To try to avoid the HTML oddities of New Blogger, I am trying going back to something I’d done in the past but gave up out of laziness, typing posts into my word processor instead of Blogger’s to see if I can’t avoid the HTML and other font problems that I’m having with this “New Blogger” which seems to be messing up things in ways I can’t figure out how to fix. It might be slower than typing directly into Blogger but we’ll see if it’s worth the effort.
Before going on with Walter Brueggemann’s numbered points about the nature of the alternative way of thinking and living Moses presented I’ll point out that if you want to consider this a kind of eccentric and narrow commentary on what Bureggemann says in The Prophetic Imagination, I began with going through the text, proper of the book on August 1, with a post about the front material of the book on July 17th. I would recommend you either borrow or get the book and read it for yourself, I will certainly be leaving some of it out of this if for no other reason than I suspect typing the entire book into these posts would violate fair use – though with Brueggemann writing at this level every paragraph is worth consideration. I had thought of recommending this for you what I’m considering it for myself, a sort of autodidactic self-given course in the book to the extent that can be done without taking the bus to the state university library to look up the citations that I am not familiar with or have at my home. But saying that sounded kind of pretentious, “eccentric and narrow commentary” is less embarrassing as well as more apt.
(2) The alternative consciousness wrought through Moses is characterized by criticizing and energizing. I will pursue this in more detail later, but these comments are in order now. The narrative of the Exodus is designed to show the radical criticism and radical dismantling of the Egyptian empire. At the beginning (Exod. 5:7-11) the Egyptians are in full flower and full power. They “wheel and deal” and are subject to none:
"Let heavier work be laid upon the men that they may labor at it and pay no regard to ying words. So the taskmasters and the foremen of the people when out and said to the people, “Thus says Pharaoh. . . . "
Notice how the language is shaped to evoke anger and bring to expression the deep resentment at this whole system. But the story moves. At the end, these same masters, taskmasers, and foremen are vanquished, humiliated, and bahished from history:
"The Egyptians whom you see today, you shall never see again." (14:13)
"Thus the Lord saved Israel that day from the hand of the Egyptians; and Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the seashore" (14:30).
From beginning to end the narrative shows, with no rush to conclude, how the religious claims of Egypitian gods are nullified by this Lord of freedom. The narrative shows, with delighted lingering, how the politics of oppression is overcome by the practice of justice and compassion. And between the beginning and the end the moment of dismantling is the plague cycle, a narrative that cannot be told too often, for it testifies to what cannot be explained, surely not by the reason of the empire. It happens in this way; In the first two plagues, concerning the turn of the Nile and the frogs, the powerful work of Moses and Aaron is matched by is Egyptian techne. Two plagues into the scene nothing is changed and the power of Egypt is no t challenge. The empire knows how to play “anything you can do, I can do better.” But then comes the third plague.
"Aaron stretched out his hand with his rod, and struck the dust of the earth, and there came gnats on man and beast;; all the dust of the earth became gnats throughout all the land of Egypt. The magicians tried by their secret arts to bring forth gnats, but they could not!" (Exod.8:17-18)
The Egyptian empire could not! The gods of Egypt could not! The scientists of the regime could not! The imperial religion was dead! The politics of oppression had failed ! That is the ultimate criticism, that the assured and alleged power of the dominant culture is now shown to be fraudulent. Criticism is not carping and denouncing. It is asserting that false claims to authority and power cannot keep their promises, which they cold not in the face of the free God. It is only a matter of time until they are dead on the seashore.
If you don’t hear history rhyming with this, in the United States, in Britain, in Sweden and other places where the interests of Mammon have governed the response to Covid-19, I don’t know how to help you. Money is the modernist-industrialist-scientistic god and pantheon that is, in fact, the same god as always happens in an imperial political-religious-elite state. That is true whether it is cotton, lumber, tobacco, or retail and "financial services" that are the incarnation of Mammon - a false god of many faces. In what seems to be happening at a number of school districts in my state and New Hampshire (and I have not the slightest doubt around the country) it would seem the exigencies and desires of the high school football industry is the Moloch to which our children, staff, teachers are even now being sacrificed to.* The magic of PR and mass media propaganda and William Barr's abracadabra with the law playing the role of Pharaoh's magicians.
We have yet to find a Moses in our story, if it is Biden, well, Moses said he wasn't any kind of great public speaker, just to find another rhyme with this history. I will be on edge every time he is speaking extemporaneously until the election. I'm not going to watch the debates, I stopped doing that several cycles ago but this time I expect it will be terrible. I don't have any faith that the media clown "moderators" will do anything except go back to their typical habits.
* One of the school districts one of my nieces lives in, the chair of the school board whois pushing to reopen the schools has mentioned, over and over again the needs of the sports programs - not mentioning academic concerns once. That she also owns a restaurant which, no doubt, lost money during the all-too-brief shutdown last Spring may honestly be suspected to play a role in her need to pretend that everything is just buzzing merrily along. That is the Trumpian line, as it was in Sweden and Britain and some other places which has made the plague here worse than in other places. What has made the USA a pariah state, leading to, oh, so ironically it being Trump's doing, travel bans, both internationally and among the several states.
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