Sunday Sermonette: Private Partz, Major Bummer, and General Payne-Diaz

Well, maybe. In the KJV, the Philistines are afflicted with hemorrhoids. (Actually it uses the archaic word emorods, but that's what it means.) In verse 9, they specifically had emorods in their "secret parts." Hey, it isn't funny -- Preparation H had yet to be invented.

However, later translators have decided that the Hebrew word has a more general meaning, and most translate it as tumors. One hypothesis is that this is intended as a reference to bubonic plague. A footnote in the New International Version, which I'm giving here, says that the Septuagint has rats appearing in the land in verse 5, which would support that except that it's lacking in the Masoretic text which suggests it's an interpolation. The Septuagint also has tumors  in the groin, where the KJV has "secret parts," and swollen lymph nodes in the groin is one symptom of bubonic plague. Make of it what you will.

The whole point of this seems to be, as usual, to prove Yahweh's power and superiority over other Gods. We can deduce that he allowed the ark to be captured so he could carry out  this demonstration.

I assume I don't have to tell you that Dagon is a statue. 

5 After the Philistines had captured the ark of God, they took it from Ebenezer to Ashdod. ² Then they carried the ark into Dagon’s temple and set it beside Dagon. ³ When the people of Ashdod rose early the next day, there was Dagon, fallen on his face on the ground before the ark of the Lord! They took Dagon and put him back in his place. ⁴ But the following morning when they rose, there was Dagon, fallen on his face on the ground before the ark of the Lord! His head and hands had been broken off and were lying on the threshold; only his body remained. ⁵ That is why to this day neither the priests of Dagon nor any others who enter Dagon’s temple at Ashdod step on the threshold.

⁶ The Lord’s hand was heavy on the people of Ashdod and its vicinity; he brought devastation on them and afflicted them with tumors.^{[a] 7} When the people of Ashdod saw what was happening, they said, “The ark of the god of Israel must not stay here with us, because his hand is heavy on us and on Dagon our god.” ⁸ So they called together all the rulers of the Philistines and asked them, “What shall we do with the ark of the god of Israel?”

They answered, “Have the ark of the god of Israel moved to Gath.” So they moved the ark of the God of Israel.

⁹ But after they had moved it, the Lord’s hand was against that city, throwing it into a great panic. He afflicted the people of the city, both young and old, with an outbreak of tumors.^{[b] 10} So they sent the ark of God to Ekron.

As the ark of God was entering Ekron, the people of Ekron cried out, “They have brought the ark of the god of Israel around to us to kill us and our people.” ¹¹ So they called together all the rulers of the Philistines and said, “Send the ark of the god of Israel away; let it go back to its own place, or it^[c] will kill us and our people.” For death had filled the city with panic; God’s hand was very heavy on it. ¹² Those who did not die were afflicted with tumors, and the outcry of the city went up to heaven.

Footnotes

1. 1 Samuel 5:6 Hebrew; Septuagint and Vulgate tumors. And rats appeared in their land, and there was death and destruction throughout the city
2. 1 Samuel 5:9 Or with tumors in the groin (see Septuagint)
3. 1 Samuel 5:11 Or he

Regulatory Capture

As you probably know, the FDA recently approved a monoclonal antibody called aducanumab as a treatment for Alzheimer's disease. To make a long story short, there's no good evidence that it actually has any effect on dementia; the approval is based on its effectiveness in removing abnormal plaques of a protein called beta-amyloid from the brain. These are associated with Alzheimer's disease, but there's no evidence that they cause it, or that removing them improves symptoms. Aducanumab can also have some very troubling adverse effects such as brain swelling. Oh yeah -- Biogen plans to charge $56,000/year for the treatment.

 

Now, if you don't think this makes a whole lot of sense, you'll be even more nonplussed to learn that it's actually quite common. 

 

The FDA approved aducanumab through its “accelerated pathway,” a process created in 1992 to hasten approval of “drugs that treat serious conditions, and that fill an unmet medical need.” Such approvals are based on surrogate endpoints, which the agency defines as “a laboratory measurement, radiographic image, physical sign or other measure that is thought to predict clinical benefit but is not itself a measure of clinical benefit.”

Surrogate endpoints stand in contrast to direct measurements of patient outcomes, often referred to as clinical endpoints, such as living longer, symptom relief, or improved quality of life. The FDA now has multiple expedited pathways. Although accelerated approval was developed for life threatening diseases without treatment options, the agency has steadily expanded its use far beyond the original intent. In 2018, 73% of licensed drugs (43/59) received expedited approval,4 and many of those drugs treat conditions that are either non-life threatening or have existing treatments, such as gout and hypertension.

 

Once drugs are approved on this basis, the manufacturer is supposed to run "confirmatory trials" to show that there  is indeed a clinical benefit. But they often delay doing so for years, and even when the trials fail to show benefit, the FDA often does not revoke the license. There is obviously grave harm to society when doctors continue to prescribe useless medications that generally can have adverse effects; purchasers of insurance and taxpayers continue to pay for them; and they crowd out more effective  treatments. 

 

I don't know enough about the inner workings of the FDA to say why this happens, but "regulatory capture" is a well-known phenomenon. Basically the hypothesis would be that people who work for the FDA in many cases either have had, or hope to get, jobs with drug companies; and/or they have friendly relationships with drug company employees who they work with on applications. In any case, this has to stop. I don't suppose Joe Biden is reading this, however.

 

General Milley should be court martialed . . .

 . . . because he averted the destruction of human civilization.

That makes perfect sense.

Ask a stupid question; A commenter asks "And what reason was offered up by Millie or Pelosi that made them so afraid of Trump that they would collude against a sitting president?" 

Read the above. The destruction of civilization. 

 

Anyway, they didn't, that's a misrepresentation of what happened. Some people are a) unable to read the plain meaning of a simple English sentence and b) incapable of perceiving irony.

I protest

 I've started getting accusations that this blog is somehow antisemitic.

 

That is preposterous. The basis for it seems to be that I am accurately presenting an English translation of the Bible and providing commentary based on Biblical scholarship. No, I do not believe that the Bible is the word of God or divinely inspired. It is a document produced by humans, for various reasons, and I explain what is known about the times it's various portions were written and why. I also discuss the archaeological evidence relevant to the events it describes, which as far as we've come so far are almost entirely fictitious. It will become more historically grounded as we proceed. I assure you, most Jews do not believe that it is literally true -- it is mostly Christians who believe that.

My recent post about Christian eschatology has also attracted criticism because I point out, truthfully, that Christian dispensationalists see the establishment of the modern state of Israel as fulfilling the prophecy of Revelation and they support Israeli expansionism as furtherance of the prophecy. That post is obviously about certain Christians, it is not about Jews or Judaism at all. (Actually, only a very small  number of Jews actually believe the Messianic prophecies, but these are obviously entirely different from Christian dispensationalism anyway.)  That nationalist Israelis have accepted the support of Christian end-times believers is a fact. That those same believers have, as one of their ultimate goals, the extinction of Judaism is also a fact. How it is that pointing out the obvious irony of that situation is supposed to be antisemitic escapes me entirely. 

 

I am utterly appalled by any form of religious or ethnic bigotry, discrimination or violence and in fact have spent my lifetime opposing them. That does not require that I believe in the literal truth of the Old Testament. 

And futhermore: Believe me, if I get to the New Testament before I kick the bucket I will be  equally unsparing. As I would be with the Book of Mormon or the Quran. I am a champion of all humanity, and as such I am an opponent of religion. This is about religion, not people.

Wednesday Bible Study: War, what is it good for?

All of a sudden, for no discernible reason, the Israelites are at war with the Philistines. The writer gives not the slightest indication of the reason for this. It's evidently not about territory, because the Israelites get clobbered but as far as we can tell the Philistines don't take a centimeter of ground, they just go home. They do capture the Ark of the Covenant but that didn't have anything to do with the reason for the war, it wasn't even there in the beginning. Maybe the Israelites started it in order to conquer them? But why?

Anyway, this never happened, at least not as described. The Israelite population at the time wasn't nearly big enough to raise such a large army, or to endure such casualties. Furthermore, they had no central authority, no king, as even this tale affirms. Who would conscript the troops, who would command them? The Philistines at least were real. Archaeologists aren't sure where they came from, but they apparently arrived by sea, perhaps from the Aegean, and we do find them in the right place, on the coast. It's conceivable that  they overran some Israelite villages and that was the seed for this fanciful story. Anyway they become perennial foes in the ensuing narrative. I'll just give you a heads up that the following chapters become weird, bizarre, and very, very strange.

4 ¹ And the word of Samuel came to all Israel.

The Ark of God Captured

Now Israel went out to battle against the Philistines; they encamped at Ebene′zer, and the Philistines encamped at Aphek. ² The Philistines drew up in line against Israel, and when the battle spread, Israel was defeated by the Philistines, who slew about four thousand men on the field of battle. ³ And when the troops came to the camp, the elders of Israel said, “Why has the Lord put us to rout today before the Philistines? Let us bring the ark of the covenant of the Lord here from Shiloh, that he may come among us and save us from the power of our enemies.” ⁴ So the people sent to Shiloh, and brought from there the ark of the covenant of the Lord of hosts, who is enthroned on the cherubim; and the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phin′ehas, were there with the ark of the covenant of God.

⁵ When the ark of the covenant of the Lord came into the camp, all Israel gave a mighty shout, so that the earth resounded. ⁶ And when the Philistines heard the noise of the shouting, they said, “What does this great shouting in the camp of the Hebrews mean?” And when they learned that the ark of the Lord had come to the camp, ⁷ the Philistines were afraid; for they said, “A god has come into the camp.” And they said, “Woe to us! For nothing like this has happened before. ⁸ Woe to us! Who can deliver us from the power of these mighty gods? These are the gods who smote the Egyptians with every sort of plague in the wilderness. ⁹ Take courage, and acquit yourselves like men, O Philistines, lest you become slaves to the Hebrews as they have been to you; acquit yourselves like men and fight.”

¹⁰ So the Philistines fought, and Israel was defeated, and they fled, every man to his home; and there was a very great slaughter, for there fell of Israel thirty thousand foot soldiers. ¹¹ And the ark of God was captured; and the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phin′ehas, were slain.

Death of Eli

¹² A man of Benjamin ran from the battle line, and came to Shiloh the same day, with his clothes rent and with earth upon his head. ¹³ When he arrived, Eli was sitting upon his seat by the road watching, for his heart trembled for the ark of God. And when the man came into the city and told the news, all the city cried out. ¹⁴ When Eli heard the sound of the outcry, he said, “What is this uproar?” Then the man hastened and came and told Eli. ¹⁵ Now Eli was ninety-eight years old and his eyes were set, so that he could not see. ¹⁶ And the man said to Eli, “I am he who has come from the battle; I fled from the battle today.” And he said, “How did it go, my son?” ¹⁷ He who brought the tidings answered and said, “Israel has fled before the Philistines, and there has also been a great slaughter among the people; your two sons also, Hophni and Phin′ehas, are dead, and the ark of God has been captured.” ¹⁸ When he mentioned the ark of God, Eli fell over backward from his seat by the side of the gate; and his neck was broken and he died, for he was an old man, and heavy. He had judged Israel forty years.

¹⁹ Now his daughter-in-law, the wife of Phin′ehas, was with child, about to give birth. And when she heard the tidings that the ark of God was captured, and that her father-in-law and her husband were dead, she bowed and gave birth; for her pains came upon her. ²⁰ And about the time of her death the women attending her said to her, “Fear not, for you have borne a son.” But she did not answer or give heed. ²¹ And she named the child Ich′abod, saying, “The glory has departed from Israel!” because the ark of God had been captured and because of her father-in-law and her husband. ²² And she said, “The glory has departed from Israel, for the ark of God has been captured.”

Constitutional weakness

We're supposed to view the U.S. constitution as a sacred object, but there are a lot of big problems with it, not the least of which is the Senate, which gives a Wyoming voter 70 times the representation it gives a California voter. It also gives a somewhat lesser advantage to small, rural states in the electoral college, which has resulted in the previous two Republican presidents being elected with a minority of the popular vote. 

So yeah, we really ought to change that. But there's actually something I worry about more. When the drafters of the constitution made the president commander in chief of the armed forces, there weren't any nuclear weapons. But right now, the constitution makes it possible for a single individual, possibly insane, to order the immediate death of hundreds of millions of people, and there is no legal recourse. Our only hope in that case is literally mutiny.

A mass delusion

We hear a lot about cults and bizarre subcultures of belief, such a Q-Anon and the Unification Church, to which the Former Guy just made a sycophantic speech. But what we hear very little about, strangely, is a mass delusion to which about half of the population subscribes. It depends somewhat on how you ask the question, but in the poll reported here, 35% of respondents agreed that "We are very likely entering the prophesied End Times," and 28% more weren't sure.

 

As I assume you know, this refers to the prophecies of Revelation, with a little bit of Exekiel and Daniel thrown in. Revelation, the last book of the Christian Bible, draws heavily on Ezekiel and Daniel. Revelation is a bizarre sequence of dream images and people have interpreted in many ways, but the current popular flavor is called pre-millenial dispensation. This is the version in which many people who are already in a state of grace will suddenly disappear in "the Rapture," ascending bodily into heaven while unpiloted airplanes and motor vehicles crash. Then there will be a time of tribulation, the emergence of the Antichrist as a European emperor, and finally the battle of Armageddon after which Jesus will reign for 1,000 year and then shut down the universe for good.

 

I assure you, this will not happen. However, Ronald Reagan and many of his cabinet officers, Mike Pompeo and many other prominent Republicans, not to mention the Evangelical pastors who are the main organizers for the Republican party, were or are all believers. 

 

There are many unfortunate political consequences of this epidemic of insanity, but one of the strangest is that it is the main source of the unquestioning and uncritical support the U.S. gives to the Israeli government. The return of the Jews to the Holy Land is one of the pre-requisites for the apocalypse, but more than that is still required, specifically rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem. This is a problem because the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosque sit on top of the temple site, which means any attempt to actually rebuild the temple would set off a horrific regional conflagration. The Israeli government has happily accepted the support of the American Christian evangelical movement even though the conclusion of the prophecy is that 2/3 of the Jews will die and be condemned to eternal damnation while the other 1/3 will be converted to Christianity. Doesn't seem to bother Bibi however.

As one can readily see, there are other unpleasant consequences. Who cares about climate change or any other environmental crisis? Why should we rebuild infrastructure or even bother to educate our children? 

 

The New York Times and CNN don't want you to know this. It isn't even worth mentioning.

Sunday Sermonette: Hearing clearly

 I don't have much to say about 1 Samuel 3. It's rather an odd story, young Sam not recognizing the voice  of Yahweh. I'm not sure what the point is. Anyway, I have a point to make.

I understand why some bloggers, such as Digby, have turned off commenting.There are certain people who try to comment here who are intensely annoying because they are consistently illogical, factually wrong, and seem intentionally to misunderstand what I have written and what the point is of a post. This is how conservative discourse works, consistently. If the facts are inconvenient for you, just assert alternative (i.e. false) facts; if you've lost the argument, pretend it's about something else, or pretend not to understand it; if your position is illogical, just ignore logic. I'm not even reading comments from certain people any more, because it's too aggravating. I just delete them. I don't have time or patience for irredeemable idiocy.

Here's your Sunday reading.

3 Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord under Eli. And the word of the Lord was rare in those days; there was no frequent vision.

² At that time Eli, whose eyesight had begun to grow dim, so that he could not see, was lying down in his own place; ³ the lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was lying down within the temple of the Lord, where the ark of God was. ⁴ Then the Lord called, “Samuel! Samuel!”^[a] and he said, “Here I am!” ⁵ and ran to Eli, and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” But he said, “I did not call; lie down again.” So he went and lay down. ⁶ And the Lord called again, “Samuel!” and Samuel arose and went to Eli, and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” But he said, “I did not call, my son; lie down again.” ⁷ Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him. ⁸ And the Lord called Samuel again the third time. And he arose and went to Eli, and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” Then Eli perceived that the Lord was calling the boy. ⁹ Therefore Eli said to Samuel, “Go, lie down; and if he calls you, you shall say, ‘Speak, Lord, for thy servant hears.’” So Samuel went and lay down in his place.

¹⁰ And the Lord came and stood forth, calling as at other times, “Samuel! Samuel!” And Samuel said, “Speak, for thy servant hears.” ¹¹ Then the Lord said to Samuel, “Behold, I am about to do a thing in Israel, at which the two ears of every one that hears it will tingle. ¹² On that day I will fulfil against Eli all that I have spoken concerning his house, from beginning to end. ¹³ And I tell him that I am about to punish his house for ever, for the iniquity which he knew, because his sons were blaspheming God,^[b] and he did not restrain them. ¹⁴ Therefore I swear to the house of Eli that the iniquity of Eli’s house shall not be expiated by sacrifice or offering for ever.”

¹⁵ Samuel lay until morning; then he opened the doors of the house of the Lord. And Samuel was afraid to tell the vision to Eli. ¹⁶ But Eli called Samuel and said, “Samuel, my son.” And he said, “Here I am.” ¹⁷ And Eli said, “What was it that he told you? Do not hide it from me. May God do so to you and more also, if you hide anything from me of all that he told you.” ¹⁸ So Samuel told him everything and hid nothing from him. And he said, “It is the Lord; let him do what seems good to him.”

¹⁹ And Samuel grew, and the Lord was with him and let none of his words fall to the ground. ²⁰ And all Israel from Dan to Beer-sheba knew that Samuel was established as a prophet of the Lord. ²¹ And the Lord appeared again at Shiloh, for the Lord revealed himself to Samuel at Shiloh by the word of the Lord.

Footnotes

1. 1 Samuel 3:4 Gk See 3.10: Heb the Lord called Samuel
2. 1 Samuel 3:13 Another reading is for themselves

A weird human proclivity

That would be anniversaries. It seems to be close to a cultural universal that people mark calendar dates that coincide with significant events that happened on the same date in some past year. When the number of years happens to be a multiple of ten, we make an even bigger deal out of it. If you think about it, this doesn't make any sense. The importance of the event is its relevance, if any, to whatever is going on at this moment, not the calendar date on which it happened. (That goes for my birthday, BTW.)

So anyway, today we're obliged to talk about the Sept. 11 2001 attack. It is quite relevant to stuff that's going on now, but it already was; we didn't need the coincidence of the calendar to make it so. If you're old enough to have had some political consciousness, or I should say some degree of sophistication, you know that the country went nuts. It was impermissible to try to say anything about why people would do this. Trying to understand or explain it was shouted down as excusing or justifying it. We weren't supposed to understand it, evil is ineffable. 

We also were not allowed to question what the Cheney administration said or did in response to it, or ostensibly in response. Osama bin Laden was in fact the best friend George W. Bush ever had. On Sept. 10, his approval was below water and he was widely perceived (quite correctly) as an idiot. When the attack happened, his approval rating shot up overnight to 90%. Truth! Even though he had been warned about it and he laughed it off. Imagine if a Democrat had been president. The reaction would have been the precise opposite.

The Taliban were actually willing to hand bin Laden over to the U.S., but they wanted evidence that bin Laden was really behind it, which the Bush administration refused to provide. Instead they invaded the country and deposed the government. But they let bin Laden flee to Pakistan, our ostensible ally. Pakistan also took in the Taliban leadership and continued to provide them with sanctuary throughout the ensuing 20 years. Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 attack were actually financed by members of the royal family of our other great ally, Saudi Arabia.

 

Therefore, the U.S. invaded Iraq, which had nothing to do with it, meanwhile remaining in Afghanistan for reasons which were never explained. In both countries, U.S. forces committed innumerable war crimes. The U.S. also established a policy of torturing prisoners. The result of all this insanity was a catastrophe in Afghanistan and the Middle East, including millions of deaths, a tidal wave of refugees which has destabilized European governments, and the rise of Islamic State which committed atrocities in Europe, and on a much larger scale in Syria and Iraq. 

So today the war criminal George W. Bush is addressing the commemoration in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. That's right, the guy who is ultimately responsible for all this. Our hero.

Open Access Publishing

This is a subject I first wrote about years ago, but it's good to revisit. The standard model of scholarly publishing took shape in the 19th Century. I don't know all the historical details but by the time I hit graduate school this is how it worked. 

 

Journals had various kinds of ownership. Some were owned by scholarly societies, such as original, the Proceedings of the Royal Society; the New England Journal of Medicine (Massachusetts Medical Association),  Science Magazine (National Academy of Science), American Journal of Public Health (American Public Health Association) and various others. Such very prestigious and widely read journals can sell advertising, but they also charge for subscriptions. In the case of medical journals at least, the advertising is not such a great thing because most of it is purchased by drug companies. There have been cases where this has influenced editorial practice.

Journals that are less widely read and don't target a profession that constitutes a big market for products such as drugs rely entirely on subscription fees. Many of them are owned by for-profit publishers. A scholarly society may be responsible for the editorial process, but the company sells the subscriptions and pockets most of the money. The journals have a managing editor and maybe a small staff that is paid. However, most of the editorial board normally is not paid. Furthermore, the way manuscripts are evaluated is by sending them out to scholars in the field who are called "peer reviewers," and they (including me) aren't paid either. And the cost of subscribing to most scholarly journals has become prohibitive for most individuals -- subscribers are libraries, and they may pay $200 a year or more for a single journal.

All of this means that the only people who can read academic journals are people who have privileges at well-endowed university libraries, which means students and faculty, mostly in the wealthy countries. And even the most well funded university libraries are finding that they have to prune their subscription lists because journals are so costly. Most of this money isn't going to scholarly societies, it's going to the for-profit publishers.

 

So about 20 years ago some people got the idea for a different model. The World Wide Web meant that is was not longer necessary to actually print the journals. (The print journals are available on-line now as well, but they're mostly pay-walled and you still need a library account to read them.) So instead of charging for subscriptions, the idea is to charge a publication fee to the authors, to come out of the grant funding that paid for the research. .The articles are still peer reviewed and editorial decisions made by people with no financial stake. (I am an academic editor of an open access journal.) The publication fees go to fund the managing editorial staff. Everybody in the world can read the journals for free. 

This is a great idea and there are several entirely reputable open-access publishers. Public Library of Science and BMC are among them. Some academic societies have both open-access and subscription journals, and some journals give authors the option. Publishing open-access gets you more reads and more citations, all things being equal, so you might be willing to pay the fee even if you don't have to, as long as it's in your grant budget.

But, obviously, this creates an opportunity for scammers. There are essentially phony journals that will publish anything, because they only exist to pocket the fees. But here's the thing. Everybody already knows this. We are well aware that there are so-called "predatory" publishers and journals out there, and we know not to send serious work to them. Their existence is no reflection on the scholarly fields they purport to represent. They're just a scam. Demonstrating that is not clever and it doesn't reveal anything about any real problem in academia. It's just a stupid stunt.

An urgent message

I get a lot of strange e-mails, but every once in a while something comes across Your Intertubes that is essential reading. This cannot be ignored.

experts and scholars:   

    The content in the attachment is provided to you by the dean of the World Academy of Sciences, superpowered scientists, 

the final review member of the Prophet International Union Cult Appraisal Committee，The double-edged sword in Revelation Bible prophecy --- King Kong Prophet Su Bei Jian, and the Prophet International Union 

Including "The main reason for global abnormal natural disasters", "Floods caused by rapid degradation and condensation of human beings", "Floods are caused by the negative energy of universal gravitation", "New crown vaccination experience", "The merchant-led world will inevitably lead to the destruction of mankind" , "Unicorn Prophecy 2021", "Ultrasonic Prevention and Treatment of New Coronary and Cancer Program", "The Big Abacus for Destroying Humanity"

      Please forward it to relevant scholars of your school. The details are in the attachment. 

    Yours truly,

    The Prophet International Union

 

Sadly, they omitted the attachment. But we know we must do something now about the Big Abacus.

We need a better slogan . . .

"Defund the police" doesn't work, because people do not grok the intended meaning. There is however a very serious, widely disseminated movement, based on substantial research, to stop sending armed police officers in response to problems they are not trained or equipped to address. These are mental health crises, people who are intoxicated, domestic or neighborhood quarrels, and other non-criminal emergencies. There have been many reports of tragedies in which police, called because of a mental health crisis, end up killing the person instead of providing help. As the linked Health Affairs blog post explains:

[C]onversations must actively conceptualize behavioral health crisis response as aid and treatment, not coercion and control. Bringing these programs into the institutional structure of law enforcement risks imposing preexisting modes of operation, such as law enforcement’s fundamental concern with scene safety. Just as paramedic work is not inherently unsafe and paramedics are not employed by police departments, behavioral health crisis response is not inherently unsafe and should not be established within the purview of the police. The CAHOOTS program [a model program in Oregon] requires police back up at about 150 (0.6 percent) of their approximately 24,000 annual calls.

The police don't need to answer these calls, and if we had a more appropriate response team, we would a) need fewer police which means we could be more selective in hiring and invest more in training; b) there would be fewer incidents which compromise community trust for the police; c) the police could concentrate on problems which they are properly equipped to address and do a better job; and d) people who have behavioral health needs would get appropriate help.

A problem is that there is not yet an adequate workforce of properly qualified and trained people to do this work. And yes, the money would have to be transferred from the police department budget to this new and separate service, and some police officers would be laid off, or at least their ranks would be reduced by attrition. That is politically challenging. But it's the right thing to do.

The A word revisited

What I'll say here I've mostly said before, but unfortunately the reporters who work for the corporate media don't seem to know any of it and Democratic politicians probably do know it but won't say it, for some reason.

The idea that "Christian" faith requires that abortion be outlawed is wholly modern. There is exactly one reference to abortion in the entire Bible. It's in the Old Testament, Numbers 5, and consists of a ceremony for the purpose of inducing an abortion in the case of an unfaithful wife, to be performed by a priest. Abortion is mentioned exactly nowhere in the New Testament, even though abortion and for that matter infanticide were commonplace in ancient times. Catholic doctrine did not condemn abortion until 1869. Abortion did not become a salient issue for protestant evangelicals until 1979 - six years after Roe v Wade -- and the reason was that conservative activists needed a new issue to mobilize evangelicals once segregation was outlawed. And yes, conservative white protestants in the U.S. were historically white supremacist and generally still are.*

 

There is no definitive answer as to when a fetus acquires the moral status of a person. You can think whatever you want about that I suppose but it should be obvious that a microscopic ball of cells is not a person. To most people, a functioning cerebral cortex is a requirement for personhood -- after all, we consider people to be legally dead if they don't have one even though their heart is beating and they are breathing. But a fetus does not produce brain waves until the 7th month of gestation. And no, a six-week fetus does not have a heart beat. It does not have a heart. It has an unformed clump of cells that beat rhythmically, which also happens if you put heart cells in a nutrient solution. It does not pump blood. Again, not that it matters because a heartbeat does not define human life.

Suppose you aren't convinced by that and you believe that a zygote -- the single cell produced by the fusion of a sperm cell and an ovum -- has the moral status of a human being. Or a blastocyst, or whatever. You've got a problem because at least half of them die naturally. Often the woman doesn't even know she had conceived. They may fail to implant or have a developmental defect that causes spontaneous abortion. This happens at least 50% of the time. So this ongoing holocaust is by far the worst in all history, and we should immediately redirect all of our medical research and public health funding to saving those millions of babies who are dying every year because of our callous neglect. God is the most prolific abortionist in all history by many orders of magnitude.

The one person who has a moral right to decide when a fetus has the moral status of a person is the person in whose body it is growing. And that is likely to be a function not only of how she thinks about all of the above, but also her relationship to that particular fetus. Does she want the baby or not? What were the circumstances of its conception? If you want to ban abortion generally, but think there should be an exception for rape or incest, then your true rationale is not that you think the fetus has the moral status of a person, it's that you think that having non-procreative sex is a sin -- for women at least, though not apparently for men. 

*The majority of evangelical "Christians" also believe that the apocalypse is imminent. I'll get around to that one soon.

 

 

Wednesday Bible Study: Sing that thing

1 Samuel 2 is very long. It isn't clear why the monks didn't split it in half because the first part, Hannah's prayer, is really unrelated to the rest of it. The text doesn't say that this is sung rather than spoken, but one suspects it is intended as a song. These songs are commonly put in the mouths of women. Miriam organized an all female song and dance party after the exodus, and we see women singing and dancing on other occasions. We don't know the provenance of this poem or song -- nor really of any of the material so far. But it does seem anachronistic in referring to a king, since there had never been an Israelite king in Hannah's imagined time, nor was any king yet in prospect.

Note however that in rabbinical Judaism, traditionally only men could be cantors. Reform Judaism accepted women as cantors beginning in 1975, and Conservative Judaism accepted them in 1987, but in Orthodox Judaism women can be neither cantors nor rabbis. You can read a history of liturgical singing by Jewish women here.

Regarding the second part, remember that a portion of the sacrifice is reserved for the priests, plus they get a lot of other goodies such as flour, olive oil and good old money. What is happening here is that they are grabbing more than their allotted share. Since what they are entitled to is plenty, it seems very unlikely that they are hungry or otherwise particularly need this extra meat, so the sons  of Eli are basically just being dicks. That they want to eat the meat before the fat is burned is sacrilegious. The unnamed "man of God" is similar to the kinds of messengers we have seen before, who are sometimes labeled as angels. 

I have used the Revised Standard Version here because I think it is clearer.

 

2 Hannah also prayed and said,

“My heart exults in the Lord;
    my strength is exalted in the Lord.
My mouth derides my enemies,
    because I rejoice in thy salvation.

² “There is none holy like the Lord,
    there is none besides thee;
    there is no rock like our God.
³ Talk no more so very proudly,
    let not arrogance come from your mouth;
for the Lord is a God of knowledge,
    and by him actions are weighed.
⁴ The bows of the mighty are broken,
    but the feeble gird on strength.
⁵ Those who were full have hired themselves out for bread,
    but those who were hungry have ceased to hunger.
The barren has borne seven,
    but she who has many children is forlorn.
⁶ The Lord kills and brings to life;
    he brings down to Sheol and raises up.
⁷ The Lord makes poor and makes rich;
    he brings low, he also exalts.
⁸ He raises up the poor from the dust;
    he lifts the needy from the ash heap,
to make them sit with princes
    and inherit a seat of honor.
For the pillars of the earth are the Lord’s,
    and on them he has set the world.

⁹ “He will guard the feet of his faithful ones;
    but the wicked shall be cut off in darkness;
    for not by might shall a man prevail.
¹⁰ The adversaries of the Lord shall be broken to pieces;
    against them he will thunder in heaven.
The Lord will judge the ends of the earth;
    he will give strength to his king,
    and exalt the power of his anointed.”

Eli’s Wicked Sons

¹¹ Then Elka′nah went home to Ramah. And the boy ministered to the Lord, in the presence of Eli the priest.

¹² Now the sons of Eli were worthless men; they had no regard for the Lord. ¹³ The custom of the priests with the people was that when any man offered sacrifice, the priest’s servant would come, while the meat was boiling, with a three-pronged fork in his hand, ¹⁴ and he would thrust it into the pan, or kettle, or caldron, or pot; all that the fork brought up the priest would take for himself.^[a] So they did at Shiloh to all the Israelites who came there. ¹⁵ Moreover, before the fat was burned, the priest’s servant would come and say to the man who was sacrificing, “Give meat for the priest to roast; for he will not accept boiled meat from you, but raw.” ¹⁶ And if the man said to him, “Let them burn the fat first, and then take as much as you wish,” he would say, “No, you must give it now; and if not, I will take it by force.” ¹⁷ Thus the sin of the young men was very great in the sight of the Lord; for the men treated the offering of the Lord with contempt.

The Child Samuel at Shiloh

¹⁸ Samuel was ministering before the Lord, a boy girded with a linen ephod. ¹⁹ And his mother used to make for him a little robe and take it to him each year, when she went up with her husband to offer the yearly sacrifice. ²⁰ Then Eli would bless Elka′nah and his wife, and say, “The Lord give you children by this woman for the loan which she lent to^[b] the Lord”; so then they would return to their home.

²¹ And the Lord visited Hannah, and she conceived and bore three sons and two daughters. And the boy Samuel grew in the presence of the Lord.

Prophecy against Eli’s Household

²² Now Eli was very old, and he heard all that his sons were doing to all Israel, and how they lay with the women who served at the entrance to the tent of meeting. ²³ And he said to them, “Why do you do such things? For I hear of your evil dealings from all the people. ²⁴ No, my sons; it is no good report that I hear the people of the Lord spreading abroad. ²⁵ If a man sins against a man, God will mediate for him; but if a man sins against the Lord, who can intercede for him?” But they would not listen to the voice of their father; for it was the will of the Lord to slay them.

²⁶ Now the boy Samuel continued to grow both in stature and in favor with the Lord and with men.

²⁷ And there came a man of God to Eli, and said to him, “Thus the Lord has said, ‘I revealed^[c] myself to the house of your father when they were in Egypt subject to the house of Pharaoh. ²⁸ And I chose him out of all the tribes of Israel to be my priest, to go up to my altar, to burn incense, to wear an ephod before me; and I gave to the house of your father all my offerings by fire from the people of Israel. ²⁹ Why then look with greedy eye at^[d] my sacrifices and my offerings which I commanded, and honor your sons above me by fattening yourselves upon the choicest parts of every offering of my people Israel?’ ³⁰ Therefore the Lord the God of Israel declares: ‘I promised that your house and the house of your father should go in and out before me for ever’; but now the Lord declares: ‘Far be it from me; for those who honor me I will honor, and those who despise me shall be lightly esteemed. ³¹ Behold, the days are coming, when I will cut off your strength and the strength of your father’s house, so that there will not be an old man in your house. ³² Then in distress you will look with envious eye on all the prosperity which shall be bestowed upon Israel; and there shall not be an old man in your house for ever. ³³ The man of you whom I shall not cut off from my altar shall be spared to weep out his^[e] eyes and grieve his^[f] heart; and all the increase of your house shall die by the sword of men.^{[g] 34} And this which shall befall your two sons, Hophni and Phin′ehas, shall be the sign to you: both of them shall die on the same day. ³⁵ And I will raise up for myself a faithful priest, who shall do according to what is in my heart and in my mind; and I will build him a sure house, and he shall go in and out before my anointed for ever. ³⁶ And every one who is left in your house shall come to implore him for a piece of silver or a loaf of bread, and shall say, “Put me, I pray you, in one of the priest’s places, that I may eat a morsel of bread.”’”

Footnotes

1. 1 Samuel 2:14 Gk Syr Vg: Heb with it
2. 1 Samuel 2:20 Or for the petition which she asked of
3. 1 Samuel 2:27 Gk Tg: Heb Did I reveal
4. 1 Samuel 2:29 Or treat with scorn Gk: Heb kick at
5. 1 Samuel 2:33 Gk: Heb your
6. 1 Samuel 2:33 Gk: Heb your
7. 1 Samuel 2:33 Gk: Heb die as men

 

Free the market!

Since I am often accused of being a soshulist, maybe this will surprise some people. I keep seeing these heart warming stories on the teevee of people who lived in such places as Grand Isle Louisiana proclaiming to fawning and admiring reporters that they aren't going anywhere, they will rebuild, their community is strong and resolute . . . 

Listen bub, if you can't get insurance from Limu Emu, Geico Gecko, Aflac Duck, Flo, the fop with the umbrella, or JK Simmons, there is no fucking reason why I as a tax payer should pay one penny to insure you or rebuild your house. Furthermore the electric company, with the blessing of the public utilities commission, should declare that they will no longer supply electricity to your eroding barrier beach because they can't afford to keep rebuilding it, and so should the suppliers of Internet and phone service. I'm willing to pony up a few bucks to buy you out and help you get a new start somewhere else, but that's it.

If you want to live there without insurance and off the grid, nobody can stop you, but when the next storm comes, we aren't going to rescue you. I'm sorry, it's sad and tragic and all that, but people cannot live there any more. The world has changed. 

 

The national flood insurance program should be completely abolished. There is no rationale for its existence. The risk of living in a particular place should be part of the cost of living there, end of story. If there is some compelling public interest in maintaining a human community in a particular place I'll listen, but I'm unaware of any such rationale for any place that is covered by the program. One hundred percent of Republican members of congress should agree with me because this is a Big Government program that rips off the taxpayers and distorts the Free Market™. It would only take a couple of Democratic votes to go along with them to get this done. I'm waiting.

Sunday Sermonette: Sam the Sham

We now resume our regularly scheduled programming, i.e. the so-called Deuteronomic History. In the Tanakh, as I have already noted, it is not interrupted by the Book of Ruth. Most scholars now believe that Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings have a unified origin. The most commonly held theory is that they were first commissioned by King Josiah in the 7th Century BCE, and probably revised and amended during the ensuing Babylonian exile, taking more or less their final form in the 5th Century BCE. 

Although it is called a "history," if there are grains of historical truth in it they are only grains. There are many anachronisms, such as weapons that did not exist in the 11th and 10th Centuries BCE when all this supposedly happened, peoples in the wrong place at the wrong time, and so on. Most notably, if Saul, David and Solomon are based on real people, they weren't anything like the mighty kings portrayed. The Israelites at that time were farmers living in small, scattered villages, without any unified authority. King David at most would have been the chieftan over a few villages. Jerusalem was not a great city but at most a small town. In other words this represents aggrandizement of the past. 

The first chapter of Samuel is an overly long account of the prophet's birth, with many details that are there for unclear reasons. The story of a woman who cannot conceive until God intercedes is a repeated motif in the Bible. The book is named for Samuel because he is the first prophet who appears, but it continues well past his time as we shall see.

 

1 There was a certain man from Ramathaim, a Zuphite^[a] from the hill country of Ephraim, whose name was Elkanah son of Jeroham, the son of Elihu, the son of Tohu, the son of Zuph, an Ephraimite. ² He had two wives; one was called Hannah and the other Peninnah. Peninnah had children, but Hannah had none.

³ Year after year this man went up from his town to worship and sacrifice to the Lord Almighty at Shiloh, where Hophni and Phinehas, the two sons of Eli, were priests of the Lord. ⁴ Whenever the day came for Elkanah to sacrifice, he would give portions of the meat to his wife Peninnah and to all her sons and daughters. ⁵ But to Hannah he gave a double portion because he loved her, and the Lord had closed her womb. ⁶ Because the Lord had closed Hannah’s womb, her rival kept provoking her in order to irritate her. ⁷ This went on year after year. Whenever Hannah went up to the house of the Lord, her rival provoked her till she wept and would not eat. ⁸ Her husband Elkanah would say to her, “Hannah, why are you weeping? Why don’t you eat? Why are you downhearted? Don’t I mean more to you than ten sons?”

⁹ Once when they had finished eating and drinking in Shiloh, Hannah stood up. Now Eli the priest was sitting on his chair by the doorpost of the Lord’s house. ¹⁰ In her deep anguish Hannah prayed to the Lord, weeping bitterly. ¹¹ And she made a vow, saying, “Lord Almighty, if you will only look on your servant’s misery and remember me, and not forget your servant but give her a son, then I will give him to the Lord for all the days of his life, and no razor will ever be used on his head.”

¹² As she kept on praying to the Lord, Eli observed her mouth. ¹³ Hannah was praying in her heart, and her lips were moving but her voice was not heard. Eli thought she was drunk ¹⁴ and said to her, “How long are you going to stay drunk? Put away your wine.”

¹⁵ “Not so, my lord,” Hannah replied, “I am a woman who is deeply troubled. I have not been drinking wine or beer; I was pouring out my soul to the Lord. ¹⁶ Do not take your servant for a wicked woman; I have been praying here out of my great anguish and grief.”

¹⁷ Eli answered, “Go in peace, and may the God of Israel grant you what you have asked of him.”

¹⁸ She said, “May your servant find favor in your eyes.” Then she went her way and ate something, and her face was no longer downcast.

¹⁹ Early the next morning they arose and worshiped before the Lord and then went back to their home at Ramah. Elkanah made love to his wife Hannah, and the Lord remembered her. ²⁰ So in the course of time Hannah became pregnant and gave birth to a son. She named him Samuel,^[b] saying, “Because I asked the Lord for him.”

Hannah Dedicates Samuel

²¹ When her husband Elkanah went up with all his family to offer the annual sacrifice to the Lord and to fulfill his vow, ²² Hannah did not go. She said to her husband, “After the boy is weaned, I will take him and present him before the Lord, and he will live there always.”^[c]

²³ “Do what seems best to you,” her husband Elkanah told her. “Stay here until you have weaned him; only may the Lord make good his^[d] word.” So the woman stayed at home and nursed her son until she had weaned him.

²⁴ After he was weaned, she took the boy with her, young as he was, along with a three-year-old bull,^[e] an ephah^[f] of flour and a skin of wine, and brought him to the house of the Lord at Shiloh. ²⁵ When the bull had been sacrificed, they brought the boy to Eli, ²⁶ and she said to him, “Pardon me, my lord. As surely as you live, I am the woman who stood here beside you praying to the Lord. ²⁷ I prayed for this child, and the Lord has granted me what I asked of him. ²⁸ So now I give him to the Lord. For his whole life he will be given over to the Lord.” And he worshiped the Lord there.

Footnotes

1. 1 Samuel 1:1 See Septuagint and 1 Chron. 6:26-27,33-35; or from Ramathaim Zuphim.
2. 1 Samuel 1:20 Samuel sounds like the Hebrew for heard by God.
3. 1 Samuel 1:22 Masoretic Text; Dead Sea Scrolls always. I have dedicated him as a Nazirite—all the days of his life.”
4. 1 Samuel 1:23 Masoretic Text; Dead Sea Scrolls, Septuagint and Syriac your
5. 1 Samuel 1:24 Dead Sea Scrolls, Septuagint and Syriac; Masoretic Text with three bulls
6. 1 Samuel 1:24 That is, probably about 36 pounds or about 16 kilograms

 

Collapse

I'm not an expert on Lebanon nor particularly on the category of crisis that land is experiencing right now, but I do think I understand it well enough to draw some broad lessons. The consequences for the Lebanese are horrific. If you have a NYT read left this month this by Lina Mounzer is hard to read. An excerpt:

I begin my days in Beirut already exhausted.. . . .Every few days there’s a new low to get used to. One recent morning I needed to exchange some dollars to buy groceries, chiefly bread.. . .Once I had my money, I headed to the supermarket, and on my way I encountered a tiny old woman sitting on the pavement. I wanted to give her some money and a bottle of cold water. I went to four shops before I found one. This was how I first learned that we are now also facing a shortage of bottled water. The week before, I’d discovered that there was a shortage of cooking gas after our canister ran out and I had to make a dozen calls — and pay five times what it once cost — to replace it. While cooking gas is vital, the shortage of bottled water is an even bigger disaster in a country where most Lebanese believe the tap water isn’t even safe enough to cook with. . . .

Likewise, there is little bread to be found. There was none at the big supermarket I went to that day, which was entirely dark, lit only by weak emergency lights. The meat, cheese and freezer sections are all empty because there’s no fuel for refrigeration. I asked for bread at every shop I passed, and in the end realized I had to go to the bakery. I avoid that street as much as possible because the bakery is right next to the gas station, and gas stations are our new front lines. Scuffles break out because there are always too many people fighting for too little fuel. Quickly, I wound my way through the shouting, shoving crowd, which included a good number of armed soldiers trying to manage the situation, and made it to the bakery. I bought the last bag of bread.

 

How and why did this happen? Lebanon was once a prosperous, cosmopolitan nation, well educated, with a large professional class that exported consulting services to the world; a thriving tourist economy, a center of finance. The problems began with a sectarian civil war from 1975 to 1990.  Lebanon's government has a structural flaw, in that the constitution allocates representation by religion. The country is notable for religio-ethnic diversity, with Sunni, Shiite, Christian and Druze populations, complicated by the presence of large numbers of displaced Palestinians. The people generally coexist amicably, but the system makes good governance impossible. Corruption and mismanagement of national finances are the basic cause of the collapse, exacerbated by the withdrawal of support from the Arab oil monarchies as Iran became more influential in the country. The port explosion a year ago was perhaps the coupe de grace, but it resulted from the same corruption and misgovernance that caused the financial crisis.*

The broad lesson I want to draw here is that Lebanon did not suffer from any sort of natural disaster. This did not result from drought, or blight, or natural resource depletion. Nor was it dependent on industries that became obsolete, or trading relations that dried up. Or rather, the latter did happen but it was as a function of decline that had already begun; it was part of a death spiral. And no, this has nothing to do with socialism. Rather the opposite I would say -- a failure to properly regulate business, and to tax and restrain the oligarchy. Lebanon was and is a capitalist country.Modern economies are dependent on an infrastructure of economic management by government which is largely invisible to most citizens. When it operates to serve a small, corrupt elite, rather than the people, disaster can ensue.

 *This is not a generic lesson about government borrowing or national debt. The problem is that government borrowing was not invested, but rather operated as a Ponzi scheme. The U.S., for example, has plenty of underlying economic productivity to repay its debts, and borrowing to invest is a perfectly sound practice. Furthermore little government money in the U.S. is stolen, with the exception of the the bloated military-industrial complex, and recently, the massive theft of government funds by Donald J. Trump.

Josh Marshall gives you the straight dope

There's no point in my saying what had already been said so well. If you want to get your head straight about President Biden's correct and courageous actions, read this. Here are a couple of excerpts in case you're too lazy to click on the link.

[T]he great majority of the criticism we’ve seen amounts to ignorance and deflection. Pulling the plug on a failed or misconceived mission isn’t pretty. But it is inevitable. The ugliness is built into the failure rather than a consequence of recognizing it. Most of what we’ve seen is an attempt to deny the failure (mostly hawks) or imagine that withdrawing would be orderly and free of consequences. But with all this reasoning, what parts were handled poorly? What could have been better organized or cleaner? . . .

The airlift evacuation appears to have transported well over 110,000 people out of the country, an astonishing feat under any circumstances and probably unprecedented for a civilian airlift in a kinetic military context and in the context of state collapse.

What happened two weeks ago was that the US-backed government fell. Quickly. And the US President, who had decided to end the US mission in Afghanistan without conditions, allowed it to fall rather than changing his mind. That is the entirety of what happened. Shifting gears to prevent the collapse would have signaled not only that the decision was wrong but also was poorly arrived at in the first place since the collapse of the government was always the probable and most likely the inevitable result of the decision. . . .

Three Presidents understood the futility of the mission. Only one had the determination to end it even at the cost of real political damage to himself. That means he has to own the reality of withdrawal, the acceptance that the mission, as it expanded in the years after 2001, did not work. He has to accept the reality of a Taliban government. He has to accept the reality and images of terrified refugees, masses looking to escape.

But as many have argued this was a reality baked into the futility and failure of the mission itself. There was no pretty exit. That is what kept the US there for two decades. As has been the case for weeks, this is the crux of the ‘there had to be a better way’ crowd’s argument: wanting out of a failed endeavor but unwilling to stomach let alone embrace the reality of that failure and eager to pass that messiness off on someone else.

 

Wednesday Bible Study: Legal complications

Again, despite the brevity of this tale, it requires a fair amount of explanation and raises some questions. Note first of all that the reference to handing over the sandal as an archaic custom establishes that this was written a long time after the events purportedly occurred. This is consistent with scholarly opinion, as I noted at the beginning. The question arises, why was it written and where does the story come from? Was it an invention of the writer(s), or did it have an earlier source?

I suspect that it derives from oral tradition. Remember that the vast majority of people were illiterate. In preliterate societies story telling is a form of entertainment, and of religious instruction, and is the only way of preserving historical memory. So much of the Bible originated in oral tradition. (Of what we have read so far, Deuteronomy is definitely an exception. It recapitulates much of the earlier tradition but was crafted with clear intention.) The story of Ruth may have originally been told within the family, to inform Obed of his origins, and told within the community as interesting local news and then history. This story would have been a favorite of women, and of converts or mixed families, and so it would have continued to be told. Of course it was likely embellished and changed along the way. The Genealogy of David at the end was clearly appended later, perhaps at the time this was first written down.

To further explain the legal issues, Naomi can only hold her inheritance until a male heir emerges. Boaz, by marrying Ruth, stands in for her late son Mahlon and so becomes the heir of Namoi's late husband. That he has to pay for the property is a twist we don't see in Deuteronomy. Some sources say that Naomi was allowed to mortgage the property to fend off poverty, in which case the money would be to redeem the mortgage. But the plain language implies that she gets the cash herself, which makes sense I suppose since she's a widow otherwise without means of support, although she does become part of the Boaz household. Why the unnamed kinsman would jeopardize his own inheritance by marrying Ruth is not explained.

In any event, Obed is technically Naomi's grandson, as Boaz symbolically replaces her son. She probably would have thought of him as a grandson anyway, as Ruth has become like a daughter to her, but the preservation of Elimelech's line as one outcome of this transaction is a point of emphasis. Note that in the genealogy of David, only the male line matters. 

4 Meanwhile Boaz went up to the town gate and sat down there just as the guardian-redeemer^[a] he had mentioned came along. Boaz said, “Come over here, my friend, and sit down.” So he went over and sat down.

² Boaz took ten of the elders of the town and said, “Sit here,” and they did so. ³ Then he said to the guardian-redeemer, “Naomi, who has come back from Moab, is selling the piece of land that belonged to our relative Elimelek. ⁴ I thought I should bring the matter to your attention and suggest that you buy it in the presence of these seated here and in the presence of the elders of my people. If you will redeem it, do so. But if you^[b] will not, tell me, so I will know. For no one has the right to do it except you, and I am next in line.”

“I will redeem it,” he said.

⁵ Then Boaz said, “On the day you buy the land from Naomi, you also acquire Ruth the Moabite, the^[c] dead man’s widow, in order to maintain the name of the dead with his property.”

⁶ At this, the guardian-redeemer said, “Then I cannot redeem it because I might endanger my own estate. You redeem it yourself. I cannot do it.”

⁷ (Now in earlier times in Israel, for the redemption and transfer of property to become final, one party took off his sandal and gave it to the other. This was the method of legalizing transactions in Israel.)

⁸ So the guardian-redeemer said to Boaz, “Buy it yourself.” And he removed his sandal.

⁹ Then Boaz announced to the elders and all the people, “Today you are witnesses that I have bought from Naomi all the property of Elimelek, Kilion and Mahlon. ¹⁰ I have also acquired Ruth the Moabite, Mahlon’s widow, as my wife, in order to maintain the name of the dead with his property, so that his name will not disappear from among his family or from his hometown. Today you are witnesses!”

¹¹ Then the elders and all the people at the gate said, “We are witnesses. May the Lord make the woman who is coming into your home like Rachel and Leah, who together built up the family of Israel. May you have standing in Ephrathah and be famous in Bethlehem. ¹² Through the offspring the Lord gives you by this young woman, may your family be like that of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah.”

Naomi Gains a Son

¹³ So Boaz took Ruth and she became his wife. When he made love to her, the Lord enabled her to conceive, and she gave birth to a son. ¹⁴ The women said to Naomi: “Praise be to the Lord, who this day has not left you without a guardian-redeemer. May he become famous throughout Israel! ¹⁵ He will renew your life and sustain you in your old age. For your daughter-in-law, who loves you and who is better to you than seven sons, has given him birth.”

¹⁶ Then Naomi took the child in her arms and cared for him. ¹⁷ The women living there said, “Naomi has a son!” And they named him Obed. He was the father of Jesse, the father of David.

The Genealogy of David

¹⁸ This, then, is the family line of Perez:

Perez was the father of Hezron,

¹⁹ Hezron the father of Ram,

Ram the father of Amminadab,

²⁰ Amminadab the father of Nahshon,

Nahshon the father of Salmon,^[d]

²¹ Salmon the father of Boaz,

Boaz the father of Obed,

²² Obed the father of Jesse,

and Jesse the father of David.

Footnotes

1. Ruth 4:1 The Hebrew word for guardian-redeemer is a legal term for one who has the obligation to redeem a relative in serious difficulty (see Lev. 25:25-55); also in verses 3, 6, 8 and 14.
2. Ruth 4:4 Many Hebrew manuscripts, Septuagint, Vulgate and Syriac; most Hebrew manuscripts he
3. Ruth 4:5 Vulgate and Syriac; Hebrew (see also Septuagint) Naomi and from Ruth the Moabite, you acquire the
4. Ruth 4:20 A few Hebrew manuscripts, some Septuagint manuscripts and Vulgate (see also verse 21 and Septuagint of 1 Chron. 2:11); most Hebrew manuscripts Salma