Gross food (and other reasons I'm glad I'm not an OT prophet)

I'm reading through the prophets right now.  I do love the prophet part of the Bible--always a little eyebrow-raising, not to mention that prophetically I often don't know what's going on, and generally I have no idea if things like "the tower of Syene" are important--and all the extra question marks compel me to do extra homework, which is sort of fun.  Mostly because I'm a nerd and I like to do fun research.  But I was thinking the other day:  I love reading the prophets, but is it because I like to learn from them, or because it's sort of like watching a train wreck?  I know stuff is crazy and I feel undeniably sorry for those prophets, but I just can't seem to look away. So bear with me as I ponder some of the many, many, many reasons why I think being an OT prophet was pretty much the least desirable job.  Ever.

Gross food.  I know I've referenced Ezekiel 4 in my blog in times past, as being wildly misunderstood by my brother and I for way too long, but seriously, regardless of the fuel, or the ingredients of Ezekiel's bread (sorry, but any combination of lentils, millet, barley, etc. sounds gross to me), the fact that he had to eat it for more than a year is enough to make me dislike it out of hand.  There's nothing that could possibly be desirable after more than a year of intake.  Sorry, Ezekiel.

Indecent exposure.  Dear Isaiah had a very strange assignment.  Although the barefoot part sounds reasonable (those would be some serious callouses, though, after three whole years of barefootedness!), the zero clothes is just weird.  Those prophets were really willing to do whatever the Lord asked of them.  Hard core is the word that comes to mind.

Arranged marriage.  Honestly, marriage is already a somewhat tricky business, but for the Lord to ask Hosea to take Gomer to wife to be a picture of Israel?  Yikes.  There is almost nothing happy about poor Hosea's story.

The opposite of marriage.  Ever wonder why there aren't any Biblical fiction books about Daniel like there are about King David and Isaac and Rebekah?  One word.  Eunuch.  I'm sorry, Daniel.

The occasional no-tears policy.  We all know Jeremiah as the weeping prophet, but what about poor Ezekiel, who couldn't even cry when his wife died?  That's just... depressing.

Doom and gloom.  I'm not going to cite anything specific, because we all have read the verses about blood flowing in the streets and pestilence and ripping up women with children.  Suffice it to say, I can't imagine that the prophets slept very well at night.

Time fails me to tell of miry pits, tales of captivity, and disturbing visions.  I'm sure you all agree that happiness abounds in the thought of not being a prophet. 

I'm guessing that's a pretty common rejoicement amongst most people who don't live in the Old Testament.

By the dozen

I won't bore you with my regular introduction of "we have the best family dinners ever," but last week we had a particularly funny episode that I'll recount in part.

So, we were were talking about the old-timey way of hanging people (throwing them up on stakes on a wall, just in case you were curious), and other random things like why my brother and I long misunderstood Ezekiel 4, and eventually we started talking about clocks. This is because we have a heinous clock that chirps, hoots, and makes other bird noises ever hour, on the hour. It's awful. I took the batteries out one time, but my mom actually likes the clock, so she found new batteries and now the clock is as loud as ever. This is fine, as we say, because what makes her happy makes us happy, but during supper we kept hearing it (it ended up being a long supper, so we heard the clock at least twice, and possibly even three times) and it was quite the topic of conversation.

That brought us to the thought that we should manufacture a clock with the twelve disciples on it! By the way, this may seem like a confusing train of thought to you, but we were talking about clocks, and we'd been talking about hanging people, and Judas was a disciple, and he hanged himself... well, somehow this made sense to us.

So anyhow, we had great discussion about how the clock would look. Would it have sounds for each disciple? Like Matthew, being a tax collector, would have clinky money sounds, and John would have some angelic sound, and Peter and the fishermen-type guys would have... fish sounds. Well, we decided that maybe the disciples wouldn't get sounds after all. But then there was the discussion of where we'd put the disciples. Who would get the 12:00 spot, right at the top of the clock? I voted Peter, but there was significant pull for John. Then we questioned if Judas should even get a slot. Maybe we could stick Matthias instead of Judas. My brother, of course, thought that perhaps we could have Judas at the 6:00 slot, and the clock could show the rope hanging him.

My mom wasn't impressed.

After a while we thought maybe we should just skip the disciples (too much drama!) and just do the twelve tribes. Of course, then there's the discussion about which tribe you should leave out (remember, Joseph got two tribes), and then we started all over again.

I Googled "twelve disciples wall clock" later, sure I'd find that somebody had already invented it, and to my surprise, didn't find anything. I looked only casually, but the closest I could find was a Last Supper clock and an old clock in Prague with the twelve on there, but it's an old clock, and not for sale. Also, there's a rock formation in Australia called The Twelve Apostles, and you can get clocks with the rock formation on the face, but that is, in fact, no help at all.

So one day if you wander into a Christian bookstore and see a twelve disciples clock, well, perhaps it was I, who somehow managed to finagle a deal to design clocks. It could happen!

Best left unsaid

Our family dinners tend to be sort of an open form for chaos. I don't mean that in a bad way, and in fact, our family dinners are pretty much the best ever. Sometimes, however, my brother and I get a little too chatty for my parents' tastes.

It's bad enough that we frequently reminisce about the days before we understood Ezekiel 4, question exactly what every colour of scab and hair in Leviticus 13 means, but Monday night at dinner we spent an inordinate amount of time discussing Judges 19.

For those who don't recall the story, it's the charming little tale of the time that the Levite and his concubine spent the night in Gibeah, and due to some terrible treatment from the men of that place, the concubine died. Ahem. Anyhow, the Levite realized that he should stand up for this wrong (or something), and decided to prove a point. So he took the dead concubine, cut her in twelve pieces, and sent her via messenger to the twelve tribes of Israel, hoping to incite righteous anger. Or something. That he did, and by the time all was said and done, thousands of Israelites had given their lives fighting for the cause. This, of course, inspired the whole Rock-of-Rimmon passage, which is a story for another time.

So the discussion my brother and I were so animatedly having was that matter of exactly how the woman would have been divided. For instance, if the arms/hands were divided into three pieces, then you wouldn't have need of the legs/feet to be divided into three pieces. Perhaps the larger the tribe was, the larger the piece was?

Anyhow, my parents didn't seem to have much appreciation for our highly spiritual discussion, and shot it down. But seriously, the quandary is remarkable!

It brings to mind the age-old discussion from Revelation 13 about the heads and horns/crowns. How can seven heads have ten horns/crowns? Which heads get the extra horns/crowns? Is it symmetrical, like the heads on either end and the one in the middle get those extra horns/crowns? It's just so confusing.

But, these are things that don't really make a difference in the long run. There are many, many other things in the Word of God I should be spending my time considering.

Like, you know, whether or not the lions in Solomon's temple were real or not. Always a good one.