Prophetic Top Trumps

Top five Old Testament prophets? Anyone?

Well, obviously Jonah rates highly on intelligence alone, but it is impossible to imagine him in the flesh without associating him with the strong smell of fish guts. On balance then, I'd have to give pride of place (as, incidentally, did the Israelites) to Elijah.

One of the most interesting stories about Elijah is his confrontation with the Priests of Baal: a gameshow of sorts in which, instead of getting over three oversized red balls, the contestants were required to prove whose god was the more powerful. Given that religious power within the Kingdom of Israel was at this point balanced on a knife-edge between Yahweh, the tribal god of the Israelites, and Baal, the tribal god of Queen Jezebel, the stakes were high.

The nature of the contest was to see which of the two gods (Yahweh or Baal) would accept the sacrifice of a bullock. The Priests of Baal (450 in number) might have done better to choose a task where they could bring their numerical supremacy to bear. A tug of war perhaps. Instead, they fell into Elijah's trap and spent the day doing the best that they could to entreat Baal to signal his acceptance of their sacrificial bullock, which he was required to do by setting it spontaneously alight.

During their vain attempts, Elijah mocked them for the benefit of the audience, saying "Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked." (Irreverence is not a modern invention.)

At the end of this, the Priests gave up, Elijah prepared his own altar (complete, one suspects, with mirrors and a large painted sign saying The Great Elijah) and arranged for his bullock to be inundated with twelve barrels of water (or, as even a mild cynic must suspect, lamp oil).

At this point Elijah called upon Yahweh, at which we are told that the following happened. "Then the fire of the LORD fell, and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that [was] in the trench."

Whether Elijah kept his eyebrows is unrecorded in Biblical history.

Now this story may seem at first to be of little consequence, but it seems to me that it is one of the most important episodes in the history of religion.

Yahweh is a water god: He moves on the face of the waters; He drowns the world; He parts the Red Sea; He brings water out of a stone; He turns water into wine; He walks on water. As befits the god of a desert tribe, He is most strongly associated with the medium that brings life, and when He deals with fire it is often (not exclusively, but often) in opposition to it, as when the three men emerge unharmed from the burning fiery furnace.

Elijah does not only defeat the Priests of Baal, but - by setting a task to be answered by fire - he also dramatises the crucial step for a monotheistic religion from an elemental deity to an all-encompassing God, which is the basis of monotheism. And monotheism is both the greatest strength and greatest weakness of the religions that adopt it.

While I will admit, therefore, that a cackling voiceover from Richard Hammond would probably have improved things ... that's what I call entertainment.

Bounded In An Eggshell

Easter is the most counter-programmed Christian holiday. Having Christmas at the Winter Solstice sort of makes sense because "the people that walked in darkness have seen a great light" and the incarnation makes sense as the dawning of the promise of redemption. Easter, on the other hand, is a pagan celebration of Spring birth recast as a celebration of Divine sacrifice.

This rich palimpsest of symbolism would have been taken some planning if it had not been for the fact that God routinely calculates pi to infinite places and doesn't recognise the concept of a challenge. Easter is more or less the vernal equinox because Jesus died at the Jewish Passover, and presumably Jesus died at Passover because at the original, Mosaic passover the first born (of Israel) were sacrificed that the chosen people might go free. God, with the sensibility of a fine poet, juggled ideas of sacrifice, freedom and (re-)birth. Oh, and Cadbury's Creme Eggs.

Mention of creme eggs is not flippant. If God is infinite, omniscient, omnipotent etc. then He didn't simply construct one perfect associative structure and then turn in for a couple of millenia to see how the whole thing turned out. God foresaw (or, more properly, saw) that The Great Escape and The Sound of Music would end up being associated with Christmas, and He also saw that eggs of chocolate would be eaten at Easter.

Moreover, it is a theological nonsense to suggest that God planned all the imagery of Easter up to Easter Sunday, A.D. 30-odd and then left the rest to be debased by humanity. The popular image may be of a creator god who keeps coming back to His creation only to discover that his hooligan offspring have messed it up again, but that isn't a view that squares easily with the concept of an omniscient or omnipotent deity. Pretty much the only reasonable interpretation of the course of history is that at the point God said "Let There Be Light" He also willed the sacrifice of Christ and that Cadbury's creme eggs would get mysteriously smaller from invention to A.D. 2009 and beyond. He also saw that His own raising from the dead would become inextricably connected with an Irish rebellion of 1916.

The presence of God is often felt on mountainsides and barren coasts, but omnipresence is also fortuitously manifest in Lindt bunnies. You just have to know how to look.

God's Little Helpers

There can be little doubt that the brightest character in the Old Testament (the veritable Stephen Fry of Biblical characters) is Jonah. When God gave him the news that he was to be the next prophet, he saw the writing on the wall (not literally, of course, because the writing on the wall was aimed at Belshazzar) and scarpered.

The attentions of God are generally not a good thing in the Bible. First (well, duh!) there was Adam (that unpleasant business that was picked over several blogs back), and it wasn't long before Abraham was receiving instructions on how to do away with his son.

This story, the story of Abraham and Isaac, is only even slightly tolerable if you see it entirely from the human perspective. God doesn't come too well out of the Garden of Eden debacle, but here He is surely just being sadistic, to ask a father to take his son up the mountain and sacrifice him. After all, there's the omniscience thing again; God knew full well that Abraham was so incapable of independent thought that he would slavishly obey. The only point, then, in going through the entire rigmarole was in order to demonstrate (either to Abraham, to Isaac, or to us) that strict adherence to Divine instruction would probably work out alright in the end.

There we go: moral instruction inculcated and no one harmed except for a ram that thought that the worst part of its day was getting caught in a thicket until Abraham happened along with a murderous gleam in his eye.

And yet, one has to think that Isaac (who uncomplainingly allowed himself to be bound and laid on an altar by the person previously known as "Dad") would have slept less easy in his bed that night. Had psychoanalysis existed in those times, I would have though some intensive counselling and arguably a full course 0f the talking therapy might have done him some good. Abraham himself is likely have looked away evasively as Sarah caught his eye while cooking up (what my knowledge of early-era cooking only extends to describing as) a mess of potage that evening. All cannot have been well in the Abraham household for some days after, and I suspect that they were not permitted to eat the ram to assuage their collective misery, however free-range and hand-cut it might have been.

Were God inclined to justify His own ways to men, he might counter that facing the threat of sacrificing one's son is nothing compared to genuinely sacrificing one's son for the redemption of the world. Moreover, given that God's wrath extends even to an extinction event survived by only one family and a large number of breeding pairs, I don't think that I would be inclined to argue with Him.

But I would be ever so grateful if He were to pass me by next time that He was selecting a helper.