Tag: anthropology

The Horse and Humanity: A Short Love Story

On By Jennifer Mugrage4 Comments

Behold, the following reconstructed Proto-Indo-European words:

  • ekwo- … “horse” equus (Latin), equestrian (English) Perhaps from Proto-Indo-European ōku-, “swift.”
  • demə- … “to force,” especially in the sense of “to tame horses.”
    • Derivatives: daunt, indomitable, tame
  • kwel– … “to revolve, move around; herd stock.”
    • Derivatives: Latin colere, to till, cultivate, inhabit; colonus, farmer. Hence, cult, cultivate, culture, colony, colonize.
    • Greek telos (from the suffixed form kwel–es), completion of a cycle, consummation, end result. Hence, talisman, teleology, leutospore.
  • kw(e)-kwl-o (suffixed reduplicated form of kwel) … “wheel, circle.”
    • Derivatives: Old English hwēol, hweogol. Hence, wheel.
    • Greek kuklos “wheel” and Latin circulus, “circle.” Hence, circle, cycle, cyclone, etc.
    • Sanskrit chakram, “circle or wheel.” Hence, chakra.
  • wegh- … “to go or transport in a vehicle” Derivative: wagon

“Chariot racing for sport and ritual purposes was prominent in the culture of many early Indo-European peoples, such as the Indo-Iranians, Greeks, and Irish.”

source: The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, rev. & ed. by Calvert Watkins, pp. xxviii – xxix and 46

Yes indeed, the Indo-Europeans loved their horses.

But they are not the only ones.

The Mongolians love their horses too. And let’s not forget the American Plains Indians. As soon as horses became available to them, some of them (notably the Lakota) re-structured their entire society around them, and began doing amazing things that the Europeans had never dreamt of (at least, not for many generations), such as hanging by their legs off the side of the horse to shoot a moving target with a bow.

Basically, horses are cool and beautiful, and also extremely demanding and high-maintenance. People tend to like them, but bear in mind that you do have to make them the focus of your entire life if you are going to do anything at all with them.

source: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.pinimg.com%2F736x%2Fc5%2F8f%2Fbd%2Fc58fbde89d3a2d06c744f36f225ee961–amazon-warriors-ancient-art.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=c354c6f07bb684c13e883874b543b3b104a0db28df392ffeeef8404f8ab4f9ac

The “Parthian shot.” The Parthians were a people related to the Scythians and other horse-riding groups of Central Asia. That conical hat, too, is found among the Scythians, a people who live in what is presumed to be the Indo-European homeland.

Themes in The King Must Die: Hellenes vs. ‘Shore People’

On By Jennifer MugrageLeave a comment

source: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Farthistoryresources.net%2Fgreek-art-archaeology-2016%2Fgreek-art-archaeology-images%2Fmycenaefemalehead.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=7f3ec109d2b5fa5fc8a646dec84f0413e7fff54487f710be3ff027785a877590

As part of my ongoing, yearlong foray into fiction set in the ancient Mediterranean, I am now re-reading Mary Renault’s The King Must Die. There is so much history and speculation packed into this book, that I make free to do a series of posts on different topics from it, en route to the final book review. So, buckle up! I hope you like ancient historical fiction! (And, since you are visiting Out of Babel Books, I assume you at least don’t hate it!) Today’s topic is Renault’s theme of the two conflicting cultures of Hellenes vs. what they call the “Shore People.”

On the timing of the Theseus story

I have always had the impression that the story of Theseus was one of the older historical myths. It happens when Knossos, on Crete, is still a thriving city. So, in my mind, I put it a few generations before the Iliad. Madeline Miller, author of Circe, seems to agree. In her book, Circe hears of Theseus having killed the Minotaur well before Odysseus comes to land on her island.

If you do the math, Theseus living before the Odyssey would also put him living before Agamemnon returns from the war at Troy and is slaughtered in his bath by his wife, Clytemnestra. In the play Agamemnon (written, of course, much later), Clytemnestra kills her husband in revenge for his having sacrificed their thirteen-year-old daughter before he sailed for Troy, in addition to a couple of other grudges. Like most women, I find it hard not to think Clytemnestra has a case.

Renault, however, takes a different tack. She has a teenaged Theseus hear the following story from a bard:

The song he gave us was the Lay of Mycenae: how Agamemnon the first High King took the land from the Shore Folk, and married their Queen. But while he was at war she brought back the old religion, and chose another king; and when her lord came home she sacrificed him, though he had not consented. Their son, who had been hidden by the Hellenes, came back when he was a man, to restore the Sky Gods’ worship and avenge the dead. But in his blood was the old religion, to which nothing is holier than a mother. So, when he had done justice, horror sent him mad, and the Night’s Daughters chased him half over the world.

ibid, p. 40 in my copy

So here we have Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, their son Orestes, and the Furies. At the same time, this passage raises some questions.

The Shore People and Their Appearance

The Shore People make their appearance on the very first page of The King Must Die.

Our house is Hellene, sprung from the seed of Ever-Living Zeus. We worship the Sky Gods before Mother Dia and the gods of the earth. And we have never mixed our blood with the blood of the Shore People, who had the land before us.

-ibid, p. 1

As the story progresses, it rapidly becomes obvious that the Hellenes have, in fact, mixed their blood with the blood of the Shore People. There is the story of Agamemnon, above; Theseus is said to be “blonde and blue-eyed like the Hellenes, but small and wiry like the Shore People,” and Theseus, who is very promiscuous, even has a child who “came out small and dark, but so was [his mother’s] brother.”

So we have two populations, one that is native to the Greek coastlands (or at least has been there a long time), and one that came there from the steppes. Theseus’s grandfather explains to him their ethnic history, which he got from his own grandfather:

“Long ago, he said, our people lived in the northland, beyond Olympos. He said, and he was angry when I doubted it, that they never saw the sea. Instead of water they had a sea of grass, which stretched as far as the swallow flies, from the rising to the setting sun. They lived by the increase of their herds, and built no cities; when the grass was eaten, they moved where there was more. … When they journeyed, the barons in their chariots rode round about, guarding the flocks and the women … [Lord Poseidon] told the King Horse, and the King Horse led them. When they needed new pastures, they let him loose; and he, taking care of the people as the god advised him, would smell the air seeking food and water. The barons followed him, to give battle if his passage was disputed; but only the god told him where to go.”

ibid, pp. 16 – 17

This is a description of the Indo-European lifestyle and homeland. The Indo-Europeans took their reverence for the horse, and their wheeled carts and chariots, with them wherever they went, including to Scandinavia. So the Hellenes are Indo-European, and the Shore People, presumably, Hamitic or Semitic.

The mask at the top of this post is Mycenaean. Mycenae is located in the Peloponnesian Peninsula, which is also the location of Troizen, Theseus’s home. The ancient Mycenaean culture, older than classical Greece, took its cues from the Cretan urban culture of the time. In later Greece, you get men wearing himations and women wearing finely woven chitons. This is usually how Helen of Troy, for example, is illustrated. However, she probably looked more like the Mycenaean and Cretan women. Here is someone’s attempt to reconstruct the probable hairstyle and costume of the most beautiful woman in the world:

source: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.pinimg.com%2Foriginals%2F7d%2F29%2F38%2F7d293880174568ffd506b49b1f90aefd.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=500d8b11965e5cbdcd1de9286836a9a6b69ab9fcdb46f8991655a2c6648b4ab5

Notice the Egyptian-style, kohl-lined eyes, and the red suns for makeup. Helen might have been blonde, being a Hellene, but her clothing was perhaps more like this.

Here is someone else, reconstructing a traditional Mycenean costume and pose:

source: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.pinimg.com%2F474x%2Fcf%2F30%2Fde%2Fcf30de47e8298251f9d3ecc2976996ec.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=64a6c835ea102cac25d991e173ec53081fe8af0a6bd70db48b6d80c562988c33

I’m guessing these fashion choices came from the Shore People.

Theseus’s mother is described as wearing this ancient Mycenaean style. She wears a tiered, flounced skirt hung with charms, exposed breasts (what was going on, Crete and Mycenae?) and hair that is curled by the use of “crimping braids” (probably to attain a very curly look for those who do not, like the Shore People, have it naturally). Though a blonde Hellene, she is a priestess of the mother goddess, and so she takes some of her cues from the Shore People, and here is where we find the tension.

The Shore People and Their Religion

Both the Hellenes and the Shore People practice the sacrifice of their kings. However, there is a difference. For the Hellenes, it does not come on a regular schedule. Theseus’s grandfather explains:

“When the work of the King Horse was done, he was given to the god … And in those days, said my great-grandfather, as with the King Horse, so with the King. When the king was dedicated, he knew his moira [i.e. doom]. In three years, or seven, or nine, or whenever the custom was, his term would end and the god would call him. And he went consenting, or else he was no king, and no power would fall on him to lead the people. And the custom changes, Theseus, but the token never. … Later the custom altered. They ceased to offer the King at a set time. They kept him for the extreme sacrifice … And it was no one’s place to say to him, ‘It is time to make the offering.’ He was the nearest to the god, because he had consented to his moira; and he himself received the god’s commandment. And so it is still, Theseus. We know our time. … It is not the sacrifice … it is not the bloodletting that calls down power. It is the consenting, Theseus. The readiness is all.”

ibid. pp. 18 – 19

This might explain why so many kurgan burials are of high-born individuals who seem not to have died of old age.

It also, of course, explains the title of the book.

Meanwhile, it has been established that the Shore People do things a different way: “old laments have come down from the Shore People, of young heroes who love a goddess for a year, and foreknow their deaths” (p. 37). In other words, the Shore People treat their king primarily as the goddess or priestess’s consort, and kill him after just a year.

Marija Gimbutas has tried to make the case that the Shore People practiced a gentle, feminine, goddess-worshipping religion, and that they were cruelly exterminated by the warlike, sky-god worshipping evil Indo-Europeans. Renault is not going to paint with such a broad brush. Realistically, she shows both groups living next to one another and influencing each other. Also, throughout the course of the story, she is going to show by increasingly vivid illustrations that these two cultural systems are absolutely incompatible with each other. And that the mother-worship, in the end, is at least as bloody as the worship of Zeus.

Renault’s take on the story of Agamemnon is a great illustration of this. She interprets the story as a conflict between Clytemnestra’s mother-goddess culture and Agamemnon’s sky-father culture. When Clytemnestra brings back the “old religion,” it means that Agamemnon must die–not in battle, not some day, but now, and actually, yesterday. It means that Orestes is doubly cursed. He has loyalty to both religions, with their incompatible demands, and he is put at the mercy of the furies, the representatives of the goddess-religion. They chase him because he killed his mother, but if we string out the implications, even if he had not, they would probably be chasing him anyway. After all, he is a male heir to the throne, so his days are definitely numbered. Behold, the kindness of the religion of the goddess.

Obviously, there are some universal truths and some redemptive metaphors here, hidden under a thick layer of occultism, war between the sexes, and general pain and suffering for everyone. It is going to take a much greater King than Theseus to cut this difficult knot.

Seasonal Postscript

Oh, and Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone! Such a romantic post, I realize.

Oh, Rats!

On By Jennifer Mugrage1 Comment

You can read the incident that this is a reference to, in I Samuel chapters 4 – 6.

The Philistines were a culturally Aegean/Mycenaean people who had settled along the coast of Canaan. Though culturally Greek, they spoke a Semitic language. Their god, Dagon, was a man/fish god who had antecedents going all the way back to Sumeria.

The genre of these particular chapters of Scripture might be described as dark comedy. It’s a unique story, because it presents the reaction of an Aegean people when confronted with the God of Israel. The story is told in a Hebrew historical record, but the amount of detail means that the Hebrew chronicler must have had spies or eyewitness accounts.

The Philistines, though, or perhaps because, they are pagans, are pretty canny. They start out thinking they have won a victory over the Israelites by capturing their god, but it doesn’t take them too long to figure out that this God is trouble, and to ascertain, by process of elimination, what He wants.

Or you could say that God is very adept at communicating with the Philistines.

A Monster Theology Post about the Three Types of Old Testament Law, because it is Theology November

On By Jennifer MugrageLeave a comment

A writing prompt from the Internet

Sometimes, you get into a discussion in a comments section that clearly is beyond the scope of the comments section, both because a) it requires really long comments, b) with footnotes, and c) your interlocutor is not actually going to be convinced. In other words, this discussion ought to be a persuasive essay instead.

When you have a theology blog, this is nothing but good news.

I recently got into such a discussion.

The context: Doug Wilson’s interview with Ross Douthat. Douthat asks Wilson whether, in his ideal Christian Republic 500 years from now, every sin would be against the law. Wilson makes the helpful distinction between sins and crimes. Not every sin should be against the law, he says. Failure to understand this concept got the Puritans into trouble, but we have learned a lot since then. Wilson then goes on to mention the well-known classification of “three types of law” found in the Old Testament: the moral law (universal, binding on all individuals before God), the civil law (what was legal and illegal in the kingdom of Israel, and with what civil penalties), and the ceremonial law (regulations having to do with the Temple, the sacrificial system, and various purity laws such as food laws). If you have been around Christian circles, particularly Reformed circles, you will have heard this distinction. (Edit: I’m now not sure whether Wilson brought up the three categories of law in the video, or whether it came up in the comments as we discussed the distinction he was making between sin and crime.)

Now we come to the commenter who kindly gave me a prompt for this essay. I don’t even know whether this person is man or a woman, but I’m going to call him Rufus.

Rufus says,

The problem is that the distinction [between sin and crime] is always arbitrary, and tends to align with the cultural norms of a particular period of time (e.g. USA in the 1950s).

The inconvenient fact is that moral/civil/ceremonial law distinctions are not in the text, either explicitly or implicitly based on the arrangement (e.g. if you read straight through Leviticus and Deuteronomy, you will find yourself constantly flipping between categories, sometimes verse to verse, without any indication you should be doing so.)

What you are doing is looking at the text vs. normative Christian practice and trying to figure out a system that explains why we follow some of the commandments and not others. Then once you have devised the system, you apply it to the text and say that’s why we follow these and not those. This is a circular argument. The fact you can’t explain satisfactorily how Matthew 5:18 – 20 fits with normative Christian practice is why the Hebrew Roots movement exists. Their position is wrong, but it’s totally reasonable given the premises they’re starting with.

Thanks for the prompt, Rufus. This will give us a lot to chew on.

The trickiness of not knowing who you’re talking to

First, let me clear up just a few simple misunderstandings that Rufus can hardly be blamed for.

Rufus mentions, or implies, that Wilson is just taking a sentimental look back at 1950s America and assuming that, if he can get his Christian republic to look like that, he will have applied the law of God in a culturally appropriate way. Now, it happens that Wilson, in this interview and elsewhere, does mention 50s & 60s America as a place he remembers fondly. He usually brings it up in order to make the point that sodomy was banned back then, and yet America did not resemble the Handmaid’s Tale, which must mean laws against sodomy don’t necessarily produce that kind of society.

However, if Rufus knew Wilson a little better, he would know that Wilson does not look back at the 1950s with a sentimental and uncritical eye. In fact, Wilson has compared the position of the U.S. in the 1950s to that of someone who has just fallen out of an airplane, but is still only a yard below it. Now, we are approaching the ground, but going back to one yard below the plane, if we could do such a thing, would not help in the long run.

If Rufus knew the neoReformed world from within Wilson is writing even better, he would know that, when we do romanticize historical eras, it ain’t the 1950s we usually choose. It’s more likely to be Jane Austen’s England, or Knox’s Scotland, or Jonathan Edwards’s Puritan New England. This shows that Rufus does not really know who he is talking to. He can hardly be blamed for this, on the Internet, but if he wants to attain a “touche” moment, he needs to find out the actual position of his interlocutor, not talk to somebody he has in his mind (maybe a Southern Baptist?).

Then Rufus says to me (or perhaps it’s a general “you”), “What you are doing is looking at the text vs. normative Christian practice and trying to figure out a system that explains why we follow some of the commandments and not others. Then once you have devised the system, you apply it to the text and say that’s why we follow these and not those. This is a circular argument.”

Why yes, it would be a circular argument, if that were something I was doing. And perhaps there are some people who do that, and these are the people Rufus had in mind as the intended audience for his comment. However, I am not those people. I am a person who lived overseas, trying to get a Bible translation movement started in jungle area that boasted a lot of paganism still, a strong Muslim presence as well, and heavy influence from Christian norms that were not American Christian norms. Both before and after living there, I took anthropology and missiology classes where almost all we did was discuss how the Bible can and should be applied in different cultural contexts. I’ve prayed with native people who use their language’s name for the Creator (Mohotara), and it was glorious. I’ve attended a traditional dance ceremony that had been adapted for Christian purposes to give thanks for something. I’ve listened to people discuss whether Christians can keep in their homes heirlooms that were once used for pagan purposes, and what happens when a Muslim man with multiple wives converts to Christianity.

So no, Rufus, if I was the intended audience for your comment, you have me wrong. I was not just taking a received American Christian practice and backfilling it to make it look biblical. But there is no way you could be expected to know this. After all, I don’t even know whether you are a man or a woman.

O.K., so my claim is that people who talk about the three categories of the Law are not just arguing in a circle, or justifying sentimentality or lazy thinking. What is our biblical argument, then? Let’s address Rufus’s exegetical objections.

Rufus is right … sort of

First, let me say that Rufus is technically right in his comments about Leviticus and Deuteronomy:

The inconvenient fact is that moral/civil/ceremonial law distinctions are not in the text, either explicitly or implicitly based on the arrangement (e.g. if you read straight through Leviticus and Deuteronomy, you will find yourself constantly flipping between categories, sometimes verse to verse, without any indication you should be doing so.)

Rufus 100% is correct that nowhere in the Law are there headings that say “Moral Law,” “Civil Law,” or “Ceremonial Law.” He is also correct that all these three types of commands tend to be mixed together, and sometimes it’s hard to tell which one a given commandment is. In this essay, I will argue that his correctness about the distinctions being “not in the text” only holds if you confine yourself to the texts of the actual commands, ignore the narrative parts, ignore the New Testament, and play dumb.

Mysterious Accounts and Emerging Distinctions

First, let’s acknowledge that the Books of the Law (Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) strike the modern person as disorganized. These books toggle back and forth between law and narrative. They give the Ten Commandments, and then a bunch of differing elaborations on them in different places, organized in different ways depending upon the book, the passage, and what is foregrounded after the narrative that just took place. Sometimes, Israel acts up, God says He’s going to reject them, Moses talks Him around, and then all the commands are repeated as they are reiterated. In Numbers, new applications and case law are given as new situations arise (for example, how inheritance should work if a man has only daughters). Some of the annual ceremonies (not to mention the daily ceremonies) work differently when the people of Israel were dwelling in tents with the Tabernacle right there, versus when they were living on their homesteads throughout the land, days, or weeks’ journey from the Tabernacle and later the Temple. So, no, the laws are not organized and laid out conveniently, the way modern people would like a code of laws to be. In some ways, they are more like a tribal history, which is how laws often worked back then.

In fact, I’ll do you one better. The narrative accounts from the times of the patriarchs and Exodus are also mysterious and confusing. All this was so long ago, and so little is known about the context, that it can be difficult to re-construct, for example, Israel’s exact route out of Egypt, despite the many, now obsolete, place-names given. So yes, this is an ancient, ancient document, not a simple user’s manual.

But the distinction between ceremonial, civil, and moral law is far from the only distinction that was not present in the ancient mind, and emerged over time with progressive revelation. Another great example of this would be the doctrine of the Trinity. In the Old Testament, we often see the LORD appearing as a man. Sometimes “the Angel of the LORD” does the same thing, and very occasionally, such as in Genesis 18, we see them together. (See Michael Heiser and his discussion of “two powers in heaven” in his book The Unseen Realm.) We also see “the spirit of the LORD” coming upon people in the Old Testament. The result was usually that they prophesied, or had a kind of battle madness come upon them. Thousands of years later, in the New Testament, we see Jesus say that He is God’s Son, and that “I and the Father are one.” We see the Spirit come down upon Jesus in the form of a dove. In John 15 and 16, Jesus talks openly about both the Father and the Spirit. Finally, in Matthew 28, we get “Baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” You could not get trinitarian doctrine out of just Leviticus and Deuteronomy, but if you take the whole Bible as inspired, you can’t avoid it.

C.S. Lewis has said somewhere, I think in The Abolition of Man, that the ancient mind did not make a distinction between spiritual and physical. When ancient people saw a king’s throne, for example, they reacted to it as a totality. The physical throne and the concept of majesty and authority were one thing. As time has gone by, and humanity has made a sharper and sharper distinction between physical and spiritual, we can readily infer when the ancients were talking about one, the other, or both.

In the same way, once we have been given the “three categories of law” as a tool to help us in reading Leviticus, it’s usually pretty easy to tell which kind we are looking at. Civil laws usually come with some kind of civil penalty, anything from remuneration to death. Moral laws are usually just commands: “If you see the donkey of one who hates you falling down under its load, do not leave it there; be sure to help him with it.” (Ex. 23:5) Ceremonial laws are often prescriptions of how to handle ceremonial objects and what sacrifices to offer; the subclass of ceremonial laws called purity laws usually come with some kind of purification ritual if someone becomes “unclean.” All this may not be explicit, but neither is it arbitrary.

Now, we acknowledge that these categories are not completely watertight in the context of ancient Israel. Some offenses are both civil and ceremonial, and these often call for death. Examples would be a wide range of sexual offenses that not only wrong the victim, but also defile the nation and dishonor God. Some offenses are just ceremonial but not civil or moral: touching a dead body. Some are both moral and civil (false testimony in court), where others are just moral (envy, gossip). Having said all this, you can usually tell the category(-ies) of the offense by using common sense.

Also – ahem – the New Testament

Finally, I’d like to call Rufus’s attention to the fact that the New Testament exists. The question of the difference between a sin and a crime, and of what parts of the Old Testament Law were binding on non-Jewish believers, occupies large swathes of the New Testament. I mean large swathes. This is discussed at length.

The entire book of Hebrews establishes that the ceremonial law was a preparation for Christ, was fulfilled by Christ, and now is no longer necessary. Hebrews was written not too long before the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. It warns repeatedly that the whole sacrificial system is “passing away.” Galatians discusses at length whether circumcision, a purity ordinance designed to differentiate Israel from other peoples, is necessary for a Christian to practice (answer: No). Large chunks of Acts are devoted to early believers trying to figure out which parts of the Law are binding on Gentile converts to Christianity. God Himself reveals to Peter that the food laws no longer apply. This gives us a pretty good case that the ceremonial laws associated with temple system, and the purity laws associated with separateness, are their own category.

But there were some prohibitions that were moral, civil, and ceremonial offenses in old Israel, which now are just moral offenses. Fornication, adultery, and sex with temple prostitutes are prime examples. These things were legal in the Roman empire. They are not ceremonial offenses for Gentiles who are no longer under the ceremonial law. But Paul is at some pains to point out in his letters that they are still moral offenses against God. (“Then they should not be illegal in a Christian republic!” Whether they should be civil offenses, they were not in the Roman empire. This shows there is a distinction between moral law and a civil law.)

There is also a fair amount of discussion in the New Testament as to what should be the Christian’s relationship to the civil magistrate — the legal system of the country they live in. In Luke 3:14, when Roman soldiers ask John what they should do to demonstrate repentance, he doesn’t tell them to quit working for Empire, but he tells them not to be corrupt and oppressive. Paul says that Christians should be known as law-abiding (Romans 13:4). He seems to feel that the civil magistrate has actual real authority to enforce civil laws, but that he should not get involved in disputes within the church (I Cor. 6). Similarly, Jesus tells us that paying taxes to pay for law enforcement and national defense should not burden our conscience (Matthew 22:15ff). If someone who has legal authority over others becomes a Christian, Paul (Philemon 1 – 25) and Jesus (Matt. 24:48) say that they should use their authority to do good. Jesus also says that we should use our wealth to do good (Luke 16:9). The general picture is of two different spheres of authority, which overlap in commonsense ways. A Christian may have to engage in civil disobedience if ordered to bow down to the golden statue, but he is not culpable merely by virtue of participating in the system in which he finds himself, and should be law-abiding except in extraordinary circumstances. A Christian who finds himself with some civil power should use that power like a Christian: don’t be corrupt (the prohibition on taking bribes goes all the way back to Exodus), and try to use your influence to do as much good as possible. Long-term, this was going to lead to things like the abolition of sex slavery, then polygamy and wife-beating, and then slavery in general. But the early church could not dream of such influence.

In sum, the New Testament has a lot to tell us about ceremonial, moral, and civil law, but it is not neatly organized. It is in the form of letters and narrative history.

Looking Matthew 5:17 – 22 in the face

So now we can address Rufus’s claim that “you can’t explain satisfactorily how Matthew 5:18 – 20 fits with normative Christian practice.”

I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Anyone who breaks one of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

You are right, Rufus, but again, you are only right if we squint and play dumb. I can certainly explain it if you back up and include Matthew 5:17:

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.

Jesus fulfills the Law and the Prophets. How does He do it? By being the last High Priest we’ll ever need (Hebrews 7), the last sacrificial lamb we’ll ever need (John 1:29), the true temple (John 2:19 – 22), the true Ark (I Peter 3:20 – 21), the one for whom the prophets searched intently (I Peter 1:10 – 12), the second Adam (Romans 5:12 – 21), and so on. When His ongoing work is done, then “everything will be accomplished.” At the moment, He has accomplished a lot of it, including making the ceremonial law obsolete. At the time He was speaking in Matthew 5, He had not yet accomplished a lot of this, so the ceremonial Law was still in full force. For a little while.

Jesus did take major issue with how the Law was being applied (all out of emphasis, and contrary to its own spirit). He had been so outspoken about this that some people got the impression He was throwing out the whole thing, and they didn’t know whether to be excited or terrified. In Matthew 5:17 – 22, Jesus hastens to clarify that He is still on the side of the Lawgiver. He wanted us to know that, although large parts of the Law were shortly going to be “accomplished,” they were never going to become wrong. That book is closed, you might say, but it is not burned. It will never be the case that God was wrong to give the Law He gave to the ancient Israelites. It will never be the case that that Law was not good. We cannot accuse God of giving an imperfect Law, which I think is the main point of this passage.

O.K., that’s it. Rufus, if you’re out there, you say that you have looked into these issues deeply, “for decades.” I don’t know what your experience has been. Clearly, it has differed from mine. I hope we can stop talking past each other.

Farmlands and Paganism

On By Jennifer Mugrage1 Comment

Besides growing up around farms and reading a lot of literature set there, I’ve always kind of craved traditions, folk costumes, and folk practices. It’s not because I like being circumscribed in everything I do–I’m kind of a free spirit actually–but because I sensed these traditions and customs and bits of folk wisdom represented a thick culture, rooted in the distant past, that I as an American lacked. Traditional ways, whatever they were and wherever I read about them, seemed at the same time intriguingly exotic, and almost familiar.

In eastern Pennsylvania, where I spent my earliest years, many of the farmers were Pennsylvania Dutch–i.e., German immigrants. They had their own language, a dialect of German that my dad was able to pick up due to having majored in German. They had their own foods, like shoefly pie and scrapple. And they had a little, tiny bit of superstition: hex signs painted on barns. As a kid, I knew that these pretty little designs were called hex signs, but I had no idea of the connection between the word hex and spells or witches.

The Pennsylvania Dutch were nominally Christian, though I understand from my dad that they, like the Amish, often had a shallow and moralistic understanding of the Bible, and in fact sometimes didn’t have a Bible in a language they could read.

Despite their attractions, the Germans were to me among the least interesting of pagan farmers. I was more interested in British, Scots, and Irish folklore. It seemed warmer and more colorful somehow, and we had plenty of that around too, being in the Appalachians. It was also readily available in literature.

The connections between farming, weather-watching, astronomy, and European pagan religion are ancient and obvious. Here is Will Durant on Roman practices:

When [the Roman peasant] left the house he found himself again and everywhere in the presence of the gods. The earth itself was a deity: sometimes Tellus, or Terra Mater–Mother Earth; sometimes Mars as the very soil he trod, and its divine fertility; sometimes Bona Dea, the Good Goddess who gave rich wombs to women and fields. On the farm there was a helping god for every task or spot: Pomona for orchards, Faunus for cattle, Pales for pasturage, Sterculus for manure heaps, Saturn for sowing, Ceres for crops, Fornax for baking corn in the oven, Vulcan for making fire. Over the boundaries presided the great god Terminus, imaged and worshiped in the stones or trees that marked the limits of the farm. … Every December the Lares of the soil were worshiped in the joyful Feast of the Crossroads, or Compitalia; every January rich gifts sought the favor of Tellus for all planted things; every May the priests of the Arval (or Plowing) Brotherhood led a chanting procession along the boundaries of adjoining farms, garlanded the stones with flowers, sprinkled them with the blood of sacrificial victims, and prayed to Mars (the earth) to bear generous fruit.

Caesar and Christ, p. 59

Farming is so labor-intensive, so high-stakes, so heartbreaking, so subject to factors beyond human control, that it tends to produce nervous and conservative people. It would be impossible to engage in it for generations without coming to a profound humility before whatever entity you have been led to believe determines whether your whole year of work will be wiped out within a few days. For Christian farmers, that entity is the One who owns the cattle on a thousand hills. For post-Christian farmers, such as Wendell Berry, it’s the earth itself, I suppose, the environment. For pagans, it’s not hard to understand why they might be reluctant to let go of all the little rituals that stand between them and disaster.

Thus, paganism hangs on longer among country folk than in the city. If you want your eyeballs to be assaulted with an astonishing variety of pagan superstitions still proudly held by modern Americans, go get yourself a Farmer’s Almanac and look in the classifieds section.

“But modern Americans are returning to paganism!” you say. “It’s part of the New Age. It’s trendy, not traditional.”

Don’t I know it. I have met a few neopagans in my day. The one I knew best, was raised in a nominally Roman Catholic home. She was innovating with her paganism, part of the modern self-worshipping, I’ll-make-it-up-as-I-go ethos. The neopagans in the back pages of The Farmer’s Almanac don’t give me that vibe. I could be wrong, but it seems like they never left.

Where is the line between weather-watching, paying attention to the phases of the moon when you plant, following the zodiac along with the yearly calendar, hiring a water-witch, hanging a horseshoe over your door to protect your entryway with iron, and full-on pagan worship? How much of it is science, and how much is just doing things the way your mother did them? And how many “mindlessly followed” folk traditions turn out to have a sound scientific basis?

I’m guessing that Christian farmers in the modern age may have given up some valuable folk knowledge in an effort to avoid idolatry. Idolatry is a deadly poison, though, so no doubt, the sacrifice is worth it. If your eye cause you to sin, pluck it out. I hope that, as the generations roll by, we can build a culture that’s even richer than the pagan one we left behind.

Quote: Indirect Communication II

On By Jennifer MugrageLeave a comment

Lena is rocked by the strength of her urge to give Trey [all the information] she has. For generations, this townland has been begging for someone to come along and defy it wholesale, blow all its endless, unbreakable, unspoken rules to smithereens and let everyone choke on the dust. If Trey has the spine and the will to do it, she deserves the chance. Lena only wishes she had got there herself, back when she was young enough and wild enough to throw everything else away.

Tana French, The Hunter, p. 402

I Like Farmlands

On By Jennifer Mugrage6 Comments

This is a view of my neighbor’s house on a smokey afternoon late last summer. It’s also part of the internal landscape of my mind.

Farmlands are one of my favorite biomes. (Yes, they are a biome. I will die on this hill. They are a part of Naure. They are what nature looks like when people live in it.)

Farms and I go way back. I didn’t grow up on one, but I grew up around farms and farmers.

My early years were spent in eastern Pennsylvania, which is a country of rolling green hills and low mountains. My dad was the pastor of a small country church, and most of its members were dairy farmers. Whenever we visited anybody, which was often, we would first be taken into the cow barn. These were black-and-white milk cows. As soon as you stepped into the barn, your senses would be filled with cow sensations: the chorus of moos, the smell. To this day, when I smell a cattle lot, it doesn’t smell bad to me, just like a clean farm smell.

And even cleaner farm smell was the “milk room,” a little brick building with a large stainless-steel tank of milk in the center, and a drain in the middle of the wet floor. It smelled like coolness, milk, and water.

These are memories from when I was very small. That same family that I have in mind, although they had indoor plumbing, also still had a working outhouse in their back yard. There were bees, and the smell wasn’t so nice, but it was raised up on several steps, not just thrown together but definitely constructed. My brother and I would torment this family’s chickens by pulling backwards on their tails so that they flapped. (Not recommended.) We would sit in corrugated buckets filled with water to cool down in the summer, and drink from the garden hose. This family had Dobermans, and I can remember a black bear hanging up in their barn after the father shot it while hunting. Later, it was stuffed in a scary pose and placed in their study.

The dairy farmers in our church also had fields of crops. Our own house had a yard of about an acre and a half. At the back of this yard was a line of poplar trees, and right beyond them, fields rolling away towards the creek. Beyond that, you could see a mountain. They must have rotated the crops in these fields, but I know that at least one year, they were soybeans. We were allowed to pick the pods, open them, and eat the tiny, hard beans out from inside. There was a lot of milkweed, which was fun to pull open and let the tufty parachutes out when it was ripe. There was a lot of ragweed, which my brother turned out to be allergic to, and one year a plague of tent caterpillars turned the mountainside brown.

My dad had a somewhat free schedule, and he would take my brother and me (and later, our sister) on walks in the countryside. These were probably short walks, given that we were little kids, but I remember them lasting hours. We could walk along the borders of the fields and find new fields, or the creek. This habit set “walking between farm fields” permanently in my mind as a normal thing to do. If it was nighttime during this walk, my dad would sing “Walking at Night,” which, in retrospect, is probably a German hiking song.

When I was eight, we moved to western Michigan. Worse, we moved to a city. I complained hard about this. It was the first remotely tragic thing that had ever happened to me, and I was determined to milk it. By this time, my crush on American Indians was well-developed, and I was keenly aware that it was tragic to be driven off your land.

However, despite that we technically lived in a city, our tiny church there was still about half farmers. There were still many opportunities, on prayer meeting and picnic and potluck nights, to run on vast grassy lawns while the adults sat and talked, to climb trees, walk between fields, and hide in the hay lofts and corn cribs.

The countryside in Michigan was flatter and dryer than it had been in Pennsylvania. Furthermore, my small denomination (the “Michiana Mennonites”) straddled the border between Michigan and its neighbor to the south, Indiana, which is really flat. The summer camp we went to served kids from both states, and we often found ourselves crossing the border for pulpit exchanges and things like that. I have attended church in what was literally a tiny, plain white chapel perched at the edge of a sea of fields with no other building nearby. I have tramped over Indiana farms, again with my brother and usually another farm boy, while the adults sat in the house and talked. And these Indiana farms are truly the farmland biome, because there is nothing there but farms, not even a hill to break up the monotony.

The farmland biome combines the best features of wilderness and human habitation. You can walk for as long as you like in solitude. There is wind, there is the changing sky, there are wildflowers, and flora and fauna on the windrows. You can get lost if you want, and if it’s winter, you can get cold and miserable too. But as the sun goes down, you can see in the distance the lights of houses. Coming back from the walk to the warmly glowing farmhouse provides all the romance that a kid with a big imagination and a copy of The Lord of the Rings could desire.

Farms have always been with us, and, though technology has changed somewhat, the logistics of having fields surrounding clusters of buildings mean that farmlands in every place and time look essentially the same. You have the wide horizon, the walls, canals or windrows carving the space up and giving some sense of distance, and the lights low to the ground. Perhaps one reason I like fantasy, as a genre, is that it naturally includes farms surrounding the town and castle.

Some of my favorite fantasy series start with, and often return to, the humble but honest farming community. O.K., actually I can only think of two, but they are good ones. The Belgariad starts off with Garion growing up on Faldor’s farm in Sendaria. Actually, it starts in one of my favorite parts of the farm, the kitchen. And, of course, The Lord of the Rings. Bilbo is not really a farmer, he’s more of a country squire, but the Shire is definitely a farming countryside. The four hobbits’ journey starts out hiking through the fields, as every journey should. Their first encounter with one of the Nine takes place on an otherwise ordinary country road. Farmer Maggot, a wholesome character, takes the four friends in, feeds them, and gets them safely to the river crossing in his wagon. And, when the journey is over, the four hobbits must come back and rescue from collectivization the ordinary, boring farms that they sacrificed to save. What would we do without ordinary, boring farms, after all? We’d starve, that’s what. And we would go insane, because the farming life, though hard, represents a very basic pattern for the way people were designed to live.

I like ’em.

When Did We Stop Marrying Our Siblings?

On By Jennifer Mugrage8 Comments

… and why do I care?

I might be in the process of drafting a book that takes place before the Flood. So that is forcing me to tackle this issue. Besides needing to get it settled in my own mind, this post is meant to test the waters and see how you, my readers, react to this concept. If I even bring it up, will I be kicked out of polite society?

So, this post is a historical survey of sister-marrying. And it starts in Egypt.

Royals did it

Marrying one’s sister, or half-sister, was not unheard of in the royal families of Ancient Near Eastern cultures. See the following two links for some hair-raising proof that it happened in ancient Egypt:

https://fount.aucegypt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6097&context=faculty_journal_articles

https://www.historyskills.com/classroom/ancient-history/egypt-brother-sister-marriage/

The practice of royal inbreeding continued so long in Egypt that, by the time we get to Tut-ankh-amen, he has a myriad of health problems and is rather strange-looking.

This was such an established part of married love, at least among royals, in the Ancient Near East that calling someone “my sister” became a conventional endearment. Here, for example, is Solomon:

You have stolen my heart, my sister, my bride,

you have stolen my heart with one glance of your eyes,

with one jewel of your necklace.

Song of Solomon 4:9

And why did they do it? The obvious answer is to keep the royal bloodline pure. Most ANE cultures tended to believe that their royal family was descended from the gods (see my post Genetic Engineering in the Ancient World), and to add another layer to this, their myths about the gods also often featured sibling-marriage. Typically, you’d have gods and goddesses all being descended from the same being (Father Sky and Mother Earth, say), and then reproducing with each other to produce all the typically observed features of the cosmos. (Please, for the love of God, take my word for this and don’t read the Sumerian creation myths. I’m begging you–don’t!)

Speaking of Sumerians, here is an article that argues that Abram married his half-sister Sarai (whose name means princess) for the same reason: because their family was some kind of royalty in Mesopotamia before he left on his journey.

https://biblicalanthropology.blogspot.com/2011/03/sister-wives-and-cousin-wives.html

My question, however, is this. Did this practice of royals marrying their sisters represent breaking an established taboo for a “good” reason, or was it a case of carrying on a common practice a little longer than most people? My contention is that it’s the latter.

Let’s Go to Genesis

Genesis is, as I have often said, my favorite ancient history book. The more I study all of this, the more I realize that it is by far the most accurate written record we have of really ancient history, and of course it’s the only written record we have for some events that are, nevertheless, corroborated indirectly by archaeology, genetics, and historical traditions from around the world.

So, in Genesis, we have humanity starting out with one single couple. If we take this seriously, we have to conclude that the first generation would have had to marry their brothers and sisters, because there was nobody else around.

Nowadays, this would be an impossible genetic problem, besides being taboo. However, clearly it wasn’t taboo at the time. By producing families, people were obeying God’s command to “be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it.” (Gen. 1:28) Based on the extremely long lifespans recorded in Genesis, we can infer that the newly created people were much healthier than we are, with a much more varied and robust genetic code. They would have had few diseases as yet, and almost no harmful mutations to inherit. Adam and Eve, who didn’t die until they were into their 900s, could have had literally a hundred or more children in that first generation. Furthermore, these children need not all have looked alike, except in the sense of being human. We have to remember that Adam and Eve had within them the potential to produce every genetic variation we see today (and actually more, since most of the variety was lost during the Flood).

By the time Cain kills Abel, there are enough people in the earth that Cain can complain, “I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.” These other people that he is worried about would have been his siblings, nephews and nieces, grandnephews and -nieces, and so forth. If we figure that Seth was born not long after the murder of Abel, then the murder of Abel took place just under 130 years after the Fall. (Genesis 4:25 – 5:3) Apparently, that was enough time for the world to be populated.

In this video, starting at about 20:00, geneticist Nathaniel T. Jeansen discusses how our ancestors had to have been more closely related “than we are usually comfortable with.”

A Detour into Evolutionary Theory

“But wait!” you may say. “All this is nonsense. People didn’t all come from one founding couple, we evolved from several different but related species of hominids.”

Actually, if you think that way, you probably stopped reading this article before you got to this section. But let’s dip a toe into natural selection, just in case there is anyone hate-reading or any readers who are intrigued by what I’m saying about history, but are bothered by the science side of things.

Natural selection, in order to work as a mechanism, has to have a population of creatures already in place, with some genetic variation already in their genome. And–this is critical–they have to be already reproducing. That way, natural selection can operate on the subsequent generations of the population, encouraging variety here, stamping it out there, etc.

This creates a big problem if you want to argue that people evolved from (ultimately) one-celled animals. Now, how one-celled animals reproduce is itself a beautiful, complex mystery, but it’s basically by subdividing, producing clones of themselves. In other words, it’s not sexual reproduction.

How did sexual reproduction come about through natural selection? It would call for a wildly improbable series of (already vanishingly rare) beneficial mutations to the genetic code of two different creatures of the same species, such that one ended up male and one ended up female, with their systems perfectly corresponding to each other for reproduction. And it would have to work perfectly the first time.

If you want several different populations of human species, then you need this miracle to happen not once but several times, in different places. If it only happens once, then you’re back to what Genesis describes, which is just one founding couple.

What I’m saying is that introducing evolutionary theory doesn’t make the believability problem smaller, it makes it bigger.

Stephen Meyer explains why beneficial mutations are mathematically impossible.

Back to Genesis Again

We’ve established that in the pre-Flood world, there was no taboo on marrying one’s sibling (or probably, cousin or niece either), and also no health cost to doing so. Also (probably) it would not necessarily mean marrying someone you had grown up in close proximity with, given the size of the families we are talking about.

Then we get the Flood, in Genesis 6 – 9 and also attested in numerous local histories worldwide. At the Flood, the human population of the earth, previously vast in genetic diversity, gets culled down to just four couples, and the men of these couples are all related to each other. It’s from these four couples (perhaps just three of them?) that all of us today are descended. (We are literally just one big family!)

Think about the implications of this. The most distant relationship that any of Noah’s grandchildren would have had to each other would have been cousin during that first generation. Perhaps they married their cousins, and then their second cousins and so forth, but there is nothing to indicate that the possibility of marrying siblings had been closed to them. In Gen. 9:1 -17, God makes a new covenant with Noah and his sons. He reiterates the command to increase in number and fill the earth. He gives them the animals to eat, institutes the death penalty for murder of humans, and promises never to send another worldwide flood. He does not mention any new rules about not marrying your sister.

Next, in Genesis 11 and 10 respectively, we get the Tower of Babel and the Table of Nations. Though the Table of Nations comes before the account of Babel, the fact that we are told which geographical areas these nations settled in hints that the Table of Nations is at least a partial elaboration of where people went when “the LORD scattered them over the face of the earth.”

In the Table of Nations, the peoples are sorted by father. We see the descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japeth listed by a paternal line, and we see them scattering to found cities, kingdoms, and peoples. This implies, though it does not directly say, that they were having a lot of children per family, and that they were practicing in-group marriage.

Now we get to Abram, who was a Sumerian basically, or was living in that region of the world and in that culture area. As has been covered, he married his half-sister Sarai, whether because theirs was an aristocratic family or because it was still common practice in Mesopotamia at the time. Later, on two separate occasions (Gen. 12:10 – 20 and 20:1 – 18), he “lies” by telling a local ruler that Sarai is his sister. On both occasions, the local king understands this to mean that Sarai is not Abram’s wife and is fair game for his harem. This shows that, probably, most wives were not sisters at the time, at least in Egypt (Gen. 12) and southern Palestine (Gen. 20).

This would be about 2,000 B.C.

In Genesis 24, Abraham asks his servant to get a wife for Isaac from among “my own relatives.” The servant, guided by the LORD (!), finds Rebekah, the daughter of Abraham’s niece (Gen. 24:15). One generation later, Rebekah herself encourages Jacob to marry one of his cousins, daughters of her brother Laban. So by this time, we are practicing in-group marriage, but with cousins, not siblings.

Some groups still do this. See my post on The Iroquois Kinship System.

Finally, A Taboo in Leviticus 18!

Finally, in Leviticus 18, we get an explicit prohibition on marrying your sister.

Leviticus comprises the details of the giving of the Law, right after the exodus from Egypt, so about 1400 B.C. If you plop your finger onto Leviticus, it looks really early in the Bible. However, it’s 600 years after Abraham and a couple of thousand years after the Flood, so it is coming rather late from this blog’s perspective on ancient history.

The intended recipients of Leviticus are a large population of tribes who have just spent 400 years becoming culturally Egyptian. Since Moses’ parents were both from the tribe of Levi (Exodus 2:1), we can infer that they are still practicing in-group marriage.

Leviticus chapter 18 begins this way:

The LORD said to Moses: “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘I am the LORD your God. You must not do as they do in Egypt, where you used to live, and you must not do as they do in the land of Canaan, where I am bringing you. Do not follow their practices. You must obey my laws and be careful to follow my decrees. I am the LORD your God. Keep my decrees and laws, for the man who obeys them will live [i.e. find life] by them. I am the LORD.

“No one is to approach any close relative to have sexual relations. I am the LORD.”

Lev. 18:1 – 6

There follows a very comprehensive list of close relatives who are off-limits. This list includes everything you can think of, and some things that you perhaps haven’t. It ranges from very sick perversions, to this:

“‘Do not have sexual relations with your sister, either your father’s daughter or your mother’s daughter, whether she was born in the same home or elsewhere. (v. 9)

“‘Do not take your wife’s sister as a rival wife and have sexual relations with her while your wife is living.'” (v. 17)

Verse 9 gives us a clue of what types of family arrangements were possible among the Israelites of 1400 B.C. You might have a half-sister who was raised in a separate household. Verse 17 describes a behavior that Jacob famously engaged in with Rachael and Leah (additionally, both women were his cousins). In fact, the two women’s rivalry was how we got the twelve tribes of Israel. Marrying two sisters at the same time (not to mention their respective maidservants) was apparently something that was normal in the age of the patriarchs, but now, giving the Law 600 years later, God forbids it.

Leviticus 18:24 – 29 makes it clear that “all these things were done by the people who lived in the land before you,” but God considers them to be things that defile a land. I gather that this means the wide variety of disordered sexual relationships described in Leviticus 18 were not unheard-of, probably not just among the Egyptians and Canaanites, but among many or all of the many tribes in the surrounding areas.

We have God to thank for this taboo

So, now we know approximately when marrying your sister became taboo. 1400 B.C. And people didn’t come up with this on their own; God had to enforce it.

The overall picture is one where we start off with is marriages taking place among close family, in sort of a wholesome way, before and immediately after the Flood. Then, instead of branching out and marrying more and more distantly related people as the earth’s population increases, we see cultures in the Ancient Near East curving back in on themselves and coming up with more and more perverse ways to approach this. I gather from Lev. 18 that, once an ANE man had bagged a wife, he seemed to feel entitled, or at least have an eye out for the opportunity, for sexual rights to everyone related to her.

The time of the Israelite patriarchs, enslavement in Egypt, and Exodus also overlaps with the Minoan civilization on Crete, which gave us the legend (?) of the Minotaur, the offspring (allegedly) of Queen Pasiphae and a white bull. That gives us a clue that such horrifying practices were not confined to the Levant. “Do not defile yourselves in any of these ways, because this is how that nations that I am going to drive out before you became defiled.”

The Hunter, by Tana French: a book review

On By Jennifer MugrageLeave a comment

recently posted on my GoodReads account:

Another funny and poignant book by Tana French, set in the Irish village of Ardnakelty.

The humor comes from the way the residents, especially a certain older man named Mart, use the language. Mart is a talker. He and his friends at the pub love to roast each other, and especially Cal, the American ex-cop who has lived there two years now. For example, when they hear Cal is getting married, they try to convince him that there’s a local custom that the prospective bridegroom needs to carry a torch from his house, through the village, around his intended’s house, and then back to his own house … in his underwear.

The poignancy comes from the plot, which I won’t reveal, but suffice it to say that there is plenty of human tragedy.

French has done an amazing job of portraying a close-knit, gossipy, stifling, eccentric small community where communication is indirect, and becomes even more indirect when the stakes become high. Cal is pretty good at reading, and engaging in, this kind of 4D chess that’s played at one remove, but it gets to even him after a while. “The amount of subtlety around here was pretty near to giving him hives.” I have always wanted to write a story set in such a community, but have been unable to because I am woefully literal minded and don’t pick up on cues. I would never survive in Ardnakelty.

There is a small amount of preaching about climate change, but it’s only mentioned directly once that I remember and does not overwhelm the story. This tale takes place during an unusually hot and dry summer in Ardnakelty, which puts everyone on edge. In this way, the weather contributes to the theme and even drives the plot a little bit.

Finally, one thing I forgot to mention on my GoodReads review is that French deserves props for being able to capture the way men think and talk. Cal is the main POV character, and he’s just the quintessential male, both in the way he thinks, how he handles and solves things, and how he banters with the people in the village and deflect questions and comments and barbs when he needs to. This book kind of reminds me of She’s Come Undone, which was the opposite in that it was a well-written book with a female POV character, written by a man.

People Watching: Five Stars

On By Jennifer Mugrage4 Comments

In the only episode of Black Mirror that I ever watched (“Nosedive “), everyone can rate their interactions with everyone else on a scale of one to five, using an ocular implant that shows them a screen in their field of vision. Citizens’ jobs, housing opportunities, and so forth all depend directly on their composite rating. Of course this episode portrayed a dystopia, and I have no wish to live there. But this week, for the first time, I found myself wishing I could give strangers “five stars” from a distance, just to boost their morale. You know, what the old-timers used to call a compliment, but without the human interaction that makes it weird.

I guess this post will have to do. So, if you were at Silverwood amusement park in mid-June, know that I gave you five stars.

First, to all the beautiful young ladies in bikinis, short jean shorts, and summer dresses. You are lovely. Five stars.

Then, to all the deeply tanned grannies and the middle-aged ladies wearing racerback swimsuits. To the slender elderly ladies in linen pants and hiking shoes, and to the tough-looking older woman with the very short haircut. I want to be you. Five stars.

To the, possibly Mennonite, girls doing the park in long braids and even longer jean skirts, I love your outfits. I love your outfit, woman with a blue polka dot tiered skirt that echoed the shape of your short, pink-tipped ringlets. Five stars.

Now, about hair. I award five stars to all the ladies wearing intricate braids, hippy braids, or beachy buns. Five stars to the lady with the glossy black curls up in a high bun, and to the girl with touseled, Molly-Ringwald style short bob. Skinny girl with amazing natural hair who looks like Zendaya — five stars to you for keeping your hair in that condition. Redheads, young and old, I love your color. I love your hair, chubby American Indian kid with a true-black ponytail so long you can sit on it. Sikh family, your daughter’s forehead bun is awesome. Five stars.

People with tattoos, two stars. Some of you look cool.

Hairy guy with the nipple piercings … um, three stars. Ouch.

I love you, grandpa with the huge smile riding the scooter. Family applying sunscreen to your developmentally delayed adult son, five stars. He is adorable, because you are taking such good care of him. Five stars to your sweet-faced baby passed out in your arms, and to your excited baby with the very expressive feet. And even five stars to the baby who had HAD ENOUGH on the train ride. I hope you got cooled down or whatever you needed.

Five stars to your curly-headed toddler, and to your toddler in a life vest holding your hand. Five stars to the adorable couple where he was big and freckled, and she was slight, sweet, tanned, and Asian. And to the couple where he was big and dark and had dred locs, and she was short and pale and ginger. Five stars to the pregnant woman in a swim suit who looked like the Mona Lisa.

Five stars to mothers and daughters who look exactly alike, especially those who walk through the park holding hands. Five stars to the cool, bespectacled brunette who sold us tickets to the barbeque tent. And five stars to the tanned and muscled guy with his baby on his shoulders, who was dancing to the classic rock played over the speaker system.

And let’s not forget the beards. The guy with the white, squared-off, excuse-me-miss-my-eyes-are-up-here beard gets five stars. So does the guy who looks like he got up that morning as a starved mountain man, took a bath, and put on a T-shirt and some Bermuda shorts.

That ought to do it.