OH.. okay... but.. what about...? (When the Answers Stop being so Cut-and-Dried)

Finally completed on November 9th

Right.. so.. Mr. A.J. Jacobs, after completing his full year of reading the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica for his book "The Know-it-All", decided that he'd continue in the genre. His next literary project would be called "A Year of Living Biblically", and needless to say, he spent an entire year doing just that: Following (as best as possible) all 700 of the rules and prohibitions contained in the Bible. His interview with Newsweek can be found online, and he also has a post-year blog entry, so you can read at your own discretion. However, this obedience-quest including avoiding barbers, and even following Ecclesiastes' advice about letting one's garments always be white, made life a bit more complicated than he would have anticipated.

I felt that while Mr. Jacob's undertaking was quite a noble one, it was only an experiment, and there are millions of folk who try to do the same thing, but on a daily basis: for more than one year. I remember when I was such as person - certainly not as hard-core as Mr. Jacobs, but definitely more willing to err on the side of "caution" than to lose out of my eternal destination as a result of carelessness.

Maybe my "problem" is that I think so much. I was a youth leader, and the one time one could expect the church to be filled-to-overflowing (the youth would have their sessions on saturday/saturday afternoons, and the 'non-youths' use the opportunity of non-compulsory attendance at church to snooze) would be when I had a presentation. They knew that I would not just come and present them with the usual tried-and-true/safe fare, yet in the end it would confirm what they had always been taught to be "true". Knowing that I would attempt to present the very old from fresh and new angles, even the snoozy 'non-youths' would come out to participate with the youngsters (Yep.. my presentations were usually interactive). They knew that I would thoroughly research whatever topic I wanted them to munch/medidate on.

Planning an AY "program" (as we called them), however, was never as simple as I probably make it out to sound. For one thing, each leader was paired with another, and mutually convenient meeting times were often tough. A lot of fervent prayer went into each program, to ensure that God's path could be seen into it, and not the leaders' fallible ideas. Yeah, the topics would have been thought-jolting ("Absolutely no Puppies Allowed", "Hypocrites Anonymous", "Blind Bend Ahead", and so forth), but the contents were always wholly scriptural with deep spiritual truths, with contemporary support from social sciences, linguistics, etc.

So.. what's the point of all this? Simply put, I got to thinking that telling somebody, "This is the truth, walk ye in it", is the equivalent of "Your belief systems are all wrong and twisted, and you should just take my word for it that my path (as revealed in the Bible) is the only one you should follow". Just like Martin Luther, my mantra had been solo scriptura, and I felt confident that the Bible could answer whatever questions life threw my way. In 2002 someone had raised the issue of the "Epic of Gilgamesh", and gave me a link with scores of other "flood stories", or rather "flood myths" as SDAs would prefer to refer to them. In the summer of that year, I even saw a mini video of the 'myth' at a museum. My attitude was, "Pffsss! Um.. that just proves that the Biblical account is true, and the truth probably got corrupted as people moved away after the Tower of Babel!" That issue was so easy to resolve.

However, in 2003 i got another challenge. Everybody "knows" that the Pentateuch was written by Moses. I'd even heard it explained that being privy to the kingly house of Egypt would have ensured that he received the best training to dutifully and accurately transcribe the oral traditions of his forefathers. For this reason, he spent his 2nd 40 yrs in the 'wilderness' so that he could better get to know his God. In addition to the "Ten Commandments", SDA's know that Moses was given other laws, among them included "eye for eye, tooth for tooth" justice, in his Mosaic Code. Imagine my absolute astonishment when browsing through a Washington museum I was confronted by a larger-than-life stele with the "Code of Hammurabi" etched in. In total awe, I gazed at a Babylonian god (either Shamash or Marduk) personally delivering the code of laws to Hammurabi, thinking to myself, isn't this image kinda familiar? When I got home, I started doing research of a different sort - you see.. I had always taken what I'd been told was absolutely true, because the speakers would not set me on the wrong path. Furthermore, in all sincerity, they would never feed the sheep anything that they themselves hadn't throroughly checked out, first.

Yet, I knew that I couldn't just ask anybody the questions that started to pile up when I began doing my own historical investigations at home. There were only really two other speakers/leaders/elders who were intelligent/interested enough to do independent study (apart from the Bible-Spirit of Prophecy-Sabbath School Quarterly trilogy), so I went to one of them. He was very patient when he explained, "There's no such thing as absolute truth, you know", to my question of "How come Hammurabi's Code that so long predates the Mosaic Laws so closely resemble the laws that God dictated for Moses???". He continued, "God would have made all kingdoms, and principalities, and if he condscended to use laws that were already there, then that's His choice. In His wisdom, if laws that were already there best served His purpose, what's to stop Him using them?" (Not in these exact words, of course, but this was the germ of his point).



If there's no "absolute truth", where does a literal reading of the Bible come in, and what should I not understand/accept as literal/absolute? His SDA Politically Correct response didn't satisfy me, of course. Rather, it led to more questions, and I uncovered even more conflicting issues. I had recently finished reading my Bible from cover to cover, so I had a lot of Biblical facts reasonably fresh in my mind. I found a story about Sargon the Great, King of Akkad (a civilization that also predated the Hebrews), who had a story of origin quite similar to Moses' (found in a basket on a river by a gardener), and I began to wonder about the Pharaohs in the Old Testament. After all, "Pharaoh" is merely a title that means "king", yet all through the Bible we find all these nameless Pharaohs. Which Pharaoh was it that tried to get jiggy with Abram's 70 yr old wife? Which Pharaoh smiled on Joseph and appointed him a top dog in the kingdom? Which Pharaoh was it that tried to cleanse the land when Moses was a babe? Is it the same Pharaoh that Moses fled from into Midian? How about the Pharaoh of the Exodus? I'd also been given the understand that Moses was so named because the princess "drew him out of the water", yet, when I started doing searches for pharaohs, I invariably found out that there were several pharaohs with 'mose' in their titles: Thutmose, Ahmose, Kamose, etc. Apparently, 'mose' was a common suffix among Egyptian royals.. does that mean that they were all "drawn out of the water"??


I jumped to later parts of the Old Testament, and tried to pin down Moses and the Exodus. However, Nehemiah's reckoning couldn't seem to mesh with Solomon's and I got frustrated. I decided to forget about the pharaohs since even Egyptologists couldn't even concur on when each kingdom began and ended. I decided: since I'm a Christian, because Christianity is supposedly the only religion that has traceable witnesses, I should begin with the death of Christ, and work my way back through history. Simple solution, right? Stay tuned for the next blog (whenever that may be).