                           20020420.00

     When I clicked on the "send" button on the
communication screen yesterday, I thought that I had
concluded my comments on Leviticus 26, that I had written
enough, perhaps even too much.  This morning I realize that
much of what I wrote was wrong, or at least incomplete, and
that there is more, actually much more, to be said.

     Reading the Bible seriously and thinking about it, or
for that matter reading any serious book seriously and
thinking about it, is addictive. It's like playing a piece
of music, once you've started you can't stop, because the
melody has enchanted you and calls you to follow it to its
end, and when you reach the end the melody tells you,
as it keeps ringing in your ears, to start again from the
beginning.

     Reading the Bible seriously and thinking about it, or
for that matter reading any serious book seriously and
thinking about it, is like moving on spiral stairs.  Time
after time you find yourself again at the same horizontal
coordinates, but at a vertical coordinate that is one or
more stories higher or lower than on previous occasions.

     I should be more embarrassed to send this e-mail
message to you than I am, were it not for the circumstance
that, if you have your mind on other things, you don't have
to read it. I don't need to know whether you read it or not,
less so even than I need to know what, if anything, you
think of it. Also, I flatter myself with the thought that
what I write will keep, and will still be there next year or
five years from now, or whenever, if ever, it seems
important to you to consider.

     With respect to the horrible threats of horrible
punishment, including turning me into a cannibal to eat my
son (verse 29) (and I suppose my grandchildren too) if I
don't follow _every_ directive of God's law, threats which
are detailed in Leviticus 26:14-39, it was flighty and
foolish of me to say that God didn't say it, or if he said
it, he didn't mean it.  That would be an easy way out, no
different, really, from choosing to think about only verses
1 though 13, and closing your eyes to verses 14 through 39,
as if they didn't exist.

     Suppose God does threaten to turn me into a cannibal to
eat my son (verse 29) (and I suppose my grandchildren too)
if I don't follow _every_ directive of God's law, and
suppose he means it, for isn't it blasphemous to assume that
God doesn't mean what he says? And suppose I don't follow
every directive of God's law, What then?

     Perhaps it is blasphemous also to think of the God of
Leviticus 26 as someone you know well, almost too well, a
member as it were of your family, a father-figure if ever
there was one; without doubt the most important member of
the family and the most difficult one.  The more important,
the more difficult they are.  God gets angry; God gets very
angry; and when God gets angry, God says some pretty harsh
things, and when he says them he means them; but that
doesn't mean that God can't change his mind.  Samuel
Johnson's observation that consistency is the hobgoblin of
little minds is applicable to God in the biggest way
imaginable.  As a matter of fact, if you read the Bible
carefully, you begin to understand that God is always
changing his mind, is always taking back what he has given,
and then giving back again what he has taken away.

     God changed his mind, when after having placed Adam and
Eve into the Garden of Eden, he expelled them into the cruel
world.  He changed his mind again when having sent them into
the cruel world, he provided them with the abundance
described in Leviticus 26:2-13. God changed his mind when,
having created the world in all its beauty, he then, in a
fit of anger, drowned almost all of it in the Flood. Then
God changed his mind again, when he sent as the "all clear",
the dove with the olive branch. God changed his mind when he
withheld a son from Abraham and Sarah until they were about
a hundred years old, then gave them Isaac, only to change
his mind again, sending Abraham to the Moriah summit to make
of Isaac a sacrifice, and then changed his mind once more,
by sending the ram to be sacrificed instead of the child.
And, if you look at Leviticus 26 again, and think about
Verses 40 to 45, you will see that after the horrible
threats of Verses 14 though 39, God is again changing his
mind, promising to remember his covenants with Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob.

     Now, if you have gotten this far, you should object
that there is a contradiction between on the one hand
insisting that God must be invisible, inward and so holy
that you may not even give him a name; and on the other
hand, suggesting that you should understand his anger and
his love as if he were a member of your family.

     By the standard of anonymity in the burning bush, the
suggestion that God be considered a family member as he
appears as the Lord of the Garden of Eden, seems blasphemous
and idolatrous.

     By the standard of familiarity of the Garden of Eden,
the refusal to accord to God a name is tantamount to the
refusal, as in Adam's case, to listen to God, to give God
the honor and the glory which is God's due, just as if God
were a family member whom you disliked so much that you
pretended he wasn't there and you never spoke to him.  In a
very important sense, the refusal to accord God a name is a
denial of God.

     The contradiction, of course, is imbedded in the
Biblical text itself.  Genesis states explicitly that God
made man in his own image; and as every student of optics
understands, image and object are inherently
interchangeable; so that the Creator who created the
creature in his own image thereby revealed and documented
his own characteristics. And, of course, large sections of
the Bible quite consistently refer to God as to a human-like
person who receives offerings, sacrifices, honor and praise,
and who becomes angry when his instructions are disobeyed.
With Exodus, on the contrary, begins the insistence on the
spirituality of God, a spirituality inconsistent with the
human-like God of Genesis.  Subsequent to Moses' encounter
with the burning bush, the God of the Bible assumes a dual
nature, sometimes person, sometimes spirit, often leaving us
with uncertainty as to the proper interpretation of the
text, an uncertainty the reflection on which knows no end.

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