Genesis 12

This chapter starts out with god telling Abram to leave behind his life in return for basically founding a "great nation." There's no reason given for this, either. At least with Noah, they mention that he was righteous and everything. The impression here is that god just kind of randomly said "Hey...you!"

So Abram and his wife (Sarai, remember) and his nephew Lot pack up their things and head off to Canaan. A litany of forgettable place names follow, but the gist is that god promises Canaan to Abram's descendents.

However, for now the place is full of Canaanites, so Abram and his people just settle down minding their own business until there is a famine. There was so little food that Abram had to go down to Egypt to try and feed everyone. He comes up with a pretty genius plan before they get there--since Sarai is so beautiful, they'll kill him if they know she's his wife. So they'll just tell everyone they're brother and sister! There is no way this plan goes wrong.

Except, of course, that it does. Sarai is so beautiful that word gets to the pharaoh--I mean, really, are we to believe Sarai is THAT freaking hot? It's like the oldest Mary Sue.--and so he takes her for his wife and gives Abram lots of gifts. This seems like a good thing (guess Abram isn't a jealous dude), until god sends plagues on pharaoh and his household. Cause this is in any way his fault? God sure does love to play favorites--send the plagues on Abram for being a lying sack of shit, eh? Anyway. So the pharaoh figures it out and sends Sarai and Abram away.

Fairly simple chapter, but it leaves me wondering what the point of a lot of this crap is. It seems like so much filler! If I had written the bible, or been on the councils that edited it, I would definitely pare down!

Genesis 11

I don't know who decided where the chapter breaks would go in these books, but it really is poorly designed. The poor tower of Babel story gets crunched in 9 verses before yet another genealogy list that drones on for 23 verses.

Anyway, the story of Babel is pretty straightforward. The "whole earth" (so far, the only impression given is the "whole fertile crescent," shockingly enough) spoke one language, and so they decided to get together and build a huge tower with "its top in the heavens." God, of course, wasn't too pleased with this. I don't know why--if we haven't got to heaven with spacecraft, it hardly seems like a tower had any chance of it--but god isn't particularly logical so far. So god gives them a bunch of different languages and scatters them all over. Interesting that the languages he made them were so conveniently and logically interconnected based on where he scattered them to. Also, one has to wonder again about god's so-called omniscience. He didn't see from the start that there should be different languages? He didn't know they were going to build Babel? Why is this "omniscient" god acting as if he's surprised by humanity's wacky antics, like some bad sitcom?

That's all there is to Babel. Short and sweet explanation about why we have different languages. Again, fulfilling a mythical function to a people who didn't understand the way languages were interconnected and evolved.

From here on, it's more "son of son of" stuff. We get a recap again on Shem's descendants, even thought we just heard that in the previous chapter! The line is traced all the way from Shem to Abram and Lot, who will soon feature more prominently. Interestingly enough, the men are having their sons earlier and living shorter every generation. It starts with Shem having Arpachshad at 100 and living to be 600 and ends with Nahor having Terah at 29 and living to be 148. There is no explanation given for this, which seems odd to me.

We finish off the exciting genealogy with a mess of a family--Terah is the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran. Abram is married to Sarai and Nahor to Milcah. It seems to me that Milcah is Haran's daughter, but to be honest I'm a little confused. I read verse 29b like five times and still have no idea what they're trying to say: "Nahor's wife was Milcah. She was the daughter of Haran the father of Milcah and Iscah." I think they need more commas!

So Haran--who is dead at this point--has a son Lot. Terah, Abram, Sarai, and Lot set out to Canaan but end up settling in Haran (I can only guess they named the place after they got there, or that's a pretty big coincidence!) instead. This is where the chapter ends--perfect set up and hook for Genesis 12!

Genesis 10

Another chapter devoted to an endless list of difficult names and family relations! Good thing we have all this stuff written down and sold around the world more than 100 million times every year, or how would I ever know that Togarmah was the son of Gomer, who was himself the son of Japheth (who was one of Noah's sons, if you can't remember, which would hardly be surprising at this point).

One random descendant who gets special attention is Nimrod (ha!), son of Cush, son of Ham. He was "the first on earth to become a mighty warrior." Given that, by this point, it's already been hundreds or thousands of years, I'd bet that there have been some mighty warriors. Mankind is good at nothing if not trying to kill each other! Apparently Nimrod was the original badass, though. "Therefore it is said, 'Like Nimrod a might hunter before the Lord.'" Sounds to me like nothing more than an explanation for a pithy statement of the time. Weird to get a mention like that.

Nimrod's kingdom included Shinar (Babel, Erech, Accad), and Assyria (Nineveh, Rehobothir, Calah, Resen). Canaan has a bunch of sons and they spread out from Sidon to Gaza, "in the direction of Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboiim," whatever that means. Shem's brood takes over from Mesha to Sephar. Spoiler alert: Some of these places might be important later!

And that's it. Thrilling chapter, wrapped up with this gem of a line: "From these the nations spread abroad on the earth after the flood."

So yes. All 7 billion people on this planet are descended from Noah, whose sons established some nations all in the same vicinity. Not to mention that all of them were originally descended from one couple and the incestuous genealogy that followed. I don't know much about genetics, but I know enough to know that is complete BS.

Long Time No See!

Phew. Can't believe it's been over a year since I've updated. It's positively shameful, and I'm sure I've probably lost the few readers I had. My sincere apologies! Life has been life, and for a long time I wasn't sure I would ever take this up again.

But! Here I am, ready to blog! Lovely San Diego is now lovely Charleston, lovely husband is now estranged husband, but the crazy-ass Bible is still the crazy-ass Bible. =)

Now where was I...

Genesis 9

We're back with Noah again this chapter, and the subtitle (The Covenant with Noah) leads me to expect we'll be getting further elaboration on the promise God made to not freak out on the earth again.

God tells Noah and his family to be fruitful and multiply. It's the same thing he told Adam and Eve, and it didn't work out too well for them. They'd have been better off saving some energy and just birthing a direct line to Noah. But God needed to have all that "fruit" to kill, or the Flood just wouldn't have that much of an impact. God also tells them that everything else on earth will have "fear and dread of you." Awesome. I'm wondering if God was including creatures like sharks, tigers, bears? Last I checked they weren't too scared of me.

God says that they should eat all the animals and plants, which is I suppose why fundies look so askance at vegans and vegetarians. They're dirty liberals who are directly flouting Genesis 9:3! Then again, some of the carnivores aren't doing any better. God says that if we eat anything that still has its blood, we will pay in our own blood. So God is against a good rare steak? And sushi? I'm not really sure what he's prohibiting here. I suppose it's a useful injuction for a primitive culture to cook their meat, but it hardly seems holy.

Genesis 9:6 is the predecessor to the later eye for an eye philosophy. It's a pretty cut and dried statement in support of the death penalty. "Whoever sheds the blood of a human, by a human shall that person's blood be shed." Well, color me shocked. It is 100% probably that there are people in history who have shed the blood of others and gone on to die perfectly natural, non-human-caused deaths. So God is proclaiming something demonstrably false here. Again, I must wonder about his omniscience if he doesn't know this isn't going to pan out. Or his omnipotence for not making this pan out!

Apparently feeling guilty, God repeats his promise to Noah and co. to never flood the earth again. Which is a bit of a wimpy promise, really. I mean, if God gets pissed off, there are thousands of ways he could destroy the earth without flooding it. So, congratulations, you've ruled out ONE possibility, God. I'll sure sleep better now! The really ludicrous part of this is that God says as a sign of this promise, he will put a rainbow in the sky so that we can remember. In fact, not only so we will remember, but that so God himself won't forget! That's some BS for an omniscient god!

Surely there were rainbows in the hundreds of years before the flood? Did it never rain? Did the sunlight never strike water at just that particular angle? That's ridiculous. This reminds me of the song in Fantasia where the night comes as a lady's robe and a rainbow is created by another lady's dress. MYTH. It truly hurts my brain to try to take this literally.

To end out the chapter, we get a nice little tale of Noah and his sons. Noah has three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham's son is Canaan (sound familiar?). One night, Noah gets drunk off wine from his vineyard (take that, teetotallers!), and passes out in his tent naked (hmmm, one has to wonder what he was doing in his tent, drunk, alone, and naked...blech). Ham sees Noah is naked, and tells Shem and Japheth who manage to cover up Noah without getting a peep at his peeper. Noah wakes up, probably hungover and with a wine headache, because there is no real reason for him to curse Canaan for this. But he does, and says that Canaan will be slave to Shem and Japheth. Wow. First of all, it was HAM who saw Noah, but Ham's innocent son who gets the curse. I kinda feel like there has to be something missing here. It says that Noah cursed Canaan "When Noah...knew what his youngest son had done to him." That sounds a lot more ominous that Ham just catching a glimpse of his dad passed out naked. Jeez.

That's Genesis for you. Vengeful, irratic, illogical, hypocritical, and mythical. It's quite entertaining until I remember that there are people try to live as if this were true. Gah.

And the Super Bowl approaches, so that's all for now!

Quick update: A post is in progress! Work got craaaazy last week, but I expect to get it up tonight! =D

Genesis 8

Sorry for the delay in posting. I wrote the first half of this last week, but then had a few 12 hour work days in a row and my husband got hurt so I had to take care of him all weekend. Not that I mind, but it kept me from blogging!

It's almost discouraging to realize that we're only on the 8th chapter, but I have no time limit and taking it in these small chunks is making it a lot easier to keep up with posting. So we'll continue on, one step at a time, and I'll try not to feel too overwhelmed. I only have to think about one chapter for now! And that's the wrapping up of the flood in Genesis 8.

But God finally remembers Noah and all the animals (Did he forget about them? It usually seems like the implication of "remembering" something is that it was forgotten at some point!) and sends a wind to blow away the waters. Wait, what? If the waters are covering the whole earth, where is the wind blowing the water to? This makes sense from a flat earth perspective, but for a globe it's illogical. However he did it, though, the waters start to recede. Eventually the ark comes to rest on Mt. Ararat.

Given that the there is a specific location given for the resting place of the ark, and given that it wasn't more than a few thousand years ago according to the Biblical timeline, surely we could find evidence of the ark's remains on Ararat? Indeed, various expeditions have attempted this before. None of them have found anything! Well, that's not true. None of them have found anything that didn't turn out later to be a hoax. To be fair, the bible only says that it came to rest on "the mountains of Ararat," which may refer to a nearby peak to the actual Mt. Ararat. Still, nothing has been found on any of them either.

I find it interesting that the ark rests on its mountain on the 17th day of the 7th month, but "the tops of the mountains appeared" only when the water had been receding for 10 months. At that rate, it would take a lot longer to clear the water. Maybe God was tired, or just really laughing to himself about how cranky the Noahs were getting.

Noah sends out birds to see if they can find places to roost or find anything of note. The third bird he sends out, a dove, brings back a fresh olive leaf. This happens about 2 months after the tops of the mountains appear from the water. I don't know a ton about olive trees, but a quick Wikipedia check tells me they flourish in coastal areas and the like. Coastal areas tend to be about sea level. So in 2 months, the water completely disappeared and the olive tree had time to grow and bloom? Or is this an olive tree that survived being underwater for a year? And if it did, how does that fit with God wanting to kill every living thing on earth? (For that matter, what about the fishies? Were they on God's good list? And if so, why didn't he just temporarily give a couple animals gills until the flood had passed? Or just protect them in a bubble? The ark just seems SO unnecessary for am omnipotent god!)

One year and two months and some days after the start of the flood, God finally okays the ark to be emptied. Maybe it's just me, but there's no way I would sit in a dank, smelly, cramped ark for months while I waited for the ground to dry. Nope, I'd sneak out a window and run around in the mud and breathe the fresh air in great big gulps (I know, I'm such a bitter, cheerless atheist). This is probably why I would've been drowned! Noah and his family are so obedient. I can just picture God saying "Good boy! Good boy! C'mon out! Who's a good boy? You are! Oh yes you are!"

So after the ark empties out, Noah builds an altar and...wait for it...sacrifices some of all the clean animals to God. Wait. This is the same God who just killed millions of animals in the entire world, and now he is pleased by Noah killing some of the ones God went through all the trouble to save? I mean, wow, you'd think even God would've been sick of the blood by now. But anyway, apparently these last few animals dying did the trick, and God says that he will "never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth." That's okay, then, because humankind is pretty capable of cursing the ground ourselves, I think. It's the second part that gets me. God, listen, you made them. And if they're evil-leaning from the very start, that means you made them evil-leaning! How are you complaining about this? I was gonna write an analogy about script writers not liking the ending of their own movies, but that doesn't even begin to compare. God is omniscient and omnipotent. Which means he had to have known what was going to happen, he had to have been able to make something else happen, and so what the hell is so pouty about? It doesn't add up.

I don't know how I had so much to say about such a short, relatively uneventful chapter, but I guess I did! And now, hopefully, back to daily updates, at least while I'm at class and not on my ship every day.

Cheers!