Quick thoughts on the huge settling of accounts presently unfurling through the financial systems of our rich countries. Every weekend or so for several weeks now, decisions involving hundreds of millions of work hours are being taken by small groups of unelected officials (experts, old Wall Street hands, etc.). Congress acts as if it is looking into it. Some hands get wrung or go flailing. Huge debts by banks and other financial institutions (if one can call them that) are being forgiven, that is, are becoming part of huge money creation (new money is made by debt, once leveraged). Investment banks, commercial banks, now car companies, many come hat in hand to ask for help and forgiveness. Which reminds me of Matthew’s parable (18.23-34, nihil novi sub sole):

The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. When he began the reckoning, a man who owed him 10,000 talents was brought to him; and, as he could not pay, his lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, and payment to be made. So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, “have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.” And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt. But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owned him a hundred denarii; and seizing him by the throat, he said, “Pay what you owe.” Then his fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, “have patience with me, and I will pay you.” But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he would pay the debt. When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. Then his lord summoned him and said to him, “You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?” And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt.

The problem with allegorizing this parable and folding it unto our situation: where is the king in our system? where is the reckoning at the center? Who is doing the debt forgiveness? A government? hardly. As in those old parables portraying distant kings in far-flung kingdoms and empires, our financial structure too is spatially and temporally stretched out. Banks offshore, complex interconnected accounts mirroring each other ad infinitum, leveraging instruments by which the real reckoning is reported to a later date and an ever further elsewhere. To be paid by whom? Blind historical causality and its occasional hiccups? But the “pay what you owe” is alive and well: credit card companies have long been charging usurious rates and are not going to stop now. Banks need this income more than ever. And Biden and other democrats helped the creditors make individual bankrupcy much more difficult (2002).

So there will be full forgiveness (no matter the public upbraidings) for those “too large to fail”, and too influential, and therefore whose prostrations are still more significant, more credible than those of the small guy owing 100 denarii (about 1/3 of a year full employment: say 15K). Because done by those used also to manipulate, since they are very experienced both in entertaining begging demands (clients) and acceding to, or refusing them. Creditors themselves, they decide how much trust to allocate, how much credit. The small creditor at the bottom of the pile or the pyramid has few on whom or against whom to turn. His family, neighbors, co-workers? He can’t fake his requests as well as those owing 10K talents (“I will pay you everything”). He can’t promise full repayment, or is too honest about it. Which is (the forced honesty) what makes him credit-worthy for others.

A parable is a nice map. But one could imagine another ending, and a different reaction of the fellow slaves. The big-time debtor would feel good to have fooled his king once more with his play for pity. On the way down from the palace, he would be surrounded by sycophants who would start right away with the urgent task of grabbing the small-time debtors. Newspaper columnists of the time would attack the profligate ways of the masses, their imprudence, their lack of foresight, etc.

For another take on all of this, see this particularly beautiful commentary on the equation: John Lennon on peace.

Is a philosophy of history recoverable in the story of Jacob at the Jabbok (Gen 32.23–33)?

Before answering that question with more questions, the text! The one given below comes from Alter (Genesis, 1996). The verses in bold are those passages thought to have been added by a later redactor to the Yahwistic text. For the reasons underlying this understanding of the existence of at least two (actually three) main layers in the story, see the commentaries (for instance Westermann, Genesis 12-36: a commentary, 1985). The detail of the argument is important but would be a little overwhelming here and superfetatory (as befits a Jacobian twin). Let lineaments suffice. The Yahwist is thought to be re-using older, undatable, material (layer 1), namely a local folktale of a universally known type regarding a spirit or troll of the river, to which the name of Jacob was not yet attached. Indeed, the Jabbok/Jacob pair is a less than perfect metathesis, since the `ayin of Jacob is in the way. On the other hand, the better pair of words, hence their presumed original featuring in an old local folktale, is provided by the name of the river, יַבֹּק, and the wrestling, וַיֵּאָבֵק. The Yahwist (early or late Judaean, I vote for the latter, for reasons having to do with the late use of writing in the kingdom of Judah: so, –8th-7th c.) integrated the tale (perhaps already attached to Jacob by northern Israelite traditions, but not yet arranged in the larger-frame story as we have it now) in a larger cycle of longish stories concerning Jacob. Travels across and outside the “land” (from Bethel in the south to Gilead in the northeast), conflicts arranged in imbricated pairs (Esau/Jacob, Laban/Jacob, Leah/Rachel), and their resolutions, all of this book-ended by night visions of the “man” or Yahweh, no doubt the author is a story-teller and a thinker who is very skillfully using Israelite traditions about Jacob their ancestor. As said supra, the text in bold seems to be a more recent addition: it makes Jacob disabled in verse 26b, yet Jacob is able to wrestle his opponent until dawn. It also introduces the re-naming of Jacob as Israel (as a counterpart of Jacob’s question to his opponent) and gives it a strange, intellectual, explanation: “You have striven with God”. Theophoric names normally express a divine action, protection in this particular case, not an action by the name-bearer. Finally, it explains an otherwise unknown dietary rule and adds a “to this day” that looks more recent. Westermann notes that many flights of theological thinking are based on these putatively late insertions into the story and would like serious theology to take into account the layering in the text.

²³And he rose on that night and took his two wives and his two slavegirls and his eleven boys and he crossed over the Jabbok ford. ²⁴And he took them and brought them across the stream, and he brought across all he had. ²⁵And Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until the break of dawn. ²⁶And he saw that he had not won out against him and he touched his hip-socket and Jacob’s hip-socket was wrenched as he wrestled with him. ²⁷And he said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” ²⁸And he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob”. ²⁹And he said, “Not Jacob shall your name hence be said, but Israel, for you have striven with God and men, and won out.” ³⁰And Jacob asked and said, “Tell your name, pray.” And he said, “Why should you ask my name?” and there he blessed him. ³¹And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, meaning, “I have seen God face to face and I came out alive.” ³²And the sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel and he was limping on his hip. ³³Therefore the children of Israel do not eat the sinew of the thigh which is by the hip-socket to this day, for he touched Jacob’s hip-socket at the sinew of the thigh.

Now for the philosophy of history that one can dream up from this text: A weakening of what passed for known, self- and once-revealed being: god(s) identifiable and localizable, worshippable and bankable (politicizable, meaning whose temples, tithing, or sacrificial systems, and scriptures, could be domesticated or tandem-ridden by priesthoods and kings)? To or towards something inherently weaker, limping, unassured. Acquiring the means to control destiny, namely birthright, women and reproduction, capital, and finally land (though it is just marked by cultic stones, made palatable by yahwist apparitions to the hero, but still called Canaan in this fictional arrangement by an author or framer who is quite familiar with the end of both monarchies of Israel and Judah), acquiring all of this can’t be the center of one’s devotion. I hope that this is what my imaginary ancient hearer/reader was thinking (by this I mean the –5th c. post-exilic reader, say in the late, Ezra-ic or post-Ezra period), in a tiny part of the vast Persian empire. My imaginary Judaean reader, in a small corner of the vast Eber-Naharaim satrapy, one of twenty-three, would be reading the latest installment of the struggles for survival of an ancestral Jacob as a story in which land, livestock, and reproduction of self have to be waged. Only through these repeated contractual arrangements with Esau, Laban, and the divine troll at the crossing of the stream, is there hope to get beyond trickery and reach something like the grace of a new morning, diminished, limping but alive, and more importantly not a twin or mirror image anymore, but self-knowing and with a passable name, en route to something one could call one’s home or land. A passable name, that is an identifier and most ancient guarantee of the bona fide claim to ancestral lands that were now part of an immense empire.

Or am I fooling myself and is the story playing a trick on us, namely that the radical weakening of political control presented in such stories as Gen 22 and 32 (binding of Isaac scene, and Jacob at the Jabbok) can become the source of even harsher, absolute, and uncompromising type of land power?

Reeve in our class just alerted me to the following PBS documentary called The Bible’s buried Secrets, which will show this Tuesday night, Nov 18, at 8pm:

The Bible’s Buried Secrets is an archeological journey into the Hebrew Bible, more commonly known as the Old Testament. It builds on centuries of biblical scholarship and excavation to tackle some of the biggest questions in biblical studies: Where did the ancient Israelites come from? How and when did their religion transform into modern Judaism? Who wrote the Bible, when, and why? How did the ancient Israelites, who, like virtually all ancient peoples, worshiped many gods, come to believe in a single God?

The answers to these questions emerge as we look both at the archeological evidence and at the biblical text itself—the powerful accounts describing Abraham and his journey to the Promised Land; Moses and the Exodus; David’s kingdom and Solomon’s Temple; and the destruction of that temple and Jerusalem followed by the Exile of Jews to Babylon.

Thoughts on a discussion Wed 10/29/08 at UCSC, held at Humanities I, on digital humanities projects, the need to have grain (polyphonic and -scopic?), universal access to text-image-sound, right to copy, and selectivity. I’m thinking of the physical aspects of this medium. The screen is still flat, no matter the roundness or modern styling of portable machines. The labyrinthic aspect of the machine was originally enticing: one can become fascinated by unix commands and the mysteries of the vi editor. But most applications since, while still having their duplicable and duplicitous mysteries, leave me with a strange lack of feeling. I miss the old scratching pen. “Digital”: using fingers indeed, both to leaf through pages of occasionally dog-eared codices and now to type, as I am presently doing in linear fashion. Two things are a saving grace: unicode encoding and TeX typesetting, both allowing something like an aesthetics (high falooting –sp?– word for feeling).

We have been reading the cycle of stories about Abraham (Genesis 12-24) in our class, and wondering why the writer/redactor frames the appropriation of land by Abraham in a way that seems so radically different from that of the Greeks (chs. 20-23). For the Greeks, Plato in the Menexenus, or its parodic author, will have to serve:

The origin of our ancestors is not that of “arrivals,” neither is it to show foreign residents (μετοικοῦντας), settled in this land to which they would have come from elsewhere, but they were autochthonous, inhabiting (οἰκοῦντας) and living authentically in their fatherland, and fed not by a stepmother like the others, but by a mother, the earth where they were inhabitants (οἰκοῦν), and now that they are dead, they rest in the places (οἰκεῖοις τόποις) of her who has begot, fed, and received them.

Compare to Genesis: Abraham the foreign resident, the gêr, who comes from “elsewhere”, self-avowedly “stranger and an alien”, not autochthonous, and who manages to buy a burial cave from Ephron the *Hittite* in 23.10–15!! From as close as he could get to an autochthonous local: “My lord, listen to me; a piece of land worth four hundred shekels of silver—what is that between you and me? Bury your dead.”

As luck would have it, this week, Jewish Studies presents the Gold Foundation Distinguished Lecture on a closely related topic. Ilan Troen, Professor in Israel Studies at Brandeis University, will give the following lecture, “Whose land is it anyway? Theology and secular politics in the land of Israel/Palestine”, this coming Thursday, October 30, 7:00pm, in Humanities 1, Room 210.

On Yom Kippur in 1967
by Yehuda Amichai (translated from the Hebrew by Stephen Mitchell)

On Yom Kippur in 1967, the Year of Forgetting, I put on
my dark holiday clothes and walked to the Old City of Jerusalem.
For a long time I stood in front of an Arab’s hole-in-the-wall shop,
not far from the Damascus Gate, a shop with
buttons and zippers and spools of thread
in every color and snaps and buckles.
A rare light and many colors, like an open Ark.
I told him in my heart that my father too
had a shop like this, with thread and buttons.
I explained to him in my heart about all the decades
and the causes and the events, why I am now here
and my father’s shop was burned there and he is buried here.
When I finished, it was time for the Closing of the Gates prayer.
He too lowered the shutters and locked the gate
and I returned, with all the worshippers, home.

One learned tonight that vice-presidential candidate Palin doesn’t “attribute every activity of man to the changes in the climate”. Whew!

One can write to one’s congress representative (Sam Farr in my case, who voted yes on HR 3997: see recorded votes on 9/29/08) or senator (Diane Feinstein) something like:

Dear Representative: Please kill the misnamed Paulson bill—a cloud of goody-good suggestions really— and replace it with a bill that helps those people for whom foreclosures are real catastrophes. Do not be fooled by the money-man’s muscle-showing in the case of Lehman’s and Washington Mutual. If one trillion dollars or so is needed to make up for deflated values of purchased homes, it must go to the initial accounts and lenders, and absolutely not to help the creators of derivatives. Also needed: to go back on the iniquitous bankruptcy law and afford better safety for the weakest and most at risk in this financial fiasco.

Les électeurs américains sont en colère d’après les journaux, et gare aux politiciens qui abondent dans le sens de Paulson, Bernanke et la Maison-Blanche et renflouent les banques d’investissement. Il serait en effet assez gros de voir beaucoup de gens perdre leur maison ou partie de leurs avoirs immobiliers pendant que les principaux acteurs de ce fiasco immobilier, qui ont poussé à la manipulation des garanties immobilières et à leur liquéfaction, s’y retrouvent! De plus, comment pourrait-on à l’avenir déterminer le risque (et donc mesurer l’intérêt) si les grands acteurs de cette débâcle sont renfloués? MacCain est en chute dans les sondages et se démène comme un beau diable. Il retrousse les manches et retourne faire son travail de sénateur à Washington! Pas un mot sur les épargnants ordinaires cependant. Même Obama est trop prudent: il pourrait nous dire un peu plus clairement ce qu’il a l’intention de faire, mais peut-être est-il à court d’idées sur ce qui se passe?

Vincent Reinhart, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, is quoted in the New York Times of 9/10/08 as saying that

Mr. Paulson, like Mr. Bush, would ordinarily resist government intervention. “I think the economy is taking Bush and Paulson to a place where they wouldn’t go on their own,” he said. “In a crisis, you start bending principles, and Paulson bent principles.”

What principles is he talking about? not the socializing of debt and privatizing of profits apparently.