Midian

Barker was apparently so intrigued that he, partnered with Disney no less, purchased the rights to Edward's story in 2000.

Take a breath and imagine this thing brought to life by the brilliantly twisted mind of Barker, the creator of Candyman, the Cenobites, Rawhead Rex, Midian, and so many other wondrous concoctions.

Now put Disney's vast resources behind him, and I don't know about you, but my imagination has already left the fucking building.

The lost glory of this epic effort boggles the mind and sears the soul.

It's an impurity that must be purified.

In Judges 6 from verse fourteen to fifteen, we see God coming to a man called Gideon, and he comes to him and says, "You mighty man of valor, I want to raise you as, as a judge in Israel and deliver my people from the Midianites." And you see, um, Gideon responding from the lens of a limiting mindset and he says, "How can I be the one who will save the people of Israel? I'm the least in my father's house.

We come from a poor family." Many believers have faulty mindsets and many excuses that negotiate them out of what God has said.

And tonight God is saying that's an impurity that must be cleansed.

God called Gideon to lead an army of Israelites.

You see, there was a group of people called the Midianites who were treating the Israelites very badly, including stealing their crops and food.

Gideon was hiding from the Midianites and secretly threshing wheat so his family would have food.

An angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon, and do you know what this angel called Gideon? Listen to Judges 6:12: "The angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon and said, 'The Lord is with you, mighty warrior.'" Can you imagine? Gideon was in hiding.

He was trying to secure food for his family, and the angel shows up and calls him a mighty warrior.

When He says that we are loved, forgiven, and accepted, He means it, and He meant it when He called Gideon a mighty warrior.

But Gideon did not feel very mighty.

Listen to this conversation in Judges 6:14-16: The Lord turned to Gideon and said, "Go with your strength and save Israel from the Midianites.

God doesn't call you by your condition.

See, in Judges chapter 6, Israel is being oppressed by the Midianites.

And we meet a man named Gideon.

Gideon is hiding.

It doesn't even make sense.

You call the movie Nightbreed and you're like, wait a second, let's not focus so much on those monsters that live in Midian that are called Nightbreed.

Right.

I don't

It's like 45 minutes of climax.

Yeah.

Like, it's like Mad Maxian in the sense that, like, the action don't stop once the police and the townspeople sort of get up a posse and go hunt down all the nightbreed in Midian's graveyard.

You know, that's a good point.

that the z'roah, the front leg, parallels Pinchas' yad, remembering the story in the Pasha Pinchas, that Pinchas goes and, sorry, it's not the Pasha Pinchas, it's the Pasha before that, at the end of Pasha Balak.

He goes and stabs Zimri and the Midianite woman that he's sleeping with.

So the Zorah parallels Pinchas' hand.

He took a spear in his hand.

The jawbone parallels the tefillah because Pinchas, in another story, davened that the plague should stop spreading the nation.

And the stomach is... exactly where he pierced the Midianite woman.

The private parts there is called Kovatah.

And therefore this Rosh Hashanah is basically saying that the Kuanim get these three body parts because of Pinchas' piety and his actions, not just by the story of Zimri, but also by the story of the plague.

A description of the enemy made by a person or a people must be taken cum grano siracus.

When Moses fled after killing the Egyptian, he went northward and east into the land of the Midianites, who were also descendants of Abraham.

At this time he was forty years of age and still unmarried, his work in the Egyptian court having evidently fully absorbed his time.

It is a pretty little romance, all too brief in its details, of how the tired man stopped at a well, and the seven daughters of a Jethro came to draw water for their flocks.

By religious leaders, by my parents, yes.

That there are the genocides of the Canaanite tribes, and in particular the Midianites and the Amalekites.

There is explicit commandments that the Israelites are to go into these lands and to kill everything that breathes.

Women, children, livestock.

For the world that opens up when you dive into the first five books of the Old Testament, that, you know, within Deuteronomy, which may or may not have been the first one that was really written down in any finished form, although it comes as number five, but that within it, Moses, who is married to a Midianite woman.

Exactly.

So he's got a Midianite wife and a Midianite father-in-law, and yet it's the Midianites that he...

Right at the end, almost...