https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=4Hv6dMqir_I
So Norm Grondet asks, in the Great Adventure Bible, the nation of Israel is described in the section of the Conquest and Judges, Joshua, Judges, and Samuel, as falling into a continuous cycle of sin, servitude, supplication, salvation, and silence. In light of your recent emergence, talk with John Dee and Paul Dee, you discussed the idea of story and the breakdown of meaning. Elsewhere, you discussed the idea of loss of memory as an inevitable consequence of moving further and further away from the center. In what ways might this breakdown of meaning be a symptom of forgetting? Silence. In what ways might this breakdown of meaning be a symptom of forgetting? I don’t know why you put silence there, because I don’t see silence as forgetting. And so the book of Judges, so the book of Judges is showing you how when you don’t have a stable authority, then you have extremes, you have these extremes in this cycle. And so yes, you’re right. What it is is this cycle, right, of this movement of cycle. Then you can see that in the book of Judges, it’s continually saying something like, Israel did not have a king, right? Israel did not have a king in the land. And so it’s actually, it’s something like the story of the Greek tragedies, where you have the, my brain is completely gone, sorry, guys. What’s the name of the cycle, the Greek tragedy cycle? There’s a Greek tragedy cycle where you have this breakdown of meaning, where all the taboos are broken, and things start to cycle, and then there starts to be like the son killing the father and the children killing the parents, and there’s this kind of cycle of chaos and madness. And then finally, it’s solved by Athena, who establishes law in Athens. And so the establishing of law and a stable hierarchy is what stops the cycle of vengeance and cycles of fall and everything. And so that is what is represented in this story of the Bible as well, is that although kingship has its problems in scripture, and even the prophets talk about what the problems are gonna be, nonetheless, it ends up being a stabilizing force. They build the temple, which is a stabilizing force in terms of the religious practice. They also create laws, which will stabilize the identity of these tribes that are fighting amongst each other and ripping each other apart. And so I think that that’s the best way to understand it. And so if you think of my brother’s book, you can understand it as the book of judges is being a slave to the cyclical pattern, right? To be a slave to this cycle of time, whereas establishing space in the center, establishing the temple and establishing Jerusalem as the capital, the king, is what is going to stop this kind of endless cycle of turning that happened in the book of judges.