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Sometimes God is Funny, or, It’s True that You Should Be Careful about the Movies You See

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Last night I was reading Haggai (*really* bad insomnia). I actually woke up my husband with my bed-shaking giggling after I read

“I smote you with blasting and with MILDEW…” (Haggai 1:18)

I just couldn’t help picturing a guy with a bad French accent, yelling from a tower, “I smite you with mildew, you silly Englishman…”

Come to think of it, maybe this suggests that Haggai was actually a woman–after all, men don’t think about mildew, do they? Hmmm–I feel a dissertation coming on!

7 comments for “Sometimes God is Funny, or, It’s True that You Should Be Careful about the Movies You See”

  2. The latest FARMS Review, 16/1, which is hot off the press, serendipitously has several allusions to MPatHG in different essays by different authors.

    I’m a man and I never think about mildew, so your theory sounds promising to me.

  3. I was curious about what the verse is actually saying, so I looked it up (as best I could on the internet without my printed resources from home). The terms “mildew” (HEB *yeraqon*) and “blasting” (HEB *shidaphon*) are usually listed adjacent to one another (due to the paronomasia, or word play in their sounds) in lists of various plagues, as is the case in Haggai 2:17. (Dt. 28:22, 1 Ki. 8:37 and 2 Chr. 6:28 are among the other examples.) Shidaphon is usually understood as a hot wind that damages crops, but, like yeraqon, it appears to be a word used for a particular fungus infection that is a blight upon crops–another reason the two terms are usually paired together. The etymology of yeraqon appears to have to do with the color greenish-yellow, which is why it sometimes (as in Jeremiah) has the connotation “paleness” rather than mildew (IE fungal infection).

  5. Ha, sorry Kristine, I let my intellectual curiousity get the better of me. The dissertation is all yours…

  6. Kevin beat me to it, but once a crop has been blasted that way, everyone starves. Though Russians were known for eating their Rye crops anyway and just dying of the “death in the rye” or going insane.

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