When I was a kid and ended up staying home from school because I was sick,  I'd watch daytime television all day on one of the big three networks. One of the recurring commercials was for a breakfast cereal (Special K?) that asked if you could `pinch an inch?' I think the idea was that if you could pink an in inch or more worth of flab, you were fat and that somehow eating the cereal could rectify this in such a way that will power alone could not. Well, on my legs and arms, I can barely pinch half an inch. But I got close to two inches on my gut. I fear I'll need to get to the point where I do sit ups for an hour and ten minutes before it starts to come off.

And the scale says I gained two pounds this week. I can only blame myself. And Cheetos. I take plenty of healthy foods to eat at work. It's just that I eat them in addition to instead of instead of the Cheetos.

After the running, the day passed as Saturday's usually do. Grocery shopping. Cooking. House work. A bit of studying thrown in for good measure. And I was asked to substitute for the 7th and 8th grade Sunday school class. The lesson was to start on the book of Joshua.

I passed out an outline to give the kids an overview of the historical context. Then we read the first two and half chapters. I had the kids take turns reading two or three verses and then we discussed what they meant, skipping some of the pieces that mostly served as filler. I took the approach of having the kids trying to read the book as if it were a morality play. Where Joshua is The Christ, the Israelites are the The Church, The Promised Land is Heaven, the ungodly inhabitants of the Promised Land are the demons and wicked thoughts we struggle with, and the godly inhabitants of the Promised Land are those outside of the Church that need to be brought into the Church.

There were a couple interesting moral dilemmas in the first few chapters. The first was Rahab lying to the king of Jericho in order to save the Israelites who were scoping out the land in order to attack. So I brought up the idea that sometimes we're faced with two evils and the necessity of choosing a lesser evil (lying) over a greater evil (allowing the king of Jericho to kill the Israelite spies). The other dilemma was how the Israelites could honor their promise to Rahab and Rahab's family during the invasion of Jericho after the universal ban had been proclaimed. Here was a family apparently acting godly but the command was to spare no lives.

The Book of Joshua

1. Who wrote it? - No one knows for certain. There are several possibilities.
      
   
       
   1. The traditional Jewish view is that it was written by Joshua himself except for the last few verses describing his death.
         
   2. The traditional Christian view is that it was written much later by someone, perhaps Solomon, with access to historical documents from Joshua's time.
         
   3. One modern view is that it was written by someone who lived at the same time as Joshua.
         
   4. Another modern view is that it wasn't written by one person, but is a compilation of works by different people written at different times.
         
   
   
2. When was it written? - No one knows for certain.
      
   
      
   1. If it was written by Joshua or a contemporary it would have been written around 1220 to 1200 BC.
         
   2. If it was written by a later author, it would have been written some time after 1200BC but most likely before 600BC.
         
   3. It it is a composite work, the various pieces could have been written between 1200 and 600 BC.
         
   4. In any case, the events depicted take place between 1220 and 1200BC.
         
   
   
3. Why should we read it?
      
   
      
   1. Joshua is the same name as Jesus. They sound different because Joshua was transliterated    from Hebrew into English while Jesus was transliterated from Hebrew into Greek and then into English.
         
   2. Joshua is a type, a foreshadowing of Jesus and the story of the way that Joshua led the Israelites to victory in their homeland is a foreshadowing of the way that Jesus will lead the Church into heaven.
         
   3. This means we should pay attention to the roles played by various people in the narrative.
         
   
   
4. An example of the way the Church Fathers read the book of Joshua by Saint Irenaeus of Lyons:
          

   Just as it was fit that Moses should give manna as food to the fathers, but Joshua wheat; as the first-fruits of life, a type of the body of Christ, declares that the manna of the Lord ceased when the people had eaten wheat from the land.

   
   

After prepping for Sunday school, I turned to the tube as the various caucus and primary results trickled in. I was encouraged that Mr. Obama dominated on the Democratic side. I was also encouraged that Huckabee was gaining on McCain. I was even more encouraged by the turnout numbers. In Louisiana, 350k Democrats turned out to vote compared to 160k Republicans. Kansas was 37k vs. 18k respectively. Washington, 32k vs. 14k.  I think Tom Brokaw was correct in his assessment on The Daily Show that he hasn't seen the Republican party in this much disarray since the late seventies.

Come Sunday morning, I was in a daze through most of the liturgy. I don't really know why. Xanthippe stayed home because she was ``sick.'' Afterwards, it was time to cook. I've got two different pots of black beans going. (One vegetarian, one with chicken stock.) These will be for different recipes later on this week. Then I made a honey/mustard marinade which I applied to some chicken for dinner later on this evening. Meanwhile the girls are making ginger cookies to pack in their lunches this week.

What's left for me is mostly to study.