What's the over/under, 'Tooth?
T-minus 44 days until the girth of Tha SYNDICATE, the philosophical heir to William Lloyd Garrison.
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Posted on 01/30/2003 8:13:32 AM PST by shortstop
I know the Bible was a long time ago, but sometimes it has a point.
Like this Moses guy.
He was a Hebrew, some kind of Jewish guy, and his people were slaves to the Egyptians. Only he wasn’t a slave, he had some kind of special deal.
Anyway, he’s walking down the street one day, and he sees this Egyptian guy just beating the living hell out of some Hebrew guy. Just ripping him apart.
So Moses looks one way, then he looks the other, and then he goes over there and kills the Egyptian guy.
He kills him.
Just turned him flat off. Then he hid his body in the sand and went on his way.
That’s pretty extreme. But it worked. And that Egyptian didn’t beat any more Hebrews, and the one he was beating got a second chance at life.
But word got out and Moses had to lay low, so he went off to some other place, where he tended sheep. And he was doing that one night and he saw this bush on fire and he went over to see what was going on and God spoke to him out of the bush.
Which means he must have been cool with God.
Which means that if God had been too ticked off about that dead Egyptian he probably would have found someone else to talk to out of the burning bush.
But he didn’t. He picked Moses, the Egyptian killer.
To me, that says that sometimes it’s OK to kill people. Specifically, sometimes it’s OK to kill people if you are doing so to defend other people who can’t defend themselves.
See where I’m going with this?
All the way to Baghdad.
The people we rescue by taking down Saddam Hussein don’t live in the Midwest, they live in the Middle East. The primary beneficiaries of any action we take against Iraq will be Iraqis.
And Kuwaitis and Saudis and Israelis and Iranians and Kurds and, far less directly, Americans.
When Moses attacked the Egyptian, he was engaged in an act of mercy and service. Ditto for any American action against Saddam Hussein. We are not going there motivated by self-interest alone.
Certainly, cutting off the armorer of Al Qaeda will protect American lives, but not as much as it will protect the lives of those who live in Saddam’s neighborhood.
Because this guy is bad.
All these thousands of chemical bombs he had, the ones that make your skin fall off and paralyze you and leave your lungs a pussey open sore, those thousands of bombs he used to have, the ones that aren’t mysteriously unaccounted for, were used against his people and his neighbors.
He dropped chemical bombs on unarmed desert people because they weren’t his race.
That’s pretty bad. That’s a lot like beating a Hebrew, only worse, and magnified tens of thousands of times.
In recent years, experts say, a million and a half Iraqis have starved to death. Not because of drought, not because of sanctions, but because the Saddam Hussein government – which can sell oil to buy food – let them starve. Because it was more interested in funneling the money into more presidential palaces and more weapons systems.
He is a bitter and evil man who kills for fun and tortures to pass the time of day.
And that would be bad enough if it were just a figure of speech, some glib overstatement of the case.
But it is neither. It is fact.
And this guy deserves to be buried in the sand.
I don’t know which way the president will go, I’m not sure what’s what.
But if the president says it’s time, I’m going to believe it’s time. I’m going to believe that clobbering this guy is the right thing to do.
I’m going to believe that American warriors are going to be as justified in this war as they were in World War II while they liberated Korea and France and Japan and Italy and Germany. Tyrants happen, little people get pushed around and dominated. And then a big guy comes along and settles the score.
It’s time to settle the score on Saddam Hussein.
It’s time to take him out. Peacefully, or not so peacefully. We freed ourselves, we freed the slaves, we freed the French and we freed the Bosnians. Now we’re going to free the Iraqis.
And I figure God’s going to be cool with that.
I figure that God wanted Moses to kill that Egyptian that day. I figure that God doesn’t like it when people are tyrannized and oppressed.
And so he raises up a power big enough to fix things. A power like Moses, or a power like America.
So maybe it’s not the United Nations we should be listening to.
Maybe it’s our conscience, and our history and heritage, and our sense of calling. Maybe it’s God.
Moses was put on that street that day for a purpose, prepared and disposed to render aid and deliver those who were bound. He was raised up by God for a reason.
Just like we were.
Only reason I know is that I just finished helping my daughter study for her Old Testament exam which covered the Pentateuch. That was one of the study questions. My brain is currently full of all sorts of useful material like the names of all the Cities of Refuge and all the ceremonial items in the Temple and what Balaam said to Barak, and so on and so on.
The up side is that my daughter is reading the Bible closely for the first time, even learning memory verses . . . which really throws me off because I learned the King James version and her teacher is using RSV. Episcopalians are not big on Bible study although we do have three Scripture readings in the service . . . so this is a good thing.
God did let Moses see the promised land from a distance, though: http://www.blueletterbible.org/kjv/Deu/Deu032.html#49 and http://www.blueletterbible.org/kjv/Deu/Deu034.html#4
In Deuteronomy chapter 33, he lays out the future of the twelve tribes, and finally, the triumph of the Israel of God, (I Peter 2:6, Ephesians 2:20, Galatians 4:21-31, 6:15-16).
Deu 33:26 [There is] none like unto the God of Jeshurun, [who] rideth upon the heaven in thy help, and in his excellency on the sky.
Deu 33:27 The eternal God [is thy] refuge, and underneath [are] the everlasting arms: and he shall thrust out the enemy from before thee; and shall say, Destroy [them]. http://www.blueletterbible.org/tsk_b/Deu/33/27.html
Deu 33:28 Israel then shall dwell in safety alone: the fountain of Jacob [shall be] upon a land of corn and wine; also his heavens shall drop down dew.
Deu 33:29 Happy [art] thou, O Israel: who [is] like unto thee, O people saved by the LORD, the shield of thy help, and who [is] the sword of thy excellency! and thine enemies shall be found liars unto thee; and thou shalt tread upon their high places. http://www.blueletterbible.org/tsk_b/Deu/33/29.html
However, word to the wise: before Americans undertake anything else in the Middle East, it would behoove them to first understand who "Israel" is: http://preteristarchive.com/TrueHistory/index.html. (It's a covenant of grace, not race.) In Old Testament times, in order to be successful before they went into attack mode, the leaders sought God's will first. Otherwise, like Moses, they often got themselves into trouble.
doc: I agree, ethnic prejudice is out of bounds and is not of God, particulary in the New Covenant. Even in the O.T., God told the Israelites: Deu 23:7 Thou shalt not abhor an Edomite; for he [is] thy brother: thou shalt not abhor an Egyptian; because thou wast a stranger in his land. I often wonder if the "leaders" stepped out of the way and let just the people come to the peace table, if they wouldn't be able to work something out. Heck, Esau even forgave Jacob. I think most people just want to live in peace, whereas the leaders often have other agendas, and keep things stirred up in order to promote them.
I think most of them are descended from both converts and the original Hebrews. David was.
Funny, I thought David was an Israelite. Everyone else in his kingdom was.
What's the over/under, 'Tooth?
T-minus 44 days until the girth of Tha SYNDICATE, the philosophical heir to William Lloyd Garrison.
101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that Internet Explorer cannot.
He does indeed, but I'd prefer to see him hanging upside down from a lamp post, with a brand new "smile". Failing that, he'll probably end up a crispy critter in one of his bunkers after the bunker busters arrive.
But after the death of Solomon, national Israel was partitioned. Judah and Benjamin became formally known as "the Kingdom of Judah." The rest, i.e., the Ten Tribes, aka the Northern Kingdom, claimed the name "Kingdom of Israel" for themselves.
(Example: Ahab was King of Israel but not King of Judah.)
The upshot of this is that after the death of David's son--the King of all Israel--the Jews wound up separated from Israel.
Think of the prophetic/eschatological implications of this! It's especially interesting when we remember that the Ten Tribes, i.e, Israel, wound up in the Gentile nations!
(John realized this was significant when he heard the words of the High Priest about the looming death of Jesus Christ! John realized that the whole situation of the Diaspora was actually a weird typological picture in which the odd circumstances of [and changes involving] the elect nation of Israel were depicting a soteriological election involving a spiritual Israel of Gentiles!
In other words, the significance of Israel actually changed with the dispensational shift which occurred after the Cross-work of Christ. The Church became the spiritual entity in which the promises to national Israel were fulfilled. This agrees with what Paul says about the "seeds of Abraham" in Galatians! [It also fits Paul's statement that the Christians are actually the True Jews--i.e., the true heirs of all that Judaism itself signified!])
(It doesn't really matter, since proselytism is not in and of itself illegitimate--and I am not sure how reliable the claims by the aforementioned historians are anyway. But they present an interesting scenario which I have not been able to debunk.)
No, I don't believe I said that. But the fact is only members of the Southern Kingdom (which was later called Judea) were ever called Jews (named after Judea), and that was many centuries later when they returned from Babylon. David was long since dead since he ruled all the Israelites only before they split.
You're probably thinking of The 13th Tribe by Arthur Koestler. He said that the Ashkenazi, who are the Jews who came from European countries except Spain, are descendants of the Khazars, who converted en masse in the Middle Ages. Apparently, the king of the Khazars had a priest, a rabbi, and an imam, and asked them which of the other two religions were better. The priest and the imam both said Judaism, so that's what he had the Khazars convert to.
The thing is, they weren't actually Slavic, but Turkic, and it was only really the upper class that converted. I don't doubt most Ashkenazi are part-Khazar. But it's a small part. Ashkenazi Cohens match Sephardic Cohens, and they look Slavic, not Turkish.
I don't think there's any reason the variety of Jews needs a mass conversion or a serious break in continuity to explain it. A small proportion of converts per generation can eventually have a huge impact.
Correct.There is a lesson there for us..for the first time he was told to strike it (Exodus 17:6)..the second time to speak to it( numbers20)..But he was not obedient to the second command...Perhaps a sign of a change of a salvation of works to one of Grace..??
Jhn 4:10 Jesus answered and said unto her, If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water.
He had Ruth in his line...
You are correct. I was making the distinction between Israelites and Jews but should not have used the word "everyone".
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