Post-Modern Drunk: The Snark of Solomon
I glossed over this yesterday in our discussion of shibboleth in the Old Testament because it would have been a messy digression, but the Old Testament has a definite distaste for the clever. Very rarely in the Old Testament is being smart or clever shown to be a good trait.

It's the search for knowledge (of good and evil) that gets Adam and Eve kicked out of the Garden. Abraham is commended for not questioning God's demand he sacrifice his only son. Joseph's superior knowledge and ability to understand dreams leads to all of Israel being enslaved by Egypt. And of course the clever people in the shibboleth story are the murderers.

The stories of the Hebrew Bible are not filled with impressive trickery like Greek Mythology. There's no Biblical Odysseus that I know of. The person who the Old Testament refers as their wisest person would have been eaten alive by the Sphinx in a heartbeat. "Why don't you just cut the baby in half and split it?" is not a brilliant solution unless the rest of your civilization has been drinking straight out of lead pipes for generations.

Solomon probably wasn't actually wise, he was just very sarcastic. The Gileadites murdering people because they sound Catalonian is about as sophisticated as these stories get. I guess that's what happens when the only Trickster God in your stories is the Adversary himself.

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syrians, shibboleths, and christian mercy				new york values

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