Vayeira — Genesis 18:1-22:24 — “tells the stories...”
of Abraham's three visitors, Abraham's bargaining with God over Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot's two visitors, Lot's bargaining with the Sodomites, the flight of Lot, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, how Lot's daughters became pregnant by their father, how Abraham once again passed off his wife Sarah as his sister, the birth of Isaac, the expulsion of Hagar, disputes over wells, and the binding of Isaac (הָעֲקֵידָה, the Akedah).
The parashah has the most words (but not the most letters or verses) of any of the weekly Torah portions in the Book of Genesis, and its word-count is second only to parshat Naso in the entire Torah….
What I’ll extract from Vayeira is a discussion of how people have chosen and can choose to read Tanakh and associated literature, and what we recognize in it. Because most seem certain that all sacred literature “is” prescriptive: what to do (i.e., what “should” be done) in such and such circumstances. That’s an approach shared across many belief systems among observant believers and critics alike, the latter saying the literature claims to give the only good answers but the answers to them are all bad.
Answers? As if all ancient peoples must have hunted up stories to be instructive in only that way alone. Why not questions instead? After all, how remarkably descriptive simply of how human beings behave that material is: what happens when people are confronted with what challenges, what obstacles, what disasters, when they make these choices or those.
Especially with challenges, obstacles and disasters never met before, or too rarely to be good at. The canon is literally observant — the observation phase of proto-science plus initial hypotheses formed, about what just happened, how might it have come to occur, and ways people are thought to have coped with it.
Their observations and hypotheses.
To readers insisting that ancient people weren’t smart enough to be scientific, I suggest that in fact they had no choice but be that smart, and smarter than we are today, because their lives literally depended upon good observation of the world around them and under their feet, and the formation of survivable choices.
The fact that the narratives involve plot, including deity, is the device nearly every culture develops for purposes of memorability: the human mind doesn’t well retain ideas in chaotic matrix: we need rational sequence in order to remember and retell, for the ideas to be transmitted to subsequent generations, each hopefully learning to make better and better observations, and better and better choices of action under comparable and related conditions.
The texts don’t always give good “answers” and often give awful ones. Because they portray extremely human people taking extremely human measures, usually under desperate emotional pressure including ultimate threat to life. The consequences of emotion-driven and desperation-driven choices seem pretty evident. That is a completely different way for the material to be instructive.
Last week’s parasha, Noach, is a good example. Geo-archaeology revealed that the area the flood is ascribed to routinely experienced two huge river floods annually —one apparently from spring snow-melt, the other from autumn/winter precipitation— and that the cultures of the area and time were not merely adapted to floods but their agriculture and economies were dependent on them. (As Egypt’s was.)
Ancient cunieform writings of the Gilgamesh flood describe not a box but a round ark much like the coracles, or “bulboats” that remained in widespread use there and far beyond through the early 20th century and in some places still today.
They can be of fairly massive size. “Bul” happens to be the original biblical name from antecedant culture of the month in which Noach is read, and is the root of the word “flood” in Hebrew. So, maybe that parasha is our inheritance of instruction about choices in advance of flood seasons, and what happens when people decline to be observant about their climate and comply with it.
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The amount of text this approach works for is constantly striking and keeps me interested in the study. Parashat Vayeira involves another piece of instruction like that, but about fire rather than rain.
It includes a number of ‘stories’ (for lack of a better term) of fallable humans flailing around trying to meet and survive some harsh personal and collective challenges. The narrative of Sodom and Gomorrah is a story arc that encompasses several major figures of Bereisheit. Up-top of this diary is the painting wikipedia currently shows for this parasha and for the Sodom and Gomorrah article (the historicity section of which includes an illustration of a painting from the William Francis Lynch book The Narrative of the United States Expedition of the River Jordan and the Dead Sea, published in 1849, by the way. Didn’t know the Us was already in the middle-east back then? Now we know.) Next is a photo of a meteor crater. In appearance, it could almost have been a photo of Sodom&Gomorrah 24 hours later.
December 2018 New-science-suggests-biblical-city-of-sodom-was-smote-by-an-exploding-meteor
...New research finds that a powerful airburst from a meteor colliding with the atmosphere may have wiped out a Bronze Age civilization along the north side of the Dead Sea some 3,700 years ago. While the findings come from the excavation of the Tall el-Hammam archaeological site in Jordan, many believe that the same place was once known as Sodom.,,,
,,,Archaeologist Phillip J. Silvia of Trinity Southwest University in Albuquerque has been working with a team ... excavating the site for over 13 years and presented their report at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research last month.
Samples from the site show that an extremely hot, explosive event leveled an area of almost 200 square miles including the Middle Ghor - a circular plain to the north of the Dead Sea "...not only wiping out 100 percent of the Middle Bronze Age cities and towns, but also stripping agricultural soils from once-fertile fields," reads the abstract from the conference presentation.
The researchers theorize that the intense shockwaves from the blast may have also covered the area "with a super-heated brine of Dead Sea anhydride salts."
...archaeological evidence shows it took at least six centuries for the region to recover and for civilization to return, thanks to the contamination and destruction of the soil….
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How do people behave in emergencies and disasters? Some times better, sometimes worse. Sometimes horrifically toward one another. It seems to depend on how well prepared and practiced they are in making effective choices — the readiness is all, as WS’s unready tragic hero admits.
The readiness depends upon people having read or heard of what kinds emergencies the social and natural world may be afflicted with, especially in their own vicinity and lifetime, and realizing from that that leaving good choices to magically happen when the time comes is no good choice at all.
We’ve seen fire, and we’ve seen rain, in the canon and in life. We’re going to see a lot more of both. We better learn from it.
Shabat shalom.
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