prophetic

My Tuesday class ("Old Testament 2"), on the other hand, is something I'm enjoying. Maybe because both the book and the instructor are at a level that's not as far over my head as usual, but also because we're looking at the prophets, and the prophets are pretty bad-ass. 

In the first class session I learned that YHWH, the name for God in the Hebrew scriptures, was probably at one point just that: the name of a God, specifically the god of the Israelites, who were also cool with there being other gods with other names for other tribes. As monotheism evolved, YHWH became the unpronounceable name of the one and only God, and, as Wikipedia says:

Observant Jews and those who follow Talmudic Jewish traditions do not pronounce יהוה, nor do they read aloud proposed transcription forms such as Yahweh or Yehovah; instead the word is substituted with a different term, whether used to address or to refer to the God of Israel. Common substitutions in Hebrew are Adonai ("My Lord"), HaShem ("The Name") and hakadosh baruch hu ("The Holy One, Blessed Be He").

If you're a creative reader you could substitute any appropriate term for God (cf. the 99 attributes of Allah) when the tetragram appears, and it appears a lot - over 6,000 times in the Hebrew Bible. The German translation we're working with translates YHWH as HERR... So if you know that's what's going on, you can think about substituting your own appropriate term for God in all those places - but if you don't know, you just read Herr/Lord 6,000 times and a whole layer of complexity just kind of disappears. Did everyone but me know this already?

In the second class session I learned that the books of the prophets are the main books in the Old Testament that have a verifiable historical basis - unlike, for example, the books of Moses / Pentateuch, which are more like legends. So Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt probably was not a thing that really happened; when Amos rails against leaders who "trample on the poor" (Amos 5,11) he is critiquing a society that we know existed. 

In the third class session we read Hosea and omg misogyny in the bible IS A THING. 

Plead with your mother, plead—
    for she is not my wife,
    and I am not her husband—
that she put away her whoring from her face,
    and her adultery from between her breasts,
or I will strip her naked
    and expose her as in the day she was born,
and make her like a wilderness,
    and turn her into a parched land,
    and kill her with thirst.
Upon her children also I will have no pity,
    because they are children of whoredom.
For their mother has played the whore;
    she who conceived them has acted shamefully. (Hosea 2, 2-5)

Weirdly, though perhaps understandably, the author of our textbook takes this opportunity to go on a long digression about how researchers believe that YHWH might, at one point, have had a female counterpart, Aschera, and concludes:

Wir müssen also davon ausgehen, dass die Darstellung der Bibel von einem von Anfang an monotheistischen Glauben Israels, der später dann immer wieder durch fremde Götter gefährdet war, nicht der Historie entspricht. Eher war es umgekehrt: Der Glaube an den einen Gott ist im Laufe der Geschichte erst gewachsen. Am Anfang standen auch in Israel vielfältige Formen der Gottes- und Göttinnenverehrung. Die Durchsetzung des Monotheismus geschah in einem komplexen Prozess, in dem vor allem der Glaube der Frauen zunehmend verdächtigt und ausgegrenzt wurde.

We must therefore assume that the presentation in the Bible of a faith in Israel that was monotheistic from the beginning, and later endangered by foreign gods, is not historically accurate. It was, in fact, more the other way around: the belief in the one God developed over the course of history. In the beginning there were a variety of forms of devotion to both gods and goddesses in Israel. The development of monotheism was a complex process in which, most notably, the faith of women was over time increasingly condemned and excluded.

There's a moment in the #Female Pleasure trailer (not a great name, very good movie, see it if you can) where Leyla Hussein says, in a disbelieving tone, "what is it that happened, millions of years ago, that they felt that they had to do this to our bodies?" What an unfathomably large amount of work we have ahead of us if we want to undo this damage...