And Then Moses Was There: Voices from the Old Testament
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About this ebook
And Then Moses Was There celebrates events in the Old Testament by exploring them through the eyes of people who were there.
In these quietly professional yet accessible poems, Loretta Miles Tollefson combines her award-winning poetic skills and knowledge of the Bible to look in a new way at the ancient stories and the people who lived them.
Read these poems and experience a fresh approach to and appreciation of the Old Testament stories. Each poem focuses on a different event, from Noah's weariness and Pharoah's certainty of his divine rights to Jonathon's admiration for David and the prophet Jeremiah's anger with his people.
And Then Moses Was There is the companion volume to Mary At The Cross: Voices From the New Testament.
Loretta Miles Tollefson
Loretta Miles Tollefson has been publishing fiction and poetry since 1975. (She’s not old--she started young!) Growing up in foothills of the Olympic Mountains in the log cabin her grandfather built and her father was born in led naturally to an interest in history and historical fiction. When she retired to the mountains of northern New Mexico, writing historical fiction set there was a logical result. The Moreno Valley Sketches books are the first in many planned books set there. Before turning to historical fiction full time, Loretta wrote Crown of Laurel, a novel set in Seattle in the recession of the early 1980's. Loretta holds a B.S. in Bible Education from Multnomah University in Portland, Oregon. This background informs her poetry collections Mary at the Cross: Voices from the New Testament and And Then Moses Was There: Voices from the Old Testament. In the mid-1980's, Loretta and her husband suffered the loss of their first child in the fifth month of pregnancy. Her poetry collection But Still My Child came out of that period and is designed to help others deal with the pain of miscarriage. Loretta holds M.A.'s in Communication and in English Literature from the University of New Mexico. Most days, you'll find her researching New Mexico history in the 1800's and writing furiously. She publishes short historical fiction every week at LorettaMilesTollefson.Wordpress.com.
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And Then Moses Was There - Loretta Miles Tollefson
PREFACE
No matter whether you believe the events in the Bible really happened or are just stories,
the people in those stories have much to teach us. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the Bible stories aren’t relevant to us today, either because we believe that the events they tell about didn’t really happen or because they seem to tell us about people who had a special in
with the Divine.
But we’ve all read at least one great novel or short story that helped us understand ourselves by pointing out the similarities between human beings that transcend culture and time. In the same way, the Bible stories can increase our understanding of ourselves and others. After reading these stories we can comprehend a little more clearly how even the wisest of men can justify actions of great folly. We can see why the seemingly simplest of girls can be called to enormous tasks, or what would compel a daughter-in-law to sacrifice everything to follow an old and poor woman into a land full of strangers.
And we can also see that these are men and women with human failings and strengths. They are not superhuman and thus able to experience God in a way we cannot. Nor are they less than human and in need of more-than-ordinary divine intervention. They are like us, and their link with the Divine is the same link we also can have. If they could, we can.
In the poems in this collection and in Mary At the Cross I seek to ask what might it have been like to be a particular individual in a specific Bible story. How might it have felt to live those circumstances? Why might that person have reacted in that way? There are no definitive answers to these questions. Like all great literature, the stories give us clues, but not answers. Those clues provide us with a springboard for meditating on the human emotions and reactions that bridge centuries and particular habits of life, as well as on Divine grace and love, which are not bound by space and time.
The poems in this book are the result of my own meditation and research. I hope they will provide a point of departure for you, the reader, as you also think on these things.
Loretta Miles Tollefson, Feb. 2014
EVE
And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. (Genesis 2:16-17)
And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: . . . your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And . . . she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat . . . [Therefore] Unto the woman [God] said, . . . in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children. (Genesis 3:4-16)
Eve
They call it the fall.
As if life’s fragments
can be caught up in
a package of words
and disposed of. What
the serpent