Hitchhiker’s Guide to Babylon (3)
“Build houses and live in them; and plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and become the fathers of sons and daughters, and take wives for your sons and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters; and multiply there and do not decrease. Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf; for in its welfare you will have welfare.” Jeremiah 29:5-7 NASB
Take/become – Physical survival needs accomplished, God now turns to communal identity. It’s not enough to merely survive in Babylon. Accumulating assets is only a small part of the strategy. The names of Israel must also be protected. What names? Family names. The tribal identity. The legacy. Just because we are in captivity does not mean we forget who we are. We might be many Josephs, serving our Babylonian masters faithfully and completely, but we are still Israel and Israel must continue.
The verb used for “take wives” is completely common. Used over one thousand times in the Tanakh, laqah has both literal and figurative applications. “Lay hold of,” “seize,” “receive,” “snatch,” “acquire-buy” and, of course, “marry” are all possible translations. But this particular context and this specific command should remind Israel of a time, a tragic time, when laqah involved Israel’s men in kidnapping, murder and ill-conceived oaths. The last chapters of the book of Judges describes Israel’s social breakdown. Were it not for God’s grace and His appointed kings, Israel would have collapsed entirely. So laqah has historical consciousness. “Take wives” can never be a repeat of Israel’s former disgrace.
Notice also that laqah does not restrict “wives” to members of the tribe. There is no prohibition against wives from Babylon. What! This seems so contrary to our penchant for “tribal” purity. Even today we enlist Paul’s famous “unequally yoked” phrase to keep the outsiders out. But perhaps we have overlooked what God really wanted. The whole intent of these commands to exiled people is to finally fulfill the purpose of Israel’s election, that is, to be priests to the nations. In order to accomplish that directive, Israel must act as a friend to its enemies. It must show compassion, goodwill, grace, forgiveness and shalom. If it does this, God promises that the nations will come to these priests and ask, “Who is this god you serve that prospers you in this way?” In other words, living in Babylon means being a magnet for God. And this means getting to know these outsiders so that they are no longer strangers. They are now neighbors, in the best sense of that term, and as such, they share common family values. They discover the God of Israel in the lives of the captives. And then marriages happen. Not with complete pagans but rather with those who have come to realize who YHVH is and want to be part of His community. That’s why laqah is the common verb. The captors marry into the families of the captives because the relationship has changed from master-slave to friend. If that doesn’t happen first, then laqah brings us back to Judges—and tragedy.
“Take wives” means becoming fathers. This again reminds us of Judges. God has no intention of allowing the tribes to disappear while in captivity. Fathers beget children and children continue the names. In fact, the verb, yalad, is the root for “child” (yeled) and “born” (yalid). It is also the root of toledot (descendants), a crucial term in the records of Israel. “These are the generations of” is the toledot arena.
Marrying is not enough, just as building and planting was not enough. There is a greater purpose for all these actions. In this case, that purpose is continuance. Israel will survive because it finally acts as the priest it was intended to be and the community of the one true God grows through children. Evangelicals are fond of saying, “God has no grandchildren,” meaning that each of us has an intimate first-hand relationship with Him. But maybe that’s not quite true. God has lots and lots of grandchildren, and great grandchildren and great great grandchildren, etc., etc. because He is the God of toledot too.
Topical Index: laqah, take, marry, become fathers, yalad, toledot, generations, Jeremiah 29:5-7
Of all the immense tragedies spawned by the notion that a person is a complete entity in ISOLATION from all ‘other’ (the idolatrous basis for humanism), we in the West, as the inheritors of such horrible misunderstanding of reality, are now, I firmly believe, suffering from the spiritual, intellectual and biological fallout of that falsehood.
I just finished watching a series created by Patrick Gentempo called GMOs Revealed. One person he interviews is a Dr. Zach Bush, who has dedicated his life to studying the human genome and what affects it. Enter genetic manipulation and genocide on the microbiome level. Glyphosate and other genetic manipulation, too, has rendered our food supply and environment one huge anti-life disaster. this stuff not only kills our interior biome, it shreds the ability of cells to work correctly together, and creates ‘leaky’ membranes, not only in the gut, but in the brain, etc. Enter chronic illness.
I am beginning to think the most tragic consequence of believing that the human can exist as a ‘pure’ ideal form, isolated from all else, and unique in the DNA structure, has caused us to feel we can literally destroy the rest of the planet, as well as the interior ecosystem of our own bodies, and be somehow ‘better off’ than we were. In fact, we believe that the rest of the cosmos is a threat to our precious ‘self’, so we go to killing it before it kills us.
Dr. Bush points out that genetic manipulation, chemical farming and sanitary practices, as well as the indiscriminate use of antibiotics has, in 50 years, created a sterility of life in and around us that has left us bereft of enough life information; literally genetic code FROM that life, to sicken and kill us. He cites new research that shows our bodies to be inhabited by an immense population of microbes that generate countless times more genetic information than our own DNA does. In fact, almost all of our own genes are factories that produce short snippets of code designed to interact with the environment to direct enzymatic and other responses to reality. We need ALL this code to support choices. Turns out, we are not hard-wired so much as we are soft-wired, but most of that soft wiring lies in the other species that inhabit us. When we kill off those species, we lose the ability to be ourselves. I am blown away.
The Bible still has the truth. It tells us that we should not kill, and that we are physically connected and dependent upon all that other life. When ARE we going to listen? I am ashamed that we have to go now to the secular community to be taught this, because the religious community is overwhelmingly attempting to live out the idolatrous notion that there us such a thing as an isolated individual and an isolated ‘right’ way, when the whole design is about unity. What I think I learned from Dr. Bush is that we need more species, not less. In fact, we do best when our bodies are completely informed by all other life. He says that we spread our genetic info, in the form of snippets of RNA we breathe, everywhere we go. Others are literally changed in who they are by being in contact with us. He cites couples that have been together for decades as sharing so much genetic info that they look and act like each other. And that is just on the bio level.
I think we need to get together (as well as reconnect with that life in nature) to put back that information, before we all die alone. Who I am needs who you are, along with all the other information put out by all other life. ALL other life. I believe we have it exactly backwards, putting form before function. When I kill the other, I am killing myself. If I truly love myself, I will protect all that other, for it is who I am.
Yep, one of the reasons I like mud puddles. 🙂
BTW Laurita, thank you for this link. I’m listening to it for the sake of diverting those who are opposed to the idea of “religion” having any validation. You are right in the assessment of our practices being anti life and it scares me to the point of shaking sometimes. I am hoping that it doesn’t have to go down this way (there’s another option) but I don’t see much of an alternative at the moment. But God……..you’re also right in if we would just stand on what God says, whether we understand it or not, we would have His blessing. I’m thinking, that’s what He’s waiting for!