Meditation on Entropy

I'm still reading the Old Testament book of 1st Samuel. It's about 30 chapters of pure action, interspersed with odd meditative episodes and powerful rhetoric, drama, emotion and the scent of death. What strikes me about this book is that it is one of the earliest books which is actually written like a novel. The characters have discernible motives and the plot shows signs of non-prophetic foreshadowing and other literary devices.

The whole thing is very different from the near-legendary exploits of the Israelites as they journeyed out from Egypt and into the Promised Land. Rather, it is the story of a people now linked to their land and behaving like ordinary people, yet touched with the shadow of the Almighty.

But as you read further into the text, you see entropy creeping in. People wind down, give in to lower-energy decision-making, to summary rather than expansion. They make bad choices which you know will get them in the long term. Worse, in the light of what we now know, the roots of the tragedy of the Jewish Holocaust were laid then; the seed was planted when they decided to get for themselves a king.

It lifts you up to see how much effort went into the avoidance of disaster, how much input was given to raise these people against the burden of entropy. That they took so long to self-destruct and lose their Promised Land is the miracle of the tale.

Nuking

The people of Israel were an interesting lot, as the account given in the first book of Samuel shows. Not liking the idea of having God-appointed judges over them, they asked for a secular king. God told Samuel, the last judge of Israel, to tell them what a bad deal they would be getting; the people of Israel said, yeah, yeah, and asked for one anyway.

So God told Samuel to find one and give them a new king.

That king was Saul: impressive in his own way, extremely secular in many ways, and prone to interpreting God any way he felt like doing so. Saul was also the sort who liked to gain praise from other people's actions. And that kind of thing.

It did not end well.

Snakes & Ladders

I have always liked the throbbing tunes and spiky lyrics of the group called Men at Work. They took it upon themselves, years ago, to talk about life in the perfectly normal working world—except that there is a timeless quality about their thoughts. Here, for example, are the lyrics of 'Snakes and Ladders':

I could stand but I don't like the feeling
I could fall but I'm always on the floor
You could make a million staring at the ceiling
You could break your back and still be poor

One for the liar
One for the cheat
One for the man who you'll never meet
Piece of the action and a portion of pie
They'll be there waiting when your big chance comes by

There's a snake on top of every ladder
Who will tell you that he's your best friend
Everyone important needs an adder
But subtraction gets you in the end

One for the liar
One for the cheat
One for the man who you'll never meet
Piece of the action and a portion of pie
They'll be there waiting when your big chance comes by

They don't care, they don't mind
The in-betweens will steal you blind
I don't know, I can't say
It seems it's always been this way
You won't feel or complain
The gentle leech will cause no pain

It's one sharp vignette of working life. There's always someone creaming off your work and not attributing it to you; this is seen as right and fair by some people. They fish you out when they need good work done; they bury you when you are inconvenient; this is the way of the world.

I've been reading the interesting and hair-raising accounts in the first book of Samuel the prophet. Things were the same then too.

A Cunning Plan

Oh yes, there are already those of you who are thinking of Baldrick and Blackadder when you see the phrase 'a cunning plan'. It is no accident, however, that these three words are associated with power and the promulgation of perilous plans.

That's because the words 'king' and 'cunning' come from the same root. The qualities of a king are, taken as one group, something called 'cunning' or 'kingship'. This is probably why the Bible as a whole is not too keen on human kings, since these tend to display the more venal side of kingship.

Take for example the duties of a king as set out provisionally in Deuteronomy 17. It's very clear; do not set up as king one who is not your brother, make sure he is not imperialistic or grasping in any sense. These are all restrictions on human kingship, designed to pave the way for an ideal which was the plan from the first Adam.

But the consequences of not keeping within these restrictions are interesting. God tells Samuel what will happen in I Samuel 8. A king whose prowess is not fettered will make use of the state to further his goals. Such a king is no servant, but a tyrant. The ideal vision is quite different; it can be found in Isaiah 32; here is a king who reigns in justice and is a shelter, a nurturer, the source of good things and the greener of a barren land.

Sometimes I think that the limitation of reading tiny bits of the Bible each day is that one doesn't see the whole picture. Once in a while, many small bits should be put together to give the overall picture. Simple logic can be used in hermeneutic context. For example: a) the eagle is an unclean bird, b) you should not put up graven images of any kinds of animals... oops, but I've said enough about such things in other posts.

To summarise, cunning is kingship; kingship is cunning. But when you engineer your cunning plans, O leaders of this world, make sure that they are plans worthy of a King.