So it seems that in the land that Abram and Lot settle wasn’t very peaceful.  Some war of many kings broke out because some kings didn’t like being subject to another king. After a dozen years they’d had enough. This didn’t seem to involve Abram until King Kedorlaomer defeated the rebel kings of Sodom and Gomorrah and he took all that they had, which included the people living in the land of Sodom.  This was were Lot was.

Cue daring rescue by old man and his friends! Abram rescues not only Lot, but all the other people, which the King of Sodom wants back. In fact, the king ONLY wants the people (slaves?) and not the possessions, but Abram is a man who is proud of both himself and his god, so he doesn’t keep any. He only accepts a blessing from the king of Salam, who is a high priest himself.

One thing that struck me funny was the narrative suddenly refers to Abram as “Abram the Hebrew”. Why was this distinction suddenly necessary here? I can only guess that the real narrative wasn’t as clear or uniform as we are reading it. This particular story may have been pulled from some other source

Abram, his wife, his livestock, his servants (slaves) and his gold all left Egypt and backtracked to the place where Abram built his altar. His nephew, Lot, had not simply been slouching about this whole time and had gathered up his own flock and servants (slaves) and various hangers-on. Between the two men there seems to have been a lot of people involved.  Enough so that quarrels and such began.

Abram does something smart and suggests that the two groups split.  He says there is plenty of land so that Lot can go one way and Abram will go the other. There seems to be a tiny issue with people still living on the land, but when you have the creator of the world on your side, these things can seem trivial.

Lot heads down to Jordan.  Abram sticks to Canaan.  In Jordan is also Sodom. There is some not-so-subtle foreshadowing about the Lord wiping it out, so I presume Lot doesn’t know that he’s walking his people into a shitstorm. Life can be unfair, I suppose.

The Lord promises all the land Abram can see to him and promises that Abram’s offpring will be like the dust (a LOT of dust). Abram builds another altar.  The Lord likes altars, I guess.

So, now the Lord sends out some old guy from his land. So Abram (said old guy) takes his wife, his nephew Lot and all the stuff and people he acquired (slaves?) and heads out to Canaan because Lord said if you do, your friends will be awesome and your enemies destroyed.  He stops in a couple places, builds some alters…  And apparently, the land the Lord has promised him already has people, the Canaanites, but we aren’t told any more about that.  Instead we are treated to a disturbing story that takes place in Egypt, where Abram has stopped due a famine (the Lord isn’t making it easy for him I guess)

Abram thinks his wife, Sarai, is so hot, that the Egyptians will kill him to take her, but if he were her brother, they will let him alone. We have no idea if this is true or not, but Abram thinks so and makes sure everyone thinks shes his sister.  This seems to go OK for a while with Abram getting some livestock and slaves while in Egypt.

Sarai turns out the actually be beautiful enough to attract the attention of the Pharaoh.  Since everyone has been told that Sarai is Abram sister (NOT his wife) the Pharaoh decides he wants her and actually takes her. The Lord seems to side with the liar and punishes the Pharaoh for stealing Abram’s wife.  The Pharaoh seems to figure this out and gives Sarai back and has his kicked out.

So, the big question is for Sarai: Why did you let the Pharaoh “take you as his wife” (wink wink, nudge nudge)? Did you have NO input in this at all?  Was she really expected to cheat on her husband to follow his command about being his sister?

The clear lesson here is that the Lord will side with a liar. Got it, lying is OK. This won’t be contradicted anywhere else.

This starts out with the a story of man spreading out, but having one language, which makes sense since they are all directly descended from 6 people! These industrious people decided to build a city.  Ok, that sounds good.

Then they decided to build a tower.  And not just ANY tower, but one that reaches to the heavens. Their reasoning was apparently to “make a name for themselves” and to all stay together.  God seems to think this a bad idea.  He doesn’t want them to actually accomplish what they plan.  So he says to someone else in heaven Gen 11:7 that they should make it impossible to achieve their goals.  He does this by making them all speak different languages and scattered them.

Now, we could assume that He did this by clan, since in Gen 10 it states that each clan had it’s own language. Gen 10:5, Gen 10:20, Gen 10:31.  It doesn’t say so, but it makes sense, despite the narrative being bass-ackward.

This just seems like a little ad-hocary to explain why people have so many different languages.  Not the first, and I doubt the last.

But, wait, there’s more: lineage! *cheering!*

Really, more lineage.  The only significant difference is the mention of both sons AND daughters.  You’ve come a long way, baby!

Shem has Arphaxad who has *snore….

8 generation later we get a little story about Terah.  One of his 3 sons dies, Haran, but had a son.  He takes that grandson, one of his boys, Abram, and Abram’s barren wife to Canaan, but never get there.  Instead they just stopped in Canaan and plopped down there.

Oh, and these people are still living hundreds of years.

Note: These people apparently ran out of names for things a lot, because they are naming cites and kids after each other with alarming regularity.  It gets confusing.

Lineage blah blah lineage blah blah.

A couple things of note though:

• Not a single daughter is mentioned
• Canaan’s clans

I mention the first because, well, the earth is empty.  How are all these sons (a LOT of them) going to multiply on  the earth without some cousins to screw?

The other thing doesn’t mention Canaan’s curse, but mentions his sons and their clans, which scatter. A bit of a plot hole, if you ask me.

Other than that, this chapter is a snoozefest.  Let’s move on.

Now that everyone and everything is dead, God wants Noah and his boys (oh, and wives, but whatever) to fill the earth again.  He promises to be nicer next time, but still has some rules.  These are mostly about blood.

Oh, but look, a rainbow!  God says that this minor trick of light refracting off water droplets is REALLY his promise to NOT KILL EVERYONE AGAIN!  What a guy! The implication is that water refraction didn’t work before that moment.  Either that or he simply co-opted a common natural phenomenon.

Now, in the next bit of the narrative we get an intriguing story of a drunken Noah and a sadistic bit of punishment.  Apparently, the great and holiest of men that God could find gets so drunk he passes out naked.  His son, Ham sees him as such (no other narrative about this, mind you).  When Noah finds out, he freaks out.  No explination as to WHY Noah finds this bad, but he curses Ham’s son, Canaan, to be a slave.

Yes folks, he decides that because Ham was “wrong” that Ham’s son, his own grandson and all his descendants since up to now that is how curses work, should be punished.  The children pay for the sins of the father.

Noah declares Canaan a slave of Shem and Jepheth and has God extend Jepheth’s lands, presumibly to take over Canaan’s.

And Noah lived to be 950.

So after a good part of a year of ensuring that all the people of the earth are good and drowned God apparently remembers Noah and lets the waters recede.  The receding waters put the ark on Mount Ararat as they continue to recede.  It’s another 40 days before Noah sends out birds to find land.  The narrative is a bit confusing here.  It seems to be using different events to mark when the earth was dry.

Noah sent out a raven, and flew around until the “water had dried up” Gen 8:7 but then sent out a dove to figure out the same.  The raven isn’t mentioned again, but the dove is sent out 2 more times until it doesn’t return.  This is about 14 days.  Then it says that between the 1st day of the 1st month and the 27th day of the 2nd month is was completely dry.  This may not be contradictory, but it is confusing.

In the end, Noah sacrifices a few of the ONLY ANIMALS ON EARTH to God, who finds the aroma of burning flesh and only then promises to not kill us all again, despite how evil we are and deserve it (even from childhood).

Now that Noah has his marching orders. we get to re-read them a few more times.  We get it, Noah, sons, wives, animals, flood.

In this chapter the animal count is 7 of the clean and 2 of the unclean.  Again, we the reader have no clue which is which, but it seems to be enough that Noah does.  And all this when Noah was 600 years old!

This chapter is particularly hard to parse.  Lots of repetition or re-wording.  It seems say the same thing, but in enough of a different way as to seem confusing.  Maybe knowing the original language would be better, but just on the face of it the reading is almost opaque.  One of the problems is sequence.  When did it start raining and when did Noah and his sons (and wives) go into the ark?  After 7 days, after 40?  Did it start raining before they went into the ark, or did they sit in there for 7 days before the rain came?

Either way, they entered the ark and it rained for 40 days (after the 7, or 33 more?) and the ark floated and all the mountains were covered for a depth of more then 20 feet. Gen 7:20 That is an absolutely STAGGERING volume of water.  We should STILL be cleaning out basements from that kind of flood.  OH, well, God must have magicked it away.

So, from Gen 7:21-23 it brags about how much life God kills (excepting Noah and the floating super-zoo).

One hundred and fifty days.  That was the extend of God’s water massacre.  Hitler took years to kill millions, God did in a few months.

This is apparently the first time God starts giving a damn about daughters.  It’s also when he decides to wipe out almost all of mankind.  It’s hard to think this is just a coincidence.

The opening of the chapter has a lot of oddities that need mentioning.  The narrative seems to be making a distinction between “sons of God” and “men”.  We are again seeing that not all people are accounted for as part of Gods creation.  Daughters of men were beautiful and the sons of God married any of them that they chose.  Apparently this bears mentioning because God doesn’t like this.  It’s all a rather confusing jumble of non-sequitur.  Next is some seemingly random line about “Nephilim” and how their sons were heroes.  Who the hell are the Nephilim? (I’m assuming some kind of angel, but it’s not mentioned in the story so far)

Either way, we quickly get to the meat of the chapter: God is unhappy.  Read in the light of when I just mentioned, God is apparently unhappy that the daughters of “man” have corrupted his “sons” and made them wicked.  Again, it’s confusing about if he made all the men who exist, or just the line of Adam, but either way, he’s decided to wipe them ALL out.

God has decided that all men must die, and is throwing in all the animals for good measure.  W. T. F?

Yet, of all the men on earth, one is OK.  Noah finds favor is God’s eyes.  He was righteous and blameless.  We don’t know how or when he did differently, but God thinks that he should be saved and all other should die.  The exception is Noah, his wife, his sons and their wives.  Apparently this corrupt world was able to produce 3 women outside of Noah’s family worthy of rescue.  How fortunate!  Not an infant, not a girl, not even a puppy is worth saving of the whole earth.

Noah gets instructions about building an ark and bringing 2 of every kind of animal, male and female (presumably to breed more later).

There really isn’t much to talk about in this chapter.  It’s just a listing of the male lineage from Adam to Noah’s 3 sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

There really are only 3 things notable about this narrative:

1. There is no mention of Cain or Able.  I understand not mentioning Able, since he didn’t have children.  Cain did get a big mention in the last chapter, so I guess he’s covered, but it’s all so inconsistent.
2. Only sons seem deserve mentioning.  And only the first born.  ”other sons and daughters” is repeated for most in the lineage, but the only names named are sons.
3. The people lived very long lives.  I’m very curious where this longevity claim originates.  I highly doubt anyone actually lived 900+ years, so why would they be attributed that way.  A couple simple conjectures come to mind, such as glorifying of venerated figures or wanting to show how much better people must have been so close to creation.

In any event, this is a boring chapter.  The only thing that might be good to take away is the number of generations and maybe the supposed time that has passed.  The age of the universe since creation is often quoted as 6,000-10,000 years.  That number comes, in part, from the ages of the people mention in this chapter.  I calculate that at the end of this chapter the universe is 1557 years old over 12 generation.  Adam would have been alive to see Methuseluh born, his Great, Great, Great, Great, Great, Great, Great grandson.  I think I got that right.