The Word and the Struggle: Old Testament

Skyrocket Press

Santa Clarita, CA

© Raymond A. White 2018

All rights reserved. Neither this book nor any part may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher.

Skyrocket Press

28020 Newbird Drive

Santa Clarita, CA 91350

www.SkyrocketPress.com

Cover design by Emma Michaels

Interior design by Laurisa Reyes

Print Edition ISBN: 978-1-947394-94-0

Note: Unless otherwise noted, all scriptural references herein are from The King James Version of the Bible (KJV).

This book is a compilation of essays written and revised by

Raymond A. White over the past forty years.

Dedicated to Cynthia, my wife of 51 years

Cyndi, you are the love of my life, the love of my eternity

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FOR CYNDI, THE QUEEN OF MY HEAVEN

By Raymond White

Here then is the length and breadth of it,

though I doubt I’ll ever fit

together words to match the feelings of my heart.

For the words I need are not a part

of mortal tongue or writ.

But still I need to choose

some words, so these I’ll use:

I love you.

And these simple words will have to do.

Acknowledgments

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My publisher ― who happens to be my daughter ― tells me that I need to include acknowledgements. Okay, fair enough. But who should I acknowledge? Actually, that’s easy. There is only one person I ought to thank for this book, and that is my daughter, Laurisa, or, more affectionately, Lauri. Why? Because without her, this book wouldn’t exist, nor would the hundreds of essays I’ve written over four decades that comprise it.

 I vaguely recall her saying to me, way back then, something like, Dad, all this stuff you know, when you die, it’ll all be lost if you don’t start writing it down. So, start writing it down. Please! And so I did. At first with just a pen and paper, then an IBM selectric typewriter on the back of church bulletins, then they became disorganized computer files, then all of it somehow became a long-running journal of sorts that actually had some order to it, then a pile of essays which are now posted on my website, ValuePlaza.com, which makes me no money at all but is there just for the fun of it, and to convince myself that I know HTML and am still a viable programmer.

Now, more recently, Lauri said to me, Dad, it’s time for you to publish a book. I said, Oh, really? And where am I going to find a publisher?  She said, I’ll publish it for you. Again I said, Oh, really? and thought, heck, why not? Over the last decade, she had gone back to school and earned a master’s degree in English. She is now an English professor at a local college and is also a published novelist and editor. Now she wants to edit and publish my stuff, and she tells me my stuff really ought to span six books, this one being just the first. Gads, have I really been that prolific? I suppose so. Well, okay. So, thank you, Lauri, for convincing me that there might actually be real value here. And when I finally do depart this earth, everything I’ve written, is yours. It’s only fair, seeing as how you’re the real creator, I’m just the author.

― Dad

Table of Contents

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Introduction

How We Got The Hebrew Bible

The Bible is Important

Adam and Eve

The Righteous Abel and the Right Sacrifice

Noah

Abrahamic Covenant

Crossing the Red Sea

God’s War on Children

Deborah

Jephthah’s Daughter

Samson

Goliath: Problem or Opportunity?

The Davidic Covenant

David and Uriah: David’s Defense

Israel

Child Sacrifice

Elijah

Why Is Prophecy Important?

Prophets

Messianic Prophecies

Prophecies Fulfilled

About the Author

Introduction

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Believing the scriptures was never a problem for me, and I don’t know why. I had faith in them at an early age, perhaps because I just wanted it all to be true. My struggles came later.

For most folks, I think it’s the other way around — they don’t believe when they are young (too many other things to do, I suppose), and then later, often much later, they find what they’d been missing all their lives and wonder why it took them so long.

For me, the struggle was not to find faith but to keep the faith that I was born to. It was not a struggle with Satan drawing me away but more a struggle with God driving me away. As I learned more and more of what the scriptures really had to say, they became disquieting, even unnerving. At every turn, God seemed to have a dark side that I could not ignore. The reason I could not ignore the dark issues was because I really believed. I wanted God to be the warm, fuzzy, cuddly type that my church had always assured me he was. But the more I read, the more problems assailed me.

Looking back, I see that there were two kinds of problems: those that cast doubt on my faith generally (God, Jesus, Bible, afterlife) and those that cast doubt on my church specifically. I was never satisfied to assume anything; I wanted to know! It was not that I had a cause, but that a cause had me.

Occasionally, someone would ask me, How do you know so much? My answer was usually something like: "I don’t know so much. That’s my problem. And what I do know came not from a willful quest for knowledge but from God dragging me through it like Jonah in the whale."

Now, that doesn’t mean that faith is a poor substitute for knowledge. I’m quite content with mere faith — but what I believe in must, at the very least, be consistent with itself. And it would be nice if God really was the nice person that he is advertised to be.

My fundamental question was this: Just what does God want me to believe in? With inconsistencies everywhere, the answer was a moving target.

To assure you, there was never a serious thought in my mind that I might abandon the faith of my birth; I knew that I would never leave my church. I just wanted to know why I would never leave. And, as I learned later about myself, that I am an engineer at heart, I just really wanted to be right.

It occurred to me at the bottom of one faith dip: Did it really matter? What if my church was wrong? What if the Bible was wrong? My reasoning first led me to this: So what? My life was clearly better for having believed, so I should just leave it well enough alone.

But that’s too pat, isn’t it? I needed something better, so I came up with this: The real issue is the high cost of being wrong. Thoughts of hell and damnation are fraught with peril, and the idea of eternal punishment as a consequence for merely being wrong seemed so unfair. How could I skirt that? And changing religions wouldn’t help. What if I left one church for another because it seemed more right? I had no evidence there was a better church. And if I changed to another church, what if I decided later that it was wrong? Then what? Switch to yet another? On what new rationale? The rationale that had prompted that first change would then be suspect, having just failed. My point is this: If you change religions, you had better be right the first time, or you’ll never trust your motivations again.

My overarching problem was this: Every church has some dogmatized nonsense, and you can’t leave them all or you’d be leaving Christianity, and the problem with that is that Jesus Christ really did rise from the dead and is therefore humanity’s only real hope. So, wherever one finds oneself in Christendom, maybe that’s as good a place as any because one can never be certain anyway.

But that argument also is too pat. I needed something even better. And here it is. Suppose my religion is wrong. But also suppose that what I believe, I believe irresistibly because it is honestly what God’s word has led me to. Well, I would then at least know that I can do no better. Of course, there will always be zealots who will say, You’re wrong, and you’d better get right. The problem is if I’m wrong, I can’t get right because what I currently believe is based on the best information available and my willingness to take it seriously. How can I improve on that? I can’t. God can, if he wishes — he could zap me as he did Paul on the road to Damascus — but as long as God straddles me with my current facts, I have to believe what I believe.

The real question is: Given all that, would God condemn me for being wrong if my faith is sincerely based on the best facts that he has put in my heart and in my mind? My answer is: How could he? And if he does damn me, I have no escape anyway, any more than I could escape the event horizon of a black hole. Therefore, I might as well stay put and duke it out with God as Jacob did. Any change would be worse. That concession was somehow satisfying, for I now knew at the very least staying put was the okay thing to do.

So, religious minutia notwithstanding, I’m here in my church for the duration. But I do hold this principle: Never let your religion compromise your faith. Believe what you must believe because it is in you, even if your church leaders tell you that you must believe something else. You must first be true to your personal faith, or, in the end, you will not be true to your religion either.

Okay. So, that was a milestone for me. But still, I wanted it all to be right, and my problem was that much of the common religion (broad Christianity and my church) seemed wrong; that is, it conflicted with the scriptures that we collectively claim to believe.

I’m not a problem-maker, and I’m not trying to convert anyone to anything. I just want what I believe to square with the scriptures. Is that too much to ask? It may be too much to ask if it conflicts with what others think the scriptures say, and that’s the rub.

I did not embark on a quest for truth; it’s just that I’ve always had a picky-uny compulsion to make the details work. And if I found myself trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, sooner or later I’d compulsively try to reshape the peg to fit the hole or the hole to fit the peg. And that has been the spiritual quest of my life — to make the scriptures and my beliefs fit each other, somehow.

And so, after decades of fiddling, I have come up with answers, explanations, and insights that at least satisfy me, though they may annoy others. My beliefs and the scriptures are no longer at odds. I’m glad for that, though it took me fifty years to get here.

Which brings me to this question: Why am I writing this? It would be easier to just shut-up and leave it be. I’ve written this and much more, first, because I want my children to see my testimony, what the old man really believed and why. It’s a legacy thing.

But second, it occurred to me that other people, maybe many other people, struggle with the same questions that I have. And maybe they have not been so successful at coming to grips with the contradictions and have not found or kept the faith that deep inside they long for. Maybe my insights can help them find their way through the jungle of faith. And so, I offer to anyone willing to read my stuff some strange answers to some maddingly difficult questions. Hopefully, you will find that God is not so distant after all.

I feel like I’m taking a risk by making this public. I don’t want to upset anyone, most especially members of my family. If I do, please forgive me and chalk it up to old age. Many of my answers are as unsettling as the questions that prompted them. Much of this is stressful, some of it even embarrassing. The sections on sex and polygamy (in later volumes) cause even me to blush — to the point where I have considered (and am even now considering) deleting them. But I won’t because I have no right to apologize for God. The Bible says what it says, and I’m stuck with it, as you will be too if you read on.

Some may consider me a heretic for daring to believe, much less write, such things. Well, that’s fine. For those who do not like what I believe, I will say this: I do like what you believe, and I do expect to see you in heaven. Whether you expect to see me there or not is immaterial. All I care about for myself is that I believe the best I can, given the problematic scriptures that God gave us, for what else is there to believe? If you have no problems with God’s written word, good, I’m happy for you — you likely don’t need anything I’ve written here. But if you, like me, find uneasy tensions all over the scriptures, then maybe there is something here for you. If so, enjoy.

Sincerely,

Raymond A. White

How We Got the Hebrew Bible

2 Chronicles 34:14-30

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All Christians and Jews know, of course, that the Bible got its beginnings when God revealed the Torah to Moses. What’s not so well known is that there was a time when the Torah’s survival was at stake because there was only one copy of it, and no one knew it existed until someone found it by accident ― so it was, for a time, lost. Here’s the story.

[1] JOSIAH

Josiah, one of the good kings of Judah, commissioned a rehab project on the temple ― it was time (and past time) to get it back in good shape. As the work was getting underway, the high priest, Hilkiah, found in the temple the book of the law, the only exiting copy.

2 Kings 22:8 And Hilkiah the high priest said unto Shaphan the scribe, I have found the book of the law in the house of the LORD. And Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphan, and he read it.

That it was found means that it was lost, or at least misplaced. That it was the book means there was only one.

This is scary to think that all the history of God’s dealings with the human race up to that point was recorded in one single copy, and it was, for all they knew, nonexistent. No wonder they had so many bad kings. They had no revealed truth to turn to, so they had to make up religion as best they could as they went along. When God instructed Israel to keep his law, that certainly implied having a copy to keep.

So, it got found. Then it was brought to the king, and the king took it seriously.

2 Kings 23:2 And [Josiah] read in their ears all the words of the book of the covenant which was found in the house of the LORD.

That’s a proper response. They read it ― all of it.

2 Chronicles 34:14 … Hilkiah the priest found a book of the law of the LORD given by Moses. :19 And it came to pass, when the king [Josiah] had heard the words of the law, that he rent his clothes. :20 And the king commanded… :21 Go enquire of the LORD for me, for them that are left in Israel and in Judah, concerning the words of the book that is found: for great is the wrath of the LORD that is poured out upon us, because our fathers have not kept the word of the LORD, to do after all that is written in this book.

This book was vital, and they knew it. Good kings and bad kings come and go, but the codified law was paramount.

2 Chronicles 34:30 And the king [Josiah]…read in their ears all the words of the book of the covenant that was found in the house of the LORD.

They really took this to heart. We can scarcely imagine the exhilaration that Josiah and the rest of the people must have felt upon recovering what they thought had been irretrievably lost.

What happened then? Unfortunately, Josiah died in battle. After Josiah was a string of bad kings that led the Jews off a moral cliff, which finally caused God to bring the Babylonians down on them. Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed, and the Jews were taken from their homeland into captivity, thus beginning their seventy years of exile, the Diaspora.

[2] PERSIA

But the Torah survived all that, the destruction and the captivity, and we know it survived because when the Jews returned to Israel seventy years later, Ezra was an already-able scribe of the law. Therefore, there had to have been copies (a copy anyway) of the Torah in Persia. And there is biblical evidence of that.

Just prior to the Jews’ return, there must have been a copy of the Hebrew Bible (Torah plus prophets plus historic books) in the Persian archives. Why? Because those documents were found by enemies of the Jews who used those documents to try to persuade the Persian king that the Jews were not to be trusted and therefore should not be allowed to reestablish their nation. Those enemies failed of course, but the point is that such documents existed.

Ezra 4:15 That search may be made in the book of the records of thy fathers [the Persian kings]: so shalt thou find in the book of the records, and know that this city is a rebellious city [Jerusalem], and hurtful unto kings and provinces, and that they have moved sedition within the same of old time: for which cause was this city destroyed.

Those historic documents found in the Persian archives must have included the Bible because the story these enemies are telling is historically accurate ― the Jews were indeed conquered by the Babylonians because of sedition. It is clear that Jewish history was common knowledge, and books documenting their history were available even in Persia.

[3] EZRA

The exiled Jews had their Bible throughout their exile, and when the Jews did return, it was their God and their Torah that gave them their national identity. And their principle priest/scribe was Ezra.

Ezra 7:6 This Ezra went up from Babylon; and he was a ready scribe in the law of Moses. :11 Now this is a copy of the letter that the king Artaxerxes gave unto Ezra the priest, the scribe, even a scribe of the words of the commandments of the LORD, and of his statutes to Israel.

Obviously, Ezra could not be a scribe of the law if he did not have a copy of the law to be a scribe of. Therefore, we must conclude that the law survived the Diaspora, and when Ezra and the rest of the Jews returned to their homeland, they brought the Torah with them.

Nehemiah 8:8 So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading.

A principle duty (perhaps the principle duty) of the scribes was to determine exactly what the Torah was. And so, Ezra and his team of priestly scribes, the Sopherim (from saphar, to count or number) set the text in order; that is, they revised and corrected the sacred text. Basically, they canonized it. Their work took 110 years, from Nehemiah to Simon the first, 410-300 BCE.

[4] MASORETES

Once the work of the Sopherim had been completed and the text was fixed, the work then fell to the Masoretes, the authorized custodians, to preserve it. Their name Masoretes derives from the Hebrew word macoreth (maw-so’-reth) which means to fetter (Ezekiel 20:37 …into the bond…), then later to hand down, and finally to tradition.

The Masoretes did their work from the 7th to the 10th centuries CE (Ben Asher and Ben Naphtali), and corrections were made even to the 14th century (later Masoretes).

What the Masoretes did was to precisely document numerical information about the text, such as the number of words, the middle words, the middle verse, combinations of words, and other such things for the single purpose of preserving the exact integrity of the Bible text.

This was not at all frivolous but was necessary to preserve the accuracy of the transmitted text ― difficult work without computers.

Speaking of computers, today in the age of computers, we do the very same sorts of things to ensure the integrity of transmitted data. Someone sends you data and you receive it. How do you know that you received exactly what was sent?

The schemes that computer people have devised to ensure data integrity are elaborate and many, and are disciplines all of their own. For instance, hash totals is just one such scheme. If you transmit a stream of checks, for example, you can separate the stream into batches, each batch followed by a batch trailer which has a total, the hash total, of all the dollar amounts. The receiving system receives the stream and verifies its correctness by recalculating all the hash totals, and they had better agree with the incoming hash totals or something went wrong in transmission. If the hash totals don’t match, then the stream, or at least that batch, must be resent and re-verified.

That’s the work that the Masoretes did. They used statistical means to guarantee the transmission of God’s word from ancient times down to us. In retrospect, they were the forerunners of modern data security. Pretty good, I’d say, for people who didn’t have calculators.

The result of their work is the Masorah (their statistical data about the Bible) and the Masoretic text, or more specifically, Ben Asher’s codex, which is the Hebrew Bible today which Christians call the Old Testament.

There were other competing authorities and versions, but the Masoretes built their reputations, and in the end, it was their version that won out and was generally accepted as the authoritative version of the Bible.

That the Masoretes did their work well is evidenced by the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are in agreement much more with the Masoretic manuscript (and therefore our Bible) than with any competing version. And that gives us confidence that what’s in our Bibles really is God’s word and not a hodge-podge of transmission errors.

Thank God for the Masoretes, and Gutenberg, and computers. Now the Bible will never be lost, as once upon a time it almost was ― (unless courts order every copy burned because of the Bible’s intolerant views on sin. Don’t laugh. It’s happened before.)

[5] THE PROPHETS

How did the books of the prophets figure into this? After all, the Torah was intended to be final.

Deuteronomy 4:2 Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you.

God demanded that there must be no amendments, no deletions, no modifications, and no legislating from the bench.

So, how did the books of the prophets come to be part of the Bible? How did they achieve a status on par with the law? Apparently what God seems to be saying in Deuteronomy is: you can’t change it, but I can!

That the prophets had equal status with the law is evident from the words of Jesus.

Matthew 7:12 … for this is the law and the prophets.

So, the prophets did have a privileged position in the Bible equal to the Torah. But how did it happen? When did the prophets receive that similar high status? Isaiah gives us the answer:

Isaiah 59:21 As for me, this is my covenant with them, saith the LORD; My spirit that is upon thee, and my words which I have put in thy mouth, shall not depart out of thy mouth, nor out of the mouth of thy seed, nor out of the mouth of thy seed’s seed, saith the LORD, from henceforth and for ever.

This really puts Isaiah up there. It not only gives Isaiah absolute authority to speak for God, but requires that his words be remembered from generation to generation. That puts Isaiah’s words on par with the Mosaic Law. It also creates a similar status for any prophet (that is, any true prophet who truly speaks for God) and they, all of them, deserve to be in the Bible.

That the prophets were rightly added to the canon leaves the canon open to further possible additions. Two such additions immediately come to mind: the Ketuvim or writings (Psalms, Proverbs, etc.) which complete the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament and closes the canon for Jewish people, then also the New Testament, twenty-seven books, which closes the canon for Christian people, fixing the Bible at sixty-six books in all.

So, is there anything else? Well, there is the apocrypha which is revered to a lesser extent by Catholics and Eastern Orthodox ― i.e.: it is in their Bibles ― but rejected entirely by Protestants. Anything else? Well, if you’re a Mormon, there’s the Book of Mormon.

Back to the apocrypha for just one last moment. I have sometimes wondered, if Ezra and Nehemiah, who were not prophets, are in the Bible just because we need them to bridge the pre- and post-Diaspora epics, why are the books of the Maccabees not in the Bible to bridge the Jewish and Christian epics? Just wondering.

Will anything ever be added to the Bible? Unlikely but who knows. Well, God knows.

.

The Bible Is Important

Nehemiah 8:8, 2 Timothy 3:15-16

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All Christians know, of course, that the Bible is important—it is the foundation of our faith; indeed, without it there would be no Christian or Jewish faiths — But just how important is up to the discretion of each person. My point is to nudge you to pay a bit more attention to the Bible.

[1] NEHEMIAH

We often don’t regard the value of something so much as when we lose it. And so it was with the Jews. When they lost their homeland, their national identity, their temple, and their sense of divine purpose, that’s when they really understood how important all those things were.

Then, when they returned seventy years later, number one on their list of important things to recover was that important book, their Bible, which defined for them what it meant to be a Jew, both nationally and religiously.

Nehemiah 8:1 And all the people gathered themselves together as one man…and they spake unto Ezra the scribe to bring the book of the law of Moses :3 And he read therein…from morning until midday…and the ears of all the people were attentive unto the book of the law :5 …and when he opened it, all the people stood up.

Now that’s respect. This law of God is where their passion was. When Ezra read it to them, they stood as we stand for our flag, and they didn’t fall asleep.

Nehemiah 8:8 So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading.

Nehemiah 8:18 Also day by day, from the first day unto the last day, he read in the book of the law of God. And they kept the feast seven days; and on the eighth day was a solemn assembly, according unto the manner.

This went on for seven days, reading, learning, standing, and doing all that attentively.

[2] PSALMS AND PROVERBS

Psalms 78:2 I will open my mouth in a parable: I will utter dark sayings of old :4 We will not hide them from their children… :6 That the generation to come might know them, even the children which should be born… :7 That they might set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments. :12 Marvellous things did he… :13 He divided the sea :14 …he led them with a cloud, and…with a light of fire :16 He brought streams also out of the rock :17 And they sinned yet more against him…

The reason we believe the Bible is because it reeks of integrity. No other people on earth so diligently and bravely documented their own failures. The Jews, more than any other people, deserve credit for alerting us to the extent of human meanness and exposing its roots back to the birth of civilization. Surely, even non-believers can appreciate that value of the Bible and give the Jews the credit they deserve for bravely recording it all. The cost to themselves was great — two millennia of anti-Semitism — but it has also assured their survival.

Proverbs 30:5 Every word of God is pure: he is a shield unto them that put their trust in him. :6 Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar.

God protects us in many ways. For one, from accusation. When I teach a Sunday School class, I find myself hiding behind God. When I tell people what I think, I make myself a target. But when I tell people what God said, then my would-be-accusers have to attack God or be silent. My defense is simply, Hey! God said it, not me. Believe it or not as you wish. But don’t blame me for what the Bible says. As a teacher, stick to what the word says, and you’ll be okay.

[3] JEREMIAH

Jeremiah 8:8 How do ye say, we are wise, and the law of the LORD is with us? Lo, certainly in vain made he it; the pen of the scribes is in vain. :9 The wise men are ashamed, they are dismayed and taken: lo, they have rejected the word of the LORD; and what wisdom is in them?

This verse is saying: You read the Bible, copy it, and preserve it, but if you don’t live it, what good is it?

Jeremiah 11:3 And say thou unto them, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel; Cursed be the man that obeyeth not the words of this covenant.

This makes the Bible critically important. The Bible is not just a book of instructions but a book of covenants; that is, a book of promises that God and his people have made to each other. And to break those covenants brings a curse in at least two ways: first, because breaking one’s covenant with God causes God to cease his divine protection; and second, because the good advice of the covenant really is a better and safer way to live, and to abandon that in favor of an un-covenant life is fraught with peril. Some curses are just obvious, yet we fall into them just the same.

Jeremiah 26:2 …diminish not a word.

Each and every word of the text is important, as Jesus said, Matthew 5:18