Comedy in the Book of Judges

Judges. As in one of the Books of the Bible, yes. I enjoy reading the Bible sometimes for the story content. And some really nice existential poetry in Ecclesiastes. Plus, not for nothing, Gospels are nice. Calming.

Anyhoo. There are three exceedingly funny stories in Judges. I always love reading this Book.

One is actually one of my favourite stories in the Bible. It involves a man named Micah. Micah was just this one random dude from the Ephraim tribe. One day, this random Levite (of the priestly clan, if you know your Israel tribes) knocked on his door. And Micah was like: you want to be my priest? And the Levite said: ya, sure. So Micah made some carved idols and paid the Levite to be his priest. 

Come this one day and some Danites came to this town and met Micah’s priest who told them a good fortune. So they said: you want to come with us with your cast idol, serve an entire clan instead of just one man? And the Levite, this Benedict Arnold of a priest, said: ya, sure. So he left with them.

Later Micah caught up with them and was like: Hey, you took my god and my priest, what is up with that?! And the Danites, very blood-thirsty and just a gang of 600 bullies, were just like: Don’t make us hurt you. So they just took Micah’s god and his priest and set up a new town.

I don’t know the point of this story. It’s just really funny to me.

The second funny story is a little racist. And again, it involves Ephramites. Apparently Ephramites can’t pronounce Sh. So the Gileadites would ask them, “Say Shibboleth”. And if the person says Sibboleth, they just killed them. It was highly interesting to me in college when I was obsessing over linguistics.

I just find it funny it has mention in this very solemn Book. 

The third one is just a random throw-away line. Judges 3:17 reads: He presented the tribute to Eglon king of Moab, who was a very fat man. 

Just like that. It’s like the neighbourhood aunties and unclejis just looking at you and going: you are fat. Or a very honest kid who you ask to describe someone and they just go: the fat one. I mean this dude, who was a king, was ruling over Israel at some point, because they were evil and God was punishing them. Which is basically the entire recurring theme of the Book. And all that the Book has to say about his was that he was “a very fat man”. 

You have to wonder just how fat he was. And thankfully, the Bible provides that answer in the next next para. Somewhat. Ehud, a Benjamite man, whose only other description is that he was “a left-handed man”, plunged his one and half foot long sword into Eglon’s belly. And the Bible just says: “the fat closed in over it”. Always with the fat when it comes to Eglon. 

Very gory, very macabre. But also, so random it’s funny.

Now, go and read your Judges.

Kula

There is a Bible verse¹ that says a bribe concealed in the cloak pacifies great wrath. I think people are very well versed in this. Even if they didn't know it was in the Bible. Because it’s very basic social survival skills, I realise as I navigate adulthood. If you aren’t familiar with this and/or aren’t good at it, you don’t get very far at all. Raw skills and education can really only take you so far.

In Sociology, we learned about Kula Rings as practiced by the Trobriand Islanders in Polynesia, observed and studied by Bronislaw Manilowski. Very interesting. I forget the details. It’s not that important anymore outside of college. But the basic principles have remained impressed in my head. 

Gift-giving.

The Trobrianders exchange gifts symbolically and make a big deal out of it. The ritual gifts itself are mostly cowrie shells; not that big a deal at face value and in themselves, possibly not worth anything in the vicinity of the soap-sized rubies Nita Ambani wore as a necklace for the pre-wedding festivities of Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant. But what these jewelry and the gifting of them symbolize has ensured the goodwill and tradition, culture and rituals of these Polynesian tribes for I don’t even know how long.

It's such a subtle but powerful art. You scratch my back, I scratch yours. You give something, you get something. It is very hard to not return something else in kind, of commensurate value, when people have gifted you something. If you, the recipient, does not know enough to return the favour, you’re rather uncouth. No wonder Proverbs already talked about this. Bribes, sure, but in kinder words, it also said ‘a gift given in secret soothes anger’. Which is very true. 

But I guess we also find people who look at gift horses in the mouth. Or bite the hands that feed it. Very ungrateful. And ultimately, stupid. Borderline insane, I’d say. You can’t be very wise if you don’t weigh out consequences to actions. But I guess in life, too many adults are penny wise, but pound foolish. This way, many people have won battles but lost entire wars. And they don’t even know it.

I’m rather amused at the amount of clichés I’ve used in this blog. But they just came to me. And it would have been a waste to not use them. Recent events really have got me to think about all these actions and consequences. I have also ended up procrastinating on a number of things. Eh. I guess I’ll burn those bridges when I get to them; after all, at this point it’s all just spilled milk under the bridge. No?

¹Proverbs 21:14 - A gift given in secret soothes anger, and a bribe concealed in the cloak pacifies great wrath.

Flench Flies

I was reading Judges 12:5&6 and I snorted loudly over my Kindle. The Gileadites were being jerks to the Ephramites. To test if they were Ephramites, they made people say “Shibboleth” and because the Ephramites could not pronounce it right and said “Sibboleth” instead, they would know and they’d kill them. They killed 42,000 Ephramites this way.

42. I don’t care that Douglas Adams just sat on his desk, stared into the garden and thought, “42 will do… end of story”. 42 appears too many times in life to not care. In the Bible too. If I’m not wrong, usually associated with deaths. I should reflect more on this.

Moving on. Shibboleth. Sibboleth. These little pronunciation fault-lines appear when one is speaking a language one is not fluent in or perhaps not used to it. There are just some sounds that you don’t get right simply because the same sound doesn’t occur naturally in your language. Like Shibboleth and Sibboleth.

Or take for example, in Mizo language, there is no naturally sounding ‘J’. We have it in our alphabet because we use a modified, phonetic version of the Roman alphabet designed by Christian missionaries and I suppose we needed the J for a lot of names in the Bible that require a J. Like Jerusalem or Jordan or Joseph; kind of important names in Christianity. Even so, it clashes with the other sounds in Mizo. So these names are always pronounced with a ‘Z’ sound. Of course today, people take pains to get it right and use the actual J but it disturbs the flow of an otherwise lyrical language. Something’s gotta give, and all that.

But what the Shibboleth-Sibboleth story forced in my memory are all the jokes and even actual instances where Lusei-speaking Mizo folk make Burmese-Mizo folk pronounce the word for chicken. Ar. I don’t speak Burmese but maybe there’s no distinction between R and L in the language; maybe like in Japanese where the letter for R and L is the same. So instead of saying “Ar”, they’d say “Al”. It is an endless source of perhaps un-witty and unimaginative running jokes in Mizo. Embarrassing if it happens to you IRL. Once, owing to a slip of tongue, I ordered "Flench Flies" at a McD's in Priya Mkt, Vasant Vihar. The boy who took my order clearly wanted to laugh and I just kept the straightest face I could muster till he accepted defeat and just processed my French Fries order. Mortifying. Anyhoo. I was amused to note the same instance in the Bible. Maybe we’re not all that different, people all over the world, even dispersed through time.

To make my point, take Plato, the famous philosopher. I was reading this article by Aakar Patel. He mentions that Plato’s name in Greek is actually Platon, meaning wide. But in English it is spelled through Latin which drops the N. India got the name from Muslims speaking Arabic which has no P in the language so they exchanged the P with an F, but kept the N at the end. There is however no natural sounding F in Arabic so the A is inserted before the F, easing the speaker into the word by separating F from L. Hence, Af-latoon. Plato. Aflatoon. What do you know?

To paraphrase Shakespeare, what’s in a sound? No?

Of course the next Christian who calls me Easter deserves one solid round of Octopus slaps. With a catfish attached to the end of each tentacle, thank you.

*Esther: titular character of the 17th book of the Bible.

**Easter: a day marked for celebration named after the Anglo-Saxon Goddess of Spring/Fertility Eostre, and does not appear in the Bible.

Timetravel and Sci-fi in the Bible

When you think of sci-fi in the Bible, Ezekiel is your go-to guy. He is, after all, the guy who saw a wheel in a wheel and eyes all around. People have forever thought what he saw was an UFO, by which I very much do mean the classic flying saucer.

But this muse is not on UFOs but actually on time-travel.

So consider this. One fine day Moses the great leader climbed up Mount Sinai and met God. His face shone with the light of God. God and he spoke there and he came down with some ground rules for Christians.

Many years later, the prophet Elijah fled to Mount Horeb. There he encountered God again, as a still small voice. A calm. A peace, if you will.

Many more years passed and Jesus brought three friends with him up a mountain called Tabor. There he was Transfigured. He shone. And Peter, James and John saw with him two figures of old – Moses and Elijah.

There is this theory that floats around the internet sometimes and unless you’re a sci-fi fan, your algorithm would not catch it. One of them is that Moses and Elijah did not appear there on Mount Tabor with Jesus as ghosts. Rather, they had travelled through space and time for a dual purpose – one, to be with Jesus at his hour of need, and, two, to converse with God. And they did both.

In the biblical language, we find a one-day-one-thousand-days equivalency for God. In sci-fi lingo, we’d say that God exists outside the space-time continuum. So for Moses and Elijah to meet Jesus even when they are separated by centuries is an easy possibility. Madame Vastra always said time-travel was always possible in dreams, and would hold tea parties in dreams, calling together for meetings people separated by time and space. The Doctor often sends out the TARDIS to collect people separated by time and space to stand with him. For a sci-fi fan, it’s really not that hard to imagine.

I’m not saying this is real. It is a theory that someone proposed. And I really found it fun, amusing and enchanting.

Of course, while Mount Sinai and Mount Horeb are one and the same place, Mount Tabor isn’t. But if you want the facts to fit your theory, you could always say Mount Tabor was the Main Console and Mount Horeb was where you need to stand so the teleporter or transmitter or whatever thingamajic would ‘beam you up’.

Fun, no?

The Nile

I actually don’t know anything about the Nile. Nothing substantial anyway. I’ve watched The Mummy because that movie cast is a whole different layer of gorgeous. I’ve read the Bible so I know the Nile was once turned into blood, again something that got worked into The Mummy. Or was it on Prince of Egypt? I don’t know. Something Hollywood.

Kind of funny, no? Old Testament turned water into blood and New Testament turned water into wine. NT is better than OT, I think.

But it’s funny how much we hate wine now. Well, not hate-hate. More like that ‘chef in the kitchen, whore in the bedroom’ fantasy thing. Hate it when you’re in society; love it when in private. Not wine very much, I guess. More like alcohol. A lot of people say, No I don’t drink alcohol – only beer and wine. It’s a whole different level of fantasy, the kind where you lie IRL.

These days we call it gaslighting, I suppose. It’s when someone gets manipulated into doing something, carefully orchestrated by someone else. Anyone could be that someone. A lot of times, we don’t know we are being gaslit. And sometimes, I think we gaslight our own selves. We convince ourselves we are not good enough or conversely, that we are in the right when we are wrong. Basically, denying the reality in favour of the more comfortable lie. Gaslight. We flame out. Very toxic.

It has become a novelty to be principled. It is sadly rare to find someone who lives the truth. Wonko the Sane got it right, I think. Denial has become so ingrained in our lives that it is now something like a tool for survival. In the wilds of society.

Anyway, the Nile is river in Egypt.

Holy Humorists

I should probably say Jesus but if asked about my favourite character in the Bible, I’d probably say Jonah or Elijah. Jonah, most likely.

He’s just funny.

Consider this. You are a prophet. One day you receive this word to go tell some people that they were going to burn. You don’t want to do the job but you’re kind of married to it. So you try to do the “follow the spirit but break the letter” kind of deal and you get up and set out, seemingly obediently. But you shift routes because you figure God thinks you’re on the mission; so you’ll do some mission… just not that one.

But your employer is all-knowing. So God creates an obstacle so you have no choice but to do the OG mission. Resigned, you say fine, I’ll go do it. And you finish the mission.

Suddenly, you feel really important and great that you have done what God asked you to do, the fact that you’ve actively strayed from the mission in the first instance completely slipping your mind by now. So you get up on a hill and set yourself down where you could best view the city burn.

Meanwhile, the people you’ve just condemned decide to sincerely repent so God forgives them. And then you get really angry about it because you’ve missed a great show that God had, in your reckoning, promised you.

I don’t know – Jonah is amusing and at the same time, not too amusing because in his life, I see a pattern I am all too familiar with. My own, if I was being too subtle.

As for Elijah, he is just the stuff that heroes are made of, all that dry humour and everything. Probably Marvel.

A major drama queen, I like that he gets hangry too. At one point, he threw a tantrum at God asking God to just off him and God had to tell him to just go take a nap and eat something. Which he did and he felt tons better.

Elijah has one of the strongest personalities in the Bible. He is a bit violent, yes, but he does it with flair. His introduction is abrupt and his departure is enigmatic. He is sarcastic and snarky, but also his faith is unshakeable.

Elbert Hubbard, I heard, had said that it is counter-productive to take life too seriously because you’re never going to get out of it alive. Even when things get very serious – like Jonah’s doomsday message or Elijah’s constant war with other gods – there is a way to consider situations without losing your head over it. I am hopeful to navigate through this life even just okay.

Chengkawl Policy

I was thinking about how Jesus taught us to give to God what belongs to God. Seems easy enough. Who would dare to steal from God? The counterpart is where it gets tricky: to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s. And Caesar has so much! And Caesar demands so much! I don’t know who came up with the analogy but it is a very popular saying with the cynical Mizo Christian that a person who wouldn’t dream of taking one paise from the church would not have the same qualms when it came to taking money from others or the government. Would that it were not true!

Nothing is ever truly black and white because the world is blue.

Jokes aside, in adult life, one of the saddest things I find is that you just have to, by necessity, learn to lie. And you get to be so good at it – toeing the line, stopping at white lies and gossamer cover-ups, never fully hot, never fully cold; exactly what the Bible teaches people not to be. Be hot or be cold, it says. (Deep sigh) The Bible is a very difficult book to live by.

Unless you want to be a rather unpopular celebrity, sooner or later, you learn to keep mum. You start to selectively choose the ears you pour your tea into. Otherwise you keep mum. And because no matter how much someone revolts you, you might one day need their help, you learn to look the other way. And keep mum. The Stepford husbands got one cynical thing right – if you want things to run perfectly smooth at all times, you have to sacrifice your ethics along the way and lobotomize (or robotize?) everyone who stands in the way. Life just isn’t designed to be perfect.

And, as always, you keep mum.

Like snails. Snails do not indulge in auditory communication. It’s a very solid policy to abide by, given how much the tongue can land one in trouble. The Bible would concur. Do like chengkawl. It’s a good policy.