So I was so excited when I rediscovered J. Vernon McGee at TTB.org and realized I could for free keep up with the whole five year program and follow it daily. I miss a day and then catch up, but that doesn't bother me at all. What I want to do is start at the beginning and go all the way through and in the past I've just happened to catch programs here and there.
In some books, and several times, I caught the man speaking about Genesis and I couldn't wait to actualyy oops dive in to it instead of just referencing it here and there. I watched John Huston's The Bible- again, and watched 2001 again and read a few versions of Genesis 1 and had some read to me from BibleGateway.com and here I am in June just starting the story of Joseph.
What stikes ... ha ... me this time around is the paucity of information. Dr. McGee said it straight out and it is so clearly true. People have fashioned entire hypotheses and countered them and whole perspectives and paradigns ha have been created over what is just a thumbnail sketch. It's not a treatise. It's a spiralling ha snowball setting for the last weeks of or make that week of life of Christ. It is a history of Him with a long prelude. It's faster and faster and faster until the difference in words spent over Creation and just one hour of Jesus' death are so enormous we can't fathom.
And of course the end of Genesis mirrors the whole thing. Finally we have a biography of sorts. The only story of any character that even approaches the level of detail of Christ is Joseph. He's at the end of Genesis and Christ is at the end of the gospels.
I've often wanted to do a comparison between the two famous names of Old and New Testaments: Joshua who is Jesus, and Joseph who is His father. I've never seen it done that I remember- beyond maybe one or two sentences. But I do feel that the changing of the name to Jesus was a coup for the devil. In English, anyway. The changing of names bothers me so much. But tacking on some weird sounding name instead of the very common Joshua seems a real mistake to me. Of course there are languages that name people Jesus, but in English it only means one thing. And it's not even a person. It's a stained-glass image of a Man who could never have existed as opposed to a Man who almost never could have existed, but miraculously did!
What are the parallels between Joseph and Joseph? What are the parallels between Joseph and Jesus? And what are the parallels between Joshua and Jesus? I want to know.
I'm riding along with TTB.org's J. Vernon McGee and he's with Joseph and I'm still back in Genesis 1 wanting to go deeper into that. I've passed the Sacrifice of Isaac with not enough meat consumed and I've passed Babel and The Deluge, and I've passed Jacob who's always bothered me Nd the missing life bits of Isaac that startle me and here I am confronted with Joseph. I'm glad to be in Egypt, even though I know I need to come out of it.
I noticed that Joseph was said to use his cup for divination. This is a theological problem just like Jacob commanding his people to give up their idols so late in his story. I suppose the Bible is written for theology, but it's also written for history and it's also written for applicatoin. How did I spell that? What spells did Joseph cast? Or was it just said about him?
There is no way Moses could have written about the entire history of his people without even knowing God's name and being raised the way he was. I didn't grow up thinking the Books of Moses were actually written by Moses. But is that what they flat out say? To me the first five books were called that because they were the text from which the one understanding of them- which came much later, actually was drawn. I don't think anybody reading them ever considered they were one thing, until people started saying they believed it all without reading it seriously. That's modern. People didn't used to have so many books so they actually took them seriously rather than spouting off that they believed every word of them without reading much of them very well.
Back to Joseph. He is blameless but at the same time he is quite a dick. How is that conveyed in so little words. We have novels today that have characters like that and we think it's because we've read so much about them that we have empathized with their trouble and understand their inner workings and after 400 pages with them we feel like we know them. But even in all of its comparative length, how do we possibly arrive at this belief about Joseph?
I'm hoping to learn more about Joseph this time around, but I really want to study the difference between the use of the names Jacob and Israel. Surely there is something there. People think of Jews as tricksters every so often in history and there's got to be some lessons there. And what is the difference between an Israelite and a Jew, in historical thought? Was the term Jacobite ever used?
There;s not enough time to learn everything but I think I need to go back to Bethel. I can tell you that. What is this wrastling (not a typo) thing I've got going on? Isn't there any authority at all that I don't hate?
I can't think of one.
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