Life's Inanities and Ironies

  This eight-part series is written for readers who hold the Bible as the inerrant, sufficient, and authoritative Word of God and who take its historical narrative at face value. Each post is self-contained yet builds on the others. The goal is to strengthen confidence in Scripture’s account of origins, to answer common objections with biblical clarity, and to turn our attention from debate to worship of the Creator. 1: The Biblical Framework for Creation — Genesis 1–2 in Its Own Terms Genesis 1–2 is not poetry in the modern sense, nor is it myth. It is structured historical narrative written in the same style as the rest of the early chapters of Genesis and the genealogies that follow. The text itself defines the days: “And there was evening and there was morning, the first day” (and so on through the sixth day). The Hebrew word yom with a numerical adjective and the evening-morning formula consistently means an ordinary 24-hour day elsewhere in Scripture. God finished His work in...

  The gods Israel kept turning to never answered. Across this series we have walked through the idols that pressed in on God’s people from Canaan, Philistia, Moab, and the empires to the east. This wrap-up gathers those threads, sets them beside the One who actually speaks, and names what stood behind the images. Israel did not invent these gods. She borrowed them. The land was already thick with cults when Joshua crossed the Jordan, and the temptation never stayed outside the camp. High places, household shrines, royal alliances, and fear of the weather kept pulling hearts away from the covenant. The prophets did not treat that drift as a minor taste in religion. They treated it as adultery against the living God, and as fellowship with powers that were not God. Baal was the storm and fertility lord of Canaan. His name means “master,” and that is how his worship worked: rain, grain, flocks, and children were treated as his to grant or withhold. Elijah’s contest on Carmel was not a...

  Ashtoreth, also called Ashtaroth in the plural of her shrines, was the goddess of the Zidonians. She belongs to the same family as Ishtar of Mesopotamia and Astarte of the Phoenician coast: a goddess of desire, fertility, and war, the queen men set beside the storm god when they wanted both the rain and the bed. Sidon carried her name. Israel learned it. The Bible never gives her a hymn. It gives her a charge sheet. The pattern starts as soon as the generation that buried Joshua is gone. They forsook the Lord and served Baal and Ashtaroth (Judges 2:13). In the days of the judges the same pair returns: Baalim and Ashtaroth, the gods of Syria, Zidon, Moab, Ammon, and the Philistines (Judges 10:6). Samuel later stands before the nation and makes the condition of deliverance plain. If you do return unto the Lord with all your hearts, then put away the strange gods and Ashtaroth from among you, and prepare your hearts unto the Lord, and serve him only (1 Samuel 7:3). They did. They pu...

  Dagon was the god of the Philistines, and before them a god of the Euphrates lands, known there as Dagan. His name belongs with grain, not with fish. Later readers heard the Hebrew word for fish in his name and pictured a man above the waist and a fish below. That image stuck in commentaries and in Milton. The older evidence points to a god of corn, provision, and the settled city. He was the one a people thanked for bread and for victory. Whole towns carried his name. Ashdod kept his chief house. Gaza had a temple large enough for the lords and for thousands on the roof. When Israel’s enemies wanted a god who could feed them and finish their wars, they went to Dagon. The Bible shows what that worship looked like when it met the living God. After the ark was taken at Ebenezer, the Philistines carried it into Dagon’s house at Ashdod and set it beside the idol, the way a victor sets a trophy beside his god (1 Samuel 5:1–2). They went to bed as conquerors. In the morning Dagon had f...

  Chemosh was the national god of Moab, the people east of the Dead Sea who came from Lot’s line and lived as Israel’s near neighbor and frequent enemy. His name sits on Moab the way the Lord’s name sits on Israel. Numbers calls them “the people of Chemosh” in the same breath that it sings their ruin (Numbers 21:29). Jeremiah later picks up the line: Chemosh shall go forth into captivity with his priests and his princes together, and Moab shall be ashamed of him as Israel was once ashamed of Bethel (Jeremiah 48:7, 13, 46). A national god does not stay in the shrine. He becomes the explanation of the nation’s wins, the excuse for the nation’s losses, and the owner of the nation’s wars. The Moabite Stone, cut for King Mesha in the ninth century before Christ, says this in Moab’s own words. Mesha built a high place for Chemosh because the god had delivered him from all kings and let him look down on his enemies. Omri of Israel had oppressed Moab many days, Mesha writes, because Chemos...