26 February 2024
Pageau reiterates the concept of a work/sleep cycle imposed on the flesh after the Fall. He also builds on the concept of how clothing became a necessity because mortal flesh is just a part of the natural world and requires protection. This is on the personal level. On a community level, the "covering" is a community law code that protects humans from the ravages of the wilderness of sin. On the cosmic scale, it brings us back to God dressing the dry land with His revelation.
Sleep is the flooding, the chaos of nature reverting to its unguided state. It becomes a threat to human prosperity. Because it is unguided, it does not produce very much food on its own. Thus, fallen men must work the ground and artificially squeeze out a living. But, he must also rest each night, when the chaos returns. At the end of his life, a man must go into the last sleep of the flesh, descending into the chaos of Sheol.
This had always been a missing piece of the puzzle for me. I knew that the symbolism of Sheol was not what so many scholars have said it was. There has been an awful lot of confused nonsense proposed from western minds that completely miss the Hebrew thinking about death. Hebrew people certainly believed in the afterlife, but it was always a mystery. The word sheol carries a meaning of enigma or unanswered questions. It's that old Ancient Near Eastern philosophical assumption that the human mind cannot grasp eternal things, such as the afterlife. It's there, but no one can understand it.
Instead, all they could know about it was from revelation, and that was always symbolic and obscure. Thus, the word "sheol" itself points this out. From where they were in this world, Sheol was the final sleep, the dissolution of our opportunity to keep peace with God. There will be no more building, planting, or making things solid and strong for the family and tribe. It could signal a loss of all hope, but too many passages in places like the Psalms indicate that hope was possible, even if not common.
Thus, the complaint that some sad or awful thing happening to an aging patriarch would "bring his gray hair down into Sheol" referred how his life would end in total absurdity. It was his way of saying, "Did I accomplish nothing?" Someone in his household had really disappointed him by throwing away everything he had worked to build for his family.
Sheol was not literally the abode of the dead, nor did it represent a lack of belief in the afterlife. But it does represent returning to the soil from whence we came. Also, Pageau points out that traveling back to Egypt was in some ways symbolic of going down into Sheol. Did God really accomplish nothing at all in the Exodus? Will Israel (or some portion of Israel) return and surrender once again to the place of slavery whose deities were defeated with a strong hand?
In this, sleeping also symbolizes wandering in a foreign land. Too much sleep and you'll be a vagabond on the face of the earth, too often bumping into thorns and thistles instead of the fruit. Internally, our dreams will often be chaotic and rather like wandering in a foreign land. Being alert and awake is like staying home and making life better. But here's the paradox: Building civilization with walls and homes (covering) is like standing strong, but it's transitory and artificial. Rest and recreation invites nature to encroach and tear down the civilization, but the entropy is permanent and natural.
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