Some observations on Genesis 38

It has always puzzled me why in Genesis the story of Judah and Tamar appears in the middle of the story of Joseph. In the book of Genesis, there are several sections that are partitioned by the phrase "These are the generations of ...". As I recall, there's some controversy whether this phrase indicates the end or the beginning of the section. I'm going assume it indicates the beginning of the section. It first appears in 2:4 - "These are the generations of the heaves and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens." The next appearance is in 5:1 - "This is the book of the generations of Adam." Next is 6:9 - "These are the generations of Noah." Next is 10:1 - "These are the generations of the son of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth." Next is 11:10 - "These are the generations of Shem." Next is 11:27 - "These are the generations of Terah." Next is 25:12 - "These are the generations of Ishmael, Abraham's son, whom Hagar the Egyptian, Sarah's servant, gore to Abraham." Next is 25:19 - "These are the generations of Isaac, Abraham's son." Next is 36:1 - "These are the generations of Esau (that is, Edom)". This is repeated in 36:9 - "These are the generations of Esau the father of the Edomites in the hill country of Seir." Finally, 37:2 - "These are the generations of Jacob.

Ok..... Still with me? Genesis 37:2 until the end of the book of Genesis is one long section. It is principally the story of Joseph. 37:2 continues: "Joesph, being seventeen years old..." Joseph dreams two dreams, he is sold by his brothers, and winds up in Egypt as a servant to "Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh, the captain of the guard" (37:36). This part of the story is continued not in chapter 38, but in 39: "Now Joseph had been brought down to Egypt, and Potiphar, an officer of PHaraoh, the captain of the guard, an Egyptian, had bought him from the Ishmaelites who had brought him down there." The rest of the book continues to tell the story of Joseph in a very linear fashion. So why does chapter 38 come between 37 and 39? Wouldn't it make sense for 38 to come before 37? That way, the story of Joseph would be completely linear and uninterrupted from beginning to end. And why bother making such a big deal of Judah and Tamar (chapter 38) anyway? It's a weird story, end as abruptly as it began. In the middle of the Joseph story, we are told that "It happened at that time that Judah went down from his brothers and turned aside to a certain Adullamite, whose name was Hirah." While apparently living in the town of Adullam, Judah married "a certain Canaanite whose name was Shua." She bore him three sons: Er, Onan, and Shelah. Judah arranged for the marriage of Er to Tamar, but Er died without children. The custom at the time was for the nearest male relative to marry the dead man's wife. In this case, it was Onan, who also died without children. To make a long story short, Tamar should have then been married to Shelah, but Judah didn't allow it. It seems that Shelah must eventually have married, and Judah's wife died in the meantime, so that now Judah himself was the nearest relative able to marry Tamar. She tricked him into sleeping with her (pretending to be a prostitute, whom Judah did not recognize), and as a result she bore him twin sons: Perez and Zerah. The end. Back to Joseph. Abuptly. What about Perez and Zerah? We don't hear much about them ever again, except in the genealogical records.

What seems to me at this point as the most interesting reference to them is in Ruth 4:11-12: "Then all the people who were at the gate and the elders said, We are witnesses. May the Lord make the woman [Ruth], who is coming into your house, like Rachel and Leah, who together built up the house of ISrael. Mayyou act worthily in Ephrathah and be renowned in Behlehem, and may your house be like the house of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah, because of the offspring that the Lord will give you by this young woman." It seems that the story of Judah and Tamar was well-known, and even viewed favorably, by the people in Ruth's time. But still, why is it in the middle of the Joseph story?

Well, I have an idea now. But first, two more notes about the story: 1) When Judah finds out that Tamar is pregnant, he still doesn't know that he himself is the father, and he says "Bring her out, and let her be burned." Later, under Moses, this punishment was codified specifically for daughters of priests who had prostituted themselves (Leviticus 21:9), in contrast to women who were not daughters of priests and who were stoned (Deuteronomy 22:21) for sexual immorality. Now, Moses was some 400+ years after Judah, but if we assume a similar custom in the time of Judah, the implication is that Tamar was a priest's daughter, or something like that. 2) Before this, when Judah sends a goat to her (still thinking she is a prostitute), his friend can't find her, and asks the people if they have seen "the cult prostitute". Now, we don't know anything about Tamar's father, whether he was a Canaanite priest or not, but the language used in this chapter suggests that we should be thinking of Tamar as if she were a priest's daughter, whether she really was or not. Judah and this pseudo-priest's daughter have two sons in a way reminiscent of Jacob and Esau. Namely, Jacob and Esau were twins, as were Perez and Zerah; both pairs of twins were born with one trying to get out before the other - Jacob was holding on to Esau's heel, and Perez was born first in spite of his brother's hand first coming out. Because Zerah's hand was out first, he was recognized as the firstborn: "This one came out first" (38:28), but Perez became the more important of the two, just as Jacob was more important than Esau.

Ok... Now what about Joseph? I wonder now if Judah and Tamar don't interrupt the story of Joseph in order to serve as a contrast to Joseph. Joseph has been sold to Egypt, yes. The next part of the story involved Joseph refusing to sleep with his master's wife, and eventually being married to a priest's daughter and having two sons. See the parellels? There is another parallel: Joseph was separated from his brothers by being sold into Egypt, and Judah also "went down from his brothers" (38:1). Judah and Joseph both were living away from their brothers, in foreign lands (Joseph among the Egyptians, Judah among the Canaanites. Both of them married foreign women (Judah married the daughter of Shua the Canaanite, Joseph married Asenath the Egyptian). But Judah contrasts with Joseph in his methods. Judah was the one who suggested to sell Joesph into slavery (37:26); Judah left his own brothers of his own will and married a Canaanite, where Joseph left his brothers unwillingly and married an Egyptian; my guess is that Judah was trying to become an important man on his own efforts (there's more to this than just a wild guess, but I won't discuss it here), whereas Joseph became an important man through faith in God; Judah loses his first two sons and has twins in a rather bad way - and in the process, when he can't find Tamar who has his signet and cord and staff (items indicating his importance), he says "Let her keep the things as her own, or we shall be laughed at" (38:23), whereas Joseph has two sons (perhaps even twins???) in an honorable way - and in the process, when he resists the advances of Potiphar's wife, he is accused by her of coming "to laugh at" her (39:14, 17).

As I am working on this entry, I'm thinking about chapters 37 and 38 as a parallel to 39-41. You have, basically, two stories that parallel each other - perhaps the first story is primarily about Judah (as himself, and as the representative of his brothers), and the second story primarily about Joseph. In broad strokes, the first story can be thought of as the following four episodes: 1) Joseph is the favorite in the Jacob's house, 2) Joseph has dreams which Jacob interprets, 3) Joseph is sold into slavery by his brothers (at Judah's suggestion) and his robe is used as proof of his death, 4) Judah departs from his brothers and has twin sons from (presumably) the daughter of a priest. The second story has four parallel episodes: 1) Joseph is prosperous in Potiphar's house, 2) Joseph ends up in prison and his garment is used as proof of his crime, 3) Joseph interprets dreams, and 4) Joseph rises to power and has two sons from the daughter of a prist. (Note that the 2nd and 3rd episodes are in the opposite order in the two stories). Judah meant to profit from selling his brother, and to become a great man by leaving his brothers. In the end, Joseph becomes the great man and Judah, who has become the head of the house of Jacob (except for Jacob himself), must come to him for food. It is Joseph who receives a double portion of the inheritance because Jacob adopts Joseph's two sons - Jacob does not adopt Judah's two sons.

So the book of Genesis from Abraham on is a study of contrasts between two brothers in each generation. In each case, one brother believes the promises made to Abraham while the other does not. First you have Isaac and Ishmael. Ishmael is the older, but he is not the son of the promise. Then you have Jacob and Esau. Esau is the older, but he does not believe in the promises and therefore Jacob recieves the birthright and the blessing. Of Jacob's sons, we have Judah and Joseph in particular. Joseph is the firstborn of Rachel, and Judah is the 4th of Leah. The first three sons of Leah (Reuben, Simeon, Levi) all got themselves into trouble so that Judah is the effective head of the family after Jacob. So, Judah is older than Joseph, but... Like Esau, Judah does not appear to take the promises seriously, whereas Joseph does, and the result is that Joseph receives the blessing and the double portion. And again, each of them has two sons, in which the birth order is not the order of importance - Ephraim is preferred before Mannasseh, and Perez is preferred before Zerah.

Perhaps this helps shed some light on the popularity of the Judah and Tamar story in Ruth. The people seem to consider it a blessing for Ruth to be like Tamar. In fact, Ruth's Israelite family was from the tribe of Judah, so from a Judah-centric perspective this would seem to make great sense - Abraham, Isaach, Jacob, and Judah all had two sons (well, Jacob had 12, but we are representing them as two), and it was through this line that the family was built up.

In the meantime, Joseph is contrasted with Judah in Genesis, and yet it is through Judah (and Tamar) that the line of David is traced, and through David the line of Jesus.

So there we go. Some thoughts about Genesis 38 and how it fits into the general structure of the Joseph story and of the book of Genesis as a whole.

Of the Breaking of Marshall

We were getting ready to go see "Meet Me In Saint Louis" with some friends today, and there were some emails going back and forth about it, some sillier than others. One of our friends said he was ready for a break; another replied that we would be glad to break him; I replied with the following:

Of the Breaking of Marshall
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Full firm he planted both his feet
Against his mortal foe,
Nor would he yield for he would wield
The White Wuten of woe.
There stood the fiend that he would rend,
And bring the villain to an end.

The Great Faug, how his teeth a-burned
With blood and bits of flesh and gore,
His eyes they glowed and glowered red
For hunger for still more.
He strode apace and closed the space
To eye him in the face.

Then with a flash he loosed his lash
And hail came tumbling down,
But he who bore the White Wuten
Would not be overthrown -
He raised his shield and gained the field
And pressed the beast to yield.

Great Faug he laughed a crackled growl -
Full terrible the sound -
Then shook the land and, sword in hand,
Gained back the anguished ground.
But he who bore the White Wuten
Would not surrender then.

Long time they fought, and many scars
Upon the land they wrought -
The battle harried back and forth,
Nor peace was ever sought -
For Faug was cruel and merciless;
The hero strong and tireless.

At last the fiend repaired a ways
As seeming to need rest,
Then shook his head and ground his teeth
And hurled forth the Hest -
The Hest of legend he did hold,
The Hest of Grammelking the Old.

He laughed to scorn the White Wuten -
The Hest had found its mark,
And broke brave Marshall where he stood -
And all about was dark.
Great Faug his foe had overpow'red
And broken him that hour.

But Marshall bore the White Wuten
And fain he would not yield -
He stood again and shouting ran
Across the broken field -
And Faug yet laughing felt the sting
The White Wuten alone could bring.

So fell his foe that very hour,
And dreadful were its throes.
But he who bore the White Wuten
Scarce knew it for his woes.
And there he lay, and there still lies,
Until the with'ring world dies.

Research Update

I've talked a lot recently about how I've been learning to cook a few things. It's time for a research update... Research tends to feel kind of spurt-y to me. There are periods that seem intensely fruitful, and others when I feel like I'm just treading water. Fortunately, the current period is one of the fruitful ones. I recently wrapped up teaching a course this semester on Speech Acoustics via webcast to the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. The experience was great, and a small handful of the students put together a nice conference paper based on one of the lab assignments (it's going to be presented at the upcoming Interspeech conference in Brighton, UK). One of the final papers for the class was a very well done research project which I hope the student is going to submit to the upcoming ICASSP conference, or another similar conference. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I finally wrote up the paper based on a poster I presented at the ASA conference back in November and submitted it for publication in the conference proceedings (online only). The ASA proceedings are a new ASA publication, and this was the first paper I had submitted to it. I was very happy to find out in only one week that the paper was accepted. In the meantime, I've been working on another paper based on a poster I co-presented at the ASA conference in May. This paper is closely connected with the previous one, as well as with the final paper of my student in Budapest. I am hoping to submit this paper by the end of this week, but we'll see. And finally, I've also started writing a full journal paper with my May ASA co-presenter and my Budapest student, combining the results of all three projects into one, streamlining it, systematizing it, and adding some new findings. It will take a substantial amount of work, but it should be a nice paper when all is said and done.

One thing that I have discovered in the last week (when all this writing has been taking place) is that it is much easier now for me to write my papers than it used to be. Specifically, it is getting to be very easy to write Introduction and background sections. Methods sections are generally straight-forward, and it's getting easier to write Discussion and Conclusion sections. Presenting the new results is still a bit challenging. I just think it's interesting how easy it has become to write Introductions, in particular. I guess it's because I've written enough Introductions on this topic (my specialty), and as I learn more and collect more data and write more papers, there's more to say and it just comes more naturally. It's nice. :-)

I'm now starting to think about writing a paper specifically for phonologists/phoneticians. Most of my papers so far have been a little outside the scope of what a linguist would typically read. But I think that linguists would be interested if it were presented to them appropriately. So I'm thinking of trying to get a small number of people from a wide range of langauge backgrounds to record, and write a paper about the vowels and consonants with respect to subglottal acoustics in a cross-linguistic study. We'll see how far I get with that any time soon. :-}

Oh, I also need to write a proceedings paper based on a second poster that I co-presented in May. That paper will be more difficult to write.

I don't plan to attend any more conferences this year (too expensive), but the ASA next November (2010) is in Cancun.....Hmmmmm..... Might be a nice place to visit. :-)

So that's it. Research is going well. Can't wait to have my own lab with my own students some day...

Greek!

M & C are a couple in our community group at church. C needs to translate a certain amount of Plato (yes, in Greek) to fulfill degree requirements, and both of them have done some NT Greek in college. And I am very rusty in classical Greek and looking for a way to brush up on it a bit. So I joined them today for our first meeting to translate a section of the Republic. Now, we were supposed to do as much of the translation as we could ahead of time, but it seemed that our initial assignment was too much - in fact it was a bit overwhelming for me and I just didn't do as much as I probably really had time for. But that's just to say that we went rather slowly today. And it was great fun! It's been almost 8 years since I last translated classical Greek with any degree of seriousness. Let's just say that there was a lot of rust. Fortunately for all three of us, I think we are all at about the same level - I was afraid I would end up being a drag on the conversation/translation. And our strengths are all a bit different, so it's a nice complementarity. One of the fun things about translating Plato with M & C is that they both have some real background in philosophy (whereas I only pretend now and then to know something about philosophy). So the discussions about how best to translate a certain clause, what's the main verb, is that a participle?, and so on - these discussions were punctuated with revelations about the philosophical implications and how great it is to read Plato in Greek. So I learned some things about Plato's system, shook off a little bit of rust, and over all had a great time. I think it was decided after today's session that we really want to start at the beginning and translate all of the Republic. At the rate we're going that's probably a multi-year project, but even if we never finish it will be great fun and very educational. :-)

In other news, I got to teach a Speech Acoustics course this semester via webcast between here (St Louis) and a group of grad students in Budapest. That was also a lot of fun, and a lot of work. I'm afraid I started stronger than I finished, but my teaching has definitely improved since the first time I taught a version of this course (a year ago at MIT), and I have plans for improving the course for its third iteration, whenever and wherever that may be.

And finally, at long last, I have been reading Tolkien. All through college and grad school my friends would tell me I needed to read Tolkien, but I never was interested enough to put it very high on my To Do list. But after moving to St Louis I read the Silmarillion, and then M and I read The Hobbitt together, followed by The Fellowship of the Ring, and we are currently reading The Two Towers. Once we finish that, we will of course read The Return of the King. Then... We might return to the Silmarillion, since M has never read it. Anyway, I am now a Tolkien fan.

The weather in St Louis has been awesome this week. I find that each time I go outside in this weather, I feel like reading Milton or Pope, or something similar. It stems from my time living in Cambridge, when I was reading Paradise Lost (spread out over a couple of years) and found that it was very pleasurable to read it outside in a little park on a sunny day. A few weeks ago when I was reading a few pieces by Pope, I did go out to Forest Park and found a nice bench to sit on and read - on sunny days. But that only happened two or three times (Pope's stuff is much shorter and easier than Paradise Lost). Anyway, apparently sunny days (without humidity!) are Milton/Pope reading days for me...and Milton/Pope are best read outside. :-)

Various

I've been meaning to write down some thoughts and observations I've been making in my personal Bible study times. Since M is working tonight and I'm done working for the day, I thought this might be a good time to do so. So......

I've been trying to get a better handle on the book of Job. It's been kind of slow in coming. One of the things I was curious about is how the tone and content of each of Job's friends' speeches change over time. But between the first and second speech of Eliphaz, for instance, there are three other speeches, so that I've found it hard to keep the first one in mind by the time I get to the second. So I decided to skip the intervening speeches and just read all three of Eliphaz' speeches one right after the other; then do the same for Bildad, then for Zophar, etc. Here are just a few observations:

1. Language Describing Visions and Textual Criticism

In Eliphaz' first speech, he says the following (4:12-14):

Now a word was brought to me stealthily;
my ear recieved a whisper of it.
Amid thoughts from visions of the night,
when deep sleep falls on men,
dread came upon me, and trembling,
which made all my bones shake.

In Elihu's speech, he says the following (33:14-):

For God speaks in one way,
and in two, though man does not perceive it.
In a dream, in a vision of the night,
when deep sleep falls on men,
then he opens the ears of men
and terrifies them with warnings...

These two passages use very similar language to describe visions from God, and they are also similar to another passage (Genesis 15:12-13a):

As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram.
And behold, dreadful and great darkness fell upon him.
Then the Lord said to Abram...

As far as I'm aware, this kind of language ("deep sleep", "dread") to speak of visions and revelations from God is not used anywhere else in the Bible (the closest is Genesis 2:21 - "So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man..."). This similarity of language between Job and early Genesis seems like one more piece of evidence that the story of Job occurred around the time of the patriarchs - that this kind of language was typical of that time period but not of later times.

For that matter, my pet theory is that Moses was largely the editor of Genesis rather than the actual author - I wonder whether Joseph himself might not have written/edited much of the book. It seems reasonable that he could have written the accounts of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, being only the 4th generation of patriarchs, being well educated in Egypt, and clearly demonstrating the faith of Abraham (Genesis 50:22-26). Furthermore, the accounts of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Genesis 10-35) have some continuity with each other and some contrast with the story of Joseph (Genesis 37-50). First, both Abraham and Jacob have their names changed by God, but this does not happen to Joseph or anyone else in the Old Testament. Second, God appears to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and speaks directly to them, sometimes in dreams, whereas Joseph has dreams that must be interpreted. Third, the two sections are separated by the genealogy of Esau. On the other hand, the story of Joseph might have been written by Joseph as well, or by someone close to him - it includes details that presumably only Joseph would know, such as Genesis 43:31, as well as the conversations between Jacob and Joseph, and Jacob's final blessing of his sons and then his death. Joseph could have had something to do with Genesis 1 as well, since he lived around the time that similar "creation epics" were being written in Mesopotamia. ...But all of this is pure speculation.

One last observation on Jacob and Joseph: he was 17 when Jacob lost him, but then Jacob got another 17 years with him in Egypt before he died. The story of Jacob has similarities to Job: i) Both of them are wealthy men with many children, ii) both of them lose everything (from drought in Jacob's case), including children (only Joseph in Jacob's case), iii) both of them get everything back twofold in the end (in the case of Jacob, he not only gets Joseph back, but also claims Joseph's two sons for his own).

2. To the Third and Fourth Generation...

Several times in the Bible, God says that He will "visit the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me" (see, for instance, the 10 Commandments: Exodus 20:5). This brings us back to Job. At the very end of the book, we find out that (Job 42:16-17)

Job lived [another] 140 years, and saw his sons, and his sons' sons,
four generations. And Job died, an old man, and full of days.

Back to the Pentateuch (Genesis 25:7-8):

These are the days of the years of Abraham's life, 175 years.
Abraham breathed his last and died in a good old age,
an old man full of years, and was gtathered to his people.

Furthermore, (Genesis 50:22-23a):

So Joseph remained in Egypt, he and his father's house.
Joseph lived 110 years. And Joseph saw Ephraim's children
of the third generation.

Once you get to Abraham, people are generally living long enough that their grandsons and great-grandsons are born before they die, perhaps even their great-great-grandsons, but then they die. Before Abraham, people lived much longer and saw many more generations (if you do the math in chapter 11, you'll find that Abraham was born before Noah died - and there's 10 generations in between!). But by the time of the patriarchs, it seems that three or four generations is about as long as people lived. So I wonder if "to the third and the fourth generation" is an idiom meaning "all your life".

Again, note the common phraseology of Job and Genesis, further supporting the notion that they were written in the same general time period.

3. Job and the Anthropic Principle

The anthropic principle comes in few varieties. The strongest version states that the universe exists precisely because humans exist who are able to observe it. The weak version states that we know the universe exists because we observe it. Both versions are meant to address the question "Why is there something instead of nothing?", or "Why is the universe such that we can exist?" The universe is "tuned" so precisely that if any one of its basic parameters were tweaked ever so slightly, life would not be possible. On one side, one might argue that the perfection and balance of creation proves that God created it (or at least strongly suggests it, since the probability of a universe like ours coming together by pure chance is amazingly small). On the other hand, if you don't want to concede that God even exists, you can deal with this amazingly small probability by making it much less small - this is where the anthropic principle comes in. Since we obviously exist, our universe must exist in the special way it does, and that means that it did in fact come together, whether by amazingly small chance or not. The fact is that the universe is as it is, and this essentionally makes the probably equal to 1. Alternatively, you can get into theories about multiple universes and oscillating universes and the like, in which case you have any number of universes to choose from, and whatever the amazingly small chances, an amazingly large number of universes makes up for this small probability and here we are. (The problem is that we have no way to verify or falsify any of these theories. In fact, if I may accomodate Stephen J. Gould's notion of "Non-Overlapping MAgisteria" (NOMA, his description of faith vs. science), it might be equally applicable to science vs. theories of multiple universes.)

...But I digress. Theories of multiple universes deal with the weak form of the anthropic principle. The strong form is, well...different. It is akin to giving "No" as the answer to the age-old question: "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to witness it, did it make a sound?" In fact, one might go so far as to say the tree didn't fall if no one was there to witness it. It's like Schroedinger's cat - it is neither alive nor dead until you open the box and observe it. The cat would not even exist unless you observed it - and for that matter, the universe would not exist until it was observed.

God's answer to Job (Job 38-41) clearly comes out against the anthropic principle (in any of its varieties). I highlight only one stanza (Job 38:25-27):

Who has cleft a channel for the torrents of rain
and a way for the thunderbolt,
to bring rain on a land where no man is,
on the desert in which there is no man,
to satisfy the waste and desolate land,
and to make the ground sprout with grass?

The highlighted words are, of course, my own emphasis.

4. Zephaniah

M and I read Zephaniah two nights ago. Zephaniah 1:2-3 sounds an awful lot like the Flood of Noah's time. But Zephaniah must have known about God's promise to Noah never to destroy the earth in a flood again. Zephaniah therefore begs the question, I think, what God will do in order to keep His promise. But he seems to answer the question a few verses later (Zephaniah 1:7):

Be silent before the Lord God!
For the day of the Lord is near;
the Lord has prepared a sacrifice
and consecrated his guests.

The question is raised again in Zephaniah 1:14-18 - which seems reminiscent of the Israelites' experience at Mt. Sinai (Exodus 19) - ending with the threat that "all the earth shall be consumed; for a full and sudden end he will make of all the inhabitants of the earth." On Sinai, too, the people were saved by God's institution of the Mosaic covenant, in which sacrifice was the central ingredient. The threat is again repeated in Zephaniah 3:8b: "for in the fire of my jealousy all the earth shall be consumed," but now it is followed immediately by a very different tone (Zephaniah 3:9):

For at that time I will change the speech of the peoples
to a pure speech,
that all of them may call upon the name of the Lord
and serve him with one acord.

This echoes Jeremiah 31:33-34:

But this is the convenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, 'Know the Lord,' for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.

Jeremiah, of course, is also hearkening back to the Mosaic covenant.

Zephaniah never really answers the question "How?" How can he go seamlessly from 3:8 to 3:9 (from threats of destruction to making a new covenant)? At this point I think 1:7 is the key - "the Lord has prepared a sacrifice." The answer to the question "How?" is not made explicit until Jesus' death and resurrection, but Zephaniah had a glimpse of it.

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So there you have it. Some of these ruminations are more speculative than others, but they are the things I've been observing and mulling recently.