1 And they took their journey from Elim, and all the congregation of the children of Israel came unto the wilderness of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after their departing out of the land of Egypt.Wilderness of Sin? Never heard of it. I guess what happens in the Wilderness of Sin stays in the Wilderness of Sin.
2 And the whole congregation of the children of Israel murmured against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness:
3 And the children of Israel said unto them, Would to God we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots, and when we did eat bread to the full; for ye have brought us forth into this wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger.
4 Then said the LORD unto Moses, Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you; and the people shall go out and gather a certain rate every day, that I may prove them, whether they will walk in my law, or no.
5 And it shall come to pass, that on the sixth day they shall prepare that which they bring in; and it shall be twice as much as they gather daily.
6 And Moses and Aaron said unto all the children of Israel, At even, then ye shall know that the LORD hath brought you out from the land of Egypt:
7 And in the morning, then ye shall see the glory of the LORD; for that he heareth your murmurings against the LORD: and what are we, that ye murmur against us?
8 And Moses said, This shall be, when the LORD shall give you in the evening flesh to eat, and in the morning bread to the full; for that the LORD heareth your murmurings which ye murmur against him: and what are we? your murmurings are not against us, but against the LORD.
9 And Moses spake unto Aaron, Say unto all the congregation of the children of Israel, Come near before the LORD: for he hath heard your murmurings.
10 And it came to pass, as Aaron spake unto the whole congregation of the children of Israel, that they looked toward the wilderness, and, behold, the glory of the LORD appeared in the cloud.
11 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying,
12 I have heard the murmurings of the children of Israel: speak unto them, saying, At even ye shall eat flesh, and in the morning ye shall be filled with bread; and ye shall know that I am the LORD your God.
13 And it came to pass, that at even the quails came up, and covered the camp: and in the morning the dew lay round about the host.
14 And when the dew that lay was gone up, behold, upon the face of the wilderness there lay a small round thing, as small as the hoar frost on the ground.
15 And when the children of Israel saw it, they said one to another, It is manna: for they wist not what it was. And Moses said unto them, This is the bread which the LORD hath given you to eat.
16 This is the thing which the LORD hath commanded, Gather of it every man according to his eating, an omer for every man, according to the number of your persons; take ye every man for them which are in his tents.
17 And the children of Israel did so, and gathered, some more, some less.
18 And when they did mete it with an omer, he that gathered much had nothing over, and he that gathered little had no lack; they gathered every man according to his eating.
19 And Moses said, Let no man leave of it till the morning.
20 Notwithstanding they hearkened not unto Moses; but some of them left of it until the morning, and it bred worms, and stank: and Moses was wroth with them.
21 And they gathered it every morning, every man according to his eating: and when the sun waxed hot, it melted.
22 And it came to pass, that on the sixth day they gathered twice as much bread, two omers for one man: and all the rulers of the congregation came and told Moses.
23 And he said unto them, This is that which the LORD hath said, To morrow is the rest of the holy sabbath unto the LORD: bake that which ye will bake to day, and seethe that ye will seethe; and that which remaineth over lay up for you to be kept until the morning.
24 And they laid it up till the morning, as Moses bade: and it did not stink, neither was there any worm therein.
25 And Moses said, Eat that to day; for to day is a sabbath unto the LORD: to day ye shall not find it in the field.
26 Six days ye shall gather it; but on the seventh day, which is the sabbath, in it there shall be none.
27 And it came to pass, that there went out some of the people on the seventh day for to gather, and they found none.
28 And the LORD said unto Moses, How long refuse ye to keep my commandments and my laws?
29 See, for that the LORD hath given you the sabbath, therefore he giveth you on the sixth day the bread of two days; abide ye every man in his place, let no man go out of his place on the seventh day.
30 So the people rested on the seventh day.
31 And the house of Israel called the name thereof Manna: and it was like coriander seed, white; and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey.
32 And Moses said, This is the thing which the LORD commandeth, Fill an omer of it to be kept for your generations; that they may see the bread wherewith I have fed you in the wilderness, when I brought you forth from the land of Egypt.
33 And Moses said unto Aaron, Take a pot, and put an omer full of manna therein, and lay it up before the LORD, to be kept for your generations.
34 As the LORD commanded Moses, so Aaron laid it up before the Testimony, to be kept.
35 And the children of Israel did eat manna forty years, until they came to a land inhabited; they did eat manna, until they came unto the borders of the land of Canaan.
36 Now an omer is the tenth part of an ephah.
Again with the kvetching, as the Israelites bitch about Moses and Aaron.
It's always "what have you done for me lately" with this crowd. After they parted the fucking Red Sea and killed the pursuing army, why do God/Moe/Aaron still have to prove anything?
Moe says if you dis me and my bro, you're dissing the Lord. I've never gotten anywhere saying that, but ol' Moses is able to back it up.
Vocabulary: Flesh pot (a cooking vessel, and later — without the space — a lusty place or person); omer, 2.3 dry ounces (can also mean a barley sheaf or a seven-day period beginning with the second day of Passover).
It's cloudy, with 100% chance of carbs, as God rains wondrous bread for the hungry Israelites. Doesn't seem sanitary, though, to eat baked goods that were dumped into the wilderness, unless maybe they were cello-packed, or in crates à la the DHARMA Initiative.
God uses the bread to spot unbelievers: they're the ones who stray from the recommended daily requirement of those dirty loaves, especially the ones who don't properly stock up the day before the Sabbath. No schlepping to the Stop & Shop on the Lord's day.
There is talk of them "preparing" what they bring in. So, was it dough instead of bread? That would be even nastier chucked onto wilderness floor.
Interesting that baking was called "seething." I guess that's how Mrs. Lovett felt about it.
The Manna "was like coriander seed, white; and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey." Like coriander seed how? That filthy stuff is snuck into all manner of other otherwise delicious international foods, as seeds or leaves, and it doesn't taste like any goddamned honey.
And such small portions! The size of "hoar frost"? That doesn't sound like any goddamned omer, either.
In addition to the honey-cilantro bread, there is meat in the evenings.
Do lamb chops fall from heaven each night? Either that, or you have to shoot your own quail, which are so plentiful that even Cheney could bag one.
The Lord's not good at delegating. He tells Moses what to tell the Israelites, then he appears in the sky and tells him again — in front of the Israelites and everybody.
Again we hear that leftovers are bad. If you leave food out (except for that long-lasting Sabbath-eve bread), you get a diet of worms.
Yet, they're supposed to keep a pot of manna for generations. I hope they had plenty of BHT on hand.
They're told to stash it "before the Testimony." Apparently that means in front of a hardcopy of those commandments that haven't been properly explained yet, and which no doubt will be told with contradictory histories.
So, they were stuck the wilderness for 40 years, wolfing down manna. I hope they were able to rouse up a little sin, while they were at it. Man doesn't live by manna alone.
14 comments:
verse 1 is from the stations list again. The "Wilderness of Sin" doesn't refer to sinfulness, but to the sumerian moon-god that happens to be called Sin (in french, for example, the phrase is "désert de Sin", and in hungarian its "Sin pusztájába"; its only in English that the word for sinfulness happens to be similar to the name of the sumerian moon-god)
Manna isn't bread. The passage describes it like that because biblical authors hadn't seen it themselves. The word translated as "bread" does now mean "bread" in hebrew, but originally meant just "food"; in arabic the word came to mean "meat".
Its really honeydew (the secretion of insects, rather than the melon), which fits all the descritions - dry air makes it a sticky solid, and it turns white over time. "Manna" comes from the arabic word "man", meaning plant lice (an animal known for producing honeydew).
Quails/Manna - two different versions of the same "food was provided" narrative. Manna is the earlier (Jahwist) story, quails is the later (Priestly Source) version; manna isn't grand enough in the eyes of the author of the Priestly Source.
Worms - ancient belief (which survived into the 16th century) was that animals were produced from objects - "take some wheat, and leave it in a barn over night, and in a few days it will have turned into mice", for example. In other words, here we have the food "turning into" worms if its left - rather than the understanding that worms and so on will gradually migrate from dispersed parts of the ground towards the food if you don't stop them by eating it.
40 years is a symbolic length of time in Israelite culture - you'll get it a lot in the remainder of the bible. Its not really 40 years - that's ridiculous, the desert isn't that barren, or difficult to navigate, and had major roads (even then) running through it, that would have given a big clue about direction, as well as nomads who knew where they were going.
Hmm, manna isn't bread, and the Eden fruit isn't described as apples. I'm curious how many legendary things in the Bible have gotten mixed up, in the way that people think Frankenstein is the monster and that "wherefore art thou Romeo" means "where are you, Romeo?"
Well, words change meaning over time. For example "meat" in the King James Version just means food, including vegetables. The word "deer" originally just meant "animal", and the word "hart" was used to describe the animal now called "deer".
And when you get to Exodus 28 there is a whole host of words that don't mean what they seem to at first glace.
One of the best cases of this are things like Isaiah, which mentions a "screech owl". The Hebrew word translated here is "lilitu"; Lilith was a demon that existed in Jewish belief, but the translators didn't know about that, so they guessed.
Omer doesn't mean a "seven day period from the second day after passover". That's more like "counting of the Omer", which is ritual counting out of each day of barley for each of the seven weeks following Passover; that's 49 days - the 50th day is the "feast of weeks" ("Shavuot"). In a Christian Calender, Passover is roughly easter, and Shavuot is roughly Whitsun/Pentecost.
I always thought that 40 yrs was an aweful long time to travel from Egypt to Isreal. Shit, Lewis and Clark made it all the way to Oregon from Louisiana in less time.
As an aside, I read something that makes me think of God. It has been proven that the Universe is expanding and accelerating. An astronomer recently raised the idea that as galaxies reach the speed of light at the fringes of the universe we become unable to see them or garner any info at all from them. This makes a sort of edge of the universe beyond which we can know nothing about. Supposedly in millions of billions of years we will probably only be able to observe a handfull of local galaxies.
Oh yea I forgot to link the NYtimes article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/05/science/space/05essa.html?ex=1181707200&en=d141397a5ce81335&ei=5070&emc=eta1
The "heat death" effect comes before then.
Basically, thermodynamics implies that energy in = energy out + heat, the more efficient, the less the proportion that is heat. The problem is that all forms of activity are less than 100% efficient, and so the amount of heat increases, and the amount of (non-heat) energy decreases; eventually everything completely runs out of energy, and all that's left is heat.
Anyway, in the equations of General Relativity, there's this variable called the "density parameter"; this (usually symbolised with a greek capital omega) is the quality that controls the acceleration.
There is a large disagreement about the value of this "density parameter", and beyond a certain number, it means that the universe grinds to a halt, and starts collapsing together again (in millions of billions of years). Observations unhelpfully indicate that its near to the certain number, but isn't t accurate enough to determine whether its at the number, or falls on one or other side.
There is always an edge to the knowable universe, in general relativity - the edge of what can currently be seen (with perfect technology) is called the "Particle Horizon" [this enlarges with time], and the edge of what can ever be seen is the "Event Horizon [of the universe]"; anything beyond the latter can never be seen, under any circumstance.
Anyway, millions of billions of years is ages away, the universe is barely 14 billion years old.
And that's more a concern for deism ("there is a god, though don't know what, or who, or why"), not monotheism ("there is this particular specific god, and only them"); there's no reason for it to be Yahweh rather than Shiva, or Freya.
I'm quite familiar with thermo. The millions of billions of years was an exaggeration on my part the article quotes 100 billion which is in itself an approximation.
Sounds like someone's been reading "Just Six Numbers" which is one of my fav physics for the masses books.
My point was not that it gives credence to the biblical account of the LORD somehow, just that the idea of an edge to the universe beyond which no information is able to be garnered raises an interesting philosophical issue. Especially since that edge is going to collapse inward as the universe accelerates outward. Future generations will effectively have less information about the universe available than we currently do today.
Granted humanity will likely be wiped out and the universe will be a homogenous blob of heat by then it nevertheless comforts me that there is no absolute knowledge of the universe possible. There is space and there are objects beyond our capability to observe and describe and physics as we know it may not even apply. Uncertainty is all that is certain.
I have a more in-depth knowledge of cosmological physics than popular science literature; I know about the Christoffel, Reimann, and Ricci Tensors, for example.
Your assumption is flawed anyway; that's the limits on light travelling a linear path between there and here, not on what is possible. Wormholes are theoretically possible (examples haven't been found yet - black holes were just theoretical once as well), for example, and a wormhole between here and somewhere nearer there could deliver light from beyond the linear limit.
The absolute speed limit of the speed of light comes about because of the fundamental relationship between time and space - the wick rotation; the wick rotation isn't really understood very well (technically though, the wick rotation is multiplying time by the the speed of light and the square root of minus 1 - w=ict - its called a "rotation" because e to the power of i times a number is the same as a phase rotation). And from the bits that aren't understood yet, it may turn out that there's a huge loophole in the restriction; supersymmetry often seems to suggest tachyons are possible, for example, which if true would utterly undermine the idea that there is a limit to where we can get information from.
Anyway, this is a bible blog
It is a bible blog... hence my calling it an aside and me trying to relate it to god in someway but of course you took it as an excuse to condescend and pick apart what I was trying to convey. As you did yet a second time with BS about completely unproven theories. I thought it was interesting but not interesting enough for de jesus apparently
The wick rotation is a standard part of renormalisation - a very standard procedure in Quantum Field Theory - itself a very standard theory. Saying that its "unproven BS" really is doing it a vast injustice.
The wick rotation lies at the core of special relativity. The core fact about special relativity is the Minkowski metric: ds^2 = dx^2 + dy^2 + dz^2 - c^2.dt^2 . Note the minus sign - otherwise it would be pythagoras in 4 dimensions. After applying the wick rotation you get ds^2 = dx^2 + dy^2 + dz^2 + dw^2; in other words, all that wierdness from special relativity (which includes the existence of magnetism) is simply due to measuring t instead of w.
Who is deJesus?
If you want to learn something, then you have to accept that the inaccurate has to be picked apart. If you build a palace, you want firm foundations, not ramshackle ones; you can't get that if the ramshackle ones that are there are not removed, one by one.
A.,
That's a great sentiment: "If you want to learn something, then you have to accept that the inaccurate has to be picked apart. If you build a palace, you want firm foundations, not ramshackle ones; you can't get that if the ramshackle ones that are there are not removed, one by one."
Good lord willin', I'll have Ex. 17 up tonight, and if possible 18 later this weekend.
Krankor,
FYI, by my last comment, I'm not taking sides in the debate you and Mr. A. have going; I just like the survival-of-the-fittest-ideas philosophy noted in Mr. A.'s last response.
I greatly enjoy the smart and lively commentary from all here, and I hope we'll all stick with it.
Ivan DeJesus.
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