Really. "Angels Dancing On The Head Of A Pin" - Ignorant Hate Mail

I HAVE REPEATED THAT the mid-1990s book "The Historical Jesus" of John Dominic Crossan had the effect of sparking my interest in and taking seriously the Gospels and, from there, the writings of the rest of the Second Testament. And, inevitably from that, the Jewish Bible.  But I've also mentioned that I have become very skeptical about the "historical Jesus" business since then. I freely admit that along the way I have adopted some of that skepticism from such eminent scholars as Walter Brueggemann, Luke Timothy Johnson and Marilynne Robinson.

Recently reading about the theories, modern and quite old, about the various hands that went into the creation of the First Testament, I have found myself far more skeptical about similar claims made about the early Christian texts which have a far shorter history before they became the canon of orthodox Christian Scripture. I think a lot of New Testament Scholars envy the complex richness of First Testament scholarship and they want those kinds of publication generating opportunities for themselves. I have gone from taking the claims of the various, often disagreeing modern pruners and adders to and ideologically interpreting scholars about the Christian scriptures as being no more reliable than those who produced the canonical books of the Second Testament. And, in some ways, for me, quite less so, so removed from the milieu in which Jesus and his earliest followers lived.

As an aside, I have come to ask why the "historical Jesus" industry is allowed to have it both ways, discrediting the canonical Gospels because they were written a few decades after Jesus lived because they were written too late to be credible while allowing the far later ones, even some of them making clearly inauthentic and incredible claims and even some pretty wacky "sayings," more current cred.  Such as the devalued thing that current cred is.  They should get their industrial standards straightened out, like right now.

I think the reason Luke and the others wrote what they did (and with some details, we have a pretty reliable text of what they did) is because they knew people who knew Jesus or who learned from those who did and those things are what they told them. It's not out of the question that some of them may have known or witnessed his named followers or been eye witness to some of it. And they believed they were saying what was said about him was accurate. That is while it's clear none of them believed they were producing a biography, accurate in every detail chronology or even a comprehensive account of what was taught and what happened. I think the author of Mark probably didn't have time or paper or the educational background nearly as much as the author of Luke-Acts did.  

And I think when they said Jesus was talking about life and death, in a time and place when early and often violent death was so common, that's what they were talking about. I think people were probably, day to day, even more anxious about our fate at death than modern people are till they face death full on. When Jesus had Lazarus and the rich man existing in present time versions of what Christianity interpreted as heaven and hell, I think that's what they think he meant.  And I think the obscure passages of Jesus prophesying were presented in quite confusing terms because that's the nature of prophesy, as done by Jesus as it was the seers of Isaiah and Jeremiah. Just what he was referring to is open to interpretation.

As to the use of metaphor by Jesus, given his life and violent death, the testimony about the Resurrection, life and death, the two richest sources of metaphorical potential, it wouldn't be anything but expected that he and his followers would use those terms metaphorically to deal with the pre-decease vicissitudes of human experience and to describe things we cannot experience.  The very act of using terms metaphorically requires there to be common aspects of what is used metaphorically and what those are used to describe.  But sometimes life and death and claims about life after death aren't metaphors but facts and claims about those. If that were not the case the metaphor would be powerless to describe anything.   And, unless you see the risen Jesus, unless you see what was described, when it comes to Resurrection, human beings are stuck with relying on the metaphors. And even if you saw Jesus risen from death, if you wanted to talk about it, that's how you'd probably do it.

Try reading some modern theoretical physics and tell me which is more sensible in human terms.  Oh, you'll need more math than you probably have. Otherwise, like other than a few thousand people in the world, including me, you have to take that on faith. Though, like me, you aren't required to believe it. Which of the conflicting multiverse legends of physics are you to choose?

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I can say that the commentary of The Jewish Study Bible published by The Jewish Publications Society and, right now, the collection of Essays in the back of the book will probably influence me much more than Crossan or the better of his colleagues will.  And the more I look at the scholarship and careers of some of them, I don't hold them to be reliable. In a few cases, even some who got faculty positions at some of the more elite universities out of the fame they got from the "historical Jesus" fad, I don't find them credible.  

Among the things I've gotten from  reading the JSB has been its account of not only commentary after the present texts of Scripture have been determined but the way that all through the production of the texts the insertion and incorporation of commentary on the earliest kernels of the various books has been going on and what we have is a rich and varied and often conflicting compound based in the interpretations of large numbers of unknown rabbis, editors, theologians, priests, etc. based on their understandings, their preferences and, in the way of every human language document ever produced, influenced by often very different experiences and points of view and, so, commentary on scripture is an extremely hard thing  to do but you can't read it without doing that. So it's not any great surprise it's often done badly.  For example,

Finally, some later comments on biblical passages occur within those passages themselves, at least in the text of the Bible has been in use for the past two millennia. Like modern readers, ancient readers penned explanations or reactions to the text they were reading in margins or between the lines. Some of these marginal comments were subsequently inserted into the text itself by scribes who copied the scroll containing the marginal comment. (It is also possible that some of these comments were inserted to begin with by scribes who made them as they were copying a scroll.) For example, 1 Kings 15.5 originally limited itself to a comment praising King David, and one important manuscript of the ancient Greek translation of Kings preserves that original text. A later scribe found the fulsome praise of David inconsistent with the story in 2 Sam. ch 11. That story is exceedingly critical of David for committing adultery with the wife of Uriah the Hittite (one of his own soldiers) and for having Uriah murdered to insure that the adultery was not discovered. Therefore, the scribe added a qualification in 1 Kings 15.5: "except in the matter of Uriah the Hittite."  These words became part of the Masoretic Text, which thus contains both the original author's evaluation of David and a later reader's reaction to that evaluation.  

And, more consequentially, I'd think, that's true of even the most central parts of Scripture, even THE CENTRAL text, Exodus.

Similarly, Exod. 22.24 originally read,  "If you lend money to My "am," do  not act toward them as a creditor; extract no interest from them."  Now,  the Hebrew word "am" usually means "people,"  but it can also mean "the poor" or "common folk, peasantry" (see Isa. 3.15; Ps.72.2; Neh. 5.1).  To make clear that in this case the second of these meanings was to be understood, a later scribe added the words "to the poor among you" immediately after "'am."  Since the meaning of "am" as "people" was more common, the scribe worried that without clarification the verse would be misread.

When I think of how I could be spending my dwindling days instead, teasing out the so abstract as to have no meaning games of modern philosophers, the thinking of "ethicists" whose primary professional activity is writing up lists of who it's Ok to let die of neglect or to actively murder, following the absolute trash of commercial "culture," cinematic "art,"(I was recently subjected to a Hallmark Christmas crap movie) I'd rather be doing this. Modernism turns out to be the ideological focusing on the equivalent of counting angels dancing on the head of a pin, materialist-atheist-scientism requires the demotion and inconsequence of human minds and modern kulcha follows suit, from the basest to the ritziest.

And as to "angels dancing on" which, contrary to the college-credentialed common received wisdom of my and he immediately preceding generations Aquinas doesn't seem to have proposed doing, it was an anti-Catholic early modern era Brit who seems to have made that polemical myth up. I wish I had a ten for every in-the-know university teacher,student or hanger on I heard make an in-the-know disdainful reference to that.  If I had one for every time I got a comment as ignorant as yours, I might not be able to buy a crappy social media company but I could buy a better computer.

Unlike modern philosophy in its most esteemed form, I'll take anything that ends up with it being even slightly more likely the poor will receive the material support they need, enough so that it will contribute to their having a decent life, even if that is some "historical Jesus" text. I'll leave it to the atheist theoretical physicists to argue how many universes are generated when I hit the wrong key or my damned space bar sticks.  I'll certainly take the moral conclusions of Crossan over the death lists of modern "ethics."  

Magnificat J. Michael Thompson

 

 

 

The Schola Cantorum of St. Peter the Apostle, 

 J Michael Thompson Director

 

The setting uses the Orthodox style of interspersing a devotional text between the verses.   

 

Excellent chorus.  

Magnificat in a Minor - Harold Darke

 

Hereford Cathedral Choir 

Roy Massey director

 

On The First Monday of Advent

This book proposes that one fruitful approach to the theology of Mary, historically the mother of Jesus, called in faith the Theotokos or God-bearer, is to envision her as a concrete woman of our history who walked with the Spirit."
Elizabeth A. Johnson from Truly Our Sister

IN AN E-MAIL INTERVIEW of the theologian Elizabeth A. Johnson by Clint A. Schenekloth, a Lutheran pastor, the Magnificat came up. But there's a lot more to come before then.

Clint:  If I am reading you correctly, it is not necessary to understand the virgin birth as parthenogenesis in order to confess the virgin birth of faith.  Rather virginity has to do with the independence for the woman, and is related to Mary's free assent to the work of the Spirit in making her the Theotokos.  Is that correct?

I will break in to note one thing, the common resort to parthenogenesis to describe the conception of Jesus makes a big mistake because parthenogeneis always results in an offspring who is the same gender as the mother in species which have the XY chromosomal form of reproduction.  I believe it has never been observed to.  Whatever the story of the conception of Jesus in Luke and Matthew is, it is not nearly a conventional description of the biological phenomenon of parthenogenesis.    

Elizabeth:  I'm not sure you hit the nail on the head with this one, though what you say does reflect some of the aspects of what I think.  Basically, the virginal conception (which is different from the virgin birth) is a christological truth, not a doctrine about Mary.  In Scripture, as I try to show on pp.  251-254, the Spirit's overshadowing Mary signals that God is doing a new thing here.  God is taking the initiative.  As in Gen. 1 when the Spirit moves over the chaotic waters and in Exodus with the cloud and pillar of fire leading the people and in the transfiguration scene in the gospels, the words used by Luke point to the creative presence and action of God doing a new thing in the world.  The conception of Jesus told in this language means that who Christ is cannot be traced to the efforts of human beings alone.  His origin is in God.  He comes to us as a gift of God, at the Creator Spirit's own initiative.  It's kind of like sola gratia in a different setting.

As you note, women today also read the scene as a marvelous story of how God and a woman can bring about the Messiah, without the help of men, which symbolized both women's spiritual empowerment and also a critique of patriarchal power.  This is a great gain toward understanding the propoer relationships among human beings.

But the heart of the text is theological, saying a truth about Christ.

And here I'll break in to note that what she says about there being no men involved in the birth of Jesus mirrors a point that Sojourner Truth made at a suffrage meeting when they were being harassed by men,

Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ‘cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it. The men better let them.

Clint:  I'd like to hit the nail on the head with this one,  so we'll try a second time (and point taken, the virginial conception is a different issue than the virgin birth).  I'm not quite sure, given the context of its usage, what Carsten Colpe means when he insists that the Holy Spirit overshadowing Mary is "the opposite of human creation" (253). I understand that it is different, by why opposite?  To ask it another way, you emphasize that God is not a sexual partner but a creative power in the beginning of Jesus, but why is God's being a creative power set in opposition to the procreative understanding traditionally ascribed to the Holy Spirit in the virginal conception?  Of we could point out that might be obvious - God is present and "creative" in may situations, and God's Spirit is with us, empowering and protecting in many situations as well.  But humans, at least a vast majority of the time, only experience the procreativeness of God through childbearing when there is sexual intercourse involved (or the technologized versions of the same).  So what about Mary?

Elizabeth:  Regarding the creative action of God and procreation:  As I point out on pp. 227-233, thinkers from the second century on have put forth at least four interpretations namely that the child was conceived by Mary and Joseph having sexual relations, or that an unknown man seduced her, or that she was raped by the Roman soldier Panthera, or that this was a biological miracle.  This last became the teaching of the church.  Even here, however, no mechanism is ever described.  Given that the Holy Spirit is the creative agent and given that there is a tradition of considering the Spirit in feminine imagery,  it is too naive to posit the Spirit as the male sexual partner of Mary.

My fundamental position about the historical root of the virginal conception agrees with the biblical scholar Joseph Fitzmyer:  "What really happened?  We'll never know." Since the popular imagination has slipped into the idea that God acted as the male sexual partner in this conception, I spend a lot of energy deconstructing this notion.  
 

This does not mean that God could not have done so.  There is no opposition between the creative action of God and procreation, in priciple.  My point is, though, that such is not the theological heart of the Christian belief: "Conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary."

I have said that I have no great emotional attachment to the story of The Virgin Birth of Jesus but I have also said that there is no way that we can ever know if the angel Gabriel came and told her that she was going to have a baby by the action of the Holy Ghost even though she was a virgin.  Before I became too wrapped up with the anti-religious babble of Richard Dawkins - I'd been an opponent of his evo-psy since the late 1970s - I answered his claim that the question of the Virgin Birth could be solved with science by pointing out he made essentially the same mistake he did, over and over again, in his claims about evo-psy, that the absolutely necessary evidence to study the question scientifically was not and almost certainly never would be available, the resolvable and identifiable biological remains of Jesus, Mary and whoever his natural father might have been.  If he had a super-natural father, that crucial piece of evidence would never be had so the great champion of science did nothing but prove, again, that he really had very little conception of what the requirements to do science are.  Since then I found out that he seldom bothered to make observations, preferring to do his "science" from his writing table instead of in the field.  Yet he was probably one of the most influential writers on biology for the past forty five or so years.

I have to say I do like the story, especially as someone like Elizabeth Johnson goes over and thinks over it.  I love the Magnificat, probably the best Canticle in the Bible, certainly one which has generated perhaps more really good music than any of the others.  I believe what it says because I choose to believe in its radical, leveling view of reality in terms of equal justice, the kid of justice that secularism and human governments don't bring.   As I've pointed out, that's directly in opposition to the natural selection which is Dawkins' creator god substitute.

CLINT: Proclamation and preaching are important and integral loci of the Lutheran tradition. When I read your book [Truly Our Sister:  A theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints] and then note the placement of the Magnificat the beginning of Luke, it is my sense that Mary is one of the first preachers in the gospels, and certainly the first female preacher. Can you say more about what this means for the ecclesiology of the church as it relates to gender?

ELIZABETH A Johnson: The implications of the Magnificat for women in the church are many (271–274) [referring to the pages in her book, it's an e-mail interview]. Fundamentally, these words signal that the lowly will be lifted up.

In so far as women have not functioned or been treated equally in the churches, either in theory or practice, they count among the lowly (though thankfully that is beginning to change). The Magnificat urges even greater efforts in this regard, in light of God’s design revealed in this song.

CLINT: From an interpretive/theological perspective, is there a difference between preaching (say the preaching that goes on in Acts, for example) and prophetic singing (the songs sung by Hannah, Mary, etc.)? How does this relate to the ordination practices of our churches?

ELIZABETH: Obviously, there are differences among the churches here. I also draw attention to the feminist critique I made of Luke-Acts on pp. 213–216 and 301–302, in view of which Luke is not a reliable historical guide to what women did and how they preached in the early decades of the church. Luke had a different agenda. But women did preach in an apostolic way, even though he did not see fit to record this. So in truth, I do not see any direct connection to the ordination practices of the churches.

CLINT: My question here has more to do with the fact that Mary speaks/sings the Magnificat than it does with the actual content of what she speaks forth (as important as that content is). If we look at the text from a rhetorical perspective, it is a song and sermon placed very early in the Gospel of Luke, and placed on the lips of Mary. If we take Luther’s observation to heart, that “she sang it not for herself alone but for all of us, to sing it after her,” should we not say, and encourage the church to practice, the continued singing of this song not by a solo female voice with male priestly accompaniment, but rather with the full voice of the choir summoned forth by God to preach the gospel?

ELIZABETH: I agree—the Magnificat is a song for the whole church to sing.

I will speak up for Luke who was certainly not close to a feminist but who, for example, showed the Women of Jerusalem as faithfully and sorrowfully accompanying Jesus as he was going to his death instead of running away like the men did.  And he did give Mary more lines, not to mention Elizabeth, than in the other Gospels.  I think her critique is probably more relevant to Acts, which the author of Luke probably wrote as well.

I have always had a bit of unease with the idea of the trinity though I've read quite a lot about that theological idea and am more comfortable with it now than I used to be.  Part of what makes me more comfortable with it is exactly what Elizabeth Johnson says about the virginal conception of Jesus, "We'll never know."  I like the idea that God acts decisively in the midst of our physical reality, our lives in such a radical way as to be incarnated in the person of a human being, Jesus, who is also more than merely human as he is fully human.  I especially like the idea that with him all of physical reality is transformed - or, perhaps, that with his life and resurrection human beings can conceive of that transformation - and that we are all on our way to be more than merely physical beings in a physical world, while being that, as well.  I especially like the idea that these things surpass our ability to understand them.  I think that's in no small part because the human act of understanding is tied up so intimately with our experience of material existence and human thinking about mathematical objects so it would be absurd to think we could use understanding to become fully familiar with something partially, perhaps mostly outside of both our experience of physical reality or the manipulation of numbers and abstract lines and planes and points on those. These questions are a bit more complex than the axioms of math or our observations of the movements and combinations of objects.

As to who actually sings The Song of Mary, you have to take into account the practice of only allowing males, men and boys, to sing it in church for so many centuries.  While it is certainly a song that has meaning for everyone, I'd like there to be a whole slew of good to great settings for Women's voices, Women and girls as well as those which would have been composed with the idea that it was men or men and boys or, as in one of my favorite English settings by George Dyson, for boys, mostly younger than Mary would have been.  And I'd like a lot of those settings to be composed by Women as well as men.

I'm going to be dipping into some of the text of the series I did a number of years back where I posted one or more musical settings of the Magnificat during let almost every day of Advent.  I still am offline at home so it might be hit or miss and I will be concentrating most but not exclusively on living vernacular translations of it - I WILL NOT BE POSTING THE APPALLING ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF BACH'S SETTING OF THE LATIN TEXT BECAUSE IT IS A MUSICAL AND TEXTUAL ABOMINATION.  I will probably not post some of the pop style versions.  While those might mean something to some people, the show-biz style and format is something I can't imagine will lead anyone to the meaning of those.  I don't think they have the musical integrity of the songs of some of the more sincere blues or country musicians.  I wonder what someone like Dolly Parton might have done for a setting of it.  I'll bet it would be worth hearing.  Having had that thought, I can think of a whole list of Women I'll bet could do a good job of that.

More On The Tales of Genesis That Atheists Love To Embarrass Literalists With But Not Me - Hate Mail

THE JEWISH STUDY BIBLE says this about the similarities found in Genesis with some articles of Mesopotamian literature that so many like to claim the Jews stole from those poor, put upon pagans who repeatedly overran Israel and Judea.

Largely because of its focus on creation, the primeval history exhibits a number of contacts with Mesopotamian mythology.  The account of creation with which Genesis opens (1.1-2.3), for example, has affinities with Enuma elish, a Babylonian epic, which tells how one god, Marduk, attained supremacy over the others and created the world by splitting his aquatic enemy in half.  The story of Adam and Eve's sin in the garden of Eden (2.25-3.24) displays similarities with Gilgamesh, an epic poem that tells how its hero lost the opportunity for immortality and came to terms with his humanity.  And the story of Noah (6.5-9.17) Has close connections with Atrahasis, a Mesopotamian story in which the gods send a flood to wipe out the human race with the exception of one man from whom mankind begins afresh (the story was eventually incorporated into Gilgamesh as well).  In each case, the biblical narrator has adapted the Mesopotamian forerunner to Israelite theology.  The primeval history thus evidences both the deep continuities and the striking points of discontinuity of biblical Israel with its Mesopotamian antecedents and contemporaries.

I have no problem accepting this because I would have no problem with them using local folklore to make theological points or to assert the Hebrew ideas of morality.  Vatican II had what I think is a very honest teaching that the Scriptures contain what is needed for salvation, they are not history books or science books or even accurate in terms of those intellectual categories.   I can accept it on those terms and might be prepared to believe those were borrowings if we had a solid basis to make that assumption on, so far as I can see, we don't have that.

I do wonder why it never seems to occur to people that as with the variant texts of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, the Masoretic text, those of the Samaritans, etc. it is impossible to know what version is "original," assuming we have "the original," when they set the text of Genesis against the recovered texts of these related stories.  

The physical objects, encoded in clay might be older than the surviving fragments of the Hebrew Bible but that, in itself, doesn't guarantee that the non-Hebrew texts have a prior, independent existence from what we have now.  It never seems to be asked if the earlier versions of what appears in the Hebrew Bible may not have been copied by the source we have Gilgamesh, etc, from.  I think that the "older" versions of the story might seem to us older because the clay tablets used to write them down were more durable than either oral transmission or a language commonly written on far less durable paper or parchment.  I wonder if the reason there is so much cuneiform around is because it was a lot cheaper than paper or parchment would have been, its material substrate is literally as common as dirt and, given a pure enough source, is far easier to produce. And it never seems to be asked what the Gilgamesh, etc. came from, how the telling of it might have differed from an "original" form, altered to fit the local culture, heavily influenced by their theology and, almost certainly, their politics.  I wonder how much textual criticism of those has been done.

Or it is possible that the different versions grew from an earlier oral tradition that both of them knew and adapted but which we don't know.  The fact is, we simply don't know and likely never will know.  We know which tradition persisted, even with that less durable, more easily lost medium of its preservation which forces a reliance on the human choice to take it seriously enough to preserve it.  And that is the tradition that had such a radical, egalitarian content, a moral foundation of universal justice to it to make it worth preserving even in the more ephemeral, difficult to produce medium of writing on paper or parchment.

The fact is, like with my critique of much of, perhaps most of the alleged science done about biological evolution, the evidence to make any kind of reliable conclusions about that is not available.  Though it is possible that, unlike with so much of the stuff of evolution which covers millions and billions instead of thousands of years, is certainly lost for all time and comes with the inconvenience of not being as articulate or safely interpreted as written text.  There might be a better chance of something earlier coming up in this much narrower area of research, though I doubt it will be written on paper or parchment. It is unfortunate that the earliest Hebrew tradition that we know doesn't seem to have often used a more durable medium for writing, though it must have been a lot easier to lug around some scrolls than a bunch of heavy clay tablets, Genesis and Exodus show them to have been people on the go.  The fact is, unless we have readable texts that we can understand, earlier human culture is nothing but a product of rank conjecture and story telling, the modern versions of that lacking the basis in knowledge that those who produced the earliest available texts may have had access to.  In the modern pop version of that, the stuff of internet babble and "journalism" and in a good deal of the modern academic babble about it, there is an obvious anti-religious, anti-Jewish and, so, anti-Christian bias assumed from the start.  Even many Christians and Jews, wanting to be good and, more so, respectable academics go along uncritically to get along with that.  I think a lot of them give up too much way too easily when a MORE CRITICAL look at the evidence would not necessarily lead to the modern debunking of the texts.

Even if you make the stupendous mistake of mistaking Genesis for history as written by modern scholars, what makes Fundamentalism, in spite of itself a product of modernism, the fact is that the literary and editorial practice of including two versions of the same story in the text makes that far less credible than, as Brueggmann advocates, taking it seriously but "holding it loosely."  Following that advice, I take it seriously but never hold on to any ideas I might have about this or that passage of most of it as being certain knowledge.  That is especially true of the Gospels and the Prophets which contain passages that surpass that kind of knowing.

Of course I don't believe in the literal truth of the creation of the human species in Genesis (which one of the two accounts?).  While I respect his brilliance, his responsibility in formal intellectual discourse and his incredible work ethic which makes him such an effective debater with scientistic atheists, I think William Lane Craig's attempt to locate a biological Adam and Eve isn't his best work.  His evangelical orientation leads him to hold onto some things too hard, a criticism I can make of another current and very effective apologist, the Oxford mathematician, John Lennox.  If there's one thing we know about the literary cultures  that gave us Genesis and the other Books of the Bible (and there was considerable cultural change all during the period when those were written), they used exaggeration as a method of giving emphasis and to make things more noticeable.  I would guess that a Sarah might have been in her late 40s or early 50s, that a Moses would have had a considerably narrower number of years in which to do what is attributed to him. But that's my conjecture.  The record in Scripture is the only record we've got.  

Of course I don't believe that the flood in the story of Noah was a weather report on the most catastrophic rain storm in history - though the 1990s or so conjecture that it might have been a vaguely remembered cultural report on the flooding of the Black Sea basin thousands of years earlier had some appeal for me.  If I'd lived through it I might wonder what we'd done to make God do that to us.  And stories about it may well have persisted in oral literary culture for a very long time.   Though the scientific basis for such an origin is certainly in hot dispute with some evidence that it was horse feathers.

I think the Tower of Babel might have been a satirical (though not necessarily unreliable) report on a Trumpian building project that collapsed in arrogance, rich-guy insistence on their builders doing the impossible.  I predict "Neom" will turn out be one going on right now.  Maybe their architects were as incompetent about materials and physics as so many modern celebrity ones are in our "enlightened" culture.*  

Or through  misplaced confidence in unproved building technology.  And then there is the injustice that allowed the ruling class to waste resources on self-aggrandizement which could have gone to improve the conditions of the least among them.  I'll bet the poor people of knew they were getting the shaft so they could build the thing, like some realize that when the grifting Mayor and Council try to build a new football stadium or they put in a bid with the gangsters of the International Olympics Committee. Slave labor would almost certainly have been involved at some level.

In that there is certainly a parallel in the Pharaonic regime and its pyramids and other useless self-aggrandizing extravagances.  I'm more convinced that the cultural memory of that kind of thing might have something to do with the reluctance of the Jewish tradition to mention the afterlife except only very occasionally and generally somewhat askance. I'll bet that's part of what they thought of when they remembered that they were slaves in Egypt.

* And, or so my carpenter brother told me, even many non-celeb architects who run up huge costs doing the same.  He's worked on two hospitals that wasted enormous amounts on cost-overruns for totally useless architectural ornamentation such as an ornamental tower that didn't even contain a radio antenna, even more so on a very large indoor waterfall that carried such an obvious danger of becoming infectious that you have to wonder at the absolute stupidity of having such things IN A FRIGGIN' HOSPITAL approved by idiots who should never have been in a position to do that. I don't know if they still have it going but when I went in there the lobby stank of chlorine, so much so I had a hard time standing it for a few minutes.  Our hospitals are run by idiots and gangsters, the medical industry in the United States is a moral cesspool.  Obamacare was a huge advance over what was but it doesn't come close to fixing the basic problem of for-profit medicine, which should never have been allowed to become for-profit.