Deck Garden

rocking chair askew
rosemary shoots tall, cactus blooms
granite cairn worships

The corruption of King David

The story of King David's fall from grace goes that the King sees Bathsheba bathing on her roof and falls inn love with her beauty. He calls her to his palace and seduces her. Bathsheba's husband, Uriah, is on away at battle. Ultimately Bathsheba becomes pregnant with David's baby, and David, afraid that he will be caught in the perfidy of seducing the wife of one of his troops, calls Uriah back, hoping that Uriah will have intercourse with his wife and assume that the baby is his. However, Uriah is practicing chastity in order to save his strength for the battlefield. David encourages Uriah to make love and tells him it is safe, but Uriah refuses to break his chastity. David sends him back to battle and tells Uriah's general to send him to the front of the battle so that he will be killed. Uriah is killed, and David marries Bathsheba and claims fatherhood to the resulting child. King David declines in moral purity and virtue from this time on. David is probably the greatest figure in the Five Books of Moses and Israel's greatest king, and his decline is tragic.
David did decline as king as leader of the people of Israel. He is a great and courageous warrior and brilliant tactician who ends his life soft and corrupt. However, I think the seduction of Bathsheba and murder of Uriah are symptoms of his decline rather than the cause. David is King of Israel with all the comfort and glories of kingship. He is no longer leading his troops on the field but conducting war from the capital. He is surrounded by people who expect to profit from ageering with and obeying him. He has become accustomed to his comfort and agreeable company. He is denied nothing. He becomes self indulgent and soft. Bathsheba is beautiful, and he does not deny himself. But she is married to one of David's loyal soldiers, and David does not want to get caught. So he tries to get Uriah to take responsibility for his child, and when Uriah has too much integrity, he does the shameful thing of having him killed. He then marries Bathsheba and adds her to his wives. This is a shocking glimpse of the decay of a great man, but the man was already corrupted by ease and life at court and thinks nothing of taking another man's wife and killing the man himself.

spring herb

cinnamon basil
shoots up purple new leaves
seeds blown in fall sleep

Sodom, Gomorrah and the rain of fire

Archeologists think they may have discovered the sites of the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah. They found two towns very close together that were destroyed by fire, ash, and stones from the sky. They had different names, but other details are consistent with the story in Genesis. We can recall that Lot and his family lived in one of the towns and that God told Lot that he was the only just man in either town. Lot should take his family and flee because God was so enraged at the towns he was going to destroy them with fire from the sky. Lot argues that he can find, finally, just five just men in the towns, and God tells Lot that if he can find five just men, He will spare the towns. Lot cannot find even five just men.
Meanwhile, a stranger passes through the town, and in accord with Jewish law, Lot invites him to stay in his home. The stranger should be treated better than one's own family, so lot is required to treat this stranger with extreme courtesy. The men of the towns find out that Lot is harboring a stranger in his home and come to Lot's door demanding that Lot send out the visitor so that the villagers may "know" him. Lot stands in the doorway of his house and refuses the village men entrance. The men are very threatening, but Lot has a duty to God to protect the visitor. As a just man, he cannot release his guest to this crowd, so he offers his virgin daughters instead. The crowd refuses and continues to insist that Lot send out his guest. God tells Lot to take his family and flee. He is going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. Lot gathers his family and flees the town just as fire and stones begin to fall from the sky. The two towns are obliterated.
I may have some of the details of the story wrong, and I have left out the warning not to look back. Lot's wife does look back and is turned into a pillar of salt with interesting consequences which I will not discuss here. My apologies for errors in details. However, I would like to say something about what has always seemed to me to be a very strange story. Why would the men of the towns be so obsessesd with "knowing" a stranger under any circumstances? The towns were probably trading towns, and under any circumstances, settling and maintaining a town requires a certain practicality and stability in the inhabitants. It seems to me that towns where the men were obsessesed with raping strangers would hardly stand long. One rarely hears of homosexual gang rape because someone is passing through and for no other reason. As I say this story seems very strange. I think I may have an explanation.
Ancient Jewish people seem to have considered that all events were the direct result of God's pleasure or anger. People want reasons for things that happen. This is the root of science. We do not simply understand that things happen. They are the result of something. Everything has a cause. The early Hebrews had exactly the same brains we have today but a lot less information. They looked for causes for things they did not understand, and like most cultures, they attributed what they did not understand to God. If the Jews pleased God, things went well. If they displeased him, he punished with drought, fire, and flood. Reading Robert Alter's literary translations, I get the impression that Jews often assumed they had pleased or displeased God when things went well or badly. Two towns wiped off the face of the earth by fire, ash, and stones falling from the sky definitely suggested that God was not pleased.
Like all cultures, the Jews told stories which were passed orally for hundreds of generations before they were put together in the Five Books of Moses. The towns that have been discovered were destroyed by volcanic eruption. People at that time usually did not travel far from home, and the people of the area may have known nothing whatever about volcanoes. These towns have been obliterated in horror from the sky. God was clearly displeased. What could the residents of the town have done to cause such devastation from the Almighty?
As I said, coutesy to the stranger was an important law for the ancient Jews. Defiling a stranger is about as bad as one could get. Two whole towns full of men who wanted to "know" a guest in a man's home would definitely make God very angry. Maybe the storyteller could think of nothing more terrible that the people of a town could do. They had to have sinned grievously to have earned such a terrible fate. The entire populations of both towns would have had to violate the commandments very grievouly. There was one just man in those two towns, and he was spared with his children.
I think this story is an ancient attempt to understand what happened in Sodom and Gomorrah rather than literal truth.

pansies

lettuce shoots seed stalks
garden spring winter plants die back
earth awaits color

athens

Acropolis stones
lie on silent earth, sun beats
ancient secrets blow

Suddenly in March

I brush plum petals
from my windshield in the morning
the kids take to playing
Iraq War in the gorge behind the park
robins consider nesting
in the eave of the porch
framed conveniently by the open door
hummingbirds shoot across the yard
roost in the scrub trees
downtown glitters against the sky
and the market is full of tulips
every year I wake to this feast
and know
that before I can fall in love
morning glory will be strangling the myrtle
the canyon walls will be gold
in the evening
the hawk will circle and circle