That’s interesting. Reduce my ignorance some please.
Islam and Judaism share many of the same stories and certainly many of the same cast members, but my understanding is that the stories take different flavors as reflected even in the names of the peoples - a Muslim is one who submits to God and the people Israel are those that wrestle with God (sure losing most of the time).
Is my impression way off base and simple ignorance?
Are there many other stories in Islamic literature of arguing with God? Was there historically a tradition of it at some point in the past?
Not so much, like you said. That’s about the only example that springs to mind. I should mention that the hadith corpus contains tons of stories of Biblical prophets and they are known as “Isra’iliyat” (meaning ‘stuff we lifted from the Children of Israel’), a lot of it derived from Mishnah, I’ve heard somewhere. I’m not well acquainted with it, but that one I paraphrased struck me as a lovely just-so story, so I remembered it.
Many years ago, as a young piano student, I read an interview in a piano magazine with a pianist who had arranged “The Great Gate of Kiev” for solo piano (the score was included in the magazine; I photocopied it, took it home, and learned to play it; great fun, too). The arranger was telling how he tried to give the piano the full sonorities of pealing church bells, Russian Orthodox hymns, and the whole grandiosity of the piece. A propos of that, (I think he was Jewish) he remarked that the Russians have this in common with the Jews: they don’t plead meekly in prayer but instead they’re all “God, you give us what we want right now!” which inspired work on the piece.
(I have a recording of Rachmaninoff’s “The Bells,” which uses a Russian translation of Poe’s “The Bells” for the text. The recording notes came with a translation of the libretto back into English. Not Poe’s original poem! That would have been too easy! They translated the translation, instead!)
Whoops. :smack: You’re right. I once knew that… So the interview consisted of the pianist explaining how he approached the score, markups, annotations, etc.
Hey, translators need work too! For the original English set to music, there’s always Phil Ochs.
There’s the really confusing incident with Zipporah, Moses’ wife.
Exodus 4:24-26: *At a lodging place on the way, the Lord met Moses and was about to kill him. But Zipporah took a flint knife, cut off her son’s foreskin and touched Moses’ feet with it. “Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me,” she said. So the Lord let him alone. *
That’s the entire story. This short passage fits in between God telling Moses to return to Egypt and God telling Aaron to go to Moses.
So all we have is that God wanted to kill Moses but Zipporah got him to change his mind. There’s no clear explanation of why God wanted to kill Moses or why Zipporah’s act caused God to change his mind. But overall I’d call it winning an argument with God even if we’re not sure what the argument was about.
I have heard it argued that this part of the book is actually a subtle argument in favour of life after death - a subject on which there wasn’t 100% agreement at the time.
Job gets twice as much stuff at the end as he had at the beginning - 14,000 sheep instead of 7,000; 6,000 camels instead of 3,000 etc etc. And he gets twice as much life as a human should normally expect - 140 years instead of 70. But he only gets the exact same number of sons and daughters - why? Because he’s supposed to see the original ones again in the afterlife.
Your post says Torah, but your title says Bible. If you’re interested in an example from outside the Torah, there’s the time that a woman asks Jesus (who according to Trinitarian doctrine is a manifestation of God) for his blessing, and he refuses because she is not Jewish.
Matthew 15:
25The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said.
26He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”
27“Yes it is, Lord,” she said. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”
28Then Jesus said to her, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And her daughter was healed at that moment.
Sounds like a good story to tell people who complain about having to pray five times a day. “I’ll have you know that God wanted us to pray 50 times a day and the Prophet talked him down to five!”
What you’re offering is a possible interpretation. Maybe God wanted to kill Moses because Gershom hadn’t been circumcised. But the Bible doesn’t say that. So maybe God was just in a bad mood because his favorite football team lost and he had a hangover.
