Joel Baden Profile picture
25 Apr, 11 tweets, 2 min read
Here’s a hot take:

The oft-repeated claim that, despite our differences, Jews and Christians “all believe in the same god” is yet another ostensibly banal but actually deeply insidious token of Christian supersessionism.
Like “Judeo-Christian values” and much other “interfaith” language, it is designed to eradicate the ongoing distinctiveness of Judaism as a lived religion standing alongside, and separate from, Christianity.
It subsumes Judaism under a fundamentally Christian rubric of faith, relegating all of Judaism’s particularities to mere by-products of some essential core, which just happens to be identical to Christianity.
In short: stop it.
Well, this hot take sizzled a bit.

Let me add an idea:

God is a story - or, if you like, a character in a story. In theory, we can have divergent understandings of a character, even have them do different things in different stories, and be the same character.
But at a certain point, the basic character of the character changes so much that it’s not reconcilable with the base version. Or, better, two different versions of the base character diverge too widely from each other to be recognizably the same.
The deities of both Judaism and Christianity are, essentially, fan fiction about the character of YHWH in the Hebrew Bible. There comes a moment when their stories and characters are so different that it’s just the same name - they share almost nothing else.
So I’m not making an absolutist kind of claim that any different ideas about a deity mean that it’s not the same deity. But there’s a line - perhaps not easily defined - where it crosses from mostly commonality to mostly difference.
And, of course, none of that gets at what my main point was probably supposed to be, which is that, all else aside, the rhetoric of “the same god” is deeply problematic in its practical use, the same way that “Judeo-Christian values” is.
But this is the sort of thing I’m definitely not claiming. It’s a spectrum, people, and at some point the line is crossed.
Come on - shared background doesn’t cut it. You have to artificially cut somewhere. The religion of the Hebrew Bible is fundamentally driven from Canaanite religion. Is Christianity the same as Canaanite religion? Why not, by the logic of the shared background?

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More from @JoelBaden

27 Apr
#Exodus 32:1-6

The golden calf

Let’s get the story straight here:

Despite what you may have heard or read, the sin of the golden calf was not idolatry or apostasy.

Come and see.
What is it that prompts the people to make the calf? It’s not the absence of YHWH, who was never just hanging around the camp anyway. It’s the absence of Moses - without whom their access to the deity is eliminated. They don’t need a new god - YHWH hasn’t changed.
What they need is a new conduit to the deity. Specifically, they’re stuck in the middle of the wilderness and need someone, or something, to lead them through. We don’t know what happened to Moses, they say. You don’t replace Moses with a different god. They didn’t worship him.
Read 16 tweets
26 Apr
Time for a summary thread, since we got all the way through the Tabernacle instructions (in one piece, no less). So if you're just tuning in or catching up, here's the last recap of where we've been:
Read 33 tweets
25 Apr
The amount of pushback I’ve gotten on this raises maybe a more interesting question for me:

Why are people so invested in this as an idea at all?
It’s not that it’s “true” - truth hasn’t got anything to do with this, that’s a category error. So the question I think has to be the classic cui bono - who benefits?
Seems to me that the commitment to the idea stems from some desire to identify with the other “Abrahamic” faiths - but why? For increased tolerance? If you require some shared faith commitment to be tolerant, or kind, or decent, or caring, then you’re an asshole.
Read 4 tweets
22 Apr
#Exodus 31:12-17

Sabbath

Why does P feel the need to put the sabbath law here? (We might actually ask why P has a sabbath law at all, if we were being cheeky, but I’ll let it slide.) But why here, in the Tabernacle blueprint section?
The rabbinic-style answer would be that here all Israel is working at building the Tabernacle, so they need to know to stop on the seventh day. Which is also why the categories of work forbidden on Shabbat are aligned with those needed to build the Tabernacle.
There’s something to that - at least, the sense that this is an all-Israel venture, and the sabbath is too, while the ritual laws to come in Leviticus are almost entirely about individuals.
Read 9 tweets
21 Apr
#Exodus 31:1-11

Bezalel

This is really just a long-ish section of YHWH telling Moses that a couple of dudes, Bezalel and Oholiab, are going to be the lead craftsmen for the Tabernacle, with help from whoever is similarly gifted. My question is: who is Bezalel?
I don’t mean in the narrative world: we get his full two-generation genealogy and his tribal affiliation, and we know what his function in the story is. I mean more like, where did he come from in the tradition?
He’s known only to P, which is sensible, since only P has the whole Tabernacle thing. But where does P get the name, the genealogy, the tribal affiliation? Is it just invented entirely? Is it some old tradition among the priests? Was the name written in graffiti on the altar?
Read 5 tweets
29 Mar
#Exodus 27:1-8

The sacrificial altar

For the center of activity in the Tabernacle, the altar doesn't get any special attention here - fewer verses devoted to it than to the court in the next section, for example. And there are aspects of it here that, well, don't matter much.
Why does it need to have a mesh grating? I don't know. It just does, okay? The poles and the hollowness - well, those are for carrying the thing, but they have no other function.
All of this just to say: what we're doing here is describing the objects in the Tabernacle - bringing them solidly into the mind of the reader. There's going to be chapters and chapters of what to do with them, especially with this one.
Read 4 tweets

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