Let the Other Guy Merge

In the wake of terrible terrorist attacks, there are bound to be various reactions, a veritable Venn diagram of the understandable, irrational, inexcusable, and all other stripes.  I read one today about how, if you encounter someone who believes that the answer to terrorism isn't violence, you should punch that person in the face repeatedly until they agree with you that violence is awesome.  Or some such bullshit.  And unfortunately, that Venn diagram circle with "Understandable" written on it encompasses many, many responses.  It's understandable.  You want to fight back.  Who wouldn't?  You want to kill all those terrorists dead and then there will be nude volleyball and free beer for all.  Right?

It's hard to find fault with the idea, at its base level.  Terrorists do something violent.  We can't let them get away with it or they'll keep doing violent things.  How else can we punish them but with violence, because catching individual terrorists is tough and frequently violent anyway and in most cases futile because terrorists commit suicide in order to do horrible things.

Terrorists are, for want of a better metaphor (and this one came to me first so it's what you get) the asshole drivers of the world.  They seem to care not at all if they put themselves in danger of injury or death, they don't respect laws, they have selfish agendas, and they cause more problems for other people than they do for themselves.  And they get away with it.  Gah!  Those asshole drivers always get away with it.

So imagine yourself in a traffic jam (probably caused by assholes too; is there nothing they won't do to ruin your day?), being good, maintaining your lane, not suddenly cutting around people.  You're a good driver.  You don't take advantage.  And this entitled asshole in his red sports car, clearly more important than everyone else as he talks on his cellphone, weaves around into the lane that's about to end and then tries to merge ahead of you.  Not a cop in sight.  He's going to get away with it, the asshole.  He's going to endanger his own and your life in order to get ahead.

What do you do?  If you're like anyone reasonable, you honk.  You even pull forward so he can't get in.  By God he's not going to cut you off.  And you do it!  He's left stalled at the merge point waiting for some other fool to let him in, while you make it out ahead.

And you've just broken the law.  Yep, there are laws on the books which say you shouldn't do that.  Not that you're likely to be caught or punished, but you just lowered yourself just a bit.  You are no longer a good driver.  You are a mostly-good driver.

And what's worse?  Traffic scientists agree that you're perpetuating the problem.  The most efficient method, least likely to cause traffic jams (not to mention safer) is merging late and doing a zipper merge.  Don't believe me?  You can ask the DOT.  Or don't take their word for it and ask any number of other traffic studies.  Not only that, but an effective way to disperse traffic jams is to keep your following distance nice and wide.  In other words, the sensible thing to do is to let the asshole get away with it.

Why?  Well, it turns out that the traffic jam probably wasn't an asshole's fault anyway.  It was probably caused by a sufficient density of cars, all good drivers like you, which made them a bit too close together, at which point somebody, probably not an asshole, hit their breaks a bit too hard causing a cascade of braking which led to a traffic standstill.  That's how maintaining good following distance can help break up the jam; if you don't have to apply your brakes as much, people behind you will similarly be able to maintain forward motion, leading to a reverse cascade (in the best circumstances) which frees the snarl.  And that's why merging late and zipper merging work too: because all lanes are being used to their maximum capacity, density is lowered, and when people zipper merge properly, there aren't stoppages, leading to smoother traffic flow and preventing the cascade.  And crazily enough, at least according to this very interesting site and others I've read, it doesn't take many people behaving properly to have a large effect on a jam.

But suppose the initial brake was caused by an asshole either being an asshole and slamming on his brakes or causing someone else to do so with his asshole driving?  Shouldn't the traffic gods somehow punish him for his behavior with a jam?  Turns out, not so much.  The initial asshole will get away with it regardless; he'll be long gone before the traffic piles up.  And if everyone drove more in accordance with the law (which mandates following distances that are generous to say the least) the jam might not happen anyway.  So mostly-good drivers have to shoulder at least some of the blame here.

But what does that have to do with our original asshole, the one who's not merging late and zipper merging, but rather cutting you off?  Shouldn't he have to pay?  After all, no one else is in his lane, so the system isn't working.  Thing is, someone will have to let him in, and by making him stop completely you're forcing someone else to stop completely where you might have been able to slow down rather than stop, particularly if you preserved the proper cushion to allow merges.  You're not just driving illegally, you're forcing someone following you to inherit your problem, but now bigger.  You're... kind of being an asshole.

But if we allow assholes to get away with it in the name of the common good and not stooping to their level, doesn't that mean that they win?  Doesn't that, in fact, incentivize being an asshole?  Pretty soon all the assholes in the world will be taking advantage of you, getting where they want to go while you sit twiddling your thumbs.

If that happens, two very interesting things occur.  One, if becoming the "asshole who doesn't merge early and cuts in at the last minute" becomes easier, soon everyone will be doing it and, wouldn't you know it, the density of traffic is reduced just like they said it would be.  And that's with everyone being selfish.  Pretty soon the two merge lanes have no comparative benefits.  People just stay in whatever lane their in.

But then won't the assholes dominate?  No, because of the second part of the equation: mutuality... I mean, the zipper merge.  Sure, you let one asshole in front of you, but then it's your turn, so you get to go, and then the guy in the other lane, and then the first lane again, and so on until hey, we're all merging.  The lanes no longer have an asshole status, merging  late is the proper thing to do, and suddenly there's no way for the assholes to game the system because all they can do is stay in their lane and merge in like everyone else.

But what about the inevitable assholes who merge ahead of their turn, or who decide to game the system and merge early because it looks like the other lane is moving faster.  Well, here's the part that's going to hurt the most.  If we're all following at the proper distances and respecting the rules... there's very little we can do about those assholes.  They will be able to drive at 100 MPH, weaving through traffic, and merging ahead of their turns with impunity.

So the assholes win.  What a depressing prospect.  But what do they win?  For starters, an asshole who merges ahead of turn gets at most one car ahead of where he would be (yes, all the assholes in this discussion are men because, let's face it, statistics bear out that men are giant assholes on the road).  And an asshole who weaves through traffic might be able to do it and achieve some gains, but because he's not cutting people off, he's not as much of a menace to others.  Plus, if everyone else is abiding by the rules of the road, those assholes are going to stand out like a sore thumb, making it more likely (that's all you'll get) that they'll be spotted by the 5-0.

What else?  Well, because we're all letting the assholes get away with their small gains, we're safer as above, but we also get the satisfaction of knowing that even if an asshole does something in his nature, he doesn't cause a traffic jam.  We're able to adjust.  We all get there a bit faster than if we'd been stuck in traffic.

Well all of that was cool, you're thinking.  But while I see the parallels you're trying to draw with terrorism (mostly because you spelled it out at the beginning and then beat it over the head) you can't seriously expect me to make foreign policy decisions based on a metaphor with traffic patterns.  What kind of pinko commie-lib running-dog...

Let me just stop you there.  Because that's not what I'm doing.  Hopefully you can enjoy the fairly artful way that traffic and terrorism match up, at least in metaphor, but I'm not trying to change your mind about what to do about terrorism because of traffic science.  I wanted to look at something deeper.  Because when you say, "Kill all the terrorists!" you're having an understandable reaction.  As would you if you pulled up to block the asshole from getting ahead.  You're looking for a world where justice works.  And you're putting yourself ahead of the common good, even if what you're doing winds up serving the common good (debatable in the terrorism case, not so as we've seen in the traffic case).

We all want to live in a universe where the evil get what they deserve.  We want justice.  That's what people crying for blood want, for the most part.  Sure, there are the lunatic fringe who want super-justice, like killing off everyone in the Middle East, or maybe they don't even see it as justice and they're just racist.  But the vast majority of people want justice and safety.  Just like the vast majority of drivers are good drivers.

So when we see someone hurting others and seemingly getting away with it, our first instinct is to bring them to justice so that it can never happen again.  That's two impulses really, but they feed one another.  In our traffic metaphor, I bet we've all wished that not only would the asshole have to wait but that something terrible happen to him.  It's a dirty little secret, but we've all been there.  And yes, there are the nutcases who, either out of a sense of justice or rage or just insanity, decide to do more than just block the asshole.  That way road rage lies.  But we're human, so we accept that we're wishing someone ill and don't follow through with it.

The difference in stakes and perception is instructive here.  We perceive the terrorist threat to be almost existential and mammoth, whereas an asshole getting to be an asshole another day is just a minor annoyance.  But statistically, that asshole is more dangerous than any terrorist.  Would it then be right to execute him on the side of the road in order to keep the good drivers safe?  But in any case, whether our perceptions are right or wrong, it's understandable that we wish for justice and a cessation to any further threats by the same asshole, whether terrorist or driver.

I'd like to delve deeper into justice vs. retribution at some later point, but for now let's just assume that retribution doesn't enter the picture.  We are wholly moral and we only desire justice and safety.  Nor will I delve into, "Justice is mine, sayeth the Lord."  We're understandably helping ourselves in this regard.

But notice what happens to the driver who desires justice and puts himself ahead of the common good.  Firstly, he damages the common good.  Secondly, he becomes something of an asshole himself.  And thirdly, and this didn't really come up during the discussion of the metaphor but, he doesn't actually stop the asshole.  For one thing, maybe it doesn't work.  Maybe the asshole, despite our hero's best efforts, manages to cut in anyway, but much more dangerously because the space has tightened up.  Or maybe the asshole only loses one car length and is able to cut in behind our hero.  What has our hero actually accomplished?

Again, I'm not at all saying that traffic solutions and counterterrorism are equivalent, or that you can use lessons from one in the other.  Well, maybe I am saying that a little, but not so much as to suggest that because the best strategy in traffic is, in essence, appeasement, it follows that the same is true in terrorism.  I'm merely asking for you to look at two similar situations, both governed by human nature.

Suppose, for sake of argument, that the two metaphorical partners do mesh up in the real world, and that not seeking justice is the way to go with terrorism too.  There are all kinds of other solutions besides kill 'em all, but we don't have to pick one; we merely have to say that in this circumstance as in traffic, retributive action (the technical term for what you're doing when you keep someone from merging because they're being an asshole, not having to do with the justice vs. retribution thing) is non-ideal.  Your response might be, "So we're just supposed to let terrorists get away with it?"

Yes, it's true that the cooperative approach in traffic still allows assholes to succeed in being assholes.  And here's where I finally get to the crux of my argument: sometimes you've got to let them.  Eventually the cost-benefit ratio will even out and being an asshole will no longer be a reasonable thing, but that supposes two things: first, that everyone is reasonable, which they aren't, and second, that there will be some non-zero period of transition where assholes are going to get away with it a lot and you won't be able to stop them because the system won't have hit equilibrium.  The first point means that yes, there are always going to be some assholes, which means that terrorism is going to be a thing forever, because some people just don't give two shits.  And the second means that yes, terrorists are going to continue to be able to attack us, not as checked as we'd like, for a while if we let this play out.  Possibly too long.

But again, that's presupposing that terrorism is a simple model, which it isn't.  Traffic has a wrong thing to do and a right thing to do.  Terrorism has many possible solutions, all of which may be viable in certain places and times and to certain extents.  Hell, though I've argued pretty forcefully against it here and elsewhere, violence may be the answer.  It may not be an answer which leaves us any better than our enemies, but it might stop terrorism eventually, putting us in a new equilibrium where terrorism isn't a thing because we've literally killed everyone who could be a terrorist (again, my doubts).  I'm not arguing solutions here.  I'm just saying that right now, we've just been cut off by an asshole.  We're in traffic and it looks like he's going to win.

And here's where we finally get to the reason why I'm posting this in a blog devoted to homilies.  No matter what we decide, we're going to have to get used to the fact that even in the best solution, the asshole might succeed in being an asshole sometimes.  Does that mean he wins?  Not necessarily.  But it likely means that, at least for a while, traffic jams are going to happen.  And we have to let them.  We have to let the other guy merge.  We have to, dare I say it, turn the other cheek.

Because if there's one thing that can be certain, it's that without examining our options, we have no idea what the best solution is, any more than I would have known that merging late and zipper merging was the best solution without looking into it.  And this is a way more complicated problem.

We seek justice, but sometimes the world is seemingly unjust.  And in the face of injustice, all we can do is turn the other cheek, or we wind up going off half-cocked and killing everyone.

And that is why we will continue to go off half-cocked.  Because the brutal fact of the matter is that humans would rather get quick justice than lasting common good.  If we get this pissed off about merging, why should be be anything but irrational in the face of terrorism?

If you've read my metaphor and digested all the bits and pieces of it, now it's time for my opinion: the current traffic jam we're in might be able to be traced back to an asshole or it might simply be a well-meaning mostly-good driver, but that doesn't really matter.  What matters is that we continue to live in this traffic jam, passing it on to cars which haven't even been built yet, because no one is willing to let the other guy merge.  And every time someone brakes hard to stop an asshole from getting ahead, it just creates a situation where more and more people are going to get fed up with dealing with the traffic and try to be an asshole themselves, because while we don't promote it, we're certainly not stopping it.

Apocalypse Now?

There are a lot of people out there who believe the Apocalypse is nigh. You've probably heard some of them on television. Mike Huckabee, for instance, believes that the End Times are upon us and is constantly looking for signs everywhere. Ben Carson may too, given his religious background, as may others in the GOP's carnival. Lots of TV preachers believe it. Pat Robertson believes it.

And they're all so sure because clearly we're living in the End of Days. Look at the world we live in. Clearly we're on the brink.

So if you're one of those people who are terrified that the world is going to end tomorrow, I have some words of comfort for you. Just remember your history.

Specifically, the part of history (and this is good Christian history too) talking about The Black Plague.

Because if you or I had lived during the years of the first outbreak of y. pestis, we could have been forgiven for thinking that the End Times were not just nigh but that the call from God was coming from inside the house. We would have been perfectly sane to be afraid that, were we to open our closets, Jesus was going to pop out with a chainsaw and Rapture the ever-living fuck out of us (okay, so the medieval conception of the End Times didn't include The Rapture, but you get the point: if there were any times to be the End Times, these would have been them).

And people did all kinds of crazy shit because they really truly believed the world was going to end. None of this, "In our lifetimes God is coming back so send five smackers to my ministry," bullshit. More like, "God may be back in the next five minutes so let's get wasted." People were scared.  And with good reason.

See, during the first outbreak of Plague, some estimates say as many as half the population of Europe died. That means if Europe were a law school and Plague were the curmudgeonly professor everyone dreads, he'd start the first class by saying, "Look to your left. One of the two of you will not graduate." And then you'd realize you had puss-filled lumps under your arms and were coughing up blood. One half the population. The Plague had a better batting average than Ted Williams.  Even if it was just a third, as other estimates have put it, that's still hitting the cover off the ball.

And that's not accounting for people who recovered. Because recovering from the flu isn't pleasant but doesn't involve spending days vomiting blood, puss-filled lumps which leave scars when they burst, hemorrhaging which leaves you black and blue, or being abandoned by family, friends, and society. Everyone would have been touched by it. Everyone in the known world would have borne the marks in one way or another.

Why am I asking you to remember this horrible thing? Because, and correct me if I'm wrong, the world did not end. In fact, after the Plague swept through, the world improved in some ways. It would not be implausible to say that we owe the modern world to the Black Death.

And it came back. Again and again. And it sucked again and again. But the world remained unended each time, even as the worst thing to have ever happened happened over and over. And I'm sure that there were Bible verses quoted proving that, yep, the world was about to end. And there were probably people who took advantage of people's (justified, to my mind) fear to make money. It was all probably quite similar to now, in many ways.

But the thing is, the world is still here. And if you compare the world today and the signs of the times which are supposed to be so terrible with every second person dying over the entire world (and that's an average; many places lost nearly everyone)... well, I'm afraid that, "everyone I know horribly dying of a mystery disease," comes way ahead of, "Obama reelection," on my list of signs of impending Apocalypse.

So stop worrying so much about the end of the world. It's been through a lot worse and it's still ticking.

Valley of the Shadows

97 years ago today a man was lying in No-Man's Land, that gray muddy extreme between the trenches, churned into a quagmire by endless artillery shells.  He was an ordinary man, his uniform too bloody and muddy and torn to be recognized.  Maybe his comrades had left him or maybe they were all around him, lying still where he still moaned.

97 years ago today a man was lying in No-Man's Land, crying for water, or his mother, or his sweetheart.  Maybe he wasn't alone.  Maybe there were other voices in this dismal choir, men just like him lying in other soggy holes and valleys.  But they weren't with him.  He was alone, crying for help, crying for some power to rescue him.

97 years ago today a man was lying in No-Man's Land denying the inevitable or perhaps starting to feel like it would be better to let go.  Maybe he was preparing to meet his God, or maybe he had no God to meet and was merely unwilling to give up and say goodbye.  Maybe he was asking himself why.  Maybe he was trying to bargain.  We don't know.  We weren't there.  No one was there.

97 years ago today a man lying in No-Man's Land died.  He died as we all must, but alone and in pain and before his time.  He wanted to live, like we all do.  But war cut him short, a great scythe that reaps crop and weed alike, uncaring and brutal.

And 97 years ago today, they say the guns stopped.

And isn't that lovely to believe.  Armistice Day, a day of peace, an end to violence, to war.  A day to celebrate.

But remember that 97 years ago today a man died, and before that another, and before that another, a long line, unbroken in grief, stretching back to the beginning.  All those men, women, children, animals, all waiting in that gray place we want to ignore as we celebrate peace and thank a veteran and publish the American flag on our Facebook wall.  They're all waiting in No-Man's Land.  Ending the war didn't undo their suffering.

Do you see them?  They're there.  They've stopped crying out for anything, but their spirits still weep.  And their numbers still grow, as they have since before history began.

97 years ago today, a war ended.  But in that gray land between the trenches, nothing changed.  And nothing ever will change unless we remember why an end to war is worth celebrating.  Unless we remember the man lying in No-Man's Land crying in vain for his mother.

Holy Moly: You're Gonna Build an Ark-y Ark-y

And God saw that things had gone to shit.

That's basically the crux of the early part of Noah's story.  God regretted making everything and decided to wipe the slate clean.  Creation hadn't gone the way He'd planned.

Seems to me like God should have seen this coming right after Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the Tree of Wisdom, frankly.  My reaction to that would probably have been to squash Adam and Eve back into the clay from which they came and to make some tentacle monsters instead or something.  But God is both capricious and forgiving, so He let it get to this point before deciding to hit that great cosmic Undo button.

I take this as proof of our free will.  And while the question always is: "Could God create a stone so big even He couldn't lift it?" I think the interesting question is, "Could God create a world which would go to so much shit even He couldn't put up with it any more?"  The answer: yes.  So God decides He's going to destroy the world.

But there's this one guy, Noah, who "walk[s] with God."  God likes him.  And I'm pretty sure we all know the story from here because of the fables of our culture or because of Aronofski movies.  God tells Noah, "Build an ark using a large number of cubits.  Take two of each animal, male and female and put them on the ark.  Then get in yourself, for I am going to flood the world."  And that's where Genesis 6 leaves us, waiting in anticipation for the CGI tsunamis and the wailing and gnashing of teeth among the wicked.

But Genesis 7 picks up with God saying to Noah, "Take seven pairs of every clean animal and one pair of every unclean animal and get in the ark with your family."  What gives?  Did God stutter?

We'll come back to this, but remember that the Bible was written on several stone tablets that Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai from a burning bush which apparently could chisel tablets.  So what it says goes, right?

Not exactly.  The Bible was definitely not written in stone by a burning bush, nor did it spring full-formed into Moses' head on Mt. Sinai.  It's a collection of writings by people who were collecting oral tradition thousands of years after said traditions were hatched.  The thing is, clean and unclean animals weren't even a thing for Noah because Kosher wasn't a thing until after Moses.  So that's an anachronism right there.

I'll leave it for smarter people than me to determine why it's there or why the same passage in two forms appears, but I think it probably has to do with an injection of Mosaic Law into a legend from a much earlier time in order to bring some additional "just-so" to bear on this particular legend.  But it's pretty inelegant, especially since a few lines later we've got clean and unclean animals, a pair each, being loaded up.  And then again a few lines after that, with no mention of cleanliness.

Anyway, however many pairs Noah took, he loaded them all into the ark.  Possibly twice, with a flood happening.  Must have been a schlep.

There's a similar confusion with time.  The flood rose for 40 days and 40 nights, or maybe 150 days, or something else.  Again, we're talking about old, old stories being written down much later.  And then collected later than that.  And then edited later than that.  At a certain point, someone must have just said, "Screw it, put it all in there.  Better that than maybe losing something important."  So there was a flood and everything died.

Note also that the waters rose to 23 feet high, which was apparently enough to cover the mountains, plate tectonics not having been invented yet so mountains were much shorter.  I'm sure the Creationists have answers for that too, but why listen to Creationists?

Genesis 8 starts out with some more time strangeness, but suffice it to say that everyone was in the ark for a long time.  I think that's probably all that the ancient authors wanted to convey, and it must have been shitty, both metaphorically and literally, in that ark by that point.  Then the ark comes to rest on Mt. Ararat.

Except it doesn't, because we've got an interlude with some birds first.

Holy Moly: Nephilim

Oh, the Nephilim.  There are so many different translations of this passage and different commentaries, and it's difficult to untangle them all.  I don't think I'm even going to try, because I'd just like to say something different here.

But first, here's the Common English Bible's translation of Genesis 6:4.

In those days, giants lived on the earth and also afterward, when divine beings and human daughters had sexual relations and gave birth to children. These were the ancient heroes, famous men.

They footnote "giants" as "Nephilim" because that's the Hebrew word and we can't be sure whether the authors meant literal giants or just that "Nephilim" was a tribal name, or possibly that by "giants" they meant the same thing as we mean when we say we "stand on the shoulders of giants," meaning great men (this seems the most likely).

Sometimes "divine beings" is translated as "sons of God," which has led some people to speculate that what is actually meant is that the children of Adam through Seth were uniquely blessed, being these sons of God, and meanwhile there were other strains of humanity, either descendants of Cain or of Adam's other, unnamed children, and the children of Seth polluted their divine bloodline by intermarriage (as opposed to, say, incest, which would seem like the only other option, but don't judge too harshly; it was pretty common in the old days when one wanted to keep one's tribe pure).

And sometimes it seems like these "giants" are the result of the sons of God and daughters of men having sex, but other times it seems like the Nephilim might actually be those sons of God or divine beings.  Like I said, it's confusing.

Before I leave that by the wayside, people who believe in the literal Bible have to believe in this stuff too.  Because if there's one thing that "ancient heroes, famous men" and "giants" says to me, it's that we should be taking everything we read literally.  And also, they're not reading the Hebrew original, so they're probably taking King James' version literally, which is:

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

Yeah, so they're literally believing that about 6000 years ago, humans and giants literally interbred.  I've heard justifications, but they don't hold much water.  Nor do I care to make any wild theories, because... well, give me a second.

See, here's how I read it:

Once upon a time, when the world was young, there were great men, heroes, who arose from the divine bloodline.  We've already given you the names of some of them.  Remember Enoch?  He was a giant and lived for 365 years.  Now let me tell you the story of when one of those great men, Noah, was the last righteous man in the world, and what God did to save him from destruction.

Gods intermarrying with mortals?  Yep, the Greeks did that.  So did the Egyptians.  So did pretty much every other ancient culture.  How else to explain great deeds and great men?

So I don't think it's that strange a passage, really.  It's setting up the story.  But what annoys me is that clearly there were plenty of good stories about the Nephilim because they were great men and so forth, but we don't hear about any of them.  If you start a story with, "Once upon a time there were great heroes on the Earth..." I want to hear about more than just, "... and then God got mad that the heroes were falling into sin and decided to wipe them all out with a flood."

How many of these great heroes, these Nephilim, are we missing out on?  Gilgamesh has a great flood too (as do many other traditions and stories) but we also get to see him kicking some ass and adventuring.  Did the writers of the Bible take all the old stories and just pick this one?  Did there used to be whole other books of the Bible where other Nephilim fought Enkidu, invented fire, forged magic rings, or any other adventures that other "giants" of myth have got up to?

I tend to think that there was probably some recycling going on.  Likely some of the stories of these heroes made it into the Bible in other places where they needed great heroics.  But still, wouldn't it be amazing to hear some of the stories as they originally were told?

But be that as it may, we've got the set-up: there were and still are heroes in the world, and one day the last righteous man was Noah, descended from a long line of giants.  And so God said... well, we'll get to that next.

Walking Faithfully With God

I'd like to take a moment to examine Enoch, if I might.

We read in Genesis 5:22-24 that Enoch "walked faithfully with God."  The translations are pretty clear on the walking part; sometimes they say "habitually" or "in fellowship" or "faithfully," but it's pretty clear Enoch walked with God.

What do we mean when we say that someone walks with God?

On journeys, it used to be common to tell the departing, "Go with God." We have a tradition of believing that God watches over our travels.  But in that sense, I get the feeling we mean more, "Travel under God's protection, so that nothing bad will happen to you, the person I care about," than, "Take a trip with God at your side."

If we say that someone walks with God, we tend to mean that they're somehow in touch with the divine, that they have something holy about them.  After all, if you're walking with someone, you're likely talking with them too, so walking with God goes hand in hand with some sort of divine connection like talking to God, or at least hearing God.  Or perhaps we mean that God is walking with this person, showing them the way.  That's a pretty decent approximation of "let God guide your way."  And then there's the whole "when you only saw one set of footprints," thing.

But what if we were to take this to the bottom?  What if we believed that everyone was walking with God, and "walking with God," is just noticing you're doing it?

Try it some time.  Go out on a walk with God.  Maybe you talk, maybe you just listen, maybe you find a path because God decided to walk that direction.  Maybe walking with God is just the realization that God is all around us, that every walk we take is with God, in ourselves, in whomever we're walking with, in the world around us.

We're told that Enoch walked with God after his son Methuselah was born, not before. It's almost as if, and I'm not saying this is the case, but Enoch learned to walk faithfully with God because his son was born.  What more potent expression of the divine in our lives than the birth of a child?

So Enoch walked with God for 300 years, faithfully, and though we're not told this, I imagine that walking with God is probably not the easiest thing to do.  It requires a bit of faith and a bit of chutzpah, and clearly Enoch had both.  And when he finally got to the end, he walked off with God to someplace else and was gone.  That must have been the hardest part of the walk, to leave behind his sons and daughters and family, to leave behind the toils of this world, for though toils they might be they are still the toils with which he was familiar, and to walk off and not be seen again.  But Enoch walked faithfully with God and so he didn't turn aside at this last hurdle.

And I'd like to think that when he finally got to the end of the journey, God invited him in for some wine and pastry and a chat about what they'd seen and heard and experienced, the way a good friend might after a long walk.

May it be so for all of us.

Holy Moly: Generations

When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness, in his own image; and he named him Seth. After Seth was born, Adam lived 800 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Adam lived a total of 930 years, and then he died.

And then there's more like this. We get the family tree, or rather a branch of it, stretching from the first man Adam to his distant relative Noah. And we skim the hell out of it, right?

This isn't a regularly-quoted part of the Bible.  In fact, I'd wager that most if not all of the generational charting in the Bible, Old and New Testament, isn't preached on much.  It's hard to do.  You've got these men who are clearly living way, way longer than they actually did, siring children who mean nothing to anyone, and proceeding to the good parts of the Bible where we actually get to hear something about what someone who was sired (in his father's 182nd year, no less) actually did for someone.

Which is why the Bible is tricky.  See, we don't care that Noah's father... well, let me let the book tell it:

When Lamech had lived 182 years, he had a son. He named him Noah and said, “He will comfort us in the labor and painful toil of our hands caused by the ground the Lord has cursed.” After Noah was born, Lamech lived 595 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Lamech lived a total of 777 years, and then he died.

But for your average ancient Hebrew, genealogy was incredibly important.  How can we tell?  Well, for starters, they took the time to write it down.  We can also see parallels in other traditions such as the Norse, who were obsessed with genealogy to the point that, well, they wrote it down in their important books too.  We skim those parts as well, because as Monty Python has show us, it's damned hard to get an exciting Icelandic saga going if we get hung up on the fact that Thorgeir was son of Thorkel Braggart who took to wife Gudren, daughter of Helm the priest of Ljosawater... and so on and so on.

But they found this stuff fascinating.  Most ancient peoples thought that it was extremely important to your own character who your father (possibly mother, but rarely) was, and his character came from his father, and so on back to the beginning.  There are still cultures that believe strongly in these lineages, and your own last name is a vestige of this, albeit that for most people their last name only traces back to the time when their family became important or confused enough to warrant one.

So Noah being a descendant of Adam was very important, and to prove that he was the writers of the Bible set down his lineage because for them that was right back to the beginning.

Nowadays we'd be more likely to skip this stuff and go on to the next chapter, beginning with, "So there was this guy called Noah who..." and assume that people would get that he must be descended from Adam because everyone is.  But the Bible doesn't assume that, and probably because there were tales and legends of all of the people in Noah's line.  Seth might have been the first guy to realize that planting seeds in rows made it easier to harvest the crops.  We don't know.  Lamech might have been the first guy to decide that bathing was a good idea sometimes.  There are simply vast reams of legends, stories, and fables which the Bible doesn't record because it's a collection of some but not even most stories, written down thousands of years after those stories had passed into legend.

It's also important to note that genealogy was a powerful tool for bringing people together.  Maybe Seth was the primogenitor of a tribe that the original tellers of these genealogies wanted to name-drop, for whatever reason.  They picked him, of all of Adam's children, to be the sire of the line of Noah.  We'll probably never know exactly why.

Life back then was all about family and extended family.  We haven't even gotten to the origin of the tribes of Israel, but these would have been tribes too, small ones, family units and cousins and so forth.  Keeping track of to whom you were related was important.

But let's also look at what it says about Seth.  He was, "a son in [Adam's] own likeness, in his own image..."  And Adam was created in the image of God.  So the Bible is telling us that Seth too was created in the image of God, and so would be his sons, and their sons, and so on.

Then the Bible is careful to tell us that each of these men, after their firstborn who would be the inheritor, had other sons and daughters.  Why?  These people would have been keen on procreation, on being fruitful and multiplying, so all of our Biblical ancestors would have to have been fruitful.  They may have been living under God's curse, but they were blessed with many children and long lives.

And those lives.  Oy.  If only we could live half as long and remain so fruitful in our old age. The age numbers doubtless mean something too, because they're not just "a great many years," or "1000 years," (which, to the audience, would have meant "a great many years").  But as to what they mean, I can't guess.  Again, fact passes into story, story to myth, myth to legend, and then it gets written down much later when I'm not even sure the writers knew exactly what was meant.  The fact that they are said to have lived so long may be a way to show that these were truly legendary dudes, or to decry the decline of the "modern" audience who aren't so sainted, or perhaps to imply that these guys were special, unlike the unmentioned other people who perhaps didn't live as long.  But it's a legend.  Don't take it at face value.

We get to Enoch, who, "walked faithfully with God 300 years..."  There's a story here.  He lived 65 years before fathering Methuselah, where we're not told he walked faithfully with God, then after his firstborn son is born he does the faithful bit for 300 years, and then, "he was no more, because God took him away." Why Enoch gets this extra-special treatment I can't say.  But remember the phrasing there: "[Enoch] walked faithfully with God..."  That's an interesting way of saying it.  Not just, "he was faithful to God," but he walked with God. Maybe there's a missing travelogue of Enoch's journey with God.

And finally we come to Noah, who will be important later on as a sort of renewal, a rebirth of mankind.  It's the first of many.  His name sounds like the Hebrew for "comfort," which must not have been much comfort to him during his travails.  But that's next chapter.