Wednesday Bible Study: Fast forward

I'm going to skip Chapter 25, which is just another paean to God's greatness for destroying Moab. Genocide against the Moabites is a recurring theme in the Tanakh, in fact they get wiped out multiple times yet they always seem to reappear for more. Anyway, Chapter 26 is about how God is great for restoring Judah, and of course trashing its enemies. I have to present this chapter because in the KJV, verse 19 is rendered "Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust," which provides the title for the Clifford Odets play Awake and Sing. Odets wrote plays for the Group Theater in New York, which was the subject of my undergraduate thesis. Anyway, this is still just about Judah.

26 In that day this song will be sung in the land of Judah:

We have a strong city;
    God makes salvation
    its walls and ramparts.
² Open the gates
    that the righteous nation may enter,
    the nation that keeps faith.
³ You will keep in perfect peace
    those whose minds are steadfast,
    because they trust in you.
⁴ Trust in the Lord forever,
    for the Lord, the Lord himself, is the Rock eternal.
⁵ He humbles those who dwell on high,
    he lays the lofty city low;
he levels it to the ground
    and casts it down to the dust.
⁶ Feet trample it down—
    the feet of the oppressed,
    the footsteps of the poor.

⁷ The path of the righteous is level;
    you, the Upright One, make the way of the righteous smooth.
⁸ Yes, Lord, walking in the way of your laws,^[a]
    we wait for you;
your name and renown
    are the desire of our hearts.
⁹ My soul yearns for you in the night;
    in the morning my spirit longs for you.
When your judgments come upon the earth,
    the people of the world learn righteousness.
¹⁰ But when grace is shown to the wicked,
    they do not learn righteousness;
even in a land of uprightness they go on doing evil
    and do not regard the majesty of the Lord.
¹¹ Lord, your hand is lifted high,
    but they do not see it.
Let them see your zeal for your people and be put to shame;
    let the fire reserved for your enemies consume them.

¹² Lord, you establish peace for us;
    all that we have accomplished you have done for us.
¹³ Lord our God, other lords besides you have ruled over us,
    but your name alone do we honor.
¹⁴ They are now dead, they live no more;
    their spirits do not rise.
You punished them and brought them to ruin;
    you wiped out all memory of them.
¹⁵ You have enlarged the nation, Lord;
    you have enlarged the nation.
You have gained glory for yourself;
    you have extended all the borders of the land.

¹⁶ Lord, they came to you in their distress;
    when you disciplined them,
    they could barely whisper a prayer.^[b]
17 As a pregnant woman about to give birth
    writhes and cries out in her pain,
    so were we in your presence, Lord.
¹⁸ We were with child, we writhed in labor,
    but we gave birth to wind.
We have not brought salvation to the earth,
    and the people of the world have not come to life.

¹⁹ But your dead will live, Lord;
    their bodies will rise—
let those who dwell in the dust
    wake up and shout for joy—
your dew is like the dew of the morning;
    the earth will give birth to her dead.

²⁰ Go, my people, enter your rooms
    and shut the doors behind you;
hide yourselves for a little while
    until his wrath has passed by.
²¹ See, the Lord is coming out of his dwelling
    to punish the people of the earth for their sins.
The earth will disclose the blood shed on it;
    the earth will conceal its slain no longer.

Footnotes

1. Isaiah 26:8 Or judgments
2. Isaiah 26:16 The meaning of the Hebrew for this clause is uncertain.

 

Another weird right wing obsession

That would be raw milk.  No, I really don't understand that. Here are the TRUE FACTS.

Pediatrician Perri Klass has pointed out that we have no specific word for the parent of a dead child, comparable to widow or orphan.(2) She speculates that is because it was formerly so commonplace it didn’t need a designation.

Of course people grieved for their dead children, but it wasn’t usually the life-altering tragedy we consider it to be today. It couldn’t have been, or society could not have functioned. Klass provides a list of presidents from Washington to Lincoln, who had children, and every one of them had at least one child die. Even as late as 1900, something like 1/5 to ¼ of children died. Life expectancy at birth in the U.S. in 1900 was about 47 years. Today it's about 79 years. Life expectancy increased at all ages in the 20th Century, but the drastic decline in infant and child mortality made the biggest difference in life expectancy at birth.

Two of the leading causes of death in 1900, gastrointestinal infections and tuberculosis, were major killers of children, and a major underlying cause of these deaths was cow’s milk. The U.S. population originally was predominantly rural, but by 1900 the majority of the population in the northeast lived in cities, and by 1910 the same was true in the west and Midwest. Cow’s milk had to come into cities like New York from farms tens of miles away, at a time when there was no refrigeration. The milk was often contaminated with pathogens that killed the children who drank it. 

Louis Pasteur invented pasteurization in 1865, but even 25 years later milk was not normally pasteurized. Then a German immigrant in New York City, a wealthy merchant named Nathan Strauss, learned about pasteurization. In 1892 he used his own money to establish a pasteurization plant in Manhattan’s East Village, and in 1893 he established “milk depots” in low income neighborhoods to sell pasteurized milk below cost. He also established a second plant to provide pasteurized milk to an orphanage on Randall’s Island, where the mortality rate was something like 15% a year. The death rate immediately dropped substantially.

Strauss’s efforts attracted the attention of scientists and physicians, and incited a campaign to outlaw the sale of unpasteurized milk. This came to the attention of president Theodore Roosevelt, who in 1907 appointed a commission to study the matter. The report came back the following year with the conclusion that pasteurization would save many lives.

As might not surprise you given the reaction to public health mandates more recently, the campaign to mandate pasteurization provoked a furious backlash, including from most milk producers. Why they thought it was good business to kill their customers I cannot say. Many in the general public also opposed the ban on raw milk, claiming that pasteurization negatively affected nutrition and taste. (It doesn’t.) Nevertheless Chicago did ban the sale of raw milk in 1909. New York got around to it after a typhoid epidemic in 1913. Nearly all major cities followed suit in the next few years, and the infant and child mortality rate plummeted.

So, Republicans want to murder your children. This is objectively true.

Sunday Sermonette: The apocalypse of Isaiah

So yeah, he prophecies massive destruction and essentially, the collapse of civilization. It hasn't happened yet but a whole lot of people are praying for it. Although this is nothing but the raving of a lunatic, it unfortunately planted a seed that led straight to Revelation and now to Evangelical Christianity. We really need to get over this, especially since our civilization really does face very difficult challenges that we need to confront, not embrace.

24 See, the Lord is going to lay waste the earth
    and devastate it;
he will ruin its face
    and scatter its inhabitants—
² it will be the same
    for priest as for people,
    for the master as for his servant,
    for the mistress as for her servant,
    for seller as for buyer,
    for borrower as for lender,
    for debtor as for creditor.
³ The earth will be completely laid waste
    and totally plundered.
The Lord has spoken this word.

⁴ The earth dries up and withers,
    the world languishes and withers,
    the heavens languish with the earth.
⁵ The earth is defiled by its people;
    they have disobeyed the laws,
violated the statutes
    and broken the everlasting covenant.
⁶ Therefore a curse consumes the earth;
    its people must bear their guilt.
Therefore earth’s inhabitants are burned up,
    and very few are left.
⁷ The new wine dries up and the vine withers;
    all the merrymakers groan.
⁸ The joyful timbrels are stilled,
    the noise of the revelers has stopped,
    the joyful harp is silent.
⁹ No longer do they drink wine with a song;
    the beer is bitter to its drinkers.
¹⁰ The ruined city lies desolate;
    the entrance to every house is barred.
¹¹ In the streets they cry out for wine;
    all joy turns to gloom,
    all joyful sounds are banished from the earth.
¹² The city is left in ruins,
    its gate is battered to pieces.
¹³ So will it be on the earth
    and among the nations,
as when an olive tree is beaten,
    or as when gleanings are left after the grape harvest.

¹⁴ They raise their voices, they shout for joy;
    from the west they acclaim the Lord’s majesty.
¹⁵ Therefore in the east give glory to the Lord;
    exalt the name of the Lord, the God of Israel,
    in the islands of the sea.
¹⁶ From the ends of the earth we hear singing:
    “Glory to the Righteous One.”

But I said, “I waste away, I waste away!
    Woe to me!
The treacherous betray!
    With treachery the treacherous betray!”
¹⁷ Terror and pit and snare await you,
    people of the earth.
¹⁸ Whoever flees at the sound of terror
    will fall into a pit;
whoever climbs out of the pit
    will be caught in a snare.

The floodgates of the heavens are opened,
    the foundations of the earth shake.
¹⁹ The earth is broken up,
    the earth is split asunder,
    the earth is violently shaken.
²⁰ The earth reels like a drunkard,
    it sways like a hut in the wind;
so heavy upon it is the guilt of its rebellion
    that it falls—never to rise again.

²¹ In that day the Lord will punish
    the powers in the heavens above
    and the kings on the earth below.
²² They will be herded together
    like prisoners bound in a dungeon;
they will be shut up in prison
    and be punished^[a] after many days.
²³ The moon will be dismayed,
    the sun ashamed;
for the Lord Almighty will reign
    on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem,
    and before its elders—with great glory.

Footnotes

1. Isaiah 24:22 Or released