Ehud and Eglon
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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’re talking about Ehud and Eglon, every junior high boy’s favorite part of the book of Judges. It needs no more introduction than that, in my opinion.
And the children of Israel did evil again in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord strengthened Eglon the king of Moab against Israel, because they had done evil in the sight of the Lord. And he gathered unto him the children of Ammon and Amalek, and went and smote Israel and possessed the city of palm trees.
That’s the ruins or the rebuilding of Jericho, and that’s a key point because the valley that runs down from Jerusalem toward Jericho is the one key egress and access to the Promised Land across Jordan, so they’re holding key territory, key trans-ford rights.
So the children of Israel served Eglon the king of Moab eighteen years. But when the children of Israel cried unto the Lord, the Lord raised them up a deliverer, Ehud the son of Gera, a Benjamite, a man lefthanded, and by him the children of Israel sent a present unto Eglon the king of Moab.
Left-handedness seems to have run in the tribe of Benjamin. We will run into this more times in the former prophets in Judges. We’ll run into a bunch of left-handed Benjamites, and later on, I believe in the time of David, we come across them again, so it was real thing.
Yeah, as far as I know, but it’s a rare thing. If you want to find out in a roleplaying game whether you’re left-handed or right-handed or ambidextrous, you roll a 20-sided die and a 6-sided die. If the 20-sided die is higher you’re right-handed. If the 6-sided die is higher you’re left-handed. And if the numbers come out the same you’re ambidextrous, and those actually do fit percentages pretty well.
No, it’s not like that. Anyhow, there’s actually a meta pun here because when Benjamin was born to Rachel, Jacob called him…
The son of my right hand, except he’s left-handed. But in that world, left-handedness was looked upon as unusual, to the point of being a deformity, so most nations, tribes, cities, and peoples didn’t let their children be left-handed. They beat it out of them. So if you’re left-handed and you’re allowed to get away with it, obviously you’re not very bright, nothing to worry about. But in Israel they understood that this is simply one of God’s gifts, so he’s left-handed and it’s going to be important.
So they sent a present. The word is tribute. They’re sending tribute because Moab is their overlords right now. But this man Ehud, this leader of the tribe, makes himself a dagger in verse 16.
Right-handed people draw from the left, but left-handed people draw from the right. Guards who are not serious about their work will pat you down on your left side, the side you would draw from, and they’ll ignore the other because no one draws from over there. That’s cross-drawing and nobody does that.
And he brought the present unto Eglon king of Moab: and Eglon was a very fat man.
Body-shaming going on here, but it plays into the story. It’s an important detail. God doesn’t throw that in just to mock him, although mockage is happening.
And when he had made an end to offer the present, he sent away the people that bare the present. But he himself turned again from the quarries that were by Gilgal…
Quarries is not very clear. The margin note says ‘graven images.’ It may be that there were idols that they had set up publicly to sort of mark their dominance. Whatever it was, it was something that served as a boundary line or maybe a mental trigger. So Ehud lets his guys go beyond that and he turns around now and goes back to talk to the king a second time. He says –
So again he has some place, some position as an Israelite leader, and of course that’s important to our whole discussion here, because the king doesn’t say, “Who are you? Go away.” He says, “Keep silence. You have a secret errand? A secret mission? Maybe you know something. Maybe you know about some kind of conspiracy against me. I don’t trust all my guys. Hmm. Maybe this is important, and if he won’t tell in front of my advisors, maybe one of them… All right everybody, get out of here. I need to talk to this guy alone.” Notice how absolutely confident Eglon is because he’s not afraid of Ehud.
Right, he’s been through the metal detector and all that, and nothing showed up. He said –
Keep silence. And all that stood by him went out from him. And Ehud came unto him.
And they move up into a summer parlour, the King James said. It’s a patio on the roof that’s walled in with lattices, not glass for windows. So the king is there and Ehud is there.
And the king rises up out of his seat, because when God speaks it is appropriate for those who hear to stand up and show respect by listening, which once upon a time was common in Christian liturgies, but not so much anymore. So the king is rising, which makes this a whole lot easier to do, because if he’s sitting on his throne the target is a little sketchier.
So again the king does not instantly sense a threat here, because what’s he got over there, a parchment? Some piece of information? Some clue? So he’s watching.
…and took the dagger from his right thigh, and thrust it into his belly, and the haft also went in after the blade.
He is so fat that the fat actually acts like suction and pulls this 18” blade all the way in, including the haft. He’s trying to pull it out and he can’t, so there’s some dark comedy going on here.
And the haft also went in after the blade, and the fat closed upon the blade so that he could not draw the dagger out of his belly; and the dirt came out.
He’s cut into his colon and the processed excrement starts pouring out the hole the dagger has created and is going everywhere.
Then Ehud went forth through the porch, and shut the doors of the parlour upon him, and locked them.
So while Eglon is gurgling out his last breaths and falling down into his own excrement, our friend Ehud is locking the doors from the inside and going out through one of the lattice doors or windows and escaping to call an army together.
When he was gone out, his servants came; and when they saw that, behold, the doors of the parlour were locked, they said, Surely he covereth his feet in his summer chamber.
There’s a nice euphemism, “cover your feet.” If you are wearing robes and you need to drop them, sort of like today when a gentleman needs to use the facilities, he needs to kind of drop his pants and the pants cover the feet, that’s what’s going on here.
They can smell the odor and they’re waving their hands in front of their nose saying, “Okay, he’s using the bathroom. Oh boy, it’s terrible,” so they’re not shocked or surprised by the smell. This guy is gross in his eating habits and gross in his elimination, so they’re just waiting…and they’re waiting…and they’re waiting.
Eventually they get embarrassed. “What is he doing in there? It still smells horrible. In fact, it smells worse. Some other smell is kicking in there. We can’t just stand here forever. It’s already been like two or three hours. Okay, someone get a key,” and they get a key.
Therefore they took a key, and opened them, and, behold, their lord was fallen down dead on the earth. And Ehud escaped while they tarried, and passed beyond the quarries and escaped unto Seirath.
And it came to pass, when he was come, that he blew a trumpet in the mountain of Ephraim, and the children of Israel went down with him from the mount, and he before them. And he said unto them, Follow after me, for the Lord hath delivered your enemies the Moabites into your hand. And they went down after him, and took the fords of Jordan toward Moab, and suffered not a man to pass over.
And they slew of Moab at that time about ten thousand men, all lusty, and all men of valour, and there escaped not a man. So Moab was subdued that day under the hand of Israel. And the land had rest fourscore years.
So that’s the story, and I think you’re right. Most junior high boys revel in this story. I suspect there are a lot of females, however, particularly, and some certain types of males, who don’t know that’s in the Bible, which is sad, because it’s not nice. I mean, if you’re going to explain it, you have to explain what they thought their king was doing, why they thought that, what had actually happened to him, why they’re waiting – all of those things go into this, and if you try to leave them out you still have an issue that a lot of people have trouble with.
“Who’s this guy anyway, and why does he get away with assassination and murder?”
“Well, this is another time when God uses bad people to accomplish his purposes. We’ll skip this story because kids don’t need to know this story,” but this is the progression of the book of Judges and this is the second judge that we’ve run into. The first was Othniel, who was a type and figure of Christ undoubtedly, so when we come to this judge we should expect again to find a type and figure of Christ.
Here he has three weapons. He has his apparent disability, the disrespect that people showed him, that he’s despised and rejected, scarred, mutilated. He uses his left hand. How socially awkward is that? So he’s got that, and he’s got his dagger and he has creative imagination. He’s good at lying.
I’m thinking of the Greek phalanx, where all the soldiers lock together their shields in close quarters and form this impenetrable area with their shields. That doesn’t work with a lefty, so this is a real military disadvantage. I mean I don’t know that the Moabites were using phalanxes, but just thinking through it in the ancient world, how much of a disadvantage this would be considered. The great city cannot maintain its unity with aberrations like left-handed people.
I see in our school community that we’re growing more and more from ethnic groups that have not been in the country so long. The grandparents may be the first people who come to America, or sometimes it’s the parents who are first generation, and sometimes the kids weren’t born in America.
Within these communities – and I think you can find the same thing in basically any kind of community, it’s just that this one comes to mind quickly – there are certain things that are not done. You never go for counseling. You never see a psychiatrist. There’s a whole list of things that are considered shameful or unbiblical or out of our culture that you just don’t do. It’s not that there’s a written rule, as such. It’s just, “If we did this, it would be a great shame to the family; therefore, either 1) we’re not doing it, or 2) if we do it we’re not telling anybody.”
That’s kind of what left-handedness was. If at all possible, you broke your kid of it right away. And if somehow it crept out, you covered it up the best you could and you lied about it and didn’t draw attention to it, because it was shameful.
But Israel was different. Israel was open to possibilities – the possibility that God does not make everyone exactly the same. So this bit of culture makes a big difference in terms of what Ehud is able to do here. He’s able to pull off this bluff, this espionage, or I don’t know what the right word would be – sneaking into the enemy’s camp and assassinating their leader, because Israel doesn’t share a cultural taboo that they have. They don’t have left-handed kids.
Yeah, it’s not playing fair one bit. This would be called war. But it’s amazing how much trouble Christians, who have not fought in a war, have with this sometimes. I don’t think anyone who’s actually been a soldier on active duty has any trouble with infiltrating enemy lines, spying, camouflage, or deliberately deceiving the enemy as to where you are and where you’re going. That’s part of warfare.
I think some of these people who don’t know war at all just think, “Well, you go out on the battlefield and you kind of shoot at each other.” This is not 1776.
Yes. We’re actually allowed to hide behind things. America started that tradition.
I started reading Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels recently, and the opening has one of the generals kind of displeased with the fact that he has to listen to a spy for information. I’m kind of wondering if Michael Shaara had any historical basis for that portrayal or if that was his own bias, in creating the character.
It’s not unlikely. In the later Middle Ages on into the Reformation era, battles were fought in open fields between enemy combatants. You were not to go and bother civilians. They were to stay off the field. You were not to go bother them, and you fought it out there, out in the open. Those were the established rules of warfare for Christian civilization.
Yeah. If you’re fighting Christians, you assume that. If you’re fighting someone else, you probably don’t assume that. But among Christian nations we don’t need to kill the common people. We’ll just kill each other, like gentlemen.
Yeah, pretty much. As farcical as that may sound, it did work to a certain extent until – well, with the Hundred Years’ War in France we begin to see that violated. By the time of the American Civil War it’s kind of gone out the window. World War I destroyed what was left of it, when the common citizens became targets and the idea of, “Well, if we kill enough of them, maybe they’ll decide to change their plans.”
In Israel with the Canaanites, no quarter. This was a fight to the death, so you got who you could. Ehud realizes that if he can win a decisive victory, he can get a following. But as in other cases that we’re going to run into in the book of Judges, without the leader making the first decisive strike, no one wants to follow. Think of David and Goliath. If you don’t take out the big man, no one else is willing to invest or risk their lives. So this is what he’s doing.
This is not simply personal anger. “Boy, I hate these guys. Boy, if I just get a chance to kill this king.” He understands what he has to do. He is the war leader and civil judge, the one that God has put in authority, the one that the people recognize as the authority. If he can’t fight the battle, why is anyone else going to want to?
This brings us to another question. Does this mean then that in warfare it’s alright to go targeting national leaders? As I recall, we did that not long ago, but there was a long history of us not doing that. The only reason I ever heard for that was, “Well, if we go after their leaders, if we send assassins, they’ll send assassins after ours.”
“Well, we don’t want to get killed. We’re the brains here. They can kill other people, but if we have a nice gentlemen’s agreement between the leaders that none of us are going out, at least until the very end, then we can have a nice peaceful war and I can go to sleep every night safely, not knowing that ninja assassins are coming through my window.”
[laughing] Lord Farquaad in Shrek. “Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make.”
Exactly. So here’s this guy. Aside from being brave, aside from his faith in God, we’re not told that he’s a great warrior. We’re not told that he does anything else on a military basis. He gives orders. He summons the troops. Apparently he’s the one who has the strategy of taking the fords and giving the orders, but we’re not told that he’s like David’s mighyt men who take out hundreds or thousands of Philistines single-handedly.
He is in a position of responsibility, and he understands that to turn the tide he has to strike first. And yes, by taking out their leader he opens himself up to all kinds of things, but they’re already enslaved. They already know who he is. What’s he got to lose? He has a world to gain for the kingdom of God.
Somewhere in here the word ‘vigilante’ has to come up, if only to dismiss it almost immediately. He was a judge. The is the book of Judges. We’re walking through Judges. He’s part of the pattern. I don’t think he’s ever actually called a judge in context here, but he performs the role of the judge. “The Lord raised them up a deliverer.” Oh, even better, he’s a deliverer! He’s a savior. He’s a type of Christ.
Othniel set the pattern, in that he was anointed with the Holy Spirit. He’s a Messiah type. With most of the other judges it’s either said or implied or hinted at or we deduce from the flow of the story, “This is where the judge comes.” We’re told in the introductory thing, “God raised up a judge and God was with the judge,” so God raised him up, so he is a judge, he is a deliverer. This is legitimate authority.
We’re not told exactly how he got the position. We’re not told that a prophet appeared or the angel of the Lord or a burning bush or a star from heaven or whatever. Most likely he was elected by the tribe of Benjamin for what to them seemed good and sufficient reasons. Maybe his dad had been some kind of high muckety-muck. Maybe he had done something noble at some time in his past, and everyone loved him. Maybe he just showed great wisdom for his age.
We’re not told and it doesn’t matter, but somehow the people recognized him as a judge, and not just the tribe of Benjamin, because although Benjamin is right there where the pathway leads up from Jordan up past Jerusalem – the tribe of Benjamin’s borders began at Jerusalem, so that tribe is right there – but there’s more than that involved.
The Moabites are kind of starting there and going, so the other tribes too that are involved in this, which is not necessarily everybody but there were probably some others, they follow his leadership. They want in on this, once he’s won the decisive battle. Once he’s struck at the head of the enemy and brought him down, then the people are willing to fight the battle and drive the enemy out and reclaim the Promised Land. So is he a vigilante? No.
I don’t think we’ve had this discussion and I don’t know if this is the place for it, but the idea of vigilantism appeals deeply to the American psyche. Today of course in the Marvel universe, the DC universe on film, it’s all over the place. How many of these people actually are licensed by the government?
I’m with you, because anytime somebody says, “Hey, the United Nations said you should just immediately stop them…”
Yeah, as if the United Nations has any authority. We say they do, but we shouldn’t be saying they do, and it’s contrary to our constitution. Anyhow…
DC definitely has Batman, though. My problem with Batman isn’t so much that he’s a vigilante. It’s kind of like I can suspend my disbelief for the moment with regard to that, but he never takes care of the problem. It’s like, “If you would just kill the Joker, this would all be over,” but he’s like, “No, I don’t want to kill people.”
Why not? There’s not a qualitative difference between lethal force and non-lethal force.
One of my favorite Comic-Con things was this quote from Batman. I don’t know if it was from a game or comic or whatever. He goes, “If you kill a killer, the number of killers in the world remains the same.” Then in the comics, one of the Robins goes off and becomes like, “I’m going to murder everyone so they stop being bad guys.” So a bad guy pops up in the background and goes, “But if you kill two murderers…”
It goes much deeper than that. It goes back to our Wild West at the very least, and all the dime novels that celebrated the cowpokes and the marshals and the self-appointed lone rangers who go out there and shoot people dead to bring justice to the West.
Now, TV watered that down a little bit, to the point of saying, “Well, all they do is shoot the guns out of their hands,” because that’s so easy to do in the middle of a firefight. No, it’s not easy to do. Sometimes it can be done, but FBI agents and such get this all the time. “Why do you have to kill them? Why don’t you just shoot the guns out of their hands?”
“We’re trained to aim for center of mass, thank you very much, because that’s the fastest way to end this. If they don’t want to be shot, they should not be shooting people.”
And “whatever it takes to end this” means stop the threat. It doesn’t mean kill them, although that might well happen in the process. The main thing is to stop the threat, and if they’re using their lifeforce to be a threat, well, they need to be stopped.
On the one hand there’s the vigilantism of the American West that says anybody with a gun or a good pair of fists can go out and bonk the bad guys or shoot the bad guys and bring them down and be the hero and get the girl and ride off into the sunset, and that’s good and we all applaud. Law and order? Well, yeah. They’re fighting for law and … sort of. Not any kind of legislative/judicial law, but you know, the law of one’s own heart and what all good men know they ought to do.
I grew up, as I’ve said many times, amidst lots and lots of old westerns on TV, and in pretty much all of them at some point or another, the hero – if it was designed for kids then yes, he shoots the gun out of the guy’s hand. Think Lone Ranger. Think Cisco Kid. The actor who played the Cisco Kid made a point never to shoot anybody. The Lone Ranger, shoot the guns out of their hands, that’s fine. Those were for kids.
For adults, the prime time shows, they normally ended up killing somebody. Of course, they had to. It was the only way to save somebody, but it was a regular thing.
That’s why we have the Disney villain death of somebody falling off a cliff to their death instead of being shot by the good guy, because we don’t want the good guy to shoot people.
We don’t want the good guy to kill anybody. There’s that romanticism that thinks that if we just talk it over with the bad guy, if we just show him love, if indeed we lay down our weapons so that he understands we’re not a threat, then he’ll lay down his, and we can all sit around the fire and sing Kumbaya and have a root beer together or something.
There is no reckoning with human sin and depravity. We don’t understand that some people are so wicked, they enjoy killing people, they feel no remorse, and they will go on doing it until someone stops them. Whereas we are not licensed to go about individually privately doing that, God did give the State the sword, which is an instrument of violence, to protect the innocent.
This is basic biblical doctrine, and yet there are Christians who are very uncomfortable with it and don’t want to talk about that. “But love!” because we’re buying too much into the world’s romanticism. Then on the other hand there are those who say, “Yeah, give me a gun! I’ll go hunt them all down.” We don’t want you, either. This is orderly. God has appointed a way of doing this.
“Well, you know, he’s on the porch, or in the street, or the next street over, or he’s in the neighborhood someplace. I’m just going to go for a drive, and if I encounter him…” No, no, no.
The Bible is pretty specific. There are two case laws, I think, that reflect on the issue of vigilantism or self-defense or raising a weapon in defense of someone. The obvious one is in Exodus 22 where if you’re at home at night and there’s an intruder in your house, you have a right of self-defense up to and including killing him, no questions asked, because no one should be in your house in the middle of the night when it’s dark.
Now, the implication is you don’t know who this is. If he stumbles through the door and says, “Honey, I’m home,” that’s probably a clue that he’s just got the wrong house and he may be drunk, but he’s not a threat. The assumption is you do not know who this is. It’s dark. You could not just flip a switch and have a light on, or pull out a flashlight and shine it in his face, so you do not know who it is. You do not know if he’s armed or not. He’s in your house at night, where he has absolutely no business.
Generally these were one-room houses where husbands, wives, children, and animals all slept together, so he is not just threatening you in your bedroom or office or living room, he’s right there in the bedroom with all of you together, and you don’t know who it is, and he may have a weapon. Under such circumstances you are allowed to use deadly force, and it’s on him.
However, the Bible says if the sun be risen upon, that is light is coming through, you see his face just fine, and you see what he’s holding is a broken beer bottle, at this point you have lots of options – yelling, screaming, tackling him, trying to get everyone out the door, and only as a last line of defense do you have any business trying to kill him, because you know who he is. You can get the posse together and get the judge to find him and do all that. In our generation, dial 911 and give a description to the police.
If he’s just out on your porch or out in your barn, no, the biblical law doesn’t work and in California law it doesn’t work. I once asked the question of a friend of mine, a former student who at the time I believe was a deputy DA and now he’s a Superior Court judge. I said, “This is what the Bible says. How does California law apply?” and he said, “Yeah, that’s pretty much it. Unless he’s right in your house, don’t even think about it. Call the police or just get out of there,” because the Bible does respect life. You don’t just say, “Well, he’s trespassing. I get to kill him, right?” No, you don’t, as a matter of fact.
The other case law that bears on this, and very indirectly but I think it’s a valid call, is the case where a married woman is being raped in the city. It says if it’s in the city and it’s been found that she’s been sexually violated – and again this is the quick overview, and there are a million what-if’s that hang on it – but the point is if she’s in the city and we didn’t hear her, then the assumption is she consented, because no woman wants to be raped.
Now, why would she call out? Because that’s only going to make the guy more evil or more mad, and he presumably has a weapon or she’d be kicking him in places anyhow. So you hear a woman scream “Rape!” in ancient Israel, and what is your job? What’s your responsibility? Your responsibility is to run toward the scream as fast as you can and confront a man who presumably will be armed.
Is that really safe? Well, if we all got swords then yeah, it probably is, because you’re a member of the militia. You’ve been trained in how to use a sword. You have your sword with you. You can take this guy out and you can rescue the woman. In other words, the woman – insofar as it is possible for her – is required to call for help.
You can pick on, “Well, what if she can’t? What if…” Yes, understood, those are all valid what-if’s, but the assumption here is if she could have called out and didn’t, then she’s blameworthy. On the other hand, if she’s out in the countryside we simply assume she was raped and the guy is executed. He doesn’t get to question her or anything. It’s just over for him.
But the possibility of help, that help is a real possibility, that is people who are armed, are expected to come running if you cry rape in the city.
Of course, it would be really nice if the woman were armed with say a great equalizing weapon that would negate any difference in size and strength between her and her attacker, for instance, just hypothetically.
There is a story, and I don’t know if I’ve used it yet. We’ll use it again when we get to Deborah, and put it out there anyway. There was a young woman in Texas. Of course, it was Texas. Her husband had recently died of cancer. He’d been military, I believe, and had left a couple guns around the house. She had a new baby, and some guys came to the door and were kind of harassing her and talking at her. They were probably drunk.
She shoos them off, but she kind of listens at the door and locks the door, and it sounds like they’re not going away. They’re still there. Voices are rising and she’s getting worried. Then she begins to hear pounding on the door. “Let us in! Let us in!”
First she takes the baby and puts the baby in another room where it will be safe, and she gets her shotgun and calls the sheriff and says, “There are a couple thugs at my door. They’ve been pounding at the door. Okay, they’re trying to force the door now. I am alone and I have a baby. If they cross the threshold can I shoot them dead?” and the police responds with, “Well, uh, I can’t really tell you.”
“Well, uh, we can have a guy there real soon. In fact, we’ve dispatched somebody.”
“I can’t tell you you can shoot them, but I can tell you you have to protect that baby.”
And the DA chose not to press charges. We’ll come back to that story when we talk about Jael.
Yeah, it really might have. So yes, the thought that certainly men who serve in the militia will likely be armed, it doesn’t mean that women can’t be armed too. But the whole supposition is she’s about to be raped, and if she had a weapon she probably would not be about to be raped. This is a woman who is not armed. Maybe in the future she’ll be armed.
This is what the Bible gives us in terms of self-defense. Is it right to have a lethal weapon on you? Yes. The right to keep and bear arms is as old as at least the English Bill of Rights 1688-89, right after William and Mary came to the throne.
Interestingly there, it’s phrased as a religious principle. Christian men have the right to keep and bear arms, the idea being to defend themselves against their persecutors. Then it was carried over into the Second Amendment here, without reference to it’s original – “Yeah, Protestants are likely to be killed by….so hmm.”
There’s biblical justification for this, and there’s biblical justification for defending your own household and those who are present with you. There is no justification to go hunting down people on the street, let alone in some other city, because you feel a calling to level things out.
A decade or so ago there were guys who felt they were justified in going and shooting abortionists, “because they’re murderers and the state is not doing its job, so I have not only a right but I have an obligation under God to protect life.” No, you don’t. That’s not your call. That’s not your backyard. Forget your backyard, that’s not your bedroom, and no one here is calling for help.
This is so, and the civil authorities will answer to God for this, but you don’t have the right.
Yeah, and they’re going to answer for this, but we are not summoned to save every life that we might in theory possibly be able to save, because life is not the greatest thing in God’s world. Obedience to God’s law, faith in Christ, fear of God – those are the great things.
Really, the whole issue with vigilantism is what your respective sphere of authority is, your level of authority. As a non-ordained – I’m going to use the word ‘ordained,’ and is that for civil servants as well? Is that what they call it?
I think ordained works here. I don’t know what they call it, but the Bible assumes that they’re ministers of God, deacons of God, so I think ordination is fine, as long as we understand it’s to a different office.
Cool. So if you’re a standard citizen, so to speak, and you’re not ordained to any kind of office, your responsibility is for your family and your home and, to a lesser extent, your city or county or state.
Your church, but it’s not something where you go out of your way to start something.
Presumably you have a job that you’re supposed to be doing instead, for one thing.
Honestly, that is something that I think of every day that I spend looking on Twitter and seeing people have arguments.
I wonder two things, in full honesty. 1) How do you have the time? Most of you are married that I’m seeing interact on here. You have wives. You have jobs. You have children. And you’re doing some random argument on Facebook or Twitter about lapsarian views. You have better things to be doing. And 2) Where do you get the energy? I lose energy just scrolling it.
It all comes down to what do you actually have authority over, as far as God is concerned? You do not have the authority to go out on the streets in a cape and cowl, let’s say, and a grappling hook to swing from building to building. You don’t have the authority from God to do that and beat up random people, or to kill them and stop them from doing things that you don’t have any business finding them doing.
It’s one thing if you are walking in your normal course of duties and you pass an alleyway where someone is getting mugged. That is a categorically different issue.
The Good Samaritan principle. If in his providence God brings you into such a situation where turning away would be consenting with the thief or murderer, then you intervene. But you don’t go down random alleys all night long trying to find such things because you get off on it somehow, or it makes you feel good about yourself because you’re doing something about the problem – self-righteousness.
I see we’re getting toward the end, so there is one other thing I would like to mention, and that has to do with my earlier assertion that this story is something that many people have never heard. They probably never heard it preached from the pulpit, and they almost certainly didn’t hear it in Sunday School, and there’s a couple reasons.
First, it’s not a nice story, so we’re dealing with a little Neoplatonism and prudish neo-Victorianism of, “Ooo, we can’t talk about excrement and bloodshed and all of that, because that somehow will defile the minds and hearts of our little children.” The little children are going to love the Bible all the more for reading this. I’m sorry you don’t understand children, first of all. Secondly, God put it in the Bible so who are you to tear it out or to skip over it?
Our headmaster was looking for a book he could give to dads in the school to encourage them to lead their families in devotions, and he found one that was pretty good. I read through it and was like, “Okay, there’s some good points, and there’s nothing offensive,” until it came to the end. Then there was a list of Bible readings, and there were some that were marked as, “Not age appropriate.”
It may have been more specific, with the idea that you’re talking to your younger kids. “Skip this when reading to younger kids” is what it would say. He said, “Nope, no way we’re back in that. The children need to hear the whole Bible. That’s what God told Israel. Read the word, read the law.”
The law has some messy disgusting things in it, because people are messy and disgusting and it addresses it head-on. What are we going to do – wait until TV teaches our children about homosexuality, about abortion? Or are we going to let God teach them first? So there’s that.
The other thing is the entire hermeneutic and philosophy or theology of scripture that says that the Old Testament – and sometimes, unfortunately, even the New Testament stories – are Bible times, Bible land, Bible places, Bible story kinds of things, which means they kind of float in this etheric “Bible times” time and it doesn’t matter what order you present them in. Don’t expect any relationship, because the point is the point.
“There’s a moral point here. These are like inspired Aesop’s fables or Ben Franklin proverbs.” As long as the kids get the point, which is often something very simple and moralistic like don’t lie, trust God, take down giants…
Which leaves the story out altogether. There’s not a “don’t lie or don’t do this or don’t do that” that arises immediately from the story.
Yeah. What we have here, and I’ve tried to say it maybe not so subtly, is we have an anointed savior, a deliverer who strikes at the head of the enemy forces and brings him down in a disgusting manner to thoroughly humiliate him, so that all of his troops are now ready to follow him into battle and take back the Promised Land.
Yeah, that’s the story of Jesus. That’s what Jesus did for us, and it’s a story that’s echoed throughout the book of Judges and on into Samuel, and reaches perhaps its high point in the work of David, particularly as he begins with Goliath.
This is the preaching of the gospel, and it falls here because it falls here. This is when it actually historically happened. It happened after Moses, after the 40 years of wandering, after the conquest, after Joshua’s dead, after Othniel, but it’s still toward the beginning of the 300 years of the judges, so there’s still the rest of the book that’s following.
As we get to the end of Judges we’ll find out there are two stories at the end that actually do take place earlier, to explain why this was going on. The Levites weren’t doing their job. They weren’t teaching God’s word. They weren’t being faithful. So that’s the background for this.
Why are the people falling into sin again and again? Why do we need special saviors? Because God’s appointed ministers aren’t teaching his word, aren’t being faithful to their wives, aren’t guarding their flocks, and aren’t guarding worship. You think that’s a relevant message for today?
But if you pull it out of that context, you miss it all and you miss one more key step in the coming of Christ. Because what happens if Moab seizes that area of land permanently? That’s Jerusalem. That’s Bethlehem. That’s all that area. What if when it’s time for Jesus to come Moab still holds that, because we never got it back. Oops. It’s part of the story and it’s an important part.
So as we are Bible teachers, Sunday School teachers, and parents teaching our kids at home, we need to tell the stories in order. And the kids when they’re done need to be able to tell us the order of the stories, so that they can see how this is all leading up to Jesus, how in each stage we’re picturing and prophesying and preaching Jesus risen, Jesus conquering.
This is a problem with how we teach reading, as well as the Bible. I was just noticing in one of the reading lessons I was giving to some 5th-graders that they were supposed to identify the purpose of a sample paragraph, and the options were to entertain, to persuade, or to inform. Then there was this fourth category of “to teach a lesson.” And of course, guess what kind of paragraph fell into that category? It was a summary of a Bible story.
And I don’t want to rag on the curriculum, because for one thing it’s very hard to find good Christian curricula, very hard. And it wasn’t that hard to sort of amend it and say, “We don’t really need that category because this is informing us about something that happened.” So it’s easy to re-assign, but it’s something to pay attention to for sure as you’re educating your children or having them educated.
That is a good place to wrap up and have some recommendations. Can I go first?
Great, because we talked a little bit about westerns, so this is a perfect time to bring up my favorite spoof western, which is called The Hallelujah Trail. I don’t know if it’s so much a spoof as an affectionate parody. It’s just delightful. It’s a very long movie, like three hours, and it’s older. It was made in the ‘60s I think, and it’s not quite a musical but you will get the songs stuck in your head.
It’s just a rollicking good time. You’ve got these miners out in Colorado who are running out of whiskey, and of course this is a problem.
Miners – people mining in the mines. Thank you, Bryan. This is an audio production.
So you’ve got a shipment of whiskey coming from the east coast to Colorado. However, the US marshals have heard word that there is a band of Indians coming to intercept the shipment, and we all know how much we don’t want the whiskey to fall into the hands of the hostile Indians. Meanwhile, there’s also marching to Denver a battalion of temperance ladies who do not want the whiskey to arrive in Denver.
I will go next because I have a movie recommendation as well. I forgot what you said you were going to recommend earlier, but in any case my recommendation is for the original starring Jimmy Stewart - Rear Window, which I just watched this past week.
That’s true, I can’t. It is phenomenally good. I will say I watched that one and another Alfred Hitchcock film this week, which I will recommend next week so I’m not going to name it, but I found it very funny how he structures the timing of his movies.
I don’t want to say they drag, because they don’t. They’re very interesting all the way through, but there will just be like this slow burn. It’s almost like watching a fuse go pffff for a mile. It’s just chugging along and it’s building up, and then eventually within the last 10 minutes of the movie it splits into four and you’re like, “Oh, now it’s really intense!” Then it leads to 1,400 barrels of dynamite stuck in a hill somewhere, then everything explodes and it’s done and that’s the movie!
His timing is just like, “Okay, we’re up to the moment, up to the moment, up to the moment, and… concluded! Okay, now we’re done. Go home. You’re fine. You know how it ends now.” I found that very interesting. There’s very little time for denouement.
Even Rear Window, which gave you more time than the other one that I watched, it was like you get a 2-minute scene or maybe a 1-minute scene where…
That makes a lot of sense, now that you mention it. I’ve not seen very much Hitchcock. I’ve seen The Birds, I’ve seen Vertigo, and the one that I enjoyed was Rear Window. I guess technically I’ve seen North by Northwest, but it’s been many years.
I’d seen The Birds before. For years that was the only Hitchcock film I’d seen.
I will tell you someday about my experience with The Birds, but not right now.
I have a story that goes with trying to watch The Birds with a bunch of college kids. It was special.
Anyhow, by the way, remind me someday for my recommendation on westerns, because I hate westerns but there’s one I absolutely love, but it’s not yours so I’ll tell you some other time.
I was asking my wife, as you both know, for some kind of recommendation and she recommended teaching old idioms, figures of speech, expressions that were once common to our parents or grandparents, but today’s generation just looks at you and says, “What?” or more literally, “What does that mean, Mrs. Uttinger.”
There are books, and no doubt websites, that introduce you to old idioms, and being familiar with them will help you communicate with an older generation. It will also help you find your way through a great many older books and things. Do you remember what Kate suggested as one?
I’m guessing that in theaters there used to be cheap seats where people would bring peanuts and throw the shells at people. Am I very far off?
That’s a great guess, but no. There was an old kids’ show on early TV, black and white, called Howdy Doody.
It was a puppet show. “It’s Howdy Doody time.” It was filmed live, so kids who were invited made up the studio audience and they were put off to one side, where no doubt the staff members and parents would keep an eye on them. That was called the peanut gallery because they’re little peanuts. So the peanut gallery has come to mean a collection of people who are sitting and watching, but really we don’t get them involved and they have no right really to say anything because they’re too stupid.
Yeah, they’re not hecklers. It’s like, “No comments from the peanut gallery,” the implication being that whoever is making the comment has the maturity of a child and should not be listened to, nor should he open his mouth right now.
So that’s where that comes from, and no doubt there are many, many others. Maybe we can all think of some old-time idioms and cliches that we have struggled with or that we have made a fool of ourselves with – okay, maybe not.
My Aunt Lou, bless her heart, came from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and we would hang out with her when I was a young teenager and she was in her 80s and 90s at the time. She had all of these amazing idioms when she was a drama teacher back in southern California before she retired.
She would always say things like, “There’s more than one way to kill a cat than kissing it to death.” Something would be like, “Taking coal to Newcastle” or I don’t know, there were a lot of dead cats in her analogies, lots of dead cats. I just had to share those examples. They couldn’t be passed up.
That’s an interesting example. Maybe you can remember some more of her charming idioms.
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