I promised myself that this month I would hunker down with the Little Apocalypse in Matthew but that hasn’t happend – instead, the Second Creation Story has stood up and demanded my attention and I have yielded to its demands. My assumption is that something in my head is smarter than I am. This has generally worked out to be true, and a lucky thing, too.
Marti Steussy’s comments on this story from the workshop last February at CTS – described in the last post – have taken me a long way into this story in the last week or so. I’ve also tackled the Hebrew, doing word study to the best of my extremely limited ability.
I’m noticing how the extremely terse Hebrew text, as it’s translated, gets aerated into discursive literary English. How odd. I’ve ordered Everett Fox’s Five Books of Moses from the library and am picking them up tonight, so I can see whether he has God announce something like:
“thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”
or more like:
Eat this, die, die!
