Attending to details

I have to get my "sea legs," as it were, with this new blog. Forgive me if I don't start with a bang. As I said in my first post, I'm simply interested in getting ideas out there for consideration. And I will look forward to feedback from whoever feels "inspired" to reply to . . . whatever.

I hope this will become a fairly long-term, drawing-room kind of conversation. No pressure. "Just" a relaxed and thoughtful interchange.

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So this one struck me a few days ago.

As I was finishing my second annual complete read-through of the Bible, I hit Revelation 7:4-8.

Standard way of "reading" a passage like this:

And I heard the number of the sealed, 144,000, sealed from every tribe of the sons of Israel:
12,000 from the tribe of _____ were sealed,
12,000 from _____,
12,000 . . . ,
12,000 . . . ,
. . . [they] were [all] sealed.

--Move on. [In the back of our minds: "'Twelve tribes . . . 12,000 each: 144,000 total.'" And we tend to think mildly critically of the author for boring us: "Why this ridiculous repetition of the same verbiage twelve times over?" And we keep going.]

But I wanted to really read the passage and not just skim it.

So I read it. In detail.

And I heard the number of the sealed, 144,000, sealed from every tribe of the sons of Israel:
12,000 from the tribe of Judah were sealed,
12,000 from the tribe of Reuben,
12,000 from the tribe of Gad,
12,000 from the tribe of Asher,
12,000 from the tribe of Naphtali,
12,000 from the tribe of Manasseh,
12,000 from the tribe of Simeon,
12,000 from the tribe of Levi,
12,000 from the tribe of Issachar,
12,000 from the tribe of Zebulun,
12,000 from the tribe of Joseph,
12,000 from the tribe of Benjamin were sealed.

--ESV

If you pay close attention, something should feel not quite right about the list.

It certainly didn't feel right to me!

If nothing else, it struck me that the order of the tribes is different from the song my mom taught me back when I was about five or six years old. (She taught us songs for all the books of the Bible and for the sons [eventually tribes] of Israel.)

The words to the song I learned were these:

Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah,
Zebulun, Issachar and Gad.
Dan and Asher, Naphtali, Joseph,
Benjamin: Jacob was their dad.

Even as I write this post, I will confess I haven't done the research to find out whether the song's name order matches anything in the Bible (birth order? a list somewhere?) or whether the lyricist rearranged a couple of names to create that nice meter and rhyme.

But I knew that the list in Revelation 7 didn't match my mental list. Its order was definitely different. But were the actual names different as well?

So I decided to do a "match":

Reuben --> Reuben.
Simeon --> Simeon.
Levi --> Levi.
Judah --> Judah. . . .

Yep. Everything went fine until . . . "Wait a second! There's no Dan!"

I double-checked it. Nope. No Dan in Revelation 7.

And more than that . . . "Where's Manasseh come from?"

(I know Manasseh was one of the two "half"-tribes created from the "full" tribe of Joseph. But/and/so why are both Joseph and his son Manasseh listed in Revelation 7, but Joseph's other son, Ephraim, is not? Kinda weird, isn't it? Especially when the list is preceded by the (at least implicit) claim that it includes "every tribe of the sons of Israel"!

So where did Dan go? And why is Manasseh included but not Ephraim? And/or, if the author is going to include Manasseh, why does he also include Joseph? Why both father and son, but not the other son?

******
I'm not going to take this one any further today.

I just want to note that you'll find some really strange things like this if you read the Bible and pay attention to the details.

If you read it quickly or casually or go for the "general flow," you'll never notice. But if you start digging deeper, you may find some--actually, quite a lot of--things that should probably bother you.

And if you read at that level, what are you supposed to do with the strangenesses?

Ignore them? Pretend they don't exist, because they will only sidetrack you from "deeper" truths? Don't "bother your pretty little head" with the details?

Personally, I think we should "bother our pretty little heads." At least if we claim to be "people of the Book," people for whom--as, again, I was taught as a child--the B-I-B-L-E is "the book for me," the book on which we wish to "stand alone."

Sometimes such assiduous scholarship will pay off.

Too often, it seems, it leads to a blank wall.

And frustration.