On Thu, 11 Aug 2005 08:41:17 +0200
  "J.B. Lethbridge" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Dear All:
>
> What about Eve and the Serpent? Hearing of course. Then Moses' delay on Mt
> Sinai (hence the golden calf -- if he hasn't come down by now he's
> probably not going to), Pharaoh (same cycle) hardening his heart after
> repeated evidences of a very dramatic nature; Elijah ("What doest thou
> here Elijah?"). There is also a story (I can't recall it accurately
> enought to locate) of a prophet commanded not to eat and then one claiming
> to be a prophet says that God has countermanded the order; the true
> prophet eats something and later gets eaten by a lion for disobeying the
> original command. A cruel story; but a very good parallel to RC and his
> dreams and visions I should have thought, despite not really being about
> the senses (although it is as much about the senses as Una and RC's
> encounter with Archimago etc etc the parallels flesh out) -- can any one
> recal the name of the prophet to help with locating the story?
>
> Any of the scoffers in the OT would do in a general way. Had Elisha given
> any sense-evidence of his calling before the boys taunted him (and got
> eaten by bears for their pains?) Looking at longer rhythms, after how long
> in the wilderness did the children of Israel complain to moses that they
> had been led to canaan (of high walls, giants, milk and honey) only to be
> destroyed there -- and after how much sense-evidence of God's leading
> them. ("God" in all these cases is variously Yahweh, Elohim and so on.) I
> mean to moan that God is now not goig to continue to fulfil his promises
> after the plagues, the red sea, the pillar of cloud and fire, the manna,
> quail (?), earth swallowing and the Sinia business (twice) and all that
> sounds a bit like one sense-impression confuting the other for lack of
> faith.
>
> If none of all these from the riches of the list is what you are looking
> for then that is probably the most interesting thing about the whole
> business. I haven't read Jim's posting yet (the one with a health
> warning), but is all this sense business a later onset?
>
> Marvellous list.
>
> JBL
>
> J.B. Lethbridge, PhD
> English Seminar
> University of Tuebingen
> Wilhelmstrasse 50
> 72074 Tuebingen
> Germany

Yes, Eve and the serpent counts, because the evidence of her senses (and the
audition of the serpent's report) was that the fruit was marvellous to look
at, good to eat, and sufficient to make one wise. The fruit thus promises,
appearance-wise, the gratification of the senses, aesthetic sophistication,
and moral discrimination. Calvin maintained that the root sin of the Fall
of Humankind was incredulity as to God's word [contrary to the serpent's]
that in the day ye eat thereof, ye shall die (or, at least, become subject
to the King of Terrors). The story Julian cites, from 1 Kings 13, also may
count (that is, in his roll-call of impaired receptivity to the signs of
spiritual truth -- as epitomized in Isaiah's prophetic commission, in his
sixth chapter, to make God's people blind). Jeroboam's altar at Bethel was
first condemned by a prophet sent from God "out of Judah." (The narrative
favors Judah and Jerusalem over the Northern sanctuaries.) The thing became
a sign:

And when the king heard the saying of the man of God, which he cried against
the altar at Bethel, Jeroboam stretched out his hand from the altar, saying,
"Lay hold of him." And his hand, which he stretched out against him, dried
up, so that he could now draw it back to himself. The altar also was torn
down, and the ashes poured out from the altar, according to the sign which
the man of God had given by the word of the Lord. (RSV 1 Kings 13:4-5)

The false prophet who had fatally interfered with the mission of this man of
God died knowing better, and thus prophesying as had the prophet out of
Judah himself:

"...For the saying which he cried by the word of the Lord against the altar
in Bethel, and against all the houses of the high places which are in the
cities of Samaria, shall surely come to pass." After this thing Jeroboam
did not turn from his evil way, but made priests for the
high places again from among all the people; and who would, he consecrated
to be priests of the high places. And this thing became sin to the house of
Jeroboam, so as to cut it off and to destroy it from the face of the earth.
                       (RSV 1 Kings 13:32-34)

God, this time according to the prophecy of Jeroboam's subsequent nemesis
Ahijah, "will cut off from Jeroboam him that pisseth against the wall, and
him that is shut up and left in Israel, and will take away the remnant of
the house of Jeroboam as a man taketh away dung, till it be all gone. Him
that dieth of Jeroboam in the city shall the dogs eat; and him that dieth in
the field shall the fowls of the air eat" (AV 1 Kings 14:10-11). This
colorful denunciation -- for all practical purposes, a curse -- seems to
have become proverbial. For God will one day send Elijah to direct most of
it against Ahab: "In the place where the dogs licked the blood of Naboth
shall dogs lick thy blood, even thine ... Behold, I ... will cut off from
Ahab him that pisseth against the wall ..., and will make thine house like
the house of Jeroboam the son of Nebat ... Him that dieth of Ahab in the
city the dogs shall eat; and him that dieth in the field shall the fowls of
the air eat" (AV 1 Kings 21:19, 21-22, 24). And Elijah's protégé Elisha
will re-direct this prophecy against Ahab's son Joram (2 Kings 9:8-10). All
of this Northern disaster derives from Jeroboam's original apostasy, which
seems to be written into the conclusion that the narrative draws at the end
of the golden calf episode in Exodus 32 itself: "And the Lord sent a plague
upon the people, because they made the calf which Aaron made" (RSV, vs. 35).
 Why describe Israel's apostasy in this double way, unless the text is
leaving us the interpretive space we need to postulate an interval of
similarity between the calf fabricated at Sinai and the ones that furnished
Bethel and Dan? The Lord sent disaster upon the North, because Jeroboam had
made the calf that Aaron made. Exodus 32:35 reads like a kind of
prediction--of latter-day national heedlessness, and of a faith falsely put
in the visibilia of idols, rather than in the word of God and his
messengers.

FOOTNOTE:

Upon the death of Solomon Jeroboam revolted from the new representative of
the ascendant dynasty, and took 'Israel' out of the Jerusalem-based state,
to worship in secessionist shrines in the North -- to worship, with Israel
and Aaron of old, the golden calf, apart from the capital built with
Israel's labor. We must review the implications of the information that two
of Aaron's sons, who die at the altar in a repetition of the story of the
worship of the golden calf, bear names analogous to those of Jeroboam's
sons. With Aaron and Moses and the seventy elders, Nadab and Abihu have
dined with God (Exod. 24:1, 11), yet they are numbered among the
transgressors who die for sin (Num. 3:4, 26:61). Jeroboam's sons Abijah and
Nadab are marked for death by the prophecy of Ahijah against the house of
Jeroboam, and they die for the religious mis-steps of their father's house.
Exodus 32 shows Moses rejecting the golden calf made by Aaron, and Numbers
12 shows God rebuking Aaron's and Miriam's challenge of Moses in the
wilderness -- God makes Miriam leprous. Moses, at Aaron's entreaty,
intercedes to restore Miriam's health and bodily integrity. The question
is, if Jeroboam stands in place of Aaron with his calves, a latter-day Aaron
who challenges Moses' pretensions and exalts himself in his place, then who
is the Moses that rebukes him? The answer is, the Judaean man whom God
sends to come before Jeroboam and deliver his word against the altar at
Bethel, in 1 Kings 13. But this instance of a latter-day Moses against a
latter-day Aaron also recalls Moses originally speaking against Pharaoh.
 For Jeroboam strikes out against the prophetic messenger against Bethel and
his arm is frozen in the midst of his evil gesture. Then at Jeroboam's
plea, the prophet entreats God, and the king's affliction is relieved. This
action is mixed in with the sign God makes of Jeroboam's stricken altar. If
the shriveling and unshriveling of the king's arm is also a sign, it is
surely the closest one in the Bible to the sign Moses was told to show
before Pharaoh, the sign of the prophet's own stricken and and cured hand.
 But the fact is, Moses never shows this sign, and it is the one that God
says will surely compel Pharaoh's belief. Nevertheless, the sign has been
shown to Moses himself.
We could argue that only when the man of God came before Jeroboam was the
Mosaic sign of the withered hand finally shown in public. As if to confirm
that the Exodus text is fulfilled by the action in the 1 Kings text, the
first speaks, somewhat reduplicatively, of "the voice (qol) of the latter
sign" (AV Exod. 4:8), while the second text has the Judaean man of God
saying, rather heavily, "On that the [= same] day he gave the sign to say
[= saying] 'this [is] the sign that Yahweh spoke'" (1 Kings 13:3). (True
signs, in the idiom of the Bible, have a voice, and are voiced by true
prophets; they are almost contagious in their effect, even when they are
rejected. The malevolent, lying prophet who induced the true one to break
his faith with God -- along with his fast -- only succeeds in turning his
victim into a further sign,* that of the lion-ravaged carcass, and himself
into a second true prophet and convert.
  (after Like unto Moses, 292, 296-8)

* Thus Balaam's victimized ass significantly refuses to budge three times,
before opening his mouth, and Balaam baulks at blessing the numbers of
Israel, which he is compelled to do three times.





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James Nohrnberg
Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
Univ. of Virginia
P.O Box 400121
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121