God is in the Details

I've been reading through Exodus recently -- not out of excess piety, but because I have to read the whole Old Testament for my Old Testament course -- and I've noticed some interesting things. While it's easy to parse the Bible into interesting bits (Genesis, Samuel/Kings, the Gospels, Romans, maybe some psalms) and uninteresting bits (Deuteronomy, Leviticus, many of the minor prophets, Revelation if you're not inclined to enjoy bizarre conspiracy theories, etc.), I'm starting to see the wisdom in reading all of it straight through once in a while. Buried deep in the boring bits of Exodus, I've found two fascinating tidbits:

1 Consecration and Putting Words in God's Mouth (Exodus 19:9-15)
In preparation for giving the Ten Commandments God tells Moses to get the people cleaned and washed and all purtied up in their Sunday Best. In the tradition of viewing the relationship between the God (holy) and his people (mostly unholy) as a kind of cosmic battery where touching the holy and unholy ends together would cause some rather large sparks, God also tells Moses to keep the people the hell away from Mount Sinai so that they don't, y'know, die. God tells all this to Moses and Moses goes down and reports it faithfully to the people. They get consecrated, they wash their clothes, and then (almost as an afterthought, just before we move on to Moses going up the mountain) says "Prepare for the third day; do not go near a woman"

Now, I could be missing some important historical assumption here, but I find it fascinating that Moses (who is at this point God's good little messenger, dutifully running up and down the mountain for several months) seems to add on this no-sex rule of his own initiative. God didn't say anything about it, but Moses seems to think that being in your Sunday best involves keeping away from the missus. There's an interesting lesson there in our assumptions about what's holy and what God wants, as well as the way patriarchy gets imposed on otherwise gender-neutral religious events...

2 It Shall Be Made of Acacia Wood from the Trans-Jordanian Forest Aged Exactly Four Years and Two Months, and It Shall Be Two and Half Cubits Long by One and Three-Eighth Cubits High ...
Exodus 25 through 31 are, without exception, the longest Home Hardware list EVER. Followed by what is possibly the most boring do-it-yourself account EVER in Exodus 36 to 39. First there's God saying "You shall" and telling Moses exactly how to go about making a pretty box and an even prettier tent to keep the tablets of the law in, right down to how many rings should be on the curtains and what they should be made of. Then there's a brief break for Moses to go back down the mountain, have a hissy fit (including a few plagues and massacres) because the Israelites decided to do a little idol-worship while Moses was away, then the narrative resumes with the Israelites (newly zealous about their faith) banding together to donate the gold needed for those ten specific curtain rings God asked for. It's Extreme Makeover: The Exodus Edition!

In the midst of breaking my own recently-made rule on not speed reading (see my other blog) I realized something interesting about these long, boring passages. They illustrated that the Israelites (as people all over the world, then and now) are really good at following the specific rules and instructions, but really suck at getting the larger, more important messages. Build a box two cubits wide by 3 and a half cubits long and make it out of gold? No problem. Love God and love your neighbour? Uhhh.... God could spend the rest of our lives telling us to build pretty boxes, and we'd probably get pretty good at it, but that's not going to help us figure out how to live well.