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The Prophets almost give me the vibe of the Justice League or The Avengers. They’re this league of legendary figures with their own cool unique back story. I remember my church drama teacher telling us in approximately fourth grade that the Bible, specifically the book of acts, was like an action movie, and the prophets kind of fit into that narrative.

Another part of the lecture that I found interesting was talking about people not focusing on the afterlife for a long period of the Abrahamic religious timeline. As a person I tend to think about death a lot, I’m not sure if it’s just me or if it’s more people and society in general, but there’s no way that I wouldn’t think about the afterlife because quite frankly it’s scary to me. The afterlife is really the only part of Christianity that I ever struggle with. The morals and teachings of the Bible seem fairly straight forward and integral to life, but conceptualizing the afterlife is where sometimes my faith starts to waiver.

I believe that chapter 8 of Wil Gafney’s article is a little extremist in interpretation, I also think that the use of critical theory in this article doesn’t add to the dialogue but strays from any actual scholarship. Gafney admits to this, stating that “The passage does not say that David uses force against Bathsheba, as it does in other accounts of rape.” and the overuse of power structures makes me think Gafney extrapolated too much. Once again, I will defend that modern interpretations of scripture are inherently ethnocentric by nature as our cultures/ideologies are wildly different. There was also a segment (paragraph 2, page 212) that elaborates on the potential ethnic makeup of Bathsheba, I believe that this was an attempt to bring tie the final pages of how people of color in Judaic society were more likely to be raped. This sentence

has no source allocated for it, so it is unclear as to whether POC were actually systematically disenfranchised in ancient Judea. Once again, this is over extrapolation to say that our modern understanding of what the systematic oppression of “black and brown women and girls” are is in line with what the Ancient Judaic understanding of POC oppression is. Gafney then uses misogynoir,

in the United States as the final evolution of early Judaic systematic racism which seems a little far fetched to me. I think that perhaps this could even be a little anti-semitic, placing the cause of American racism on the patriarchal structure of Jewish culture.

In class today, we talked about the prophets and we tried to come up with our own definition of a prophet. The class defined a prophet as someone sent by God to preach his word or someone who predicts the future. This seems to be a pretty good definition based on the readings for today’s class. “How Capitalism Echoes the Bible,” said that the prophet Samuel warned people about the consequences of demanding for a king to rule over them, he predicted the future and tried to convince them to not ask God for a king, and yet they did anyway. The kings that Samuel tried to convince them not to get ended up expropriating the men, imposing heavy taxes on harvests, and breaking up the tribal structure of Israel. “Walking with Justice” brought up an idea I had never thought about prophets despite learning about them for so long. I never thought about the dangers of the job of a prophet. Many prophets told of controversial topics that could have made powerful people very angry. For example, Isaiah and Micah stood up to rich people who stole inheritance from the poor and Elijah prophesized that Jezebel and Ahab would die because of their treatment of Naboth. I think in defining a prophet our class should have recognized the danger of their job, as it takes a lot of courage to stand up to the powerful people and follow God’s word despite the worldly repercussions.

In class, we talked about how very often the Bible has many tellings of the same story. Usually, these stories are told in different ways to accentuate a different part of the story than previously told. However, in other books of the Bible, some stories are completely left out. For example, the book of Chronicles completely ignores Saul’s kingship and the story of David and Bathsheba. This is intentional as Chronicles is meant to tell of the rebuilding and the return to the promised land. It purposefully leaves out some of the negative things. Chronicles does a very good job of making characters previously mentioned in other books into role models and giving clear messages. I never thought about different books of the Bible in this way. Whenever I considered missing information within stories of the Bible I always assumed that the author of that book did not think that story was important enough to include. However, it makes much more sense that authors of the Bible would repeat stories told in different ways to give off different messages and portray characters in a different light. It is also important to remember that the Bible was not written to be one long narrative, but it was compiled a collection of separate books, so it makes sense that some stories do not contain the same details that others do.

In class today we talked about the importance of archaeology to providing evidence to the historicity of the Bible. Archaeology provides concrete evidence, isn’t quite as impacted as bias as analysis of the text, and archaeological evidence is from the time period that the text was written whereas the texts are copies. We also analyzed the historicity of Exodus. In order for large numbers of people to cross the Red Sea, it would take at least a week. There are indications that the crossing of the Sea of Reeds may have been a less unusual if no less important event. Archaeological evidence confirms the settling of large numbers of people in previously uninhabited Canaan. This supports the idea of Exodus.

One very interesting thing I learned in class today was the idea that the Bible is not pro-slavery but it was taking something that existed in the time and providing legislation for it. Many people argue that because the Bible talks about slavery so much it must be pro-slavery, however, this is very untrue. The Bible was written during a time when indentured servitude was much more common than slavery as we in America know it from history books. Indentured servitude allowed servants to get out of their work once they repaid their debt by working. These people also weren’t mistreated like they were in American history. Therefore, I think it is very important for Christians and people who believe in the Bible to clearly understand that the Bible does not condone slavery, especially not on the basis of racism. I think very often people are under the impression that the Bible supports slavery and being able to explain that it does not is very important.

The book of Exodus begins the law of the Bible. The story within Exodus isn’t actually that long, but it is full of law. Within the story, God wrote the ten commandments and gave them to Moses, the plagues occurred in Egypt, and God parted the Red Sea through Moses. It was mentioned in the lecture that Pharaoh in the Exodus story is unnamed. This tends to be helpful to oppressed people as it allows them to put the things that are oppressing them into the spot of Pharaoh making the story of the Exodus more relatable. I was also surprised to learn that during early American history people took out the parts that mentioned liberation during. times when people had slaves to discourage slaves from trying to gain liberation. We also worked on making a list of commandments for a hypothetical society. This was a very interesting activity as it allowed me to think about what was important to me for my specific society and to compare them to the Ten Commandments.

There are many prophets in the Bible and sometimes the people see it as a threat or as someone bearing false witness to what God has bestowed on them. I recently watched a show that featured a person playing John the Baptist. Nicodemus, the rabbi, was talking to him while John was imprisoned, and John talked about how Jesus was the son of God, the savior of the world, Nicodemus got angry because all he wanted to know what Jesus’ name was. If he wanted to know this out of curiosity to figure out how to warn others about him or to spread the news about him was unknown, but others before him and around him wanted to know out of pure fear because they thought that Jesus would overthrow them on their thrown. There were those who were scared of the prophecies, others who were interested, and some who thought that the prophet was crazy, and they wanted the prophet dead. A specific example that is widely known is the act of King Herod to kill all of the children under two years of age in his kingdom because he heard about Jesus and was worried that Jesus would dethrone him. This action connects to today how people worry too much about what could happen, and they do not focus on the present

During the discussion today, something that crossed my mind was how people knew who the prophets were. Did they themselves proclaim to be called by God to be a prophet or did the majority of the people recognize the wisdom the prophets carried and they declare them as prophets? This also gets me thinking whether they knew during the time they were living in, before any of the prophets’ predictions came true or weren’t fulfilled, if they were false prophets or if they actually knew what was going to happen in the future because of what they were told by God. It’s easy to see who in the Bible were the prophets because we now see whether their predictions came true or not. How the people who were actually living with the prophets knew they were who they claimed to be, I still do not understand.

When you Google ‘prophet’ the first definition that pops up is “a person regarded as an inspired teacher or proclaimer of the will of God.” With this definition in mind, figures like Ezekiel, Jesus, and Moses fit into the criteria for being a prophet. In class we talked about how the only way to reveal a false prophet was to wait and see if their premonitions/predictions of future events actually came to pass. It seems strange now to entrust so much into the counseling and advice from a fortune teller. The idea of a false prophet reminded me of the sci-fi game, Halo, where the main antagonist is an alien hegemony (called the Covenant) led by false prophets. Long-story short, humanity posed a threat to the entire pyramid scheme of the zealous alien hegemony. The blind faith of the followers of the fictitious Covenant and the faith placed into prophets of the Bible’s writing correlated with each other in my head during class. More of a random post, but Biblical texts and structures influence other media around us.