Lecture: Biblical Series VIII: The Phenomenology of the Divine

Oh hello, everyone. Thank you again for showing up. So tonight we're going to finish off the story of Noah and also the story of the Tower of Babel, and I don't think that'll take very long. Then we're going to turn to the Abrahamic stories, and they're a very complex set of stories. They sit between the earliest stories in Genesis that I would say end with the Tower of Babel and then the stories of Moses, which are extraordinarily well-developed.

Abrahamic stories, there's a whole sequence of them, multiple stories conjoined together, and there I found them very daunting. They're very difficult to understand, and so I'm going to stumble through them the best that I can. I would say that's probably the best way to think about this because they have a narrative content that's quite strange. I was reading a book while doing this called "The Disappearance of God" that I found quite helpful, and the author of that book argues that one of the things that happens in the Old Testament is that God is very manifest at the beginning in terms of personal appearances even.

Then that proclivity fades away as the Old Testament develops, and there's a parallel development that it's maybe causally linked. I'm not exactly sure how to conceptualize it, but that appears to be causally linked is that the stories about individuals become more and more well-developed. So it says in, it's as if, as God fades away, so to speak, the individual becomes more and more manifest.

There's a statement in the Old Testament, the location of which I don't recall, but I'll tell you about it in future lectures, where God essentially tells whoever he's speaking with—and I don't remember who that is—that he's going to disappear and let man essentially go his own way and see what happens. Not a complete disappearance, but maybe a transformation is something that modern people regard more as a psychological phenomenon rather than the sort of objective entity that God seems to be in the beginning of the biblical stories.

I've been wrestling with that a lot because the notion that God appears to Abraham multiple times, and that's not a concept that's easy for modern people to grasp. For us, generally speaking, apart from, say, issues of faith, God is something someone who makes himself personally manifest in our lives. He doesn't appear to us. That's, I suppose, why the question of belief is so paramount for modern people.

I presume that if God had been in the habit of appearing to you, you likely wouldn't have a problem with belief. I mean, it might be more complicated than that, but that's how it seems to me. So when we read stories about God making himself manifest, either to a nation, say in the case of Israel, or to individuals, it's not easy to understand. It's not easy to understand why people would write stories like that if they thought like we thought.

I mean, it really—it wasn't that long ago that the Bible was written. Say from a biological perspective, it's really only yesterday. It's a couple thousand years, say four thousand years, something like that. That's not very long ago from a biological perspective; it's nothing. So the first thing I tried to do is to see if I could figure out how to understand that.

And so, else the lecture, once we finish the remains of the story of Noah, I'll start the lecture with an attempt to situate the Abrahamic stories in a context that might make them more accessible. These two contexts that work for me to make them more accessible.

Let's conclude the Noah story first, however. When we ended last time, the ark had come to its resting place, and Noah and his family had debarked. And so, this is the stories of what occurs immediately after. It's a very short story, but I think it's very relevant for both of these stories. The Tower of Babel is well, very relevant for our current times, and the sons of Noah that went forth of the ark were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth; and Ham is the father of Canaan. These are the three sons of Noah, and of them was the whole earth overspread. And Noah began to be...