Sajara

So I'm slowly reading along the Old Testament and I'm starting to ask myself...

"Would the Israelites have been better off staying with the Egyptians rather than going off with God?"

They were eating bread for 2 years and when they asked for meat...what did God do?

First he walked amongst them and killed them with fire.

Then he gave them quail. Then:
The Israelites might have been slaves in Egypt...but at least they were treated well:

They eat better than I do

Cege

It's a good question, Sajara.

If you haven't already, you might want your read through the OT complimented by reading Slates' Blgging the Bible series. Here's a link to observations on Numbers chapters 1-12:

http://www.slate.com/id/2146473/entry/2146474/

The people quickly start moaning again, this time about the food: "Nothing but this manna," they grumble. "If only we had meat to eat!" Moses, sick of them and sick of his job, reverts to his whimpering Exodus self, moaning to the Lord about how rotten his life is. "I cannot carry all this people by myself, for it is too much for me. If You would deal thus with me, kill me rather, I beg You."

The exasperated Lord agrees to help his beloved Moses. But, like a very mean babysitter, God does the old, "You want chocolate, I'll give you so much chocolate you'll puke" trick. "The Lord will give you meat and you shall eat. You shall eat not one day, not two, not even five days or ten or twenty, but a whole month, until it comes out of your nostrils and becomes loathsome for you." So, the Lord sends a flock of quail, who crash all around the camp, forming piles several feet deep. While the Israelites are gorging on quail—"the meat was still between their teeth, not yet chewed," as Numbers puts it vividly—the Lord afflicts them with a plague, and the crabbiest Israelites die.

The blogger, David Plotz, ia Jewish so he only tackled the OT. I wish he, or someone else, had tackled the NT, too.

Chili

Manna is second hand meat from heaven, which is kind of like oats that has already been through a horse with Moses being the horse here. Remember there was milk and meat and here they needed meat because they were lost.

stephan huller

The standard explanation of Numbers 11 is that the Israelites did not exhibit the proper faith in God. While this may seem odd to us the basic 'agreement' that Israel entered into at Passover was that God would own them as a slave-owner. I always get annoyed when people sign contracts and then argue later that the contract wasn't fair to begin with. My response 'if you didn't like the contract, don't sign on the dotted line.' The question then isn't whether the Israelites should have stayed in Egypt but why did they sign up for the program. The answer at least from the perspective of later Israelite culture, was that they were ultimately getting something better than fish or meat.

jgoodguy

OTOH God appears to be an incompetent slave owner possibly misleading the Israelites to sign on the dotted line.

jgoodguy

Not to mention that the Israelites probably could not read nor write.

stephan huller

But what is 'incompetent' about this arrangement? The Israelites have to give up their selfishness and in exchange God will redeem them. Sounds like a reasonable trade especially if a place in the world to come is included in the deal.

I was watching Madonna's Body of Evidence for some reason with my wife for a few minutes tonight. Someone told her that if she made this God awful film she'd become a star. So here she is taking off her clothes, playing with herself naked - all for the purpose of establishing herself as a 'legitimate' film actress.

We all enter into strange covenants, arrangements and 'deals' every day of our lives. All with the hope of some 'betterment' at the end of our days.

The basic idea behind the Jewish religion is that God is a tough dude who demands total obedience. It's only because we live a pampered existence behind the walls of our heavily indebted society that this idea seems antiquated and 'out of touch.'

The idea that God or the world should be other than what they have always been merely because we as people are 'important' and 'mean something' seems far more delusional than positing the existence of a 'mean' God.

I have always found that religious belief sky rockets in countries which can't count on the artificialities of modern life. This doesn't mean that they are living in a fantasy world or that they are 'out of touch.' We are.

Chili

They were misled by Moses who parted the water to get them into the promised land instead of teaching them to walk on the water to get there.

I see Moses as a forerunner of Billy Graham (impersonal of course and an early protestant really), who thought that second hand bible passages would convert Judaism-in-exile into Israel with permanence.

Please notice that in my interpretation both Egypt and Israel are a state of mind.

premjan

Slavery and freedom/milk/honey as states of mind?

Chili

Of course they are. Slavery begins with the fall of man already within womb but is really affirmed with the age of reason. Milk is indoctrination, honey is consolation and meat would be realization of the indoctrianted values . . . that of course were not our own in origin.

Freedom is found after the abandonment of our faculty of reason to which we became enslaved at the age of reason wherein we found the freedom to create an identity of our own but that actually imprisoned us in the end, or at least limited our scope of reference to whatever we hunted and gathered to built our persona with and so have an identity of our own. The reason for this is that it only pertains to 'this generation' while in our soul nature that we 'left behind' we are up to (?) one thousand year old because the thousand year reign [of God] is already in us. So when the woman in Gen.3-6 (I think) saw that the TOK was good for 'gaining' goodies as outsider (in Egypt here) she knew that it would increase the beauty and truth (wisdom) of the TOL (Israel here) while he (the Jew here) was abroad as 'banned from Eden.' This then is also why Israel is without physical boundaries much like Christendom is without a national identity wherein 'Catholic' is the 'outsider' in the same way as they were 'Egypt'. So now we can say that Matthew's Jesus sought refuge in religion after Christ was born unto him . . . which is the last thing he should do because it was for liberty that Christ was born unto him (cf. temple ruckuss from the precinct in Luke).

I might add here that in the age of reason we chose to enrich our TOL and be 'like God' and so 'walk away' from our created identity in the image of God as God, which then is what Gen.3 is all about.