\n<\/p>\n
Here comes a rant.<\/p>\n
Christmas\u00a0in America is a national holiday, woven securely in a secular liturgical year, with little authentic\u00a0religious significance for many\/most of those who celebrate it.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s\u00a0commercialized nonsense, a vehicle for reaching quarterly profit margins. Christmas in America means malls, Lexus \u201cDecember to Remember\u201d\u00a0commercials, and\u00a0some\u00a0very dumb Christmas specials<\/a>.<\/p>\n OK, rant over. We all know this, and pointing it out is as insightful as saying that network television has too many commercials and toilets flush counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere (or do they<\/a>?).<\/p>\n My point here\u00a0isn\u2019t\u00a0to take aim at the easy target of the secularization of Christmas, but to draw an analogy between Christmas in America and what we read about\u00a0Israelites in\u00a0the Old Testament.<\/p>\n The Old Testament is, to state the obvious, religious literature. But we\u00a0tend to assume that the ancient Israelites were as aware as we are of what we read. They weren\u2019t.<\/p>\n There was no \u201cBible\u201d through most of Israel\u2019s ancient history\u2014what we call the Old Testament did not begin to take form until after the return from Babylonian exile (that is, beginning in the 5th c. BCE) and was still somewhat in flux in the days of Jesus and Paul. And whatever writings were floating around in the days of Israel\u2019s kings (roughly 1000-600 BCE) were the stuff of trained scribes<\/a>, not Shlomo and Miriam Israelite farmers and sheepherders.<\/p>\n People weren\u2019t running around \u201creading their Bibles\u201d as we think of it today. I imagine that the ancient Israelites celebrated their rituals\u2014festivals, sacrifices, regular times of\u00a0worship\u2014with the same lack of awareness\u00a0for their deep religious significance as\u00a0most American\u2019s celebrate Christmas. Perhaps, like popular American culture, they sort of just went along with the momentum of their vaguely sacred holidays\u00a0adapted to cultural norms of the\u00a0day\u2014if they observed them at all.<\/p>\n If we could walk through ancient Israelite towns sometime between 1000 and 600 BCE (when Israel was a nation with kings and a Temple with religious rituals), would we see an idyllic scene of common every-day Israelites owning the full religious significance of their holidays and rituals?<\/p>\n Or would we see more or less what we see today as we walk through Walmart or Times Square\u2014masses of Americans for\u00a0whom vaguely ancient religious symbols have been reframed\u00a0by the dominant culture and reinvested with meaning?<\/p>\n This is why biblical scholars and historians make a distinction between the\u00a0Old Testament<\/strong>\u00a0and\u00a0\u201cIsraelite religion.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n The\u00a0Old Testament<\/strong>\u00a0is the official record of the\u00a0literate religious leaders, written not as a straight record of historical events (as if there is such a thing), but as stories, interpretations of the past to prescribe what the people\u00a0should<\/em>\u00a0believe and do in the present\u2014namely in the exilic and post-exilic periods. (I just said a mouthful, but this isn\u2019t in the slightest bit controversial for most. I give this a lot of space in\u00a0The Bible Tells Me So<\/em><\/a>.)<\/p>\n Scholars of\u00a0\u201cIsraelite religion\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0engage the Bible, to be sure, but also archaeological evidence that shows us what people\u00a0on the ground actually\u00a0did<\/em>\u00a0do.<\/p>\n One example is\u00a0the constant Old Testament refrain in 1 and 2 Kings about the proper worship of God:<\/p>\n Readers today might assume that these injunctions were more or less commonly known at the time, and so we read the biblical\u00a0stories about the failure to worship God properly\u00a0as stories of out and out\u00a0rebellion<\/em>\u2014\u201cGeez Louise,\u00a0Israelites,\u00a0when in the world are you going to learn to obey God?! How many times do you have to be told?!\u201d<\/p>\n Or they had an idea, but, like a lot of American\u2019s singing \u201cChestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire\u201d or \u201cI\u2019ll be Home for Christmas,\u201d they effortlessly and unknowingly\u00a0mix together some vague\u00a0awareness of\u00a0what it all \u201creally\u201d means and just going with the cultural flow.<\/p>\n\n
But it may be that your average Israelite had no real conception of how God is \u201csupposed\u201d to be worshiped.<\/h2>\n