freakified

Time for the first of what I hope will be many pretentious posts!

I just finished my latest masterpiece: another essay for the Bible as Literature!  This particular one deals with a particular set of recurring narratives present in the Bible.  Recurring narratives are fairly commonplace throughout the Bible, it seems. (Just look at Genesis for quite a few; if you read the story of Noah’s ark, you might notice that every event is mentioned twice for some reason, and it has a tendency to contradict itself.)  At any rate, this particular assignment dealt with comparing the duplicate plotlines of Exodus 16 and Numbers 11.

Both stories have the same basic premise: Israelites complain about a lack of food, and things happen.  In the first, they have no food, and end up with “manna” and quails to eat.  (As an interesting sidenote, the description of manna in the Bible is mysteriously similar to the carbohydrate-rich excretion of a couple insects that live in that area.)  In the second one, God just gets pissed off and kills anyone that bothers him by putting a plague on the meat just as they eat it.

Suckers.