Asking for a friend:
1 Samuel 19:13 New International Version (NIV)
13 Then Michal took an idol and laid it on the bed, covering it with a garment and putting some goats’ hair at the head.
Since David was a man after God's own heart, why did he have a family idol?
This breaks God's second commandment.
Maybe one of the top elders who have answers for everything could give us the answer.
submitted by TLA
20 comments:
For the NT folk I will consult Our Lady of Guadalupe. For the OT oriented folk I will study Rachel of Labans Household.
I will come back shortly with the all comprehensive answer.
Occam's razor would probably result in the answer that both ladies were either stunningly beautiful according to the fashion of the day, politically influential, very rich or just pleasant and charming company for the Ruler type of man.
In Central Asia and the Caucasus where the manly types shoot before asking, I noticed stunningly beautiful women of cat walk quality to be privately extremely religious.
True rugged men probably prefer at least one person in their presence they can trust and admire. Any religion does that trick and Mical proved worthy if that task by saving Davids life.
I admire pious women as saviours of the world and boast of their reputations among their enemies before any of you will meet them my friends. (partly quoted from kingdom of heaven)
Today when the last 700 square meters of isis territory/vestige will fall I will bring tribute to the Yezidi ladies who suffered terrible injustice by the accusation of worshipping idols. I will make sure with everything in my power that justice will be done.
The heart of a Lady is as much worthy of protecting as the reputation of a man of God.
Nck
Michal was Saul’s daughter and was very much unconverted. She later laughed at David for dancing.
Because of David’s closeness to Saul’s family, his life was like a soap opera, and the soap opera became worse after his sin with Bathsheba and the killing of the perfectly loyal Uriah.
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2000/12/jon-vickers-a-heros-life
nck
I have to admit nck, at times I find it difficult to figure out what the hell you are talking about.
That’s because nck is so busy bloviating about how much he knows that he never stays on topic.
We simply do not know where this idol came from or to whom it belonged. Moreover, such questions are not the focus of the story.
We are told that Michal used the image to fool her father's messengers and give her husband more time to flee (the king wanted to kill him). How many kids have positioned pillows under their bed covers to fool parents into believing they are safely sleeping in their beds when they are actually out partying with friends?
It is also not hard to imagine that Michal would have had easy access to idols in a land which had formerly been riddled with idolatry. Remember, Saul was the first king - the kingdom of Israel was still a brand new phenomenon in the grand sweep of history. Moreover, both archaeology and the book of Judges confirm that many Israelites had household idols despite the Mosaic laws which prohibited them. Indeed, Scripture itself informs us that idolatry was a problem throughout most of the kingdom period. In fact, if we believe these accounts, there were only a few brief periods when the land was cleansed of idols (during the reigns of a few righteous kings).
7:52
That is because your mind is conditioned and brainwashed into alert modus when the word "idol" is mentioned into preconceived notions of what an idol constitutes and idols equals bad.
If you shed that my postings become much easier to understand.
Nck
People of the Bible are flawed and have hang ups, just like everyone. Rachel in Genesis 31 had an idol hidden in her possession as well.
Even here in the modern era, every one of us have had some "type" of idol in our lives, i.e. something we valued more than God, in terms of interest, desire, "first love" etc.
Gods mercy is an amazing thing IMHO.
Good art, designed and created to capture one’s attention, is always going to make a person think.
In Armstrongism, members were programmed to tune the mind’s dial soas to allow only the “official” interpretation to be thought.
So, automatically, the Armstrong infected mind, when confronted by this tale of David on the lam, is going to think “Oh my! This was King David’s home! A real man is supposed to have his family in control, especially a man after God’s own heart! How can this be???”
No biggie. The Armstrong mind was also programmed to regard the King James Version of the Bible as the penultimate authority. The KJV doesn’t even use the term “idol”. It says “image”. This probably wasn’t even something the household would have thought of bowing down to or worshipping. It may have been a simple work of art.
BB
Billy Idol was back there singing “White Wedding” for David and Michal?
BB
It doesn't say Michal took Davids idol. It just says idol, ownership unstated.
What the hell does this subject have to do with Occam's Razor, Isis, or John Vickers? Oh, I see, its nck, off topic again.
NCK how do you know how my mind is programmed? You're pretty sure that's the answer huh? Lol
I think HWA not being a scholar - he did not even finish high school - meant he did not study the original texts and did not debate the meaning and the practicality of the scriptures since he already knew everything.
This carried over to Ambassador College where we were led to believe we were learning all we needed to know about the Bible.
This is also why Pentecost was originally miscalculated because KJV was the authority, not the Hebrew text - plus the belief that WCG knew everything better than the Jews. This is also why we had the hideous, family destroying doctrine of divorce and re-marriage which was changed around the time HWA thought he better marry Ramona - who was divorced. (She got to be divorced twice - apparently being married to an Apostle was not that gratifying.)
The difference between the Michal story and the Rachel story is that Michal's teraphim is clearly large enough to cover with a garment and pass off as a man in a bed. Wolvertons Bible Story somehow decides that the teraphim is actually a man shaped cluster of small household objects. No idea how he came to that conclusion.
Then again, for a book (1 Samuel) that spans so much of David's life, maybe its just an anecdotal story with the only truthful part being that Saul didnt bring David in.
I know your minds are programmed by your statements that I am off topic. Especially the Vickers article about inner conflict of the artists but moreso of Tannhauser for the perhaps interested reader.
I find the discussion on "idols" in relation to "godly living" extremely shallow as jesus pointed out at the pharisees and hypocrites.
As of any of you display insight into rhe dynamics of rachels or micals marriage to extremely conflicted "men of god."
So I raised the bar by taking my answers to the level of inner conflict and possible dynamics allowing for "idols" that seemed important to the ladies.
Tannhauser is exemplary and vickers protestant view interesting. And one shallow nimcompoop thinks I am off topic.
DAVID AND JACOB WERE NOT PURITAN PROTESTANTS, but men of God.
Nck
NCK notes:"Shallow" "nincompoop" "I raise the bar"
Not exactly the terms one would use to be taken seriously
8.38
Is that important to you, to be taken seriously?
I just disseminate data, as is the purpose of life. Other life forms may benefit or not. Not all is important for the purpose of natural selection, I agree.
Nck
The simplest and most probable explanation is the fact that the bible is a cobbled together and heavily redacted mess, and this is one of the many things the redactors never "fixed."
The patriarchs are mythical characters because far from being contemporaneous accounts, the bible didn't even begin to be written until a thousand years after they supposedly lived. The Israelites were not named after a guy named "Israel," Moab, Edom, Canaan, etc. were not named after eponymous founders, just like Rome was not really named after a guy named "Romulus." This is all post-hoc etiology. The Israelites were never slaves in Egypt. There was no conquest, and there was no united monarchy. The "glorious" reign of Solomon was invention: the Israel of the 10th century BCE was small, rural backwater, not a wealthy and sophisticated capital city of a great empire. Even if there existed a David and Solomon, they were small-time local chieftans, and so the wealthy and sophisticated David and Solomon who appear in the pages of the bible are fictional characters nonetheless.
Because the history of the Israel which gets its earliest accepted corroboration in the Merneptah Stele are either a branch of the Canaanites or are another people who slowly assimilated nonviolently into the Levant, they never had the historical backstory which the bible fictionally attributes to them and thus they were never the recipients of some "one true monotheistic religion." They were polytheists, just as the rest of the Canaanites were, who slowly became henotheists, and as their religion evolved, from the 7th century BCE onward, they continually erased and rewrote their history to be in keeping with the version of their religion which was in vogue at the time, but it was always done imperfectly, and traces of the older versions always remained in the text.
There need not be even a kernel of truth to the tall tales of David for the anonymous biblical authors writing centuries later to have guessed that David was a polytheistic idol-worshiper, since the people who began to write the bible were still yet polytheistic idol-worshipers. Of course he would have been. Later the texts were rewritten in such a way that it became unacceptable for David to have been anything but a monotheist, so those aspects were mostly expunged and rewritten—mostly, but not completely.
6:09
At the "chariots" topic some 9 threads ago, I made EXACTLY that point at 6:24.
In this thread I expounded on that posting by speculating as to WHY the the editors might have left the story as it were. (from a psychological or marriage dynamics perspective)
Other than 6:09, I do not presume that the editors were stupid or made a mistake. I mean the word idol is beyond mistake or translating error.
So the question to solve is not wether there were Terabints, but why the centralized jerusalemite temple priests left the story as it were.
Another stint of anti female character assasination perhaps (as they were in the process of killing the female principle or the consort of yhwh.
Nck
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