You know you grew up in the incredibly specific niche of Australia + evangelical churches when...

[highlyeccentric]

Scene: a field in Darkest Lancashire. Highly emerges from the woods, opening a gate that is marked with an arrow for the onward path. She looks around. The grass is even. There's no indication where in the field one should go to find the next route marker.

There is a cluster of sheep.

Highly: Hey, sheep, which way should I go?

Sheep: *deadpan stare*

Highly: This way? *heads for the river, to the left of the farmhouse*

Sheep: *obligingly make way*

Eventually, I realise that if I follow the river I just get cornered on a spit, and have to walk back up the mill stream, and around the farmhouse the other way. I encounter the same sheep.

Sheep: *deadpan stare*

Highly: Hey, sheep, you lead me astray!

Highly: ... baa-ba-ba-doo-ba-ba

(Context is Isiah 53:6)

Then I got preoccupied with the weirdness of treating 'sheep wandering', a thing that sheep DO, because they are SHEEP, not because they have ill intentions, with intentional sin. Like. Is that a weird-ass Christian thing? I've done a bit of poking around and it seems like the rabbinical interpretation reads Isiah 53 as about the sufferings of Israel for the iniquity of the nations (ie, everyone not israel).

Comments

[noachoc]

I dunno. My cats do a lot of weird-ass things and, while I'm 90% sure it's just because they're cats, I'm always vaguely suspicious that they're doing it on purpose to annoy me. I imagine if I had sheep instead of cats, I might feel the same about the sheep.

[monksandbones]

Now see I, second-generation atheist, go straight to Handel's Messiah for the sheep-Isaiah combination!

Also, a shamefully large proportion of my familiarity with the text of the bible comes from Handel's Messiah or from heavy-handed "sicut apostolus ait" textual flagging in charters, though I swear I've read good chunks of the New Testament.

[highlyeccentric]

I think that's a much more NORMAL place to get your sheep jokes from.

[chez_jae]

Sheep are not reliable at giving directions. Dairy cattle, however, will head for home at milking time and can be followed to civilization.

:D