Biblelicious

Genesis Chapter 23

This is a sad little chapter, and I feel a little bit guilty. I was raking Sarah over the coals just the other day. And now, two chapters later, she up and dies.

But there you go, I mean, how long did you expect her to live, anyway?

This picture totally looks like something out of one of my Sunday School readers. These little magazines we got for our Sunday school lessons. Over dramatized artist’s rendering.

I kind of would have expected this chapter so say something about Sarah, or her life, or her faith, or her place as the mother of the Israelites, but it doesn’t. Rather, it’s about burying her. The mechanics of getting her in the ground, or into a tomb (as was the custom then). Abraham grieves for his dead wife, but then he has to get up and go buy some land to bury her in.

He has to go make “the arrangements”, as they say. He has to leave his greiving and negotiate a real estate deal. That’s what it’s like when someone dies. You have to go pay for them to be dead. You have to do these transactions, make these decisions, important decisions, expensive decisions when time and life and the ground under your feet seems to have disappeared.

So he does what he needs to do, he pays 400 sheckles of silver for a cave and the surrounding land. And he burys her, and he’s buried there and so are his kids and their wives.

Strangely, as nuts and bolts, as mundane as this record of an ancient real estate transaction is, it’s so infused with what it’s really like, what it feels like to lose someone, to bury someone.

Or, maybe it’s just me.

So that’s what happened. Now, on to what’s happened since.

But, before we go there, I want to talk for a minute about impermanence. Let’s say, Impermanence is the word of the day.

Impermanence: When a thing is not permanent. When it changes, when it goes away.

When you think about it, that’s pretty much everything.

I mean this in the Buddhist sense. Where impermanence is good. Where holding on to things from the past, not wanting things to change, is bad. Bad, like it’s the very core of human suffering, bad.

Why, you may ask, in a sad little chapter about burying your dead wife, do I bring up Buddhism? Well, because, this chapter and the last, are set in real, identifiable places. Places that have been turned into churches and mosques and shrines. Places that have caused folks to fight over them since, well, sence Abraham did the faux-child sacrifice and then he buried his wife.

The first place is Temple Mount, most holy place for Judaism, third most holy place for Muslims. Supposed site of almost Issac sacrifice. The Dome of the Rock is part of temple mount. Supposed rock from which all the world was made. And, we’ll get to this later, but in Revelation, it says that “The dome of the rock must fall” prior to the beginning of the end of the world. So, a fairly important hunk of land for those watching for the end of the world.

I know about the whole Dome of the Rock thing, because when I was about 13 or 14, I was in the youth choir at church and we did a “Cantata” about the Book of Revelation. One of the lines from one of the songs was “The Dome of the Rock must fall, the Dome of the Rock must fall, the Dome of the Rock must fall.” All the altos (me) singing this over and over in a minor key while the sopranos sang some other equally frightening chant in a fundamentalist Christian musical fugue thingie.

We went on the road, traveling the south for a couple of weeks, going from church to church, singing, staying in stranger’s homes. We all had matching yellow dresses that our moms made for us. The guys had yellow dress shirts and khaki pants. I’m not making this up. The dresses had white lace right under the boob part. Why I remember the dress? My mom was no seamstress, so I was not the best lookin’ one out there. But then, an ill fitting dress was the least of my worries as a 6 ft tall, 110lb clumsy puppy of a girl.

We went to OpryLand in Nashville. We also went to 6 Flags.

Back then, I didn’t know what or where the Dome of the Rock was. All I knew was that it had to fall before Jesus could come back and rapture us all into heaven and then reign supreme for a thousand years.

Now I know all about it. It’s in the middle east and it’s very, very holy and everyone wants no one other than themselves to go there. And some don’t even want themselves to go there.

For many Jews it’s forbidden to go up to the temple mount. It’s just too holy and the ritual purification, bathing in the ashes of a sacrificed red heffer, really, that’s the ritual cleansing, is just to difficult to get right, so better just not to go there.

The second place is the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the second holiest sight in Judaism. Where Abraham buries Sara, and eventually gets buried himself, along with the rest of his kinfolk. Muslims and Jews and Christians have been fighting over this hunk of land since Sarah got buried there. Muslims had control for quite a while in like 400 to say 1000 A.D., then the crusaders came along and snagged it back for the Christians, but then Saladin took it back for the Muslims round 1200. Jews weren’t allowed any closer than the 5th step, but later they were allowed to ascend two steps closer to the 7th step. I’m not sure if the Christians were allowed near it at all, seeing as how the crucaiders came in swords blazing, knocking down walls and such.

It was a really huge deal, getting to go to the 7th step. I don’t quite get it.

So, my point in the spotty, convoluted, and possibly wildly inaccurate history of these two holy sites, the two most holy for both Muslims and Jews, is, what makes them so damn holy? Why is it that a place, where legend tells us a thing happened, can make that place worth fighting for? And then when you’ve fought for it and it’s yours, you aren’t even allowed to go there. What good is it? What good is a holy place?

I mean, I think that there are places in the world that are inherently holy, where something in the universe collides to make one place more susceptible to the divine that other places. I think there were many more such places where there was less asphalt and more meadow in the world, but regardless, there are those places, and I would have to suppose that there is something inherent in the middle east, something going on there that is different from the rest of the world. Three of the worlds largest religions, two of the worlds most violent religions, stem from the very same places. But then again, all come from the same stories, the same original myths. But I’ve got to wonder if what’s going on there is holy, is divine.

I mean if you look at it from inside the Christian tradition, the stuff that has gone on in the middle east since Abraham and Sarah, doesn’t really coincide with Love they Neighbor as Thyself. It’s destructive and divisive in the name of three religions that purport they are religions of peace. Somethings going on in the very air, the very water, the very earth of the Middle East, but I don’t believe it’s divine. Seems dark and sinister and angry and hopeless to me. Doesn’t seem to be much holy going on there.

Which brings me back round to impermanence. You’d never see a Buddhist fighting a war over the site of the bodhi tree under which Buddha sat and found enlightenment. For that matter, you’d never see a Buddhist fighting a war at all. You’d see a Buddhist emulating the life of Buddha, retelling the story of the tree, recognizing that the story and the tree and you and me are all interconnected in the universe. But, not so much would you see an armed Buddhist monk defending the site of enlightenment.

When you think about it like that, it seems kinda silly.