{"id":7423,"date":"2012-04-05T00:25:54","date_gmt":"2012-04-05T00:25:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=7423"},"modified":"2012-04-05T02:17:23","modified_gmt":"2012-04-05T02:17:23","slug":"of-solomon-and-the-ant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=7423","title":{"rendered":"Of Solomon and the Ant"},"content":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron<\/strong> — King Solomon’s battle order in the Qur’an, the speech of ants, science confirms scripture, two possible directions of scriptural interpretation ]
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If I might connect two recent strands of my thinking here on Zenpundit:<\/p>\n

1.<\/p>\n

One thing I have been puzzling over is the relationship between highly charged metaphysical realities in battle, and the physical personnel and materiel of war, in posts such as Quantity and Quality: angelic hosts at Badr and \/ or Armageddon<\/a> and More \u201cnight watch\u201d than \u201cguardian angels\u201d perhaps<\/a>. <\/p>\n

This Qur’anic passage, 27.16-19 which I shall quote in the Marmaduke Pickthall<\/strong> version, presents an interesting “battle order” in this regard:<\/p>\n

And Solomon was David’s heir. And he said: O mankind! Lo! we have been taught the language of birds, and have been given (abundance) of all things. This surely is evident favour. And there were gathered together unto Solomon his armies of the jinn and humankind, and of the birds, and they were set in battle order; Till, when they reached the Valley of the Ants, an ant exclaimed: O ants! Enter your dwellings lest Solomon and his armies crush you, unperceiving. And (Solomon) smiled, laughing at her speech, and said: My Lord, arouse me to be thankful for Thy favour wherewith Thou hast favoured me and my parents, and to do good that shall be pleasing unto Thee, and include me in (the number of) Thy righteous slaves.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How’s that? “Armies of the jinn and humankind, and of the birds, and they were set in battle order…”<\/p>\n

Note also the Jewish folk-tale concerning King Solomon and the ant<\/a>… and Rumi’s telling, illustrated above from Walters manuscript W.626<\/a><\/p>\n

2.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I have also been talking about mapping the conceptual way-stations that are found in conversations leading to radicalization \u2013 but that’s really just a target of opportunity for me, I am interested in mapping concepts in general. Here again, that Qur’anic passage is of interest.<\/p>\n

That’s because it “maps” \u2013 in a very double-quote<\/strong>-ish way \u2013 to recent findings in science, as exemplified by: <\/p>\n

Francesca Barbero, Jeremy A Thomas, Simona Bonelli, Emilio Balletto, Karsten Sch\u00f6nrogge, Queen Ants Make Distinctive Sounds That Are Mimicked by a Butterfly Social Parasite<\/em><\/a>, in Science, Vol. 323 no. 5915 pp. 782-785 (2009).\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ants, it appears, talk among themselves, but the voices of their queens are distinctive: and the Maculinea rebeli<\/em> butterfly larvae can mimic the speech of a Myrmica schencki<\/em> queen. As reporter Jeremy Hance<\/strong> discussing this study<\/a> puts it:<\/p>\n

While ant vocalizations had not been as widely studied as their chemical communications, the researchers believed this might hold the key to the butterfly\u2019s success. They recorded the vocalizations of both the ant workers and the queens, and discovered significant differences in the queens\u2019 \u201cdominant frequency and overall acoustics\u201d. When the queen\u2019s vocalizations were replayed, worker ants would gather around the caller and guard it. The researchers found that this was \u201cconsistent with the exalted status and protection afforded to queens in the hierarchy of a colony\u201d.<\/p>\n

Researchers then turned to the parasitical butterfly larvae, whose vocalizations were mimics of their hosts\u2019. However, the scientists discovered that the sounds were 23 to 27 percent closer to the queens\u2019 over the workers\u2019, thus providing them with first-class treatment. While the butterfly larvae may use chemical resemblance to infiltrate the colony, once inside the colony it is the mimicked vocalizations that allow it to rise to the top, often at the expense of its hosts\u2019 offspring.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

3.<\/strong><\/p>\n

So ants talk, and butterfly larvae can communicate with them \u2013 successfully enough, in fact, that “living M. rebeli<\/em> larvae are rescued in preference to ant larvae when a colony is disturbed,” and “nurse workers kill and feed their own brood to the social parasite if food is scarce”.<\/p>\n

And so ants talk, and Solomon can understand them \u2013 enough so that their concerns about his army bring a laugh to his lips.<\/p>\n

And the overlap between those two ideas \u2013 one scripturally based and dating back fourteen hundred years, the other a product of recent science \u2013 is of the kind that provides confirmation for believers of their belief along these lines: <\/p>\n

the Qur’an says that ants speak, now science has shown this to be literally true\u2026 and this provides additional evidence that the Qur’an is Truth.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

4.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here, then, is yet another use of the “overlapping concepts” notion that I’ve explored in posts on Ada Lovelace<\/strong><\/a>, and more recently Nancy Fouts<\/strong><\/a>, Walter Benjamin<\/strong><\/a>, and the confluence of Hamlet and the Heart Sutra<\/a> in a poem of mine\u2026<\/p>\n

Arthur Koestler<\/strong> affirms in The Act of Creation<\/a> that such intersections are to be found at the heart of tragedy and catharsis, humor and laughter, and discovery and eureka: here we find them providing confirmation for religious belief.<\/p>\n

5.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Such intersections can in practice be read in two directions, as Bernard McGinn<\/strong> notes in the article on Revelation<\/em> he wrote for Robert Alter<\/strong> and Frank Kermode<\/strong>‘s Literary Guide to the Bible<\/a> \u2013 here’s his comment on Martin Luther<\/strong>‘s interpretive process:<\/p>\n

Earlier interpreters, such as Joachim (but not Augustine), had also claimed to find a consonance between Revelation’s prophecies and the events of Church history, but they had begun with Scripture and used it as a key to unlock history. Paradoxically, Luther, the great champion of the biblical word, claimed that history enabled him to make sense of Revelation…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When the overlaps are between scientific knowledge and scriptural statements, believers tend to read science as an empirical support for scripture \u2013 they don’t read scripture as supporting the findings of science.<\/p>\n

When it comes to prophecy and fulfillment, however, the danger exists that current events will be forced into the Procrustean bed of scripture \u2013 as when JF Kennedy<\/strong>, Jimmy Carter<\/strong>, Ronald Reagan<\/strong>, and Barack Obama<\/strong> have each in turn been accused of being the Antichrist\u2026<\/p>\n

6.<\/strong>
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\nThe bullet image above is available from Way 2 Worship<\/strong> as wallpaper for your computer screen<\/a>. The verse below it, James 5.11, is the verse the bullet “cites”.<\/p>\n

Comedy, tragedy — or inspiration?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron — King Solomon’s battle order in the Qur’an, the speech of ants, science confirms scripture, two possible directions of scriptural interpretation ] . . If I might connect two recent strands of my thinking here on Zenpundit: 1. One thing I have been puzzling over is the relationship between highly charged […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[531,526,627,718,676,687,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-barack-obama","category-charles-cameron","category-doublequotes","category-rethinking-thinking","category-scriptures","category-specs","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7423"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7423\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7444,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7423\/revisions\/7444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}