to ask for land. Caleb controls a lot of property already, having taken Hebron and the area surrounding it, and she’s active here. She is not the passive little shrinking violet waiting for her big man to do everything.
“Dear, now that you’ve done that – good job, by the way – we need some more land. We need some fields, so go talk to my dad.”
The husband is the head and the wife is the neck. She turns the head. No, I joke.
At least sometimes she gives profound wisdom. She moves him to ask of her father a field, but that doesn’t end it. He does his part but then she goes to Caleb on a donkey, an interesting little tidbit there. Caleb sees her coming and says basically, “What do you want? What wouldest thou?”
She says, “I want a blessing from you. You’ve given me a south land,” presumably the field in question. “Give me also springs of water,” because if you don’t have control and access to the springs and can’t funnel them off, channel them off, dig new riverbeds and such, you may not be able to water that precious field you got. You may have just got several hundred acres of desert.
We do, and he agrees. He gave her the upper springs and the nether springs. He doesn’t just give her one set of springs, he gives her two sets.
Something that’s not mentioned here, but presumably Caleb had sons. They’re getting kind of cut out on this deal, because here’s a daughter who, together with her new husband, are making a great team, and Caleb is backing this deal. He’s giving assets that normally would probably have gone to her brothers, but she’s there. She’s got a plan and it’s very clear from what follows in the rest of scripture that her priorities are those of the kingdom of God.
“Well, sons, go kill some giants someplace and get your own springs. Your sister is already on top of this one.”
I said earlier there is one other thing, because Othniel shows up again. The story is retold in Judges, almost verbatim I think, but then we have a little bit more about Othniel. It’s an honor to get your story told twice in the Bible, but then this is what happens. In the first generation, God’s people begin to defect again and go after idols. In Judges 3:8 –
Therefore the anger of the Lord was hot against Israel, and he sold them into the hand of Chushanrishathaim king of Mesopotamia: and the children of Israel served Chushanrishathaim eight years.
And when the children of Israel cried unto the Lord, the Lord raised up a deliverer to the children of Israel, who delivered them, even Othniel the son of Kenaz, Caleb's younger brother. And the Spirit of the Lord came upon him, and he judged Israel, and went out to war, and the Lord delivered Chushanrishathaim king of Mesopotamia into his hand; and his hand prevailed against Chushanrishathaim. And the land had rest forty years. And Othniel the son of Kenaz died.
So when Israel defected and God sent a conqueror, this Mesopotamian or Babylonian or Syrian – Aram-Naharaim, so I guess Syrian – and he oppresses Israel for eight years, and it only takes eight years for them to get this one. “Ow, we should repent,” and they do. And when God looks around for a deliverer, there’s Othniel. He’s clothed with the Spirit of God and he goes out and judges Israel, the first of the judges after Joshua’s death, and he proves a great warrior, saving God’s people from their temporal oppressors and establishing peace in the land for 40 years, not unlike David and Solomon.
We can step back from this for just a second. We’re all fond of biblical theology and biblical imagery. We have an anointed judge who defeats God’s enemy and brings rest to God’s people. Can we say type of Christ? That part is not hard. But now we look back and see, “Oh, and the first thing he did was to win a bride,” a bride who then moves him to ask for land, and herself beseeches the father for living water. There’s very solid images of Christ, and thus not only because of the character of this marriage, but particularly because of its Christological significance, we get this story twice.
So we come back to should Christian fathers set such tests? Well, we don’t got no giants. We don’t have a temporal Promised Land, and right now most of the battles we need to fight don’t involve swords or even AK-47s. But the idea of a daughter and a father agreeing on what’s important in her spouse is always scriptural, and a daughter and a father trusting each other enough to listen, to help, to not get in the way either direction, these are huge things and these are timeless things.
As I said when I first presented this at chapel 20-some odd years ago, the young ladies shifted from, “No, never,” to “Sign me up.” I said, “You know, there is one thing that she wasn’t guaranteed of, unless of course she knew for sure who was going to win, is there was no guarantee that he would be good-looking.”
I’m always told, “Oh, girls don’t care about the looks.” I’m not a girl and don’t know how that works.
Cute and sensitive and have a nice-looking backside is more or less what I hear. I don’t know such things. But there are elements of character that I’ve seen as my own daughters have looked over young men, and some of my female former students have shared their concerns – honesty, integrity, kindness, purity, hard work ethic, knowing that he will listen and he will care about what you’re saying, that he will provide for you.
I know this is a world of two incomes now, but I don’t think anybody wants a husband who’s going to sit in the basement and play video games while the wife goes out and maintains a job. And by the way, for the record, after the marriage I’ve seen situations where young men, after having achieved the girl, having won her, having married her, then went into the basement to play video games and left her alone at night, night after night. This is unconscionable and ridiculous. This is not the character of a godly husband.
There are things that a godly woman should want. Women I know are in the habit of making lists. I know this because they tell me this. Sometimes those lists are very wise and sometimes they’re not.
I know one young lady, whose name you would probably recognize if I said it, but I won’t, who had a very particular issue. She was very well-educated, had her own view of what someone who would be a good husband for her would be like, and she married someone who she said, in the end “met none of the things that I wanted, but was everything that I needed.” That’s pretty good. What she found was a godly husband who loved her and would lay down his life for her. That’s what’s going on with Othniel. He loves her and gives himself for her, like Jesus.
When your wife can look at you and say, “You remind me of Jesus,” that’s terrifying and yet in some ways a little comforting. Of course, it’s terrifying because, “Okay, now I have to live up to that for the rest of my life.”
Before I was married I knew the texts, that we should love our wives and lay down our lives as Jesus did for the church, and I knew that would happen now and then. What I did not understand was that it’s a daily dying to self. It’s not something you do now and then. It’s something you get up and do every day. This is what God calls us to, and we’re not going to be perfect because we’re sinners, and this is why marriages have to be founded on faith in Jesus, not on romantic love. Romantic love will come. In fact, romantic love is commanded.
There are things in Proverbs, Song of Solomon, and Ecclesiastes – and Solomon should know; he wrote all three of those books – that involve physical excitement over the one you love. And it’s not simply, “Well, you may get this someday,” it’s something that’s commanded, but it’s commanded of the one you marry, so it’s something you work on, something that both parties work on, and it’s not a given.
The excitement you feel when you first come to the altar is not guaranteed to continue. What will happen is God will build something much deeper and stronger, and it may take some time, depending on circumstances. The more you give yourself completely to Jesus, the easier and the less time it will take, but it is an active part of our sanctification. It’s not a sacrament, as Rome would have it, but it puts you through a lot that sends you back to Jesus again and again, or will send you back together to Jesus, and that brings the love and the romance.
That kind of reminds me of something, and I think I’ve mentioned this exact quote before. There’s a female comedian who talks about the ways that men and women both start to feel attraction for people that they end up dating or getting married to.
The first one is like, “You will never hear a man be honest. He could be marrying a gargoyle and you will never hear him be like, ‘Oh, Jessica? [noise] Sorry, I was just thinking about her smile.’” You’re never going to hear that. It’s always, “She is the light of my life. She is beautiful. She is my queen, the North Star, the greatest beauty in the world.”
Meanwhile, women will just be blatantly honest. They’re like, “Oh, Tom? Yeah, he’s no Brad Pitt,” and “Tom will be the first guy to be like, ‘I’m not an attractive man.’”
A professor of mine once mentioned that “Women don’t care about physical attractiveness, they care about completely superficial things like whether or not you respect them,” and there’s an element of truth to that.
Brad Pitt? Really? My girls have very different tastes. Brad Pitt is not on their radar at all.
Let’s not go down this road. Let’s wrap up with some recommendations. I actually have a marriage-related recommendation, so I’ll jump in. I recommend lamp shopping with your husband or wife, and there’s a story behind this.
The story is that about four years ago, just before David and I were married, we went lamp shopping and it almost led to the cancellation of our wedding. It was not that the lamp itself was the problem, but the shopping and the communication during the shopping brought a lot of issues to the surface that we needed to deal with.
I don’t want to take too much time to go into all the details, but we went to counseling and we still got married and we still have the lamp that was assigned to us to buy. That was our homework from that counseling session. “All right, now you guys have to go buy a lamp,” so we did and now we have that lamp and it’s not the most attractive lamp in the world, it’s from IKEA and cost about $30, but we are never getting rid of that lamp because it is the lamp that almost destroyed our marriage, and yet we overcame by the grace of God.
Or it was the lamp that salvaged your real marriage and got you past superficialities.
That’s an alternative take. We went lamp shopping again this week, just a couple days ago, and had 10,000 times better of a time after four years of practice of communicating and sharing tastes and dreams, as well as practical concerns.
That had been an issue as I’m like, “Look, it’s pretty!” and David would list all the pros and cons, because to him this is a communication thing where we both lay all our cards on the table and agree on a lamp. And I would just feel like I’m being squashed because everything I think is pretty has a list of cons.
Through the last four years we have really come to enjoy designing things together and sharing tastes, being very clear when we’re talking about ideals vs realities, and it’s a good time. We have a wonderful lamp that I like very much as a result of this weekend – two wonderful lamps, actually. We doubled down. So I recommend purchasing lamps with your husband or wife.
Yes. I think I’m going to recommend a film, or it’s more like anti-recommending a film.
Here’s the thing. I recommend watching it, with many caveats. I don’t think any of the reasons for watching it are, “You will necessarily enjoy this.”
There’s a movie that just came out, and I was actually very excited about it before I went into the theaters and actually watched it. It is a film by David Lowery, an adaptation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
I can give you more thoughts when we’re done recording, but the short and skinny of it is it’s a very art house/art film take on what should be a straightforward mythical retelling, and it makes very little sense. There’s very little context. There’s little set-up or explanation or “Here’s what’s going on,” or “Here’s who these people are and why you should care about them.” It’s just like, “Here. Here’s a story and some cool shots.”
The best I can say for it is it has really fantastic cinematography. It is a gorgeous film about 80% of the time, which is a higher percentage than I can say for a lot of movies that are intended to be that way. But it’s very, very odd. I feel like you need to be a classicist in some sense to adapt something that is classic.
Apparently. My main complaint with it is it also does the thing in the conclusion that I hate, hate, hate about modernists’ and post-modernists’ storytelling.
Don’t worry. Maybe this is a spoiler and you’ll think I’ve ruined the film for you, but nonetheless…
But our listeners may not, and we need to allow them the pleasure of reading it.
I will describe the kind of storytelling foible that I dislike in as vague of terms as possible, which is that you will see the narrative arc going like this, and right before the climax it will just be like, “And the story’s done. You’re done. You’ve got to figure out what it means. Good luck.”
I read a novel like that last year that I hated, and I sold it. It’s just not my favorite.
What I heard about the movie from the one other person that I’ve heard talk about it was that it was a perfect articulation of where we are in a post-Christian world. I don’t understand how you can tell that story and do that, because the entire story is predicated on this test of chastity and the value of chastity. I don’t know how it does these two things.
Pick up some images and make your own story out of them. That’s pretty post-modern.
That’s very post-Christian. I don’t know if they wanted it to say that, but it does, I guess. That’s a good description. So that’s my anti-recommendation.
As far as my positive recommendation, Joss Whedon did a similar thing, but it was actually good, and that was he did a film version that was kind of a modern setting, sort of, of Much Ado About Nothing, and it’s quite good.
It’s very good. We just watched it this past weekend and it’s just like, “Yeah, you did good, Joss. You got all these fun actors together and you filmed a version of Much Ado About Nothing over a long weekend and it’s good.”
So there are three things about this version of Much Ado About Nothing that I think are absolutely stellar. The first is that they kept the Shakespearean language. They didn’t try to improve on Shakespeare, which is a stupid thing to do. Second, again it’s all in a weekend at this one house. I think it’s Joss Whedon’s house, so you can tell someone actually lives here. It’s just a house, man. It’s fantastic and it’s a beautiful house, but it’s not a movie set. It’s very realistic. Imagine someone wealthy hosting a lot of people at his house for the weekend, because that’s exactly what he did.
Thirdly, you will notice in every scene there are an abundance of wine glasses in various states of fullness, and it makes the story make a lot more sense.
I will add a fourth to that list, which is that for some of the large group scenes you can tell that Joss was just like, “Hey, don’t worry. It’s just a regular party. Do whatever you’re going to do, but there’s going to be a film crew here, too.”
No, no it’s not. That’s another one that’s fun. This has all the Whedon staple actors.
Michael Keaton has his own charm that is unique in the world of Shakespeare adaptations, but yes.
All right, well, my recommendation is I recommend pulling weeds. This presupposes that you have a garden or something like that, maybe a yard. Now is the time to pull the weeds, and if you do a little bit every weekend, the weeds get pulled and your yard looks better and it’s ready for planting things. A couple hours out in the hot sun – in California it’s been around 102 or so – but shade and sitting on a towel, it is the philosophy of slow but steady keeps your house from turning into something really gross and scroungy.
My parents came out of the Depression and their attitude toward things was “Make it work, but don’t ever spend much money on it, and put it off if you can.” I think I got the worst of that and interpreted it as the worst as possible for many years, and now I’m learning, “No, let’s pull the weeds now, a little at a time. Let’s do this repair now.”
Not too long ago we spent $1,000 just on plumbing with a dear plumber friend. His daughter had been one of my students. It was that all of these faucets are getting old and one day will break, and there will be no way of fixing them – first, fix them, but first you’re going to have to fix the cutoff valve so you actually can turn the water off in our house. It was a whole bunch of real little things, but it was that stay on top of things, keep things fixed, don’t wait until everything mounts up and it’s going to cost you $10,000 to fix this. Pull the weeds now.
There are applications to marriage, too. One of my wife’s favorite lines is – “It’s the little foxes that spoil the vines.” Go after the little foxes with sniper rifles before they become great big dire wolves and take out your throat.
I was thinking of The Little Prince and his lesson of the baobab trees, where you have to pull them up while they’re small, before they take over your whole planet, and the little fox is a much more friendly and cuddly thing in that situation. So don’t shoot The Little Prince’s friend fox with your sniper rifle.
Okay. Foxes that have been disciplined can live, but little foxes that destroy vines must be taken out by the roots, or something like that.
I don’t think foxes have roots. Maybe that’s just me. I studied one biology textbook, so I’m clearly an expert.
Thank you, guys, so much for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks also to David, our producer and my dearly beloved lawfully-wedded husband and lamp buyer. He has good taste in lamps when I let him express it.
Thanks also to you, our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in and we’re always happy to hear from you. You can email us at [email protected].
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