Watchers and Holy Ones

HNV  Daniel 4:17

  The sentence is by the decree of the watchers, and the demand by the word of the holy ones; to the intent that the living may know that God rules in the kingdom of men, and gives it to whoever he will, and sets up over it the lowest of men.

Why is this ponderable?

Most biblical commentators tell us that the Watchers and Holy Ones are simply angels of the Lord who carry out His intentions. However, the context of this passage suggests that the Watchers, alluded to by Daniel, may be more like Umpires whose mission is to observe people and events on the earth and ensure God's rules are being faithfully observed.  If so, then Satan may have been doing exactly that when he noted that Job's righteousness was suspect. By his authority as a Watcher, he could take away all of Job's creature comforts to test the depth of that righteousness.

The fact that God did not cast Satan right to hell for even suggesting this gives us two clues about Satan's role in Job's case. First, he was allowed, or even assigned, to watch Job and judge potential violations of Trust. Second, he could rule that Job be separated from his material possessions and interrogated by his friends and even his wife. So we can conclude from this that the Watchers are more than ordinary angels. They have the authority to judge violations and rule on them.  But who or what are the Holy Ones?

If the Watchers patrol the earth looking for violations of God's Will, then perhaps the Holy Ones are angels who unpack God's Will in much the same way a compressed software application is unpacked and implemented.   They are empowered to execute any operation which they unanimously  agree is the will of God.  In Job's case it was God's will that Job become a role model for all who trust in God's providence and are grateful for all they are given. For King Nebuchadnezzar, the Holy Ones raised him up to be Supreme Ruler in order to show that all authority and power comes from God  who gives it to whomever he will--even the least worthy.

The Light of the Wicked

NLT Job 21:17

Yet the light of the wicked never seems to be extinguished. 
Do they ever have trouble?  Does God distribute sorrows to them in anger?

 

Why is this ponderable?

The phrase light of the wicked is ponderable because the Book of Job is the only place in the entire Bible that links light, lamp, or candle with the wicked. All other associations link light to God, Jesus, the Word, and the righteous. For example:

Ps 27:1 The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?
Ps 119:105 Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.
Jn 1:4 In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.
Eph 5:8 For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.  
Bible commentators generally focus on the point that the wicked never seem to be diminished by God nor do the Just escape sorrows. Job implies that, by allowing the wicked to flourish and the righteous to suffer, God is not fair.  And that is the issue posed by this passage. Yet the use of light symbology in this context seems contradictory. Are we to infer that the wicked have a light source which does not come from God? If so, what is the source?  Is it as powerful as the light from God?

In the Bible, light is a spiritual metaphor for truth and God’s unchanging nature (James 1:17). It is repeatedly used to assure us that God is wholly good and truthful (1 John 1:5). When we are “in the light,” we are with Him (1 Peter 2:9). He exhorts us to join Him in the light (1 John 1:7), for giving us light was His purpose (John 12:46). Light is the place where love dwells and is comfortable (1 John 2:9-10). God has created light (Genesis 1:3), dwells in the light (1 Timothy 6:16) and puts the light in human hearts so that we can see and know Him and understand truth (2 Corinthians 4:6).

Yet 2 Corinthians 11:14 warns us that, as a fallen angel,  Satan can disguise himself as an angel of light.  Like a TV commercial for unhealthy junk food, Satan bills himself as good, truthful, loving, and powerful--a genuine knockoff of God Himself. If he were to brand himself as a dark, dangerous hungry animal with horns who would want to follow him? 

So this one reference to the Light of the Wicked is a subtle hint to the faithful. It warns God's people: Not all that glitters is from God.

One of the advantages of being a Catholic is that it confers a complete intellectual freedom to examine any and all phenomena with the absolute assurance of their intelligibility.--J J Zavada   

Solomon Loved Many Foreign Women

NIV 1 Kings 11:1

King Solomon, however, loved many foreign women besides Pharaoh's daughter--Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians and Hittites.

www.lambsongs.co.nz

Why is this ponderable?

Near the end of his wise and prosperous reign, King Solomon is reported to have accumulated at least 700 princess-wives and 300 concubines. To us this seems a bit much, especially considering that his lustful desires did not beset him until well past his prime. But we must also understand that the culture of Solomon's Era was not all about sexual pleasure. The goal of any young man was to accumulate sufficient wealth to attract women who could bear him children and expand his tribe. The concept of "one man and one woman" marriage had not yet evolved. Instead one man could have as many women as he could afford to purchase and support. Given Solomon's wealth, he could easily afford and keep 700 wives in whatever style to which they had become accustomed. That does not imply that he was obligated to keep them all sexually satisfied. 

Pharaoh's daughter was the first wife of Solomon. This was an "arranged" marriage  to cement a political alliance with Egypt. Although she is not named in the text, she is the only wife singled out to explain the  political significance of this marriage. We can assume most, if not all, of the other marriages were also rooted in such alliances. Also, certain numbers are used in the Bible to convey conceptual messages--not for accounting purposes. The number "7" conveys completeness of a goal or event. Each zero added to it increases the importance of the goal or event. So 700 wives tells us that Solomon had cemented enough political alliances through marriage to secure his kingdom for many years against any potential invasion.

The 300 concubines offer another example of a conceptual message. The number "3" alludes to God's Divine Will. So the 300 concubines likely included women who could "stand in" for wives that were barren or died during their tenure as a wife of Solomon. Alliance marriages in this era were often underwritten by including concubines in the arrangement. This protected both the monarch offering his daughter in an alliance marriage and the recipient of the alliance wife. The Hebrew word for concubine (pileges) is a non-Semitic loanword used to explain a marital phenomenon that did not evolve in Israel. Babylonian and Assyrian law codes regulate primary and secondary marriages more specifically than do the Old Testament laws. Concubines are mentioned primarily in early Israelite history during patriarchal times, the period of the judges, and the early monarchy.

 God commanded Solomon to avoid emotional entanglements with foreign women who might turn him to idolatry. The prohibition had nothing to do with the the Laws of Moses governing adultery. But Solomon had acquired a taste for novel and exotic amusements. This included the exotic customs of Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Sidonian, and Hittite women. These customs revolved around homage to idols that promised heightened sexual pleasure and fertility. Giving homage to any god other than the  God of Jacob, Isaac, and Abraham was strictly forbidden--especially for the King of Israel.

But Solomon wanted to please these exotic women and succumbed to their wishes instead of being  faithful to the God of Isreal, as his father, David, had been. He paid homage to Ashtoreth, the goddess of the Sidonians, and Molech, the detestable god of the Ammonites. On the Mount of Olives, east of Jerusalem, he even built a pagan shrine for Chemosh, the detestable god of Moab, and another for Molech, the detestable god of the Ammonites. Solomon built such shrines to please his foreign wives who wanted to burn incense and offer sacrifices to their gods.

The use of the numbers 700 and 300 are intended to convey a spiritual message. God had given Solomon every material possession he could possibly want in that era. Many of the things Solomon accumulated would be considered eccentric even by today's standards. However, God trusted Solomon not to become attached to any of those things. But God cannot tolerate disloyalty. Wanting to please the foreign women opened the door to that choice and Solomon failed the loyalty test. The total of 700 and 300 equals 1000. In this test, the higher the score the greater is the offense. The text and the score tell us that Solomon failed big time. He had placed pleasing his foreign women ahead of his loyalty to God.

Members of the Heavenly Court

NLT Job 1:6

One day the members of the heavenly court came to present themselves before the Lord, and the Accuser, Satan, came with them.

Artwork Contributed by Aya & Nicole Velasquez

Why is this ponderable?

Most English Versions translate this  as "the Sons of God" or "the Angels" In this scenario, the members of the heavenly court obtain orders from the Lord in Heaven then depart to the Earth to do  work the Lord has assigned them. When this work is completed they return to Heaven. At the appropriate time they assemble before the Lord to give an account of what they have done, and to receive new orders from Him. At one such rendezvous, Satan happens to come before the Lord with them. Although he is persona non grata to the loyal Angels, Satan nonetheless is allowed to provide his accusations before the Lord.

Although this scenario fits the storyline Job 1:6 alludes to, it does not fit other facts we know about Satan. Was he not cast down to the Earth when he rebelled against God? Does not Michael, God's Number One minister, make it his personal vendetta to keep Satan out of the heavenly court? 

Most English translations render the Hebrew as "the sons of God" or Angels.  Nowhere else in the Old Testament are angels called "the sons of God".  We may call them servants of God's people, but that does not make them sons of the same family, or fellow heirs in Christ. Besides they always stand in the presence of God, and behold His face.There is no particular day assigned for them to hold court with God. They have no rest night nor day, but continually serve God, and glorify him, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty: so if this presentation of themselves to God is supposed to take place in heaven,  it is not possible for Satan to show up there with them. He is banished from heaven, and forbidden to ever stand in the presence of God.

What Satan can do, and does quite well, is to mingle with the people serving God on Earth. We can assume that Job and his family were not the only earthly servants of God at that time. So it is also likely that Job and others like him would on occasion, assemble together to present themselves, their bodies and souls, before the Lord. Together they would pray and praise God, offer sacrifice, and perform every religious exercise prescribed in those times.

 On one of these occasions, Satan infiltrated their group conscience intending to snatch away the prayerful attention of the assembly. He would do this by directing their thoughts to purely material matters, and suggesting to the members assembled together, that they did not deserve God's blessing. The storyline running throughout Job supports this scenario. Even Job's closest friends are convinced that he must have gravely offended God to have suffered such terrible consequences. Job's dear wife is not much help either. She is so weary of his suffering that she would prefer he die and let her move on.

Perhaps we are all members of the Heavenly Court--the Kingdom of Heaven. Some of us must still serve the Court here on earth as we try to discern God's will and watch for His return. Satan watches with us but has a more sinister motive. He wants to accuse us of neglect and dereliction of our duty to serve God. He wants God to reject us just as God rejected him. As firmly as we pray for God's will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, Satan wants his will done in heaven as it is on earth.

One of the advantages of being a Catholic is that it confers a complete intellectual freedom to examine any and all phenomena with the absolute assurance of their intelligibility.--J J Zavada

Tall and Powerful People

TLB  Deuteronomy 1:28

What are we getting into? Our brothers who spied out the land have frightened us with their report. They say that the people of the land are tall and powerful, and that the walls of their cities rise high into the sky! They have even seen giants there—the descendants of the Anakim!’

Why is this ponderable?

 Tall and powerful people--they could be giants--pop up in multiple places in the Old Testament but this is the first reference to giants as the descendants of Anakim. Here's the scoop:  Joshua fought several battles with the Anakim and the Amorites. Eventually, he cut off the Anakim from the mountains: from Hebron, from Debir, from Anab, from all the mountains of Judah, and from all the mountains of Israel; Joshua utterly destroyed them with their cities. None of the Anakim were left in the land of Israel; they remained only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdo (Joshua 11:21–22). These actions set the stage for the famous account of David and Goliath in 1 Samuel.

But the ponderable part about giants is not which tribes they ascended from but how they became giants. The earliest mention of giants in the Bible comes just prior to the Flood. Genesis 6:4 tells us:

There were giants [nephilim] on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.

Books have been written on the meaning of this short passage. Who were these sons of God? Were they themselves giant humans or were they angelic beings who were given the power to procreate life. Perhaps God used them to jump-start the expansion of the human race beyond the immediate family of Adam. Cain and Able were the only sons of Adam mentioned by name in the Bible, but most readers assume that Adam and Eve had many more children--both male and female. Yet we must ponder how the grandchildren of Adam and Eve came about. If there were no other families living at the same time as Adam and Eve, then incest would have been the only route to grandchildren. This seems questionable given the many prohibitions against any form of incest in the Old Testament.

But if the Nephilim were agents of God's expansion of the human race, then their intercourse with the daughters of Adam and Eve would have resulted in grandchildren without the taint of incest. Since the prodigy of the grandchildren would have come from many Nephilim, each new family would have had enough genetic difference to intermarry with other families. Some would have inherited the height and strength of their giant forefathers. Others might have inherited the more normal size and strength of their mothers.  We don't know the answer but as we begin to understand the human genetic code and variants of DNA, we may conclude that God has been the alpha and will be the omega of human creation. It was not some random accident or grand coincidence.

One of the advantages of being a Catholic is that it confers a complete intellectual freedom to examine any and all phenomena with the absolute assurance of their intelligibility.--J J Zavada

God's Secrets

TLB Deuteronomy 29:29 

There are secrets the Lord your God has not revealed to us, but these words that he has revealed are for us and our children to obey forever.

TLB Daniel 2:28

...but there is a God in heaven who reveals secrets, and he has told you in your dream what will happen in the future. 

ESV Luke 8:10

 To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God, but for others they are in parables, so that ‘seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.

Why is this ponderable?
Throughout the Bible God speaks to his People through Moses, the Prophets, Jesus, and the Apostles. Few of us, if any, can say we have heard God speak to us personally. In fact, even the people whom Moses led out of Egypt were fearful of this all-powerful and awesome God. Word on the street was that no one who got close enough to see God would live. So for Moses, Daniel, and Jesus to say that God has secrets begs the question: How did they know this and were they privy to those secrets?

We do know that even Jesus in his human state was not privy to God the Father's timeline for the End of Days. In Mark 13:32 Jesus himself tells his Apostles, “But concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." 

This tells us that God the Father does have secrets.  He will share them in His own good time and then only with those chosen to hear them. The rest of us may learn them when we are gathered around God's heavenly throne with Jesus and the 24 Elders.  

One of the advantages of being a Catholic is that it confers a complete intellectual freedom to examine any and all phenomena with the absolute assurance of their intelligibility.--J J Zavada

The City and The Stars

ESV Genesis 11:4

Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.”

 

Why is this passage ponderable?

In the time after Noah, it was not unusual for people of a given family or tribe to ban together for mutual protection and to forsake their nomadic ways in favor of a homestead. To sustain this lifestyle  required communal shelters.

Tents fabricated from animal skins were ideal for nomads but an ever-growing population soon drove the demand for animal skins well beyond the the available supply. Necessity is the mother of invention. So it is likely that the process for making bricks and binding them into walls for a shelter caught on and spread to many homestead areas including Babel. Just as cities to this day vie for record high skyscrapers that lord it over the shorter buildings, so it is possible that the people of Babel sought to make a name for themselves by building a tower so high that anyone who saw it would be spellbound.

Some scholars believe that Nimrod came with his tribe into the plain of Sannaar and built a city with such a tower. The purpose of this tower was to commemorate deliverance from the waters of the flood one hundred and thirty one years earlier. Under Nimrod's leadership over a  fifty six-year period the tower reached a height comparable to the mountains seen when the waters receded. Perhaps at the very top of the tower Nimrod's tribe wanted to mount a sign bragging about their building feats and commemorating their communal lifestyle. However, this violated God's command to disperse and populate the entire earth. It also unleashed a new round of jealousy and resentment from other tribes. To build a city and a tower was no crime; but to do so to discourage emigration was foolish, wicked, and offensive to God.

It is also possible that after years of fighting each other and neglecting food production tasks, the warring tribes were forced to do what God had commanded in the first place: disperse to the far corners of the earth and populate new areas. With no central core to control the evolution of language, it is likely that each tribe began to add new words and expressions to their basic vocabulary. After hundreds of years the language of one tribe would no longer be recognized by other tribes. That would explain how God enforced his command. He did not confuse their tongues. They brought it upon themselves.

One of the advantages of being a Catholic is that it confers a complete intellectual freedom to examine any and all phenomena with the absolute assurance of their intelligibility.--J J Zavada 

   

 

Why Trees?

ESV Genesis 2: 8-9

8 And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed.

9 And out of the ground the LORD God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

 Why is this passage ponderable?

Is God really talking about trees? Trees that provide shade? Trees that produce edibles?
Many believers do not get past the "every tree" phrase. When combined with pleasant and good for food they get the impression that God is talking about real trees that bear edible fruit or provide a pleasant, shaded view. These trees spring out of the ground just like any tree we find on earth today. So God must be talking about real trees...right?

However, the homiletic value of  trees deflates in the very next sentence, when God talks about  the tree of life and tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It is easy for a homilist to talk about shade and fruit trees as symbols of God's protection and provision. But we have never seen a tree of life variety and we certainly have never heard of, nor seen, this tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So is God being the master arborist or is there a totally different message conveyed by these trees that sprang out of the ground at the time of Creation?

Update 02/15/2021

 As Science and Religion continue their search for Truth, they sometimes converge. This should not come as a surprise to those who believe that Truth is constant and indivisible. Such is the case with Trees mentioned in the Bible. 

In one recent study, 585 young adult Japanese participants reported on their moods after walking for 15 minutes, either in an urban setting or in a forest. The forests and urban centers were in 52 different locations around the country, and about a dozen participants walked in each area. In all cases, the participants walking in a forest experienced less anxiety, hostility, fatigue, confusion, and depressive symptoms, and more vigor, compared to walking in an urban setting. The results were even stronger for people who were more anxious to begin with.

“The psychological benefits of walking through forests are very significant, and forest environments are expected to have very important roles in promoting mental health in the future,” the authors write. Indeed, various other studies suggest that the practice of “forest bathing”—deliberately spending time among the woods—can help us deal with the stresses and strains of urban living.

 Perhaps that is what God wanted to convey to Adam and Eve when He made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The trees would help them sustain themselves. But why were they to avoid two special trees: the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? 

I suspect the fruit of the Tree of Life had the power to free the soul from the body; the fruit from the tree of knowledge had the power to free the body from its soul. It would take many generations before humans were prepared to deal with either possibility. In the meantime, trees would help us cope.