By way of introduction

Hi.  First, thanks for reading. 

Before I dig in, I suppose I should spend a moment introducing myself & my purpose for the blog.  .  I grew up LDS; well, that is, I spent my formative years LDS.  My parents divorced when I was in the 3rd grade, and then I spent half my weekends with my mom in her Mormon service, and the other half of my weekends in a Catholic service with my dad.  I clung to my Mormon identity for a while, but by the time high school arrived, I was done with all religion.  Turns out, growing up with a foot in the Mormon church & a foot in the Catholic mass can cause a lot of resentment & confusion.  Mostly resentment on the part of other kids who thought I was catching some sort of awesome break because I didn't have to go to church very often.  And mostly confusion on my part because only part time attendance in both churches made me a constant outsider.  This is not a tale of woe so much as an explanation for my odd position on religion.  I guess I'm Christian, though that's about where any similarities between me and the rest of the Christian world ends.  Part of my motivation in reading the bible is for the sake of knowing it.  I doubt this endeavor will end in some sort of profound spiritual catharsis, though I suppose it could.  More, my motivation is intellectual curiosity. 

Additionally, I teach English at the high school level, and I often find biblical allusions in the literature I teach.  So to add to the intellectual curiosity piece, I'd like to be able to speak with more authority on the subject.  Often I have students who come from deeply religious families, and they know the bible because they live it.  I don't like being the ignorant one in the room on this one; I take pride in my craft, and I feel I'll be much improved as a teacher once I have a greater grasp on this particular text.  So.  

I actually started this about a year ago when I downloaded the book of Esther - a book I chose because it was a female character & a good short book.  I didn't want to start with Genesis (I've tried that before, and it's pretty awful reading).  I blogged about it and moved on to Job which cheezed me off, and I put the project down.  Now I'm back to early American Lit & again curious about the allusions I keep reading about.  It's just not good enough for me to read summarized versions on Schmoop or Sparknotes.  

I started with Psalms for two very important reasons: first, it comes after Job, and second, it's so often quoted.  You know how people will tattoo something like, "Psalms 22:21" on their arms, but then they won't tell you what the verse is, either because they were drunk when they got it and don't remember, or because only people who are a part of their exclusive bible club & who have also memorized that verse will know, and that way they'll have an appropriate level of self-riteous "us/them" shit going on.  Typically, and unfortunately, it's the latter, which makes me sad because I love a good drunken tattoo story.  

Now, my first order of business when it comes to Psalms is, of course, the unicorns.  By the way, I'm reading the King James version, and to get the full gist, you need to read the verses that come before the unicorns:  22:7-22:21.  Essentially, the narrator is being beset by dogs & bulls & lions, his bones are all out of joint, and they stare at him (which is maybe the narrator's conscience), his heart is waxen, and is falling into his belly (his heart sinks into his gut - I'm with him on this one); any way you look at it, this guy is in horrid bad shape. It's a little "Fear and Loathing."  I understand it's metaphorical, but the imagery I get from the literal reading is pretty hilarious.  He begs for help from the Lord and then says, "Save me from the lion's mouth: for thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorns."

The first place my brain went with this: seriously? I'm gonna have to find a unicorn horn to speak through for God to hear me?   Not exactly the sort of scripture, in my opinion, that would inspire confidence.  I considered it for a while, made fun of it with my husband, and then googled it.  I learned that some scholars interpret the unicorn not as the mythical horse creature with one horn, but as the very real single-horned rhino.  The reference seems to make more sense this way, but it doesn't create a better way to communicate with the Lord.  I don't want to have to poach a rhino to talk to God.  

And yes, I understand figurative language. Maybe "thou has heard me from the horns of unicorns" is simply missing the phrase, "as if from," which would clearly make it a comparison which I could dig because I would imagine a disembodied rhino horn used in the same fashion as a conch shell or modern day bullhorn. 

I find there are two very reasonable interpretations of this verse: that the speaker's prayers were heard as if they were shouted by a bullhorn at God, loud & clear, or that the speaker was lucky enough to have with him an actual unicorn horn with which, apparently, one can use to get a direct line into the office of the Big Man himself.  Logically, it seems like it must be the former, though the latter makes me giggle every time.  And to be honest, sometimes I do feel like we need a unicorn to be heard; look at our world - every day those who are beset by dogs are mauled and taken down despite their most fervent prayers.  Part of me thinks maybe it means exactly what it says.