The Almond Branch: A Novel by Stan Rice, part one. Just Who Were the Prophets Anyway?

Stan Rice has recently published another novel in the Under the Sun series, The Almond Branch. This series poses the question, what is it that God is doing in this world under the sun? The phrase comes from Ecclesiastes, which is the almost-agnostic book in the Old Testament. Rice speculates on answers to this question: in the time of Solomon (Among the Lilies); in the last days of Jerusalem (this novel); in the Middle Ages of Europe (Paraclete); and in a modern Amish community (Blue Wild Indigo).

Here is the author’s summary from Amazon:

In Jerusalem, immediately before its conquest by Babylon, Jeremiah is on his way to succeeding his father as a priest. Even when they are children, Miriam loves Jeremiah, but Jeremiah is clueless about human love even when he grows up. He is borderline crazy and keeps alienating himself from his society. He thinks God speaks to him through puns. Jeremiah’s father has pagan images in addition to Jewish ones, to appease Jebusite neighbors, but Jeremiah destroys them. And it keeps getting worse, until Jeremiah has to live in a cave with the other prophets. Miriam is torn between a marriage proposal from an older but very good man, Saad, and Jeremiah’s invitation for her to join the prophets, though not as his lover.

Even after Miriam marries Saad, Jeremiah still seeks her comradeship. The king counts on Egypt’s help against Babylon, only to be disappointed. A wealthy businessman and his grim brother, modeled after Trump and Pence, cannot save Jerusalem either. While Jerusalem suffers starvation and cannibalism during the Babylonian siege, the king throws Jeremiah into a cesspit, from which he is rescued by a steward modeled after Obama and a court jester modeled after Biden. Jeremiah rejoices when the tension is broken and Jerusalem falls, and all the skilled people, including Saad, are deported. Miriam stays behind and rescues the Old Testament wisdom literature—which is still an embarrassment to conservatives—from being lost.

Those of us who grew up in a church revere the Old Testament prophets. We are taught that the operation of God’s will took place through prophets, priests, and kings. Prophets had their own divinely-ordained role. But this disguises the truth: kings exercised their will, and priests carried out the religious ceremonies. But the prophets proclaimed God’s will and judgment. They did so quite independently of priests and kings. This means that prophets could openly criticize priests and kings, and they could do so brutally. They often lived in caves or on the street, their words recorded not in the priestly or kingly archives but by their own followers. Just as in Medieval Europe, there were three estates (Kings, the Church, and the people, or third estate), in Israel the prophets were the third estate, serving as the voice of the people against the abuses of both church and state. Prophets were seen as dirty and dishonorable, but people recognized that it was a dirty job that somebody had to do.

The prophets accused the leaders of the business world of oppressing the poor in many ways: taking their lands and livelihood, engaging in dishonest business practices, etc. Business leaders then as now wanted such prophets to just shut the hell up. (Literally; the prophets said that God condemned the dishonest rich people.)

The voice of this novel, The Almond Branch, is a young woman named Miriam, who grew up as the childhood friend of Jeremiah. She could hardly help but love this boy who saw the beauty of God everywhere in the landscape. Everyone assumed Jeremiah would become a priest and Miriam would marry him. The problem was that Jeremiah also saw sin everywhere in society. Jeremiah he started saying and doing things (such as destroying the household pagan god statues and denouncing societal leaders in the marketplace) that were an embarrassment to his family and which threatened the rich people, upon whose donations (then as now) the priests depended.

When it became apparent that Jeremiah would not succeed his father as a priest, Miriam wondered if this would mean Jeremiah would be a prophet. Her father told her, “That’s not a job, Miriam.”

It takes little imagination (Rice has at least a little bit) to depict Jeremiah as socially clueless. How else could he stand in front of the king and denounce him? Jeremiah seemed unaware of his danger. He would croak out his denunciations like a bullfrog in the swamp, even at the risk of revealing his hiding place to a predator. (One cannot help but think of Three Dog Night, “Jeremiah was a bullfrog, was a good friend of mine, I never understood a single word he said but he always had mighty fine wine.” I assume Rice was thinking of this also.) But Jeremiah was also clueless around Miriam. Jeremiah started setting Scripture to music. He sang some of it to Miriam, including the part from Leviticus about women having a discharge of blood. When Miriam made it very clear that he had hurt her by singing this, he still did not understand how anyone could be offended by scripture. Then Miriam made up a song about how Jeremiah woke up one morning and found that his bed was sticky from an unexpected nocturnal emission. Finally Jeremiah understood, but he forgot it all very quickly and went back to being clueless. During a music festival, he sang a song by Isaiah (an earlier prophet), the song to my beloved. Everyone understood this to mean Miriam. It started off very lovey-dovey, but degenerated into rage. Miriam felt humiliated by this. Even when singing a love song, Jeremiah’s rage got in the way.

So, can you be just a friend to a prophet? Miriam discovers that she cannot. She ended up marrying a burly but gentle hunter named Saad.

There is a lot of humor in this novel. There is nothing funny in Jeremiah’s original writings, even as edited by later generations, either in Jeremiah or in Lamentations. Even or especially today, it is hard work to slog through Jeremiah’s scriptures. If Rice had been as downbeat as Jeremiah, literally nobody would read this novel.

But it is not all funny. During the siege of Jerusalem, when the Babylonians trapped the Jews in the city where they starved, Miriam took care of a little orphan girl named Janiletha, who died. This was, the author indicated in the supplementary material, based on the death of a little Mexican girl, Josseline Janiletha Quintero, in the Sonoran Desert as she fled to Arizona. She had decomposed so much that she was recognizable only by her green shoes. Nothing funny about this, or about the tragedy of Central American immigrants at the U.S. border. See The Death of Josseline by Margaret Regan. Whatever I may forget about Rice’s novel, I will probably carry the mental image of Janiletha’s corpse with green shoes to the end of my days.

Miriam, who preserved scriptures for the people who remained in Jerusalem after the Conquest, thought about how scriptural writers suggested that something good comes out of whatever God does, or allows to happen. But Miriam silently screamed what many of us do: Was there something beautiful in Janiletha’s death? IF THIS IS YOUR TRUTH, THEN I HATE YOU (caps and italics in the original).

Once Saved Always Saved?

One of the good things about being an agnostic is that I do not have to give you a final answer about everything. When a question cannot be answered (usually because the terms cannot be defined), I can just say so.

One question that has surfaced, in various forms, for centuries in Christian theology is, if you are once saved, do you remain saved forever, no matter what happens? On the face of it, this seems unfair; if you sacrifice a lot in order to be saved, such as giving up sinful but lucrative or enjoyable sins, should you not be penalized if you go back to those sins? Is Jesus’ salvation a technicality that will let you off the hook for anything? But certainly the Bible makes it sound like your salvation is Jesus’ initiative, not yours, and you can’t stop Him once you have handed Him the keys to your volition.

I don’t think this question can be answered, because nobody really knows what happens when you are saved, assuming that anything happens at all. The Bible implies that you receive a new nature; indeed, the Holy Spirit Himself dwells in you. At the same time, the old nature remains in you also. So whenever you feel attracted to sin, it is the old nature, and when you rejoice in righteousness, it is the Holy Spirit.

This explanation never satisfied me. Before I was “saved,” that is, accepted the fundamentalist doctrine of what I had to believe in order to be saved, I still felt inspired by God’s creation (especially Nature). Of course, I continued to feel this inspiration after I was “saved.” But how much of my inspiration, of my desire for goodness, was mine, and how much was the Holy Spirit, which supposedly did not enter into me until I was baptized?

And now that my increase of knowledge and experience (including with the Bible) has led me to reject almost all doctrines as at least unprovable, and many of them wrong, am I still saved? I still feel inspiration, and the desire to do good. This is hard to explain if the goodness within me is due entirely to the Spirit, whose presence I cannot discern. Unless the Spirit never leaves. Once He’s got you, you’re got.

An acquaintance in graduate school once accused me, only half seriously, of having an “ineradicable streak of decency.” Was he right?

The Angst of Creativity: or, How Louisa May Alcott Solved the Creation/Evolution Problem

In Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, Josephine March (Jo) wanted more than anything to be a fiction writer, no matter how hard she had to work at it or how little it paid. Jo is by far the most interesting of the four sisters in this book I find otherwise uninteresting. The only novel less interesting is Pilgrim’s Progress, which was the favorite novel of all four of the sisters. But Jo rocks!

When Jo was in her writing mood, everybody knew it. Here is the quote from chapter XXVII:

“Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and "fall into a vortex" as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace. Her "scribbling suit" consisted of a black woolen pinafore on which she could wipe her pen at will, and a cap of the same material, adorned with a cheerful red bow, into which she bundled her hair when the decks were cleared for action. This cap was a beacon to the inquiring eyes of her family, who during these periods kept their distance, merely popping in their heads semi-occasionally, to ask, with interest, "Does genius burn, Jo?" They did not always venture even to ask this question, but took an observation of the cap, and judged accordingly. If this expressive article of dress was drawn low upon the forehead, it was a sign that hard work was going on; in exciting moments it was pushed rakishly askew; and when despair seized the author it was plucked wholly off, and cast upon the floor. At such times the intruder silently withdrew; and not until the red bow was seen gayly erect upon the gifted brow, did any one dare address Jo.”

I understand what Jo (probably based on Alcott’s own experiences) felt. When I am writing, the experience consumes me, and when I re-read what I wrote, the feelings come back. It feels even better than sex.

But it is also frustrating. Everyone assumes the writer is in complete control, but this is not true. Once the writer creates the character and his/her world, there are certain rules and patterns that must be followed; even the creator cannot violate them. The creator must follow the laws of nature, that is, the nature s/he created.

And this is also true of God the Creator, whatever this might mean. Once the Big Bang happened, and the physical constants (such as gravitation) were established, the Creator could not violate them. Once the solar system formed, whatever happened next was pretty much constrained to the operation of natural laws. That is, once S/He created the world, S/He had to let evolution take its course. From this viewpoint, creation and evolution are the same thing.

Historical contingencies, otherwise known as chance events, appear to come to the rescue. Things happen for no apparent reason, and change the whole course of evolution. One could not have predicted that cyanobacteria would move into larger cells, but once they did, the whole evolutionary history of plants opened up. It didn’t have to be that way. One some other Earth, something else might have happened. But one can, in fact, question whether chance events can actually occur.

So God the Creator, if there is one, is trapped within His story. It must be very frustrating. Just ask Jo March.

Among the Lilies, a novel by Stan Rice, part two. What was Solomon thinking anyway?

Stan Rice has just published another novel, Among the Lilies, the first novel in the trilogy Under the Sun. The central character is Elah, who is the scribe who writes the things that King Solomon takes the credit for: Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs, as well as many other Old Testament writings.

The summary from Kindle is:

Elah, the narrator, is a servant in one of King Solomon’s harems. While this sounds like the best job in the world, Elah’s work is way below his mind. He spends all the time he can thinking and writing about what, if anything, God is doing under the sun. But then he meets and loves Henna, the only black woman in Jerusalem. She is confined to her stepfather’s walled garden. Elah risks his life to meet Henna in the garden.

While in a cavalcade to the cedar forests of Lebanon, which he intends to cut down to make his palace, The King (who resembles Elvis) elevates Elah to the position of chief scribe. When The King sees Henna, he decides to add her to his stable of wives. Meanwhile Gomer, who becomes the woman in charge of the royal kitchens and is an expert in poisonous wild plants, is not at all pleased. She wants Elah for herself, and doesn’t she try to do something about it. But she cannot keep Elah from meeting Henna again. His quest fails.

Elah becomes a leader of revolutionary forces against The King. Elah finally finds Henna in the muddy eroded landscape that used to be the forests of Lebanon. The King captures Elah and offers him the choice between death and not quite being dead.

A thousand sex partners? What was Solomon thinking anyway? Three hundred were wives, with inheritance rights, and seven hundred were well-paid concubines. Obviously Solomon could not love all of those women, though he probably fantasized that he could. Was he simply a sex maniac?

King Solomon is, in this novel, the most narcissistic man who ever lived. He names everything after himself. He aspires to build a huge Temple, and an even bigger Palace. Rice models him after Elvis Presley who is, of course, The King.

Rice brings up the possibility that Solomon was the consummate politician. He had total dictatorial control over the Kingdom of Israel, so much so that the people tolerated high taxes and having to dedicate a month of labor every year to governmental, or to Solomon’s personal, projects. And perhaps Solomon was using his many marriages to consolidate his political power. Any provincial families who became restless and questioned Solomon’s absolute authority found that they could do nothing: they had already married their daughters into Solomon’s family!

Even the Temple was a political stunt. At the dedication ceremony, Solomon makes a long speech, mostly about himself. And there is a sign on the Temple: Your Tax Money at Work!

One of Solomon’s children is Prince Rehoboam, who is modeled after Machiavelli’s The Prince. He is as powerful and ruthless as Solomon, only he does not understand that true power comes from creating the appearance of altruism. Rehoboam fails because he does not know that even an absolute dictator needs to have the people like him.

Among the Lilies, a novel by Stan Rice, part one. The subversive writer in King Solomon’s court

Stan Rice has just published another novel, Among the Lilies, the first novel in the trilogy Under the Sun. The central character is Elah, who is the scribe who writes the things that King Solomon takes the credit for: Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs, as well as many other Old Testament writings.

The summary from Kindle is:

Elah, the narrator, is a servant in one of King Solomon’s harems. While this sounds like the best job in the world, Elah’s work is way below his mind. He spends all the time he can thinking and writing about what, if anything, God is doing under the sun. But then he meets and loves Henna, the only black woman in Jerusalem. She is confined to her stepfather’s walled garden. Elah risks his life to meet Henna in the garden.

While in a cavalcade to the cedar forests of Lebanon, which he intends to cut down to make his palace, The King (who resembles Elvis) elevates Elah to the position of chief scribe. When The King sees Henna, he decides to add her to his stable of wives. Meanwhile Gomer, who becomes the woman in charge of the royal kitchens and is an expert in poisonous wild plants, is not at all pleased. She wants Elah for herself, and doesn’t she try to do something about it. But she cannot keep Elah from meeting Henna again. His quest fails.

Elah becomes a leader of revolutionary forces against The King. Elah finally finds Henna in the muddy eroded landscape that used to be the forests of Lebanon. The King captures Elah and offers him the choice between death and not quite being dead.

Rice has published this novel himself rather than looking for a commercial publisher because the fiction market is totally flooded with novels based on the Bible. The difference between most (or all?) of those novels and Rice’s is that the others are all either sand-and-sandal stories (reverent re-tellings of children’s Bible stories for adults), such as The Robe, an old novel by Lloyd C. Douglas; or creative derivations of them, such as The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd. None of them appear to be critical re-tellings from an agnostic, even cynical, viewpoint like Rice’s novel. No agent, editor, or reader would be able to find Among the Lilies in this veritable ocean of Bible fan-literature.

Elah is a servant in one of Solomon’s dozens of stables of wives, concubines, and sex slaves, where he is surrounded by temptations he cannot touch. The concubines are all beautiful, but the wives are faded and fat. And they think they can sing. Elah thought he had the worst job in the world, but it was at least a job.

But Elah has prospects. He is a good writer. At least, if anyone would want to read what he wrote, which was mostly deep and depressing things (the origin of the Biblical Ecclesiastes). His friend Eli is good with numbers. Someday, they fantasize, they will be Chief Scribe and Chief Steward.

Then Elah meets Henna, a black thunderbolt, the only sub-Saharan African woman in Jerusalem. She is beautiful and, like Elah, a good writer. An instant bond forms and Elah stops at nothing to find her again, which he does. This is what he wants: a partner not just of the body but of the mind and spirit. They exchange love notes, which have become the Song of Songs, Biblical passages seldom read in modern churches because of their explicit sexuality.

Elah and Eli succeed in their quests for importance in Solomon’s court. But Elah’s pursuit of Henna comes to a halt when Solomon decides he wants to marry her. Time and time again Elah almost meets up with her, until they get caught. At the end, when Elah and Henna are very briefly reunited, Elah gets to choose between being a living dog and a dead lion—words that he had written. This ending will make you wonder, just how far would you go in the pursuit of true love?

Tails of Evolution: Unnatural Selections, a story collection by Stan Rice, story six. A Taste of Honey

 

Stan Rice has published a collection of short stories, Tails of Evolution. Rice is also the author of the Encyclopedia of Evolution, Life of Earth, and popular articles about evolution. Here is Rice’s summary from Kindle:

             What you don’t know about evolution can kill you.

In these stories, Stan Rice introduces us to people who would never have imagined that evolution had any impact on their lives. A young fundamentalist Christian woman, out of place at a university, discovers that love can evolve. A creationist discovers half-fish half-amphibians in a swamp in Oklahoma. Two young Englishmen find themselves actors on the stage of Darwinian sexual selection. A fundamentalist bases his faith on hearing a devil bird. A young preacher finds a hidden city that is based on Darwinism. A food scientist discovers a tribe of Homo ergaster pre-humans in the cliffs of Madagascar. Darwin meets Lincoln, who was born on the same day in 1809. And a young man discovers that love is the most combustible thing in the universe.

The taste of an unusual honey from Madagascar jolted Isaac, a food chemist, into making a trip to track down the source of the mysterious flavor. He discovers a secret forest up in the tsingy limestone blade mountains that is left over from a couple of million years in the past. He also finds a tribe of Homo ergaster (also called erectus), a species of human ancestors left over from the past.

This being fiction, it is inevitable that Isaac falls in love with one of the ergaster women and couples with her. (Can they have children? This fascinating evolutionary question will remain forever without an answer.) But, this being fiction, Isaac has to return to his Homo sapiens world, from which he feels forever alienated.

Could a secret population of pre-humans survive somewhere in the world?

Spending Time

Annie Dillard recently died. She was renowned for her writings, especially Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm. I read these books, and did not get much out of them, but maybe I just didn’t get it. It happens sometimes. I didn’t like Faulkner, Hemingway, Joyce, or Salinger either. She wrote The Writing Life. The purpose of my writing is life, that is, my life and the lives of others who will, I hope, be blessed by what I write. To keep people laughing is a good way to bless them.

Annie said, “Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.” We have all heard statements like this regarding money and possessions. But time is also a resource which we must spend, not waste. I am one of those personalities who tried to cram as many accomplishments into a day as I could. I planned ahead for them, and kept detailed records of them. In retirement, I still do this to a great extent.

Having said this, I must point out that sometimes the best investment of time is to rest. I have had a lifelong insomnia problem, which to my amazement seems to be now under control. I do not nap very often, but when I do, it is because (I think) my body needs it. The result of my nap this afternoon is this mediocre essay.

Life, including naps, is an investment, and one in which you have no choice but to participate. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” is truer than you may think.