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The Roadside Hookup That Changed the World

How Do People Change?

Last week we noted that in the movement to the Joseph story in the book of Genesis God’s overt interventionist tendencies seem to change. In Genesis 37 you don’t even find the words God or Yhwh or “El Shaddai”.

The baggage of God’s chosen family is on full display. The family tradition of favoritism has yielded bitter fruit. Joseph’s murder by his brothers is interrupted by Judah realizing there is more profit in slavery than fratricide.

As is typical in the book of Genesis God’s world-blessing-project seems once again not only in jeopardy but also possibly irresponsible. Who would try to save the world through THIS family?

Lifestyles of the Bronze Age Rich and Famous

Genesis chapter 38 seems like a strange break in the story, but as we will see it is an important part of the author’s larger framework. As is often the case parts of this story likely don’t follow chronologically from the Joseph story but the author is filling us in on Judah’s character.

Judah left his brothers and took up with a man named Hirah. When he saw his daughter Shua he took her and had three sons with her, Er, Onan and Shelah. When Er was old enough he took a wife for her named Tamar.

Judah here seems to be the first of the patriarchs that gets wives and sons in the normal way others in that place and time did. There is no barrenness. There seems to be no particular destiny, no meeting at a well, yet anyway. God seems absent. Judah is just going about his business.

Er Was Evil and Yhwh Killed Him

Charles Taylor on how “The Reform” remade how we try to save the world

In Charles Taylor’s long pathfinding of our road to secularization one crucial step he notes in the tradition of “Latin Christianity” the development of what he calls “the new police state” (Kindle Loc. 1440) where churches, governments and leaders attempt to organize the lives of their citizens in rational ways.

There are certain common features running through all these attempts at reform and organization:

(1) they are activist; they seek effective measures to re-order society; they are highly interventionist;

(2) they are uniformizing: they aim to apply a single model or schema to everything and everybody; they attempt to eliminate anomalies, exceptions, marginal populations, and all kinds of non-conformists;

(3) they are homogenizing; although they still operate in societies based on differences of rank, their general tendency is to reduce differences, to educate the masses, and to make them conform more and more to the standards governing their betters. This is very clear in the church reformations; but it also is true of the attempts to order people’s lives by the “police states”;

(4) they are “rationalizing” in Weber’s double sense: that is, they not only involve an increased use of instrumental reason, in the very process of activist reform, as well as in designing some of the ends of reform (e.g., in the economic sphere); but they also try to order society by a coherent set of rules (Weber’s second dimension of rationality, Wertrationalitat).