This I found to be interesting...
So, there is this site that gives you like seven hundred different classes that you can take online for free (700 Free Online Courses). I checked them out, perused the different subjects that would likely appeal to me and settled so far on five different classes. Now, mind you, I graduated high school in 1978 and have not been back to school since, with the small exception of beginning a course in counseling, which I never completed, so this will prove to be a pretty interesting venture on my horizon.
To get back to the courses that I decided on. I chose to take classes on both the Old and New Testament, Food Sustainability; Sustainable Healthy Diets and Nutrition for Health Promotion and Disease prevention, all areas that I am interested in. Imagine my surprise when the first class, Food Sustainability bombarded me with Chemistry. The monoglycerides, diglycerides, triglycerides and lipids made my head spin and the breakdown of hydrogen and oxygen to make up H2O gave me a bit of a headache. Mind you, I loved chemistry....having stuff bubble over your beaker was fun and making and studying crystals was pretty cool, too, but I did all of that in my freshman year, so the bulk of the class pretty much has gone from my memory. However, I really want to try to understand more about the sustainability of food, especially in times such as these, so I will push forward and tax my poor brain to its utter limits and capacity. I would like to think of this as a joke, however, with the fibro fog as it is on occasion, this could quite well be a challenge.
The other class that has started has to do with the TaNakh, or the Old Testament. This particular class is one that I will be beating my head against the desk over. I am glad that we are using the Jewish Bible for this class, it gives me a different view of the Old Testament than I am used to, but we are also using a couple of other texts; The Ancient Near East by James Pritchard, and The Religion of Israel: From Its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile by Yehezkel Kaufmann; Moshe Greenberg. I haven't gotten the Jewish Bible yet, it seems that it had to be ordered and wasn't available at the local bookstore. Since I'm not a student of any college, going to the college bookstore is something that is generally discouraged apparently. As for the second text, it's kind of scarce out there, so it too had to be ordered. Who knew that textbooks could be so doggone expensive, but obtain it I did and it is on its way to me as well. The text that I do have, The Ancient Near East, contains one of the reading assignments for the first lecture...The Deluge; The Creation Epic; and The Epic of Gilgamesh. Yeah. Epic equals long.
So, going through the Deluge was difficult because some of the text is missing from the tablets that were discovered. The same held true for the Creation Epic. The Epic of Gilgamesh, go figure, the stinking thing is all intact and long. Never mind that it details many gods and their dealings with each other, but it depicts (so far, I quit reading it last night because it was giving me a headache) the choosing of a (I will call it) "main" god who goes by the name of Marduk. Just as an aside, if you have kids or grand kids and they are in to the Disney movies, Marduk is one of the gods that is mentioned in Brave and is depicted as a bear in the story, so imagine how difficult it was for me, having seen the movie quite a few times already, to get through what text I got through. Every time I got to the name, the image of the bear kept popping into my mind. I figured that at that point there was no use to me going further until I had a good night's sleep and several cups of coffee in me so that I could comprehend what I was reading without thinking of a cartoon.
As far as the lecture video of the Old Testament class is concerned, I found a couple of times that she mentioned things that were not true of what I know of the Old Testament, the most glaring being that no one in the Old Testament lived past the age of 70. Uh, oops? Wrong! Lets start with Adam, who lived 930 years; his son Seth - 912 years. Enosh, Seth's son lived to the ripe old age of 905; Cainan was 910 when he died; Mahalalel lived 800 years; Jared, 962. Enoch lived three hundred years before he was "translated" or taken home, not having died. Methuselah was 969 years old and Noah was 950 when he died. Clearly these all lived past the age of seventy, so there's a bit of a road block to be cleared before I will be able to fully trust what she says. Not having been a student for a number of years, I suppose I will have to remember my place, learn what I need to learn and move forward.
Why am I taking this particular course, you might ask? Simply put, I want to understand my Bible more than I already do. There's so much that I don't understand that I think perhaps looking at it from another aspect might give me a greater appreciation and perhaps a better understanding of what I do know and believe. Part of the reading assignment is Genesis chapters 1-4 in the Jewish Bible, which, of course I do not have as of yet. However, I decided to spend some time in my old King James and read the Creation story. A couple of words in the text I guess I never quite understood what they meant, until today when I ran them through the dictionary. I mean, I knew the basic meaning of the words, but not the actual meaning of them. The first one was firmament. Up until today, I figured that just meant the heavens, you know, the sky, the stars, yadda, yadda. It means much more. It means "the arch of the sky. vault". Huh? Vault? So, in reading I replaced the meaning of the word firmament with the word vault and then Genesis 1:8a became a little clearer: "And God called the vault Heaven". Cool! What a wonderful way to imagine Heaven as a vault or a safe, which further leads me to the notion that it is a "safe place", a harbor.
Then as I wound down the Creation story and got to the reprimand of the serpent and Eve, another interesting thing popped out at me. The word enmity. Enmity is defined as: "positive, actively and typically mutual hatred or ill will", which makes quite a few things clear as it pertains to women and Christianity. Genesis 3:15 (replacing enmity with hatred)..."And I will put hatred between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed: He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise His heel". This, to me, explains the fervor that a Christian woman feels when evil, or the "world" tries to come between her and God or even what she feels has been given to her by God, her family. Let me tell you this...let the world view come at her kids as she is raising them and you haven't seen a determination such as the one that a Christian woman has. I had noticed it with myself on a few occasions, but on women who were or are much stronger than I am in the faith, Dude, mess with her family and you best be tucking your tail between your legs because you will catch it with both barrels. That's not to say that they are mean or spiteful, but the enmity that she has for the things that are against the Word of God are unparalleled even by Chuck Norris. He wouldn't stand a chance if he were trying to make her family stray from their appointed course with God. The score would be: Christian Mom - 1/ Chuck Norris - 0.
Anyway, I thought that this was blog-worthy and I apologise if this was kind of boring for you, but this was just awe inspiring for me. A revelation of sorts. I'm hoping that this class will produce more of these revelations instead of rubbing my fur the wrong way by suggesting that the Old Testament is made up from myths borrowed from, of all places, Babylon, Assyria, Sumeria and Mesopotamia. However, in the interest of gaining these revelations I will continue on, knowing that the Bible is the True Word of God, not some book of fables as has been asserted by some.
To get back to the courses that I decided on. I chose to take classes on both the Old and New Testament, Food Sustainability; Sustainable Healthy Diets and Nutrition for Health Promotion and Disease prevention, all areas that I am interested in. Imagine my surprise when the first class, Food Sustainability bombarded me with Chemistry. The monoglycerides, diglycerides, triglycerides and lipids made my head spin and the breakdown of hydrogen and oxygen to make up H2O gave me a bit of a headache. Mind you, I loved chemistry....having stuff bubble over your beaker was fun and making and studying crystals was pretty cool, too, but I did all of that in my freshman year, so the bulk of the class pretty much has gone from my memory. However, I really want to try to understand more about the sustainability of food, especially in times such as these, so I will push forward and tax my poor brain to its utter limits and capacity. I would like to think of this as a joke, however, with the fibro fog as it is on occasion, this could quite well be a challenge.
The other class that has started has to do with the TaNakh, or the Old Testament. This particular class is one that I will be beating my head against the desk over. I am glad that we are using the Jewish Bible for this class, it gives me a different view of the Old Testament than I am used to, but we are also using a couple of other texts; The Ancient Near East by James Pritchard, and The Religion of Israel: From Its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile by Yehezkel Kaufmann; Moshe Greenberg. I haven't gotten the Jewish Bible yet, it seems that it had to be ordered and wasn't available at the local bookstore. Since I'm not a student of any college, going to the college bookstore is something that is generally discouraged apparently. As for the second text, it's kind of scarce out there, so it too had to be ordered. Who knew that textbooks could be so doggone expensive, but obtain it I did and it is on its way to me as well. The text that I do have, The Ancient Near East, contains one of the reading assignments for the first lecture...The Deluge; The Creation Epic; and The Epic of Gilgamesh. Yeah. Epic equals long.
So, going through the Deluge was difficult because some of the text is missing from the tablets that were discovered. The same held true for the Creation Epic. The Epic of Gilgamesh, go figure, the stinking thing is all intact and long. Never mind that it details many gods and their dealings with each other, but it depicts (so far, I quit reading it last night because it was giving me a headache) the choosing of a (I will call it) "main" god who goes by the name of Marduk. Just as an aside, if you have kids or grand kids and they are in to the Disney movies, Marduk is one of the gods that is mentioned in Brave and is depicted as a bear in the story, so imagine how difficult it was for me, having seen the movie quite a few times already, to get through what text I got through. Every time I got to the name, the image of the bear kept popping into my mind. I figured that at that point there was no use to me going further until I had a good night's sleep and several cups of coffee in me so that I could comprehend what I was reading without thinking of a cartoon.
As far as the lecture video of the Old Testament class is concerned, I found a couple of times that she mentioned things that were not true of what I know of the Old Testament, the most glaring being that no one in the Old Testament lived past the age of 70. Uh, oops? Wrong! Lets start with Adam, who lived 930 years; his son Seth - 912 years. Enosh, Seth's son lived to the ripe old age of 905; Cainan was 910 when he died; Mahalalel lived 800 years; Jared, 962. Enoch lived three hundred years before he was "translated" or taken home, not having died. Methuselah was 969 years old and Noah was 950 when he died. Clearly these all lived past the age of seventy, so there's a bit of a road block to be cleared before I will be able to fully trust what she says. Not having been a student for a number of years, I suppose I will have to remember my place, learn what I need to learn and move forward.
Why am I taking this particular course, you might ask? Simply put, I want to understand my Bible more than I already do. There's so much that I don't understand that I think perhaps looking at it from another aspect might give me a greater appreciation and perhaps a better understanding of what I do know and believe. Part of the reading assignment is Genesis chapters 1-4 in the Jewish Bible, which, of course I do not have as of yet. However, I decided to spend some time in my old King James and read the Creation story. A couple of words in the text I guess I never quite understood what they meant, until today when I ran them through the dictionary. I mean, I knew the basic meaning of the words, but not the actual meaning of them. The first one was firmament. Up until today, I figured that just meant the heavens, you know, the sky, the stars, yadda, yadda. It means much more. It means "the arch of the sky. vault". Huh? Vault? So, in reading I replaced the meaning of the word firmament with the word vault and then Genesis 1:8a became a little clearer: "And God called the vault Heaven". Cool! What a wonderful way to imagine Heaven as a vault or a safe, which further leads me to the notion that it is a "safe place", a harbor.
Then as I wound down the Creation story and got to the reprimand of the serpent and Eve, another interesting thing popped out at me. The word enmity. Enmity is defined as: "positive, actively and typically mutual hatred or ill will", which makes quite a few things clear as it pertains to women and Christianity. Genesis 3:15 (replacing enmity with hatred)..."And I will put hatred between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed: He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise His heel". This, to me, explains the fervor that a Christian woman feels when evil, or the "world" tries to come between her and God or even what she feels has been given to her by God, her family. Let me tell you this...let the world view come at her kids as she is raising them and you haven't seen a determination such as the one that a Christian woman has. I had noticed it with myself on a few occasions, but on women who were or are much stronger than I am in the faith, Dude, mess with her family and you best be tucking your tail between your legs because you will catch it with both barrels. That's not to say that they are mean or spiteful, but the enmity that she has for the things that are against the Word of God are unparalleled even by Chuck Norris. He wouldn't stand a chance if he were trying to make her family stray from their appointed course with God. The score would be: Christian Mom - 1/ Chuck Norris - 0.
Anyway, I thought that this was blog-worthy and I apologise if this was kind of boring for you, but this was just awe inspiring for me. A revelation of sorts. I'm hoping that this class will produce more of these revelations instead of rubbing my fur the wrong way by suggesting that the Old Testament is made up from myths borrowed from, of all places, Babylon, Assyria, Sumeria and Mesopotamia. However, in the interest of gaining these revelations I will continue on, knowing that the Bible is the True Word of God, not some book of fables as has been asserted by some.
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