Hello, everyone. Thank you again for showing up, so

tonight

We're going to finish off the story of Noah and also

the story of

the Tower of Babel

and I don't think that'll take very long and

then we're going to

turn to the abrahamic Stories and

They're a very complex set of stories. They sit between

the

Earliest stories in Genesis that I would say end with the tower of babel

And then the stories of moses which are extraordinarily well-developed

Abrahamic stories, there's a whole sequence of them

multiple stories

conjoined together and

There I found them very daunting

they're very difficult to understand and

so

I'm going to stumble through them the best that I can I would say that's that's probably the best way to think about this because

they

Have a narrative content. That's quite strange

I

was reading a book while doing this called the disappearance of God that I found quite helpful, and

the author of that book argues that

one of the things that happens in the old testament is that

God is very manifest at the beginning

in terms of personal appearances even and then that

proclivity fades away as the old testament develops, and there's a

parallel development

That it's maybe maybe causally linked. I'm not exactly sure how to conceptualize it, but that appears to be causally linked is that?

the

Stories about individuals become more and more well-developed so it says in it's as if as God fades away, so to speak

the individual becomes more and more manifest and

There's a statement in the old testament the location of which. I don't recall

But I'll tell you about it in future lectures where God essentially tells

Whoever he's speaking with and I don't remember who that is that he's going to disappear and let man essentially go his own way

And see what happens not a complete disappearance, but maybe a transformations is something that

Modern people regard more as a psychological phenomena rather than the sort of objective entity that God seems to be in

the beginning of the biblical stories

and so I've been wrestling with that a lot because

the notion that

God, I got appears to Abraham multiple times and

that's not a concept that's easy for modern people to

to grasp in

for us

generally speaking apart from say issues of Faith

God is it some?

thing

someone who makes himself personally manifest in our lives

He doesn't appear to us

That's I suppose why the question of belief is so paramount for modern people

I presume that if God had within the habit of appearing to you you likely wouldn't have a problem with belief

I mean it might be more complicated than that, but that's how it seems to me, and so when we read stories about

God making himself manifest either to a nation say in the case of israel or to individuals

It's not easy to understand

It's not easy to understand why people would write stories like that if they thought like we thought and I mean it really it wasn't

That long ago that the Bible was written say from a biological perspective. It's really only yesterday

It's a couple thousand years say four thousand years something like that

That's not very long ago from a biological perspective, it's it's nothing

so

the first thing I tried to do is to

see if I could figure out how to understand that and so else the lecture once we finish the the

remains of the story of Noah, I'll start the lecture with a with an attempt to

Situate the abrahamic stories in a context that might make them more accessible

These two contexts that work for me to make them more accessible

Let's conclude

the Noah Story

first however when we

ended last time

The ark had come to its resting place and Noah and his family had

debarked

and

so this is the stories of

What occurs immediately after afterwards?

it's a very short story, but I think it's it's very relevant for

both

Of these stories the tower of babel is well very relevant for our current times and the sons of Noah

That went forth of the ark were shem, and ham and Japheth and ham

Is the father of Canaan?

These are the three sons of Noah and of them was the whole Earth overspread and Noah began to be a husbandman

and he planted a vine yard and

he drank of the wine and was drunken and he was uncovered within his tent and

Ham the father of Canaan saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brethren without?

and shem and Japheth took a garment and laid upon both their shoulders and went backward and

Covered the nakedness of their father and their faces were backward and they saw not their fathers nakedness

And Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his younger son

had done unto him and he said curse had to be Canaan a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren and

He said blessed shall be the lord. God of shem and Canaan Shall be his servant and God shall enlarge Japheth

And he shall dwell in the tents of shem and Canaan Shall be his servant

and Noah lived after the flood three hundred and fifty years and all the days of Noah were 950 years and he died and

the whole Earth was of one language and of one speech okay, so

I remember thinking about this story

It's got to be 30 years ago

And I think the meaning of the story stood out for me sometimes

When you read complicated material sometimes a piece of it will stand out. It's for some reason. It's like it glitters

I suppose that might be one way of thinking about it. It's

it

You're in sync with it, and you can understand what it means. I've really experienced that reading the Dao. De Jing which is document

I would really like to do a lecture on at some point because some of the verses

I don't understand but others stand right out

and I can understand them and I think I understood what this part of the story of Noah meant and I

think it means you know we talked a little bit about what nakedness meant in the story of Adam and Eve and

The idea essentially was that to know yourself naked is to become aware of your vulnerability

the physical Your physical boundaries in time and space and

Your your your physiological

your fundamental physiological

Insufficiencies as they mate might be judged by others, so there's biological

Insufficiency that sort of built into you because you're a fragile Mortal vulnerable half insane creature

And that's that's just an existential truth, and then of course

even

merely as a

Human being even with all those faults there are faults that you have that are particular to you that might be

judged harshly by the group

Well might be will definitely be judged

Harshly by the group and so to become aware of your nakedness is to become self-conscious and and to and to

Know your limits and to know your vulnerability, and that's what is

revealed

To ham when he comes across his father naked and so the question is

What does it mean to see your father naked and it seems to me and especially in an inappropriate Manner like this it it?

it's it's it's as if

ham

He does the same thing that happens in the mesopotamian creation myth

When when time out and absolute give rise to the first gods

there there the father of the eventual

deity of

redemption Marduk

they're very careless and noisy and they kill apps, ooh their father and

attempt to inhabit his corpse and that makes timeout enraged and so she

Bursts Forth from The Darkness to

To do them in it's like a precursor to the flood story or an analogue to the flood story

And I see the same thing happening here with ham. Is that he's is

insufficiently respectful of his father and

The question is exactly what does the father represent and you can say well there's there's?

There's the father that you have and that's a human being that's the demand like other men a man among men

but then there's the farther as such and that's the spirit of the father and

Insofar as you have a father you have both at the same time you have the personal father

That's a man among other men

just like anyone others father, but insofar as that man is your father that means that he's something different than just another person and

what he is is the

incarnation of the spirit of the Father and

to see that to take it to what to

Disrespect that carelessly, maybe even he's like no one makes a mistake right? He?

produces wine and gets himself drunk and you might say well

you know if he sprawled out there for everyone to see it's hardly hams fault if he stumbles across them but

The book is laying out a danger and the danger is that well maybe you catch your father at

his most vulnerable moment and if you're

disrespectful

Then you transgress against the spirit of the father and if you transgress against the spirit of father and lose

Spirit of the father and lose respect for the spirit of the father then that is likely to transform you into a slave

That's a very interesting idea and I think it's particularly interesting

Maybe not particularly interesting, but it's it's particularly germane. I think to our current cultural situation because I think that

We're pushed constantly to see the nakedness of our father so to speak

because of the intense criticism, that's

Directed towards our culture and the patriarch of culture, so to speak

we're constantly exposing its weaknesses and vulnerabilities and let's say nakedness and

There's nothing wrong with criticism, but the thing about Criticism is the purpose of criticism is to separate the wheat from the chaff

It's not to burn everything to the ground

Right, it's to say well. We're going to carefully look at this we're going to carefully differentiate

We're going to keep what's good and we're going to move away from what's bad

But the point of the Criticism isn't to identify everything is bad. It's to

Separate what's good from what's bad so that you can retain. What's good and move towards it and

And to be careless at that is deadly because you're inhabited by the spirit of the father right insofar as you're a cultural

Construction which of course is something that the that the postmodern neo-Marxists are absolutely?

emphatic about you're a cultural construction insofar as you're a cultural construction, then you're inhabited by the spirit of the father and to be

Disrespectful towards that means to undermine the very structure that makes you not all of what you are certainly

Certainly not all of what you are

But a good portion of what you are insofar as you're a socialized cultural entity and if you pull out

If you pull the foundation out from underneath that what do you have left you can hardly manage on your own?

You know it's just not possible. You're a cultural creation. And

so Ham makes this desperate

error and is Careless about

Exposing himself to the vulnerability of his father something like that. He doesn't without sufficient respect. And the judgment is that

not only will he be a slave, but so will all of his descendants, and he's contrasted with the other two sons who I

Suppose are willing to give their father the benefit of the doubt something like that, and so when they see him in a compromising position

they handle it with respect and and and

don't capitalize on it and

Maybe that makes them strong. That's what it seems to me, and so I think that's what that story means

It has something to do with respect

you know and the funny thing about having respect for your culture, and I suppose that's partly why I'm doing the biblical stories is because

They're part of a they're part of my culture

they're part of our culture perhaps, but they're certainly part of my culture and

It seems to me that

it's worthwhile to treat that with respect to see what you can glean from it and

And not kick it when it's down. Let's say

so

and so that's how the story of no ends you know and the thing too is Noah is actually a

Pretty decent incarnation of the Spirit of the father that which I suppose is one of the things that makes hams

Misstep more egregious is that I mean noah just built an ark and got everybody through the flood man

You know it's not so bad, and so maybe the fact that he happened to drink too much wine one day wasn't enough to justify

humiliating him and

You know I don't think it's pushing the limits of symbolic interpretation

To note on a daily basis that we're all contained in an ark

Right, and that's the ark that you could think about that as the ark that's been bequeathed to us by our forefathers. That's the

Tremendous infrastructure that we inhabit that we take for granted

Because it works so well

that protects us from things that we can't even imagine and we don't have to imagine because we're so well protected and

So one of the things that's really struck me hard. I would say about the

Disintegration and corruption of the universities is the absolute ingratitude that goes along with that