Wednesday Bible Study: Cut and paste

 Isaiah 37 is a copy of 2 Kings 19. That's all it is, it's just lifted.  Check it out for yourself. Presumably someone inserted it here to put Isaiah and his prophecies in context. Is this historically accurate? There's no way to know about any of the details, but it is true that Sennacharib besieged Judah in 701 BC. The outright defeat, due to a plague, described in Kings and reposted here, is probably a misrepresentation, however, as Hezekiah ended up paying tribute to Assyria and other contemporary accounts do not describe such a defeat.

Be that as it may, the point for us is that the book of Isaiah is about current events in and around 700 BC, and its prophecies concern the immediate future. It is not concerned with the coming of a Messiah hundreds of years later. The gospels were not written until a hundred years or so after the purported ministry of Jesus, and they are not eyewitness accounts. There were various versions and they disagreed on many points. The early Christian leaders in subsequent times faced the problem of deciding which accounts they would certify as authentic, and the more difficult problem of sorting out the relationship between what they labeled the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible, which they relabeled as the Old Testament. 

 

Various commentators around the Middle East -- in Jerusalem, Antioch, and the Nestorian monastery in what is now Iraq, took on the work of trying to stitch together the Old and New Testaments. They scoured the Hebrew Bible for anything that could plausibly be related to their new faith, and among their strategies was deforming the prophecies of Isaiah into something they could reinterpret as having to do with their newly invented Messiah. It really doesn't work.

37 When King Hezekiah heard this, he tore his clothes and put on sackcloth and went into the temple of the Lord. ² He sent Eliakim the palace administrator, Shebna the secretary, and the leading priests, all wearing sackcloth, to the prophet Isaiah son of Amoz. ³ They told him, “This is what Hezekiah says: This day is a day of distress and rebuke and disgrace, as when children come to the moment of birth and there is no strength to deliver them. ⁴ It may be that the Lord your God will hear the words of the field commander, whom his master, the king of Assyria, has sent to ridicule the living God, and that he will rebuke him for the words the Lord your God has heard. Therefore pray for the remnant that still survives.”

⁵ When King Hezekiah’s officials came to Isaiah, ⁶ Isaiah said to them, “Tell your master, ‘This is what the Lord says: Do not be afraid of what you have heard—those words with which the underlings of the king of Assyria have blasphemed me. ⁷ Listen! When he hears a certain report, I will make him want to return to his own country, and there I will have him cut down with the sword.’”

⁸ When the field commander heard that the king of Assyria had left Lachish, he withdrew and found the king fighting against Libnah.

⁹ Now Sennacherib received a report that Tirhakah, the king of Cush,^[a] was marching out to fight against him. When he heard it, he sent messengers to Hezekiah with this word: ¹⁰ “Say to Hezekiah king of Judah: Do not let the god you depend on deceive you when he says, ‘Jerusalem will not be given into the hands of the king of Assyria.’ ¹¹ Surely you have heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all the countries, destroying them completely. And will you be delivered? ¹² Did the gods of the nations that were destroyed by my predecessors deliver them—the gods of Gozan, Harran, Rezeph and the people of Eden who were in Tel Assar? ¹³ Where is the king of Hamath or the king of Arpad? Where are the kings of Lair, Sepharvaim, Hena and Ivvah?”

Hezekiah’s Prayer

¹⁴ Hezekiah received the letter from the messengers and read it. Then he went up to the temple of the Lord and spread it out before the Lord. ¹⁵ And Hezekiah prayed to the Lord: ¹⁶ “Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, enthroned between the cherubim, you alone are God over all the kingdoms of the earth. You have made heaven and earth. ¹⁷ Give ear, Lord, and hear; open your eyes, Lord, and see; listen to all the words Sennacherib has sent to ridicule the living God.

¹⁸ “It is true, Lord, that the Assyrian kings have laid waste all these peoples and their lands. ¹⁹ They have thrown their gods into the fire and destroyed them, for they were not gods but only wood and stone, fashioned by human hands. ²⁰ Now, Lord our God, deliver us from his hand, so that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you, Lord, are the only God.^[b]”

Sennacherib’s Fall

²¹ Then Isaiah son of Amoz sent a message to Hezekiah: “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: Because you have prayed to me concerning Sennacherib king of Assyria, ²² this is the word the Lord has spoken against him:

“Virgin Daughter Zion
    despises and mocks you.
Daughter Jerusalem
    tosses her head as you flee.
²³ Who is it you have ridiculed and blasphemed?
    Against whom have you raised your voice
and lifted your eyes in pride?
    Against the Holy One of Israel!
²⁴ By your messengers
    you have ridiculed the Lord.
And you have said,
    ‘With my many chariots
I have ascended the heights of the mountains,
    the utmost heights of Lebanon.
I have cut down its tallest cedars,
    the choicest of its junipers.
I have reached its remotest heights,
    the finest of its forests.
²⁵ I have dug wells in foreign lands^[c]
    and drunk the water there.
With the soles of my feet
    I have dried up all the streams of Egypt.’

²⁶ “Have you not heard?
    Long ago I ordained it.
In days of old I planned it;
    now I have brought it to pass,
that you have turned fortified cities
    into piles of stone.
²⁷ Their people, drained of power,
    are dismayed and put to shame.
They are like plants in the field,
    like tender green shoots,
like grass sprouting on the roof,
    scorched^[d] before it grows up.

²⁸ “But I know where you are
    and when you come and go
    and how you rage against me.
²⁹ Because you rage against me
    and because your insolence has reached my ears,
I will put my hook in your nose
    and my bit in your mouth,
and I will make you return
    by the way you came.

³⁰ “This will be the sign for you, Hezekiah:

“This year you will eat what grows by itself,
    and the second year what springs from that.
But in the third year sow and reap,
    plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
³¹ Once more a remnant of the kingdom of Judah
    will take root below and bear fruit above.
³² For out of Jerusalem will come a remnant,
    and out of Mount Zion a band of survivors.
The zeal of the Lord Almighty
    will accomplish this.

³³ “Therefore this is what the Lord says concerning the king of Assyria:

“He will not enter this city
    or shoot an arrow here.
He will not come before it with shield
    or build a siege ramp against it.
³⁴ By the way that he came he will return;
    he will not enter this city,”
declares the Lord.
³⁵ “I will defend this city and save it,
    for my sake and for the sake of David my servant!”

³⁶ Then the angel of the Lord went out and put to death a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the Assyrian camp. When the people got up the next morning—there were all the dead bodies! ³⁷ So Sennacherib king of Assyria broke camp and withdrew. He returned to Nineveh and stayed there.

³⁸ One day, while he was worshiping in the temple of his god Nisrok, his sons Adrammelek and Sharezer killed him with the sword, and they escaped to the land of Ararat. And Esarhaddon his son succeeded him as king.

Footnotes

1. Isaiah 37:9 That is, the upper Nile region
2. Isaiah 37:20 Dead Sea Scrolls (see also 2 Kings 19:19); Masoretic Text you alone are the Lord
3. Isaiah 37:25 Dead Sea Scrolls (see also 2 Kings 19:24); Masoretic Text does not have in foreign lands.
4. Isaiah 37:27 Some manuscripts of the Masoretic Text, Dead Sea Scrolls and some Septuagint manuscripts (see also 2 Kings 19:26); most manuscripts of the Masoretic Text roof / and terraced fields

More on belief, and truth

Even after we set aside moral and ethical beliefs, and personal preferences, the remaining category -- Habermas's "First World," the realm of intersubjective reality, what is "out there" -- contains several different kinds of belief. People still make category errors when arguing about matters even within the First World. Plato and Socrates didn't recognize these distinctions and in fact, it wasn't until Fermat and Pascal came along in the 17th Century that we began to develop the epistemological tools even to think about them.

One way we get into trouble is by failing to recognize that the word "opinion" has multiple meanings. It includes Second and Third World beliefs -- moral and esthetic preferences. Again, we're putting those aside for now, but it can also include people's expectations about First World questions that are in dispute. For example, one physicist may have the opinion that the mysterious dark matter consists of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, whereas another may have the opinion that Einstein's theory of gravity is incomplete in some way. Most physicists may favor the first alternative, some may favor yet others. But there isn't any way to put a number on the likelihood of who is right. We're just groping with the unknown.

Alternatively, there are questions about which physicists are overwhelmingly in agreement. These include, for example, the properties of the electromagnetic field and it's instantiation in radiation and charged particles. These are firmly held beliefs which physicists will tell you are almost certainly true and justified. This is the category where the formulation dating back to Socrates works. On the other hand, physicists have discovered that the way the world works at very small scales is not like that, and for many purposes it isn't like that at large scales. That is where we encounter Fermat, Pascal, and their successors including Gauss and Bayes, the realm of probability.

The theory of probability quantifies what we don't know. It allows us to hold very definite beliefs about what is likely to be true, or to happen, but these are beliefs that include a substantial component of not knowing. And here the concepts of truth and justification get murky indeed. That's where we'll go next time.

 

 

Sunday Sermonette: Something a little different

I'm going to skip chapters 34 and 35 because they're just one more round of prophesying the downfall of Judah (and massive destruction elsewhere) followed by a restoration. However, many scholars believe that these two chapters are a later addition by someone else, copying Isaiah's style. 

 

Chapter 36 suddenly switches to past tense and tells a story which is probably more or less historically accurate. Scholars aren't sure if this is by the same author as the preceding chapters, even though it's completely different in style and content. I expect it was appended by someone else, but scholars generally don't ascribe authorship to a later period until Chapter 40, which is thought to have been written during the Babylonian exile. This was at least more or less contemporaneous with the prophet Isaiah. Note that even in 700 B.C.E., Aramaic is the vernacular -- the people no longer speak Hebrew, although as far as we know this was originally written in Hebrew. Sennacherib's field commander insists on speaking Hebrew because he wishes to communicate only with the king's servants, not the common people.

36 In the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah’s reign, Sennacherib king of Assyria attacked all the fortified cities of Judah and captured them. ² Then the king of Assyria sent his field commander with a large army from Lachish to King Hezekiah at Jerusalem. When the commander stopped at the aqueduct of the Upper Pool, on the road to the Launderer’s Field, ³ Eliakim son of Hilkiah the palace administrator, Shebna the secretary, and Joah son of Asaph the recorder went out to him.

⁴ The field commander said to them, “Tell Hezekiah:

“‘This is what the great king, the king of Assyria, says: On what are you basing this confidence of yours? ⁵ You say you have counsel and might for war—but you speak only empty words. On whom are you depending, that you rebel against me? ⁶ Look, I know you are depending on Egypt, that splintered reed of a staff, which pierces the hand of anyone who leans on it! Such is Pharaoh king of Egypt to all who depend on him. ⁷ But if you say to me, “We are depending on the Lord our God”—isn’t he the one whose high places and altars Hezekiah removed, saying to Judah and Jerusalem, “You must worship before this altar”?

⁸ “‘Come now, make a bargain with my master, the king of Assyria: I will give you two thousand horses—if you can put riders on them! ⁹ How then can you repulse one officer of the least of my master’s officials, even though you are depending on Egypt for chariots and horsemen^[a]? ¹⁰ Furthermore, have I come to attack and destroy this land without the Lord? The Lord himself told me to march against this country and destroy it.’”

¹¹ Then Eliakim, Shebna and Joah said to the field commander, “Please speak to your servants in Aramaic, since we understand it. Don’t speak to us in Hebrew in the hearing of the people on the wall.”

¹² But the commander replied, “Was it only to your master and you that my master sent me to say these things, and not to the people sitting on the wall—who, like you, will have to eat their own excrement and drink their own urine?”

¹³ Then the commander stood and called out in Hebrew, “Hear the words of the great king, the king of Assyria! ¹⁴ This is what the king says: Do not let Hezekiah deceive you. He cannot deliver you! ¹⁵ Do not let Hezekiah persuade you to trust in the Lord when he says, ‘The Lord will surely deliver us; this city will not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria.’

¹⁶ “Do not listen to Hezekiah. This is what the king of Assyria says: Make peace with me and come out to me. Then each of you will eat fruit from your own vine and fig tree and drink water from your own cistern, ¹⁷ until I come and take you to a land like your own—a land of grain and new wine, a land of bread and vineyards.

¹⁸ “Do not let Hezekiah mislead you when he says, ‘The Lord will deliver us.’ Have the gods of any nations ever delivered their lands from the hand of the king of Assyria? ¹⁹ Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim? Have they rescued Samaria from my hand? ²⁰ Who of all the gods of these countries have been able to save their lands from me? How then can the Lord deliver Jerusalem from my hand?”

²¹ But the people remained silent and said nothing in reply, because the king had commanded, “Do not answer him.”

²² Then Eliakim son of Hilkiah the palace administrator, Shebna the secretary and Joah son of Asaph the recorder went to Hezekiah, with their clothes torn, and told him what the field commander had said.

Footnotes

1. Isaiah 36:9 Or charioteers

The African plains ape continued: Belief

Plato and Socrates didn't really unpack the concept of belief. Either you believe it or you don't. That's understandable, since they were just starting to think about what we now call epistemology so they used chunky concepts. In pagan Rome and later Christian Europe people didn't think about it much at all, or if they did it wasn't written down. For Christians, belief was simply not questioned, and people who did question it got tortured to death. Galileo managed to escape that fate, but they did shut him up.

People who have studied philosophy in any depth will no doubt want to take issue with what I am about to say as an oversimplification, but I can't help it, this is just a blog post. In the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment era, philosophers were so gobsmacked by the discoveries of science that they came to argue -- starting with Comte and leading to the Vienna circle and Wittgenstein -- that only statements that are subject to empirical verification are meaningful, ultimately going so far as to say that the meaning of a sentence is equivalent to the means by which it can be verified, and any statements that cannot be verified are nonsensical. This was called positivism.

Wittgenstein eventually recognized the absurdity of this position. It is mistaken in at least three ways. The first is that many speech acts, in fact most of them, are not even trying to be verifiable assertions.  Positivism would render most of what Socrates is purported to have said nonsensical, because he mostly asked questions. But even leaving that aside, if we restrict ourselves to assertions, positivism is mistaken in two more or less orthogonal dimensions.

The first is that there are different kinds of assertions, as Jürgen Habermas notably discussed in The Theory of Communicative Action. Many assertions are about ethics and morality -- what is right and wrong, and socially proper. These are certainly meaningful and criticizeable, but they are not subject to verification in the same way as empirical claims. We also make assertions about our personal feelings and preferences. Others may take issue with these, or believe the person is dissembling, but only the speaker knows if she is being truthful. (Promises can be seen as a special case of this sort of assertion, and we will eventually know if they are broken. I might also come to doubt, for example, that she really loves me. But these sorts of complications are not our concern here.) Many arguments are feckless because people make category errors about assertions.

The second is that even for empirically verifiable claims of the sort that are in the domain of science, belief is not binary -- there are degrees of belief, and even different kinds. Here we get into the philosophically fraught realm of probability, which we'll take up next time.

Wednesday Bible Study: More current events

 I'm going to give you two chapters today, since the first one is relatively short. Again, to be perfectly clear, Isaiah is commenting on current events in the 8th Century BCE. He is not making any predictions about events 700 or 2,700 years later. In chapter 31 he is talking about right now, as he writes. He doesn't like King Hezekiah's alliance with Egypt, apparently because the Egyptians don't worship Yahweh. He thinks that Yahweh will destroy the Assyrians without any outside help. Of course, that's not what happened, the Babylonians eventually did it. 

In Chapter 32, he predicts hard times in one year from the time he writes, followed by better times. He doesn't explain what exactly is going to happen, just that it'll be bad and women should be worried. That's it. This has absolutely no relevance to any matter of theological interest to anyone who wasn't living in Judah around 700 BC. That's it.

31 Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help,
    who rely on horses,
who trust in the multitude of their chariots
    and in the great strength of their horsemen,
but do not look to the Holy One of Israel,
    or seek help from the Lord.
² Yet he too is wise and can bring disaster;
    he does not take back his words.
He will rise up against that wicked nation,
    against those who help evildoers.
³ But the Egyptians are mere mortals and not God;
    their horses are flesh and not spirit.
When the Lord stretches out his hand,
    those who help will stumble,
    those who are helped will fall;
    all will perish together.

⁴ This is what the Lord says to me:

“As a lion growls,
    a great lion over its prey—
and though a whole band of shepherds
    is called together against it,
it is not frightened by their shouts
    or disturbed by their clamor—
so the Lord Almighty will come down
    to do battle on Mount Zion and on its heights.
⁵ Like birds hovering overhead,
    the Lord Almighty will shield Jerusalem;
he will shield it and deliver it,
    he will ‘pass over’ it and will rescue it.”

⁶ Return, you Israelites, to the One you have so greatly revolted against. ⁷ For in that day every one of you will reject the idols of silver and gold your sinful hands have made.

⁸ “Assyria will fall by no human sword;
    a sword, not of mortals, will devour them.
They will flee before the sword
    and their young men will be put to forced labor.
⁹ Their stronghold will fall because of terror;
    at the sight of the battle standard their commanders will panic,”
declares the Lord,
    whose fire is in Zion,
    whose furnace is in Jerusalem.

 

32 See, a king will reign in righteousness
    and rulers will rule with justice.
² Each one will be like a shelter from the wind
    and a refuge from the storm,
like streams of water in the desert
    and the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land.

³ Then the eyes of those who see will no longer be closed,
    and the ears of those who hear will listen.
⁴ The fearful heart will know and understand,
    and the stammering tongue will be fluent and clear.
⁵ No longer will the fool be called noble
    nor the scoundrel be highly respected.
⁶ For fools speak folly,
    their hearts are bent on evil:
They practice ungodliness
    and spread error concerning the Lord;
the hungry they leave empty
    and from the thirsty they withhold water.
⁷ Scoundrels use wicked methods,
    they make up evil schemes
to destroy the poor with lies,
    even when the plea of the needy is just.
⁸ But the noble make noble plans,
    and by noble deeds they stand.

The Women of Jerusalem

⁹ You women who are so complacent,
    rise up and listen to me;
you daughters who feel secure,
    hear what I have to say!
¹⁰ In little more than a year
    you who feel secure will tremble;
the grape harvest will fail,
    and the harvest of fruit will not come.
¹¹ Tremble, you complacent women;
    shudder, you daughters who feel secure!
Strip off your fine clothes
    and wrap yourselves in rags.
¹² Beat your breasts for the pleasant fields,
    for the fruitful vines
¹³ and for the land of my people,
    a land overgrown with thorns and briers—
yes, mourn for all houses of merriment
    and for this city of revelry.
¹⁴ The fortress will be abandoned,
    the noisy city deserted;
citadel and watchtower will become a wasteland forever,
    the delight of donkeys, a pasture for flocks,
¹⁵ till the Spirit is poured on us from on high,
    and the desert becomes a fertile field,
    and the fertile field seems like a forest.
¹⁶ The Lord’s justice will dwell in the desert,
    his righteousness live in the fertile field.
¹⁷ The fruit of that righteousness will be peace;
    its effect will be quietness and confidence forever.
¹⁸ My people will live in peaceful dwelling places,
    in secure homes,
    in undisturbed places of rest.
¹⁹ Though hail flattens the forest
    and the city is leveled completely,
²⁰ how blessed you will be,
    sowing your seed by every stream,
    and letting your cattle and donkeys range free.

 

The plains ape's life gets more complicated

The first writing we have discovered was actually an inventory record for barley, made in Sumeria (today Iraq) around 3,100 BC. It's an inscription on a clay tablet. We don't know when people started writing about more interesting subjects. Since it was quite laborious to inscribe clay tablets, there couldn't have been any best sellers, and presumably personal communications weren't ordinarily preserved. (Clay tablets could be dissolved in water, then reconstituted for reuse.) Papyrus, a material with properties similar to paper, was invented in Egypt, maybe two or three centuries later, and it allowed for lengthier documents to be made more easily. 

 

Still, they had to be copied out by hand so presumably only highly valued documents were considered valuable enough to be recopied many times and preserved. Since papyrus is perishable, anything less valuable would likely be lost, although some stores of less prestigious papyrus were preserved by accident and are now available to scholars. Most survivors were documents of religious importance. Note that we don't have any early copies of the Hebrew Bible, for example, but rather material that was copied and recopied through the millennia. In fact the only copies we have from BCE are a translation into Koine Greek. The sources of the definitive Hebrew text, the Masoretic text which was compiled in the diaspora in the first millennium CE, are lost.

Anyway, as society and technology grew more complex, and knowledge of the world extended over vastly greater distances and now, thanks to writing, over time as well, the status of knowledge itself became more problematic. How are we to know what is really true, when priests and rulers are making competing claims, rumors come from distant lands, and historical documents don't always agree? And, now that there was a class with leisure to study nature and the stars, what had once seemed obvious or nobody thought to ask became mysterious, and the immediate evidence of our senses often turned out to be misleading.

Presumably people thought and argued about the nature of knowledge, how we can know what is true, and what truth even consists of before any written records of such discourse have survived, but the earliest example we have was written by the Athenian Plato around 369 B.C. It is called the Dialogue of Theaetetus because it purports to be the record of a discussion between a young student of that name and the late Socrates, which would have happened many years before because Socrates was long dead. (Theaetetus went on to become a mathematician who proved that there are five and only five regular polyhedra, although in the dialogue he appears rather dim witted.) 

 

It was necessary to think about this because the Greeks, and especially the Athenians, were making all sorts of discoveries and inventions, some of a purely abstract nature such as the geometry in which Theaetetus participated, some much more concrete. In fact, for one impressive example, just a hundred or so years later, Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the earth quite accurately. But how could we know he was right?*

 

In the Dialogue Socrates considered, although he ultimately was not convinced by it, a doctrine which came to be known as Justified True Belief, and which became the core framework for epistemology -- the philosophy of knowledge -- ever since. Since we have a noun modified by two adjectives, we need to work backwards to unpack this construction. First we need to define belief; then we have an entity called a true belief, so we need to define truth; and then we need to consider how a true belief may be justified. Socrates never got into any of that very deeply -- after all, as far as we know [sic] nobody had ever thought about this before, so it was enough just to come up with it.  So we'll take up these problems next.

* No, Columbus didn't have the brilliant insight that the earth is round so you could get to Asia by sailing west. Every sailor already knew that the earth was basically spherical, Columbus was just an idiot who thought it was 2/3 its actual size. If he hadn't blundered onto the Caribbean islands, he and his crew would have died of hunger and thirst. Also, he was not Italian, he died thinking he was sailing back and forth to the islands of the South China Sea, and he never set foot in North America or even knew of its existence.

African plains ape, part three: knowledge of knowledge

To recap, the problem we're exploring is that a lot of people fervently believe what just isn't true. This is nothing new, obviously. But many of the currently popular false beliefs engage very directly and specifically with public policy, and who people vote for, and how they behave in civic spaces. This is happening while the nation, and all of humanity, face some very daunting problems and dangers.

 

We don't know what people believed, or how they made sense of their world, prior to the invention of writing. Quite mysteriously, that happened nearly simultaneously, a little more than 5,400 years ago, in four different places -- Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica (what is now Mexico). It happened in the context of settled, agricultural states, so what people believed and how they thought after they started writing doesn't help us understand much about those gatherer-hunter plains apes. The apes apparently started talking sometime between about 250,000 and maybe 100,000 years ago (I definitely favor the earlier date) but we can only surmise what they were talking about from what we know of their circumstances, with some indications from those non-literate, stateless societies that survived in recent times.*

 

Obviously, the most important knowledge the plains apes had was quite directly empirical. Somebody tried eating a plant and it tasted good or bad. If it tasted good and the person ate a good bit of it, maybe it sated their hunger, and maybe it made them sick, or at least they attributed their subsequent sickness to the plant. Either way, they told others and the people told their children and the children told their children. That kind of snake is dangerous, these rocks can be shaped into tools, this is where the lion hunts. Anybody who chose not to believe these things would likely end up dead.

 

We surmise that people had other kinds of beliefs, some of which were in the category of morality -- the right way to behave, who should be granted authority. These had to be shared in order for the band to function, and there needed to be ways of correcting and controlling violators, or eliminating them from the group. They no doubt varied somewhat from one group, place or time to another, but we do know that there are some commonalities among all people. In any case, varying social and moral systems have been functional in various times and places, as long as the people share them. When they don't, obviously, there is trouble, until the conflict comes to some sort of a resolution.

Finally, people no doubt had more abstract beliefs about how the world works. We think they probably ascribed sentience and agency to natural phenomena such as weather and trees and even rocks and mountains, as well as other animals. They may have believed in non-corporeal spirits, or continued existence of the dead. Whatever, all this didn't have much practical importance. They had free time to indulge these beliefs, and whatever it may have taken to propitiate unseen forces didn't cost much. (Actually, if the Hebrews are any indication, the good part of the sacrifice ended up being eaten anyway.) 

So the point is, false beliefs that actually mattered practically got weeded out pretty quickly, at least if they mattered a lot. Plenty of false beliefs could persist through the generations so long as they didn't much matter -- or possibly even if they did matter somewhat but there wasn't a competing better belief available. (That gets a bit complicated.) But when society, and technology, got more complicated, the problem of what to believe and how to decide what is true also got more complicated. The earliest record we have of somebody actually thinking about this systematically is from about 369 B.C., so long after the apes walked out of Africa. We'll get to that next.

*They may not be truly representative of paleolithic people because some or perhaps all of them may be descendants of settled agriculturalists who took to a hunter-gatherer way of life, and many of them had some contact with states -- certainly in Africa.

Sunday Sermonette: More current events

Isaiah 30 is really two distinct "prophecies" -- remember that the chapter division was made by Medieval monks and is not part of the original document. The first is further denunciation of King Hezekiah's alliance with Egypt. Why Isaiah was so strenuously opposed to this he really doesn't say. Remember the context -- Judah is under pressure from the Assyrian empire, so Hezekiah is looking for help. Instead of providing an argument, Isaiah just spews out a lot of imagery, including fantastic beasts. Then he repeats the trope of hard times followed by a restoration.

 

The second part is a prediction of the fall of Assyria. That did actually happen, but not in a good way for Judah, since it was at the hands of Babylon, which then finally completed the conquest. This all happened long after Isaiah was dead, of course. But again, please remember, he isn't talking about an apocalypse that's going to happen in 2,700 years, he's talking about right there, right then. All of this is completely irrelevant to any current events or concerns, religious belief, or practice. It's completely out of context for the present age.

30 “Woe to the obstinate children,”
    declares the Lord,
“to those who carry out plans that are not mine,
    forming an alliance, but not by my Spirit,
    heaping sin upon sin;
² who go down to Egypt
    without consulting me;
who look for help to Pharaoh’s protection,
    to Egypt’s shade for refuge.
³ But Pharaoh’s protection will be to your shame,
    Egypt’s shade will bring you disgrace.
⁴ Though they have officials in Zoan
    and their envoys have arrived in Hanes,
⁵ everyone will be put to shame
    because of a people useless to them,
who bring neither help nor advantage,
    but only shame and disgrace.”

⁶ A prophecy concerning the animals of the Negev:

Through a land of hardship and distress,
    of lions and lionesses,
    of adders and darting snakes,
the envoys carry their riches on donkeys’ backs,
    their treasures on the humps of camels,
to that unprofitable nation,
⁷     to Egypt, whose help is utterly useless.
Therefore I call her
    Rahab the Do-Nothing.

⁸ Go now, write it on a tablet for them,
    inscribe it on a scroll,
that for the days to come
    it may be an everlasting witness.
⁹ For these are rebellious people, deceitful children,
    children unwilling to listen to the Lord’s instruction.
¹⁰ They say to the seers,
    “See no more visions!”
and to the prophets,
    “Give us no more visions of what is right!
Tell us pleasant things,
    prophesy illusions.
¹¹ Leave this way,
    get off this path,
and stop confronting us
    with the Holy One of Israel!”

¹² Therefore this is what the Holy One of Israel says:

“Because you have rejected this message,
    relied on oppression
    and depended on deceit,
¹³ this sin will become for you
    like a high wall, cracked and bulging,
    that collapses suddenly, in an instant.
¹⁴ It will break in pieces like pottery,
    shattered so mercilessly
that among its pieces not a fragment will be found
    for taking coals from a hearth
    or scooping water out of a cistern.”

¹⁵ This is what the Sovereign Lord, the Holy One of Israel, says:

“In repentance and rest is your salvation,
    in quietness and trust is your strength,
    but you would have none of it.
¹⁶ You said, ‘No, we will flee on horses.’
    Therefore you will flee!
You said, ‘We will ride off on swift horses.’
    Therefore your pursuers will be swift!
¹⁷ A thousand will flee
    at the threat of one;
at the threat of five
    you will all flee away,
till you are left
    like a flagstaff on a mountaintop,
    like a banner on a hill.”

¹⁸ Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you;
    therefore he will rise up to show you compassion.
For the Lord is a God of justice.
    Blessed are all who wait for him!

¹⁹ People of Zion, who live in Jerusalem, you will weep no more. How gracious he will be when you cry for help! As soon as he hears, he will answer you. ²⁰ Although the Lord gives you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, your teachers will be hidden no more; with your own eyes you will see them. ²¹ Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, “This is the way; walk in it.” ²² Then you will desecrate your idols overlaid with silver and your images covered with gold; you will throw them away like a menstrual cloth and say to them, “Away with you!”

²³ He will also send you rain for the seed you sow in the ground, and the food that comes from the land will be rich and plentiful. In that day your cattle will graze in broad meadows. ²⁴ The oxen and donkeys that work the soil will eat fodder and mash, spread out with fork and shovel. ²⁵ In the day of great slaughter, when the towers fall, streams of water will flow on every high mountain and every lofty hill. ²⁶ The moon will shine like the sun, and the sunlight will be seven times brighter, like the light of seven full days, when the Lord binds up the bruises of his people and heals the wounds he inflicted.

²⁷ See, the Name of the Lord comes from afar,
    with burning anger and dense clouds of smoke;
his lips are full of wrath,
    and his tongue is a consuming fire.
²⁸ His breath is like a rushing torrent,
    rising up to the neck.
He shakes the nations in the sieve of destruction;
    he places in the jaws of the peoples
    a bit that leads them astray.
²⁹ And you will sing
    as on the night you celebrate a holy festival;
your hearts will rejoice
    as when people playing pipes go up
to the mountain of the Lord,
    to the Rock of Israel.
³⁰ The Lord will cause people to hear his majestic voice
    and will make them see his arm coming down
with raging anger and consuming fire,
    with cloudburst, thunderstorm and hail.
³¹ The voice of the Lord will shatter Assyria;
    with his rod he will strike them down.
³² Every stroke the Lord lays on them
    with his punishing club
will be to the music of timbrels and harps,
    as he fights them in battle with the blows of his arm.
³³ Topheth has long been prepared;
    it has been made ready for the king.
Its fire pit has been made deep and wide,
    with an abundance of fire and wood;
the breath of the Lord,
    like a stream of burning sulfur,
    sets it ablaze.

 

 

 

 

More on the African plains ape

I'm reading Misbelief, by social psychologist Daniel Ariely.* As bizarre conspiracy theories blew up on the Internet during the Covid-19 pandemic, many of them placed Ariely at the center of the global plot by Bill Gates, George Soros and the Illuminati to manufacture a fake pandemic and fake vaccines so they could inject people with microchips, damage their brains by making them wear masks to cut off the oxygen supply to the brain, and impose a dictatorial one world government. Or something like that. 

Ariely sets out to explain how people come to fervently hold such insane beliefs. He relies rather to facilely on those notorious social science experiments in which a small number of U.S. college students are subjected to weirdly structured situations, which then get generalized to all humans under circumstances which may superficially resemble the experimental conditions. Most of the time, attempts to replicate these fail. However, these are not the only grist for his mill and the broad story he tells is credible.

Essentially, the cognitive apparatus we inherit from the Pleistocene savanna doesn't work properly in the modern age. In fact it hasn't worked well ever since the neolithic revolution, as you will know if you've been reading the Bible along with me. Powerful elites and greedy tricksters have been manipulating people's beliefs for as long as we've had he written record to know about it, and people have been fooling themselves just as eagerly. But the problem has just gotten worse as the social world becomes more complicated, technology becomes more powerful, and the human impact on the planet threatens catastrophe. Acquiring the basic scientific knowledge and critical thinking skills to maintain a strong grasp on reality in the present environment is the privilege of a minority.

So, in coming posts, I'll go into a few specifics of how the cerebral cortex can lead us astray, and what, if anything, we can do about it.

 

*Ironically -- I suppose that's the word since he specializes in the study of dishonesty -- Ariely has been accused of scientific fraud. I acknowledge this because a reader may have heard of it. One case appears to be simply an inadvertent inaccurate presentation of a statistical analysis, that didn't really affect the conclusions. (That happened to me once, I just published a correction.) Another was the old story of attaching his name to a paper a senior author, completely unwitting that the post docs had fudged the data. The third is a rather murky story about some insurance data that the company claimed, years after the fact, that it had not in fact provided. In any case none of this should affect our evaluation of the book.

Wednesday Bible Study: More of the same

I would skip Chapter 29, since it's mostly just a restatement of the pervasive theme of the siege of Jerusalem, the kingdom falling on hard times, and then being restored. However, just to demonstrate that people take this stuff to mean whatever they want it to, Joseph Smith claimed that verses 11 through 14 prophesy the Book of Mormon, which he supposedly discovered on gold plates that only he could read, and which then conveniently disappeared.

Two notes: Ariel is a name for Jerusalem, not Shakespeare's sprite or The Little Mermaid. 

Verse 22 is puzzling to Biblical scholars, because there is no event in Genesis that corresponds to the "redemption" of Abraham. However, there is such an event in the Book of Jubilees,  an apocryphal text written around 160 BC, which recounts Genesis with a great deal of added material. It also explains the mystery of where Cain got his wife by saying she was actually his sister. Ditto with Seth. I guess that would have to be the answer. Anyway, all that suggests that this is a later interpolation.

29 Woe to you, Ariel, Ariel,
    the city where David settled!
Add year to year
    and let your cycle of festivals go on.
² Yet I will besiege Ariel;
    she will mourn and lament,
    she will be to me like an altar hearth.^[a]
3 I will encamp against you on all sides;
    I will encircle you with towers
    and set up my siege works against you.
⁴ Brought low, you will speak from the ground;
    your speech will mumble out of the dust.
Your voice will come ghostlike from the earth;
    out of the dust your speech will whisper.

⁵ But your many enemies will become like fine dust,
    the ruthless hordes like blown chaff.
Suddenly, in an instant,
⁶     the Lord Almighty will come
with thunder and earthquake and great noise,
    with windstorm and tempest and flames of a devouring fire.
⁷ Then the hordes of all the nations that fight against Ariel,
    that attack her and her fortress and besiege her,
will be as it is with a dream,
    with a vision in the night—
⁸ as when a hungry person dreams of eating,
    but awakens hungry still;
as when a thirsty person dreams of drinking,
    but awakens faint and thirsty still.
So will it be with the hordes of all the nations
    that fight against Mount Zion.

⁹ Be stunned and amazed,
    blind yourselves and be sightless;
be drunk, but not from wine,
    stagger, but not from beer.
¹⁰ The Lord has brought over you a deep sleep:
    He has sealed your eyes (the prophets);
    he has covered your heads (the seers).

¹¹ For you this whole vision is nothing but words sealed in a scroll. And if you give the scroll to someone who can read, and say, “Read this, please,” they will answer, “I can’t; it is sealed.” ¹² Or if you give the scroll to someone who cannot read, and say, “Read this, please,” they will answer, “I don’t know how to read.”

¹³ The Lord says:

“These people come near to me with their mouth
    and honor me with their lips,
    but their hearts are far from me.
Their worship of me
    is based on merely human rules they have been taught.^[b]
14 Therefore once more I will astound these people
    with wonder upon wonder;
the wisdom of the wise will perish,
    the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish.”
¹⁵ Woe to those who go to great depths
    to hide their plans from the Lord,
who do their work in darkness and think,
    “Who sees us? Who will know?”
¹⁶ You turn things upside down,
    as if the potter were thought to be like the clay!
Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it,
    “You did not make me”?
Can the pot say to the potter,
    “You know nothing”?

¹⁷ In a very short time, will not Lebanon be turned into a fertile field
    and the fertile field seem like a forest?
¹⁸ In that day the deaf will hear the words of the scroll,
    and out of gloom and darkness
    the eyes of the blind will see.
¹⁹ Once more the humble will rejoice in the Lord;
    the needy will rejoice in the Holy One of Israel.
²⁰ The ruthless will vanish,
    the mockers will disappear,
    and all who have an eye for evil will be cut down—
²¹ those who with a word make someone out to be guilty,
    who ensnare the defender in court
    and with false testimony deprive the innocent of justice.

²² Therefore this is what the Lord, who redeemed Abraham, says to the descendants of Jacob:

“No longer will Jacob be ashamed;
    no longer will their faces grow pale.
²³ When they see among them their children,
    the work of my hands,
they will keep my name holy;
    they will acknowledge the holiness of the Holy One of Jacob,
    and will stand in awe of the God of Israel.
²⁴ Those who are wayward in spirit will gain understanding;
    those who complain will accept instruction.”

Footnotes

1. Isaiah 29:2 The Hebrew for altar hearth sounds like the Hebrew for Ariel.
2. Isaiah 29:13 Hebrew; Septuagint They worship me in vain; / their teachings are merely human rules

The African plains ape

That's you. Our fundamental challenge is how we can live in an environment which is radically different from the one in which we evolved. The ape on the savanna lived in small groups of blood relatives that lived by digging up tubers with sticks and maybe killing animals with sharp shards of rock attached to sticks or driving off other scavengers to steal the prey of more formidable beasts. The entire universe consisted of maybe a few hundred people and a 50 mile radius. (There were actually much longer trading networks but people never knew where the goods came from beyond the neighboring group they traded with directly. Perhaps rumors of more distant, and different places came with the exotic minerals and objects, but these were only dimly imagined.)

 

That we lost a good deal, in health, longevity, equality and freedom with the agriculture, the neolithic revolution, and the rise of the state is not in doubt. States, typically controlled by an alliance between a warrior caste and a priestly caste, were oppressive and immiserating to the vast majority of their subjects. But with paleolithic technology, the planet could not possibly have supported a human population of more than a few million. (I think people have tried to calculate a more specific number, but I'm not going to look it up, it isn't important. It's a tiny fraction of the present population, and even the population 10,000 years ago.) 

For people of today, living in a vastly more complex technological and political environment, it is simply impossible for most of them to have a good understanding of how the whole apparatus works. To the extent they are unhappy with their lot, it is not surprising that they see the state as somehow the source of their problems. Where else are they to look? It must be serving the interests of others, whoever those others may be. Their own direct encounters with what they perceive as the state seem mostly annoying or even oppressive. That it provides functions that are essential to their existence is essentially invisible to them. They take the economic and social environment that it produces for granted, and don't give it credit. 

 

I commend to your attention Stephen E. Hanson and Jeffrey S. Kopstein, discussing how the incoming administration has cast the state as the enemy of the people and proposes to replace it with something different. Whatever people may have thought they were voting for, that something different is actually what is called a patrimonial state: "based on the arbitrary rule of leaders who view themselves as traditional 'fathers' of their nations and who run the state as a family business of sorts, staffed by relatives, friends and other members of the ruler’s 'extended household.'"

 

Such a state exists only to enrich that extended household, and it is incompetent to carry out the essential functions of a modern state for the benefit of citizens. In fact, it doesn't even care to. As Hanson and Kopstein put it:

 

Social scientists thought that patrimonialism had been relegated to the dustbin of history. And for good reason: Such regimes couldn’t compete militarily or economically with states led by the expert civil services that helped make modern societies rich, powerful and relatively secure.

But a slew of self-aggrandizing leaders has taken advantage of rising inequality, cultural conflicts and changing demography to grab power. The result has been a steep decline in the government’s ability to provide essential services such as health care, education and safety.

 

We'll have more to say anon.