Among the Lilies, a novel by Stan Rice, part four. A devastated landscape: Solomon’s legacy

Stan Rice has just published another novel, Among the Lilies, the first novel in the trilogy Under the Sun. The central character is Elah, who is the scribe who writes the things that King Solomon takes the credit for: Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs, as well as many other Old Testament writings.

The summary from Kindle is:

Elah, the narrator, is a servant in one of King Solomon’s harems. While this sounds like the best job in the world, Elah’s work is way below his mind. He spends all the time he can thinking and writing about what, if anything, God is doing under the sun. But then he meets and loves Henna, the only black woman in Jerusalem. She is confined to her stepfather’s walled garden. Elah risks his life to meet Henna in the garden.

While in a cavalcade to the cedar forests of Lebanon, which he intends to cut down to make his palace, The King (who resembles Elvis) elevates Elah to the position of chief scribe. When The King sees Henna, he decides to add her to his stable of wives. Meanwhile Gomer, who becomes the woman in charge of the royal kitchens and is an expert in poisonous wild plants, is not at all pleased. She wants Elah for herself, and doesn’t she try to do something about it. But she cannot keep Elah from meeting Henna again. His quest fails.

Elah becomes a leader of revolutionary forces against The King. Elah finally finds Henna in the muddy eroded landscape that used to be the forests of Lebanon. The King captures Elah and offers him the choice between death and not quite being dead.

In order to build his Temple and Palace, Solomon must totally destroy the forests of cedars in Lebanon. They were legendary before him, but today very little remains of the fabled cedars. This photo shows one of the last remaining groves of Cedrus libani today. [photo]

 

The forests are magnificent when Solomon first visits them and contracts with King Hiram to cut down the trees. He just doesn’t understand that a bunch of gilded trunks in a Temple are nothing compared to the living forest from which they came. At the end of the novel, all that remains of the forest is mud, which consumes Elah and Henna and delivers them to their downfall.

History books seldom include the environmental devastation that comes with the fall of civilizations. Early historical records tend to just be a list of kings and battles. Historians now routinely include economics and sociology in their explanations of the rise and fall of civilizations. One of the early historians to include geography in his European histories was Marc Bloch, from Strasbourg, where I now live. But world history seldom includes the environment, something that works like A Forest Journey and Collapse are helping to rectify.

But you can find an environmental explanation for the collapse of societies even in the Bible itself. The Israelites were commanded to let their farmland rest every seventh year (the “sabbath of the fields.”) They apparently never did so. After 470 years, the Israelites owed a debt of 70 years to the land. This law is stated right after the ten commandments in Exodus 23:10-11. In Leviticus 26:34-35, Moses quoted God as saying that if the Israelites did not let the land rest every seventh year, Israel would be conquered by enemies, the land would lie desolate, and then the land would “enjoy its rests.” According to the Second Chronicles 36:21, this is exactly what happened. “The land enjoyed its rests” for seventy years, not incorporated as a part of the Israelite economy, but all at once, after its collapse, during the Babylonian captivity. We have not yet, even today, learned the lesson that we have to treat God’s Earth with respect if we are to survive.

Among the Lilies, a novel by Stan Rice, part three. The taste of bread and true love

Stan Rice has just published another novel, Among the Lilies, the first novel in the trilogy Under the Sun. The central character is Elah, who is the scribe who writes the things that King Solomon takes the credit for: Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs, as well as many other Old Testament writings.

The summary from Kindle is:

Elah, the narrator, is a servant in one of King Solomon’s harems. While this sounds like the best job in the world, Elah’s work is way below his mind. He spends all the time he can thinking and writing about what, if anything, God is doing under the sun. But then he meets and loves Henna, the only black woman in Jerusalem. She is confined to her stepfather’s walled garden. Elah risks his life to meet Henna in the garden.

While in a cavalcade to the cedar forests of Lebanon, which he intends to cut down to make his palace, The King (who resembles Elvis) elevates Elah to the position of chief scribe. When The King sees Henna, he decides to add her to his stable of wives. Meanwhile Gomer, who becomes the woman in charge of the royal kitchens and is an expert in poisonous wild plants, is not at all pleased. She wants Elah for herself, and doesn’t she try to do something about it. But she cannot keep Elah from meeting Henna again. His quest fails.

Elah becomes a leader of revolutionary forces against The King. Elah finally finds Henna in the muddy eroded landscape that used to be the forests of Lebanon. The King captures Elah and offers him the choice between death and not quite being dead.

Is true love like fine wine, or maybe whiskey? Or like exquisite candies? In Rice’s novel, true love turns out to be more like fragrant bread.

Gomer is the little woman who bakes the bread and eventually becomes the Head Baker. She wants Eli as her husband and will stop at nothing to get him—even while he still pines for Henna. Elah resists Gomer, until she sacrifices herself to save his life. Eli guards Gomer’s secret: she is a runaway Hittite slave. Eli realizes that Gomer’s love is what he really wants. This love story is as good as the love between Elah and Henna.

Even when Elah says that what he really wants is to die, since he cannot have Henna, Gomer is his ally. She knows desert wildflowers, and Elah has to trust her that she knows the difference between regular lilies and the visually-similar death lilies.

One of Elah’s tasks as head scribe is to find all Israelite folk stories and write them down. These stories, once organized, become much of the Old Testament: the stories of Lot, Barack, Gideon, Jotham, and Samson. Gomer is his comrade in collecting these stories. When Eli is banned from Jerusalem, he joins the rebel general Jeroboam, whom the Israelite people support. Gomer joins him.

But at the end temptation to have Henna is Elah’s downfall. The fact that Henna wants Eli is totally irrelevant to Solomon, who just smiles as she spits in his face.

Among the Lilies, a novel by Stan Rice, part two. What was Solomon thinking anyway?

Stan Rice has just published another novel, Among the Lilies, the first novel in the trilogy Under the Sun. The central character is Elah, who is the scribe who writes the things that King Solomon takes the credit for: Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs, as well as many other Old Testament writings.

The summary from Kindle is:

Elah, the narrator, is a servant in one of King Solomon’s harems. While this sounds like the best job in the world, Elah’s work is way below his mind. He spends all the time he can thinking and writing about what, if anything, God is doing under the sun. But then he meets and loves Henna, the only black woman in Jerusalem. She is confined to her stepfather’s walled garden. Elah risks his life to meet Henna in the garden.

While in a cavalcade to the cedar forests of Lebanon, which he intends to cut down to make his palace, The King (who resembles Elvis) elevates Elah to the position of chief scribe. When The King sees Henna, he decides to add her to his stable of wives. Meanwhile Gomer, who becomes the woman in charge of the royal kitchens and is an expert in poisonous wild plants, is not at all pleased. She wants Elah for herself, and doesn’t she try to do something about it. But she cannot keep Elah from meeting Henna again. His quest fails.

Elah becomes a leader of revolutionary forces against The King. Elah finally finds Henna in the muddy eroded landscape that used to be the forests of Lebanon. The King captures Elah and offers him the choice between death and not quite being dead.

A thousand sex partners? What was Solomon thinking anyway? Three hundred were wives, with inheritance rights, and seven hundred were well-paid concubines. Obviously Solomon could not love all of those women, though he probably fantasized that he could. Was he simply a sex maniac?

King Solomon is, in this novel, the most narcissistic man who ever lived. He names everything after himself. He aspires to build a huge Temple, and an even bigger Palace. Rice models him after Elvis Presley who is, of course, The King.

Rice brings up the possibility that Solomon was the consummate politician. He had total dictatorial control over the Kingdom of Israel, so much so that the people tolerated high taxes and having to dedicate a month of labor every year to governmental, or to Solomon’s personal, projects. And perhaps Solomon was using his many marriages to consolidate his political power. Any provincial families who became restless and questioned Solomon’s absolute authority found that they could do nothing: they had already married their daughters into Solomon’s family!

Even the Temple was a political stunt. At the dedication ceremony, Solomon makes a long speech, mostly about himself. And there is a sign on the Temple: Your Tax Money at Work!

One of Solomon’s children is Prince Rehoboam, who is modeled after Machiavelli’s The Prince. He is as powerful and ruthless as Solomon, only he does not understand that true power comes from creating the appearance of altruism. Rehoboam fails because he does not know that even an absolute dictator needs to have the people like him.

Among the Lilies, a novel by Stan Rice, part one. The subversive writer in King Solomon’s court

Stan Rice has just published another novel, Among the Lilies, the first novel in the trilogy Under the Sun. The central character is Elah, who is the scribe who writes the things that King Solomon takes the credit for: Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs, as well as many other Old Testament writings.

The summary from Kindle is:

Elah, the narrator, is a servant in one of King Solomon’s harems. While this sounds like the best job in the world, Elah’s work is way below his mind. He spends all the time he can thinking and writing about what, if anything, God is doing under the sun. But then he meets and loves Henna, the only black woman in Jerusalem. She is confined to her stepfather’s walled garden. Elah risks his life to meet Henna in the garden.

While in a cavalcade to the cedar forests of Lebanon, which he intends to cut down to make his palace, The King (who resembles Elvis) elevates Elah to the position of chief scribe. When The King sees Henna, he decides to add her to his stable of wives. Meanwhile Gomer, who becomes the woman in charge of the royal kitchens and is an expert in poisonous wild plants, is not at all pleased. She wants Elah for herself, and doesn’t she try to do something about it. But she cannot keep Elah from meeting Henna again. His quest fails.

Elah becomes a leader of revolutionary forces against The King. Elah finally finds Henna in the muddy eroded landscape that used to be the forests of Lebanon. The King captures Elah and offers him the choice between death and not quite being dead.

Rice has published this novel himself rather than looking for a commercial publisher because the fiction market is totally flooded with novels based on the Bible. The difference between most (or all?) of those novels and Rice’s is that the others are all either sand-and-sandal stories (reverent re-tellings of children’s Bible stories for adults), such as The Robe, an old novel by Lloyd C. Douglas; or creative derivations of them, such as The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd. None of them appear to be critical re-tellings from an agnostic, even cynical, viewpoint like Rice’s novel. No agent, editor, or reader would be able to find Among the Lilies in this veritable ocean of Bible fan-literature.

Elah is a servant in one of Solomon’s dozens of stables of wives, concubines, and sex slaves, where he is surrounded by temptations he cannot touch. The concubines are all beautiful, but the wives are faded and fat. And they think they can sing. Elah thought he had the worst job in the world, but it was at least a job.

But Elah has prospects. He is a good writer. At least, if anyone would want to read what he wrote, which was mostly deep and depressing things (the origin of the Biblical Ecclesiastes). His friend Eli is good with numbers. Someday, they fantasize, they will be Chief Scribe and Chief Steward.

Then Elah meets Henna, a black thunderbolt, the only sub-Saharan African woman in Jerusalem. She is beautiful and, like Elah, a good writer. An instant bond forms and Elah stops at nothing to find her again, which he does. This is what he wants: a partner not just of the body but of the mind and spirit. They exchange love notes, which have become the Song of Songs, Biblical passages seldom read in modern churches because of their explicit sexuality.

Elah and Eli succeed in their quests for importance in Solomon’s court. But Elah’s pursuit of Henna comes to a halt when Solomon decides he wants to marry her. Time and time again Elah almost meets up with her, until they get caught. At the end, when Elah and Henna are very briefly reunited, Elah gets to choose between being a living dog and a dead lion—words that he had written. This ending will make you wonder, just how far would you go in the pursuit of true love?

What We Can Learn from Plants (and the Bible)

Here is part of the final chapter of a new book I am working on.

Botany, the study of plants, can help us understand the laws of nature, including the laws that govern everything we do in our economic and personal lives. For our prosperity, and perhaps our survival, we need to let the plants teach us how to live.

To learn from the plants, we have to look closely at them. They do not yell in our faces like presidential candidates or preachers. Most people do not so much as glance at plants. But if you are reading this book, you are obviously an exception to this pattern.

There is a long tradition of us who have allowed plants to teach us how to live. Ancient Biblical literature tells of King Solomon who gave lectures about “the hyssop that grows out of the wall,” a plant that not only grew but was beautiful even when it did not have access to rich soil. And this same literature says that Jesus of Nazareth was also a close observer of plants. He said, as if he had read Chapter 2 of this book, “Except a seed die it cannot be born.” He said, as if he had read Chapter 9, that no matter how the weather changes from day to day you know that spring has come when the fig tree opens its buds.

One of the most famous pieces of literature attributed to Jesus is Matthew’s version of the Sermon on the Mount, in which he said, “Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these.” He referred to the lilies of the field, the ephemeral spring wildflowers that grow briefly in the springtime in climates such as those of the Middle East or California. Actually, he referred to just one of the lilies, of which there could be ten thousand in a field: Solomon was not arrayed as one of these. Whatever other legends may have accreted to the story of Jesus, it is clear that he must have been a man who was willing to get down on his knees and look at, really look at, a flower.

Perhaps Jesus realized that a flower is an investment. He is recorded as speaking disapprovingly of fruits that bear no seeds, that is, which have no return on their investment. While it may seem that a tiny plant could not possibly be making a profit by producing a flower that was more beautiful than any splendid human garment, the flower actually is an investment in attracting pollinators. Solomon’s royal robes were also an investment. Neither Solomon nor any other king actually needed all of those royal vestments. But those vestments were an in-vestment in prestige, which brought all of these kings ample rewards in power and wealth.

As explained in the final chapter, long-term investments (the tree strategy) are not always better than short-term investments (the weed strategy). However, our entire economy seems to be based on short-term investments: quarterly earnings rather than visionary investments, postponing necessary expenditures indefinitely into the future, and perhaps worst of all, making a killing rather than making a living. To make a long-term career, you need to create a support network and please your customers. But to make a short-term profit, these are not necessary: you will be gone before anyone notices that you misled them or provided an inferior product. Our entire economy, more and more each year, is a weed economy rather than a tree economy. The weed economy should fill in the gaps between economic forests, but repeated disturbances (everything from terrorist attacks to politically-motivated government shutdowns) make the tree economy less attractive. And many people in the business world, much to the embarrassment of the others, make a virtue out of short-term killings and proclaim themselves patriots while doing so. “Durable goods” used to be defined as those items that lasted at least three years; now they seem to be items that last no more than three years. As Vance Packard decried in The Waste Makers back in the 1950s, many companies make a lot of profit from built-in obsolescence. This is the tragedy of modern times.

We are not the first people to make nearly all of our investments weedy rather than perennial. Old Testament literature (the ninth chapter of Judges) also tells the story of a man named Jotham, who spoke from a hillside to the people of Shechem about how they had chosen worthless, selfish men as their leaders, men who cared only for immediate advantage and gratification. But he spoke in a parable. The trees of the woods and orchards, he said, wanted to choose a king. First, they asked the olive tree to be their king. But the olive tree was too busy making oil. Then the trees asked the fig tree to be their king, but the fig tree was too busy making fruit. Similarly, the grape vine was too busy making wine. So the trees of the forest asked the thorn bush to be their king. The thorn bush lived fast and died young, and instead of offering shade and creating rich soil, the thorn bush turned dry and brittle, and promoted wildfires, which destroyed the forest. Have we learned anything in the last three thousand years about how to prepare for the future?

Religion vs. Science, the Vast Gulf Part Six: Continents

It is with considerable relief when I say, Congratulations to Barack Obama for winning a second term. I was afraid that Mitt Romney would make devastating cuts to science and education, cuts that would actually not reduce the deficit very much. At the same time, almost exactly half of the voters voted against Barack Obama. His next four years may be even harder than his previous four years.

Now back to our series about the many ways in which science differs from traditional religion.

The Biblical view of the Earth is that orderly dry land is surrounded by chaotic oceans; in fact, one of God’s earliest acts of creation was to set a boundary between land and sea. The landlubber Israelites were frankly afraid of being out on the ocean (so am I). The God of orderliness had created dry land as the place for people to live.

But the Israelites had no idea that the continents moved around. Of course, neither did anybody else. The idea of continental drift was proposed by Alfred Wegener in the early twentieth century, and accepted only decades later by geologists. You cannot fault the Bible for omitting continental drift, unless you believe the Bible to be the outline of all scientific truth, in which case you have to reject continental drift.

But it is a little more complicated than this. Creationists believe that God sent a Flood upon the Earth, saving only Noah and his family (which, they imagine, contained black, white, and oriental daughters-in-law) from which all the people of the Earth are descended. This was such a severe disruption to the stable continents that all sedimentary rocks (of which continents largely consist) and all volcanic and metamorphic layers between them were produced at that time. Where did all the land come from? Not from day three of Genesis 1, but from the big piles of mud left over after the Flood of Noah. The problems with this theory could fill a book, and have filled many books.

But it gets even more complicated than this. Genesis 10:25 said that in the days of Peleg (a mysterious patriarch about whom little is known) the Earth was divided. This was after the Flood. Let us consider the tremendous scientific implications of this verse, if we take it literally. This verse literally says the Earth was divided. The word for “earth” is the same Hebrew word that is used for the entire planet (see here for concordance references). The word for “divided” refers to cutting entirely in half (see here for concordance references). To really take this verse literally, we have to say what one creationist (Walter Brown) once said in a public forum at the University of Illinois: this was when God created the Atlantic Ocean, causing the Eurasian and North American plates to diverge. But the word literally means to split into pieces, thus we must go way beyond continental drift and believe that the entire planet was split in two. One of the halves must be the one we are on, and presumably the other half has been lost. This would mean that, even right after the Flood, Earth was a much bigger planet, which would give it stronger gravitation, which would make birds unable to fly and large animals (as they are currently designed) unable to walk… This quickly leads to absurdity. Therefore, creationists such as the people at Answers in Genesis claim that “earth” in this verse refers to the people of the Earth. They refuse to allow this interpretation for the very same word in reference to the whole Earth being covered by the Flood, or to God creating the whole Earth in Genesis 1. Apparently, creationists have appointed themselves as the official “deciders” of which passages are to be taken as scientifically literal statements and which are more figurative.

It gets even stranger. Something interesting happened during King Solomon’s coronation parade. “And all the people went up after him [King Solomon], playing on pipes, and rejoicing with great joy, so that the earth was split by their noise.” Some translations say that the earth rumbled with their noise, but the actual Hebrew words refer to the Earth itself actually splitting. Most of us would assume this is the figurative equivalent of “ear-splitting,” and some Bible translations take the liberty of translating it, “The earth rumbled with their noise.” But if you base your science on a literal interpretation of the Bible, you have a problem here. Creationists quietly accept the figurative meaning of this verse.

There are whole continents of difference between the ancient religious view of the earth and the modern scientific one.