Knowledge

Knowing something or somebody isn't the same as knowing about them. More than just information is involved. When you are a knower, you don't simply add to your mental store and go your way otherwise unchanged. To know is to participate in, to become imbued with, for better or worse to be affected by. When you really know a person or a language or a job, the knowledge becomes part of who you are. It gets into the bloodstream. That is presumably why the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was the one tree Adam and Eve were warned to steer clear of.

When in their innocence they knew only good, they could be only good. As soon as they knew evil too, a whole new glittering vista opened up before them. Next to obedience appeared the possibility of disobedience; next to faithfulness, faithlessness; next to love, lust; next to kindness, cruelty; and so on. Even when they chose the good way, their knowledge of the evil way remained as a conscious and by no means unattractive alternative, preventing them except on the rarest occasions from being good wholeheartedly. And when they chose the evil way, their knowledge of good tended to turn even the sweetness of forbidden fruit to ashes in their mouths. Thus they became the hapless hybrids their descendants have been ever since. It was the curse God had tried to spare them. The serpent did its work well.

According to Thomas Aquinas, God can know evil by pure intelligence without becoming tainted by it the way a doctor can know the nature of disease without becoming diseased. Humans, on the other hand, not being pure intelligences but creatures of flesh and blood inhabiting a world of space and time, can know only through the likes of experience, experiment, will, and imagination, and once they start knowing evil that way, the fat is in the fire.

~originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

Koheleth

Koheleth means "Preacher" and is the name by which the author of the book of Ecclesiastes is known. When the rabbis got together to decide which books to put into the Old Testament and which to throw out, it is reported that Koheleth's almost didn't make it. You can't help seeing why, but at the same time you can't help being grateful to them for letting it in under the wire even so. In that great chorus of voices that speak out of the Bible, it is good to have this one long-drawn sigh of disillusion, skepticism, and ennui, if only because the people who read the Bible sometimes feel that way themselves, not to mention also the ones who wouldn't be caught dead reading it.

People are born and people die, Koheleth says, and the sun goes up and the sun goes down, and first the wind blows from the northand then it blows from the south, and if you think you're seeing something for the first time, just go ask your grandmother, and if you think you're seeing something for the last time, just hang around for a while, and the whole thing is as pointless and endless and dull as a drunk singing all six dozen verses of "Roaming in the Gloaming" and then starting in from the beginning again in case you missed anything. There is nothing new under the sun, Koheleth says, with the result that everything that there is under the sun both is old and, as you might expect in all that heat, stinks.

If you decide to knock yourself out getting rich and living it up, he points out, all you have to show for it in the end is the biggest income tax in town and a bad liver; and when you finally kick the bucket, the chances are that your dim-witted heirs will sink the whole thing in a phony Florida real-estate deal or lose it at the track in Saratoga. If you decide to break your back getting a decent education and end up a Columbia Ph.D. and an adviser to presidents, you'll be just as dead when the time comes as the high-school dropout who went into stuffing sausages, and you'll be forgotten just about as soon.

If you decide to be Mr. Nice Guy or Miss Goody Two-Shoes and never do the dirty on a pal, that may win you a gold star somewhere, but it won't keep you from getting it in the teeth like everybody else, because "there are righteous people who are treated according to the conduct of the wicked, and there are wicked people who are treated according to the conduct of the righteous," Koheleth says (Ecclesiastes 8:14), and we're all in the hands of God, all right, but "whether it is love or hate, one does not know" (9:1).

God has a plan for us, to be sure, but he leaves us in the dark as to what that plan is, and if God's plan happens to conflict with some plans of our own, guess whose way wins out? That is what the famous "A time to weep and a time to laugh" passage is all about(3:1-9)-that is, if you feel like laughing at a time that God has already pegged as a time for weeping, start reaching for the Kleenex.

"The race is not to the swift," he says, "nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the skillful" (9:11), and that about sums it up. The dead are luckier than the living, he says, but luckiest of all are the ones who had the good sense never to get born in the first place.

But the rabbis in their wisdom let Koheleth into the Good Book anyway, placing him not far from the Psalms of David on one side and the prophecies of Isaiah on the other. Maybe it was their hope that in that location a little of David and Isaiah might rub off on him, especially one of the insights they more or less shared, which was that often people are closest to God when they need him most and that sometimes they know him best by missing him.

The Book of Ecclesiastes

~originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Korah

After years of knocking around the Promised Land with the children of Israel, Moses already had problems enough on his hands when some of his own people, led by a man named Korah, challenged his religious authority. "What makes you and your brother think you've got a corner on holiness?" Korah said and then added, "We're all holy, every last one of us." Moses was so undone by these remarks that, as the narrator reports, "he fell on his face" (Numbers 16:4).

He eventually picked himself up, however, and asked God to help him take care of these troublemakers. God obliged by causing the ground to open up beneath their feet. Korah and his crowd were swallowed up and taken down alive to Sheol, the abode of thedead, and Moses was able to get on with the business of leading the way to the Promised Land.

You can't blame Moses for having overreacted the way he did. Leading the Israelites anywhere was no pushover, and he needed all the unchallenged authority he could get. On the other hand, you can't really blame Korah either, who, by insisting that nobody was any holier than anybody else, was simply anticipating by a few thousand years the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers.

As for God, there seems to be a strong possibility that the reason he caused the rebels to be swallowed down into Sheolalivewas so that later on, when the whole thing had blown over, he could let them out again quietly through the back door.

Numbers 16

~originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Laban

Having promised his nephew Jacob the hand of his daughter Rachel in return for seven years' hard work, in the dark of the night Laban slipped his older, weak-eyed daughter, Leah, into the marriage bed in her place. When Jacob woke up to discover he'd been had, Laban not only convinced him that it was all a misunderstanding, but managed to get a second seven years out of him by declaring that only then would Rachel finally be his.

On another occasion he promised to pay Jacob all his speckled and spotted goats plus all his black lambs if he would go on working for him a while longer and then proceeded to spirit those very ones away so that only the unblemished white ones were left. But this time Jacob trumped his uncle's ace. By means of some arcane breeding techniques, he saw to it that the next time his flocks produced young, they were almost all of them speckled or spotted or black.

They are not the most admirable pair in the Old Testament, but it's hard to avoid a sneaking affection for them anyway-Jacob because in spite of everything he was renamed Israel and becamefather of the twelve tribes, and Laban because he was such an unabashed and genial crook. They parted friends in the end, swearing before God never to con each other again, and then celebrated with a feast that lasted till daybreak, whereupon Laban kissed his nephew's entire family good-bye and gave them all his blessing.

~originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Law

There are basically two kinds of law: (l) law as the way things ought to be, and (2) law as the way things are. An example of the first is "No Trespassing." An example of the second is the law of gravity.

God's law has traditionally been spelled out in terms of category no. 1, a compendium of dos and don'ts. These dos and don'ts are the work of moralists and, when obeyed, serve the useful purpose of keeping us from each other's throats. They can't make us human, but they can help keep us honest.

God's law in itself, however, comes under category no. 2 and is the work of God. It has been stated in seven words: "Whoever does not love abides in death" (1 John 3:14). Like it or not, that's how it is. If you don't believe it, you can always put it to the test just the way if you don't believe the law of gravity, you can always step out a tenth-story window.

~originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words