Daily Old Testament and Early Christian Writings: Judges 8:4-35 and Origen's De Principiis: Book VII (2-3)

Judges 8:4-35 - On the way through Succoth (pursuing the remaining Midianite kings—Zebah and Zalmunna), Gideon asks the people to feed his men, but they refuse.  Then the people of Penuel deny them too.  Gideon vows to return and punish them for their unwillingness to help.

Gideon finally defeats the last two, he returns and exacts the revenge he has promised on the leaders of Succoth and Penuel. 

Then he tells the kings he wouldn’t kill them had they not killed his brothers.  He gives his son Jether the task of killing the two kings, but he hesitates; he’s just a boy.  The kings tell Gideon to be a man and do it himself. He does and takes “the royal ornaments from the necks of their camels” (8:21).        

The Israelites ask Gideon to rule over them, but not just him—his son and grandson as well.  The Israelites are asking him to be their king—the first time they suggest monarchy to one of the judges. Gideon refuses “I will not rule over you, and my son will not rule over you; the Lord will rule over you” (8:23). This is the first time this problem is articulated.  The Israelites want a king, but the core of their identity as a people is acceptance of God’s kingship over them.  This will continue to be a tension throughout their later history.

Gideon collects an earring (from the booty they have gained) from each of his men; he makes an ephod with them and puts it in Ophrah, his town. It becomes an object of worship. All “Israel prostituted themselves to it there, and it became a snare to Gideon and to his family” (8:27). There are 40 years of rest.

Gideon has 70 sons.  He also had a child by a concubine—Abimelech.  When Gideon dies, the people relapse into idolatry.

Origen (185-254 AD)

De Principiis (First Principles)

Chapter VII – On Incorporeal and Corporeal Beings

4 – Origen gets into the issue of whether beings that possess “life and reason, were endowed with a soul along with their bodies at the time of creation, “when ‘God made two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night, and the stars also’ or whether their spirit was implanted in them, not at the creation of their bodies, but from without, after they had been already made.” He’s not talking about human beings here; he’s into the question of the “heavenly beings” and I believe he is including not only principalities and powers but the sun, moon and stars!

He suspects the implanting of spirit into them occurred “from without” but he want to look into what Scripture says about it. He refers to the passage that says John (the Baptist) “leapt in his mother’s womb, and exulted because the voice of the salutation of Mary had come to the ears of his mother Elisabeth.” I confess that Origen completely loses me here. Not only do I not understand exactly what he is saying, I have trouble grasping what the importance is of this subject of inquiry.

5 – He quotes a famous passage from Paul’s epistle to the Romans:

Now if [I] do what I do not want, it is no long I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. So, then, I discover the principle that when I want to do right, evil is at hand.  For I take delight in the law of God, in my inner self, but I see in my members another principle that was with the law of my mind, taking me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.  Miserable on that I am!” (7:20-24)

How are we delivered from the “bondage of corruption” which Origen sees rooted in “the body” – our “corporeal nature”??

The sun, moon and stars also are corporeal. Solomon, in Ecclesiastes, says “all is vanity” and everything in the created world looks for renewal and redemption – newness of being – those are my words, trying to get at what I think he’s saying.

He asks “what is the freedom of the creature, or the termination of its bondage. When Christ shall have delivered up the kingdom to God. . . then also those living things, when they shall have first been made the kingdom of Christ, shall be delivered, along with the whole of that kingdom, to the rule of the Father, that when God shall be all in all, they also, since they are a part of all things, may have God in themselves, as He is in all things.”

Daily Old Testament and Early Christian Writings: Judges 5 and Origen's De Principiis: Book VI (4)

Judges 5 – There follows a poetic celebration of the victory of Deborah and Barak—it includes a brief retelling of “the story.

“[W]hen you marched from the region of Edom, the earth trembled, and the heavens poured, the clouds indeed poured water.  The mountains quaked before the Lord, the One of Sinai, before the Lord, the God of Israel” (5:4-5).

“The peasantry prospered in Israel, they grew fat on plunder, because you arose, Deborah, arose as a mother in Israel.  When new gods were chosen, then war was in the gates . . .Tell of it, you who ride on white donkeys, you who sit on rich carpets and you who walk by the way” (5:7-10).

“Gilead stayed beyond the Jordan; and Dan, why did he abide with the ships? Asher sat still at the coast of the sea, settling down by his landings.  Zebulun is a people that scorned death; Naphtali too, on the heights of the field” (5:17-18).

“The stars fought from heaven, from their courses they fought against Sisera” (5:20). Jael is praised: “Most blessed on women be Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, of tent-dwelling women most blessed” (5:24).

The mother of Sisera is imagined as waiting for him to return with the spoils of war. “So perish all your enemies, O Lord! But may your friends be like the sun as it rises in its might” (5:31). The land rested for forty years.

Origen (185-254 AD)

De Principiis (First Principles)

Chapter VI – On the End or Consummation

4 – Origen tries to look into what it is that makes something “visible and temporal” while others are “invisible and eternal.” Are things “temporal” because nothing like them will be part of the “coming world” – the second creation or restored first creation? Or are they called that because just “the form of those things. . . passes away” but their “essential nature is subject to no corruption.” He thinks Paul is of the latter view and David as well in Psalm 102: “The heavens shall perish, but Thou shalt endure; and they all shall wax old as a garment, and Thou shalt change them like a vesture, and like a vestment they shall be changed.”

He believes Isaiah also believed this when he spoke of there being a  “new heaven and a new earth.” “'[T]his renewal of heaven and earth, and this transmutation of the form of the present world, and this changing of the heavens will undoubtedly be prepared for those who are walking along that way which we have pointed out above, and are tending to that goal of happiness to which, it is said, even enemies themselves are to be subjected, and in which God is said to be ‘all and in all.’”

Daily Old Testament and Early Christian Writings: Judges 4 and Origen's De Principiis: Book VI (3)

Judges 4 – King Jabin, Canaanite of Hazor, is the next tyrant Israel must fight.  His military commander is Sisera.  They dominate Israel because of their chariots of iron.

Deborah (around 1125—her song is one of the most ancient pieces of writing in the Old Testament)is a prophetess at this time and also a judge.  As judge, she sat under a palm tree situated in the hill country of Ephraim, between the towns of Ramah and Bethel.  She sends for Barak, son of Abinoam, from Kedesh in the territory of Naphtali to fight against Sisera.  He is to go to Mt. Tabor with 10,000 men from the tribes of Naphtali and Zebulun.  She will draw Sisera to the place and “give him into your hand” (4:7). He insists that Deborah come with him, and she warns him that to do so will mean that the victory he will win will not have the kind of glory it would have without her presence (4:9). 

Then another man is introduced—Heber, the Kenite. The Kenites, it says, were descended from Hobab, the father-in-law of Moses.  Now Moses’ father-in-law is called Reuel in Ex odus2 and Jethro in other places, so who is Hobab?

Sisera comes out with his 900 chariots of iron, but his men panic when Barak attack and Sisera himself flees on foot (4:15) from Barak.  He goes to the tent of Jael, wife of the said Heber - there was peace between King Jabin and the clan of Heber. Jael greets Sisera and invites him into her tent.  She gives him something to drink and covers him with a blanket.  He sleeps, but instead of watching for him at the opening of the tent, she runs a tent-peg through his head (4:21).

When Barak arrives, Jael shows him her work, and the people attribute the victory over Sisera to God.

 

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Origen (185-254 AD)

De Principiis (First Principles)

Chapter VI – On the End or Consummation

3 – Some of the “beings who fell away from that one beginning” fell to such depths of depravity that they are “deemed undeserving” of the instruction human beings are assisted with. They just do not look back to the time of perfection from which they started. These beings are called “the devil and his angels, and the other orders of evil, which the apostle classed among the opposing powers.”

Origen seems to leave undetermined whether any of these “orders” acting under the devil and obeying his commands “will in a future world be converted to righteousness because of their possessing the faculty of freedom of will, or whether persistent and inveterate wickedness may be changed by the power of habit into nature.” He seems drawn to the POSSIBILITY of a universal salvation scenario, but for the present seems to say that the present variety of moral conditions will place all these “beings” into a setting a lot like Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio.

“But in the meantime, both in those temporal worlds which are seen, as well as in those eternal worlds which are invisible, all those beings are arranged, according to a regular plan, in the order and degree of their merits; so that some of them in the first, others in the second, some even in the last times, after having undergone heavier and severer punishments, endured for a lengthened period, and for many ages, so to speak, improved by this stern method of training, and restored at first by the instruction of the angels, and subsequently by the power of a higher grade, and thus advancing through each stage to a better condition, reach even to that which is invisible and eternal.”

He lets his imagination go with the idea that there will be a “new heaven and a new earth.”