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By tduvally, October 12, 2011 12:04 pm

Genesis 9

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.

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By tduvally, March 21, 2011 5:07 pm

Genesis 6

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).

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By tduvally, February 9, 2011 1:22 pm

Genesis 4

This is the iconic story of Cain and Abel.

We need to be clear at the outset.  What Cain did was wrong.  At all times, from all perspectives, Cain was just wrong.  It was murder.  It doesn’t matter his reasons or what he felt, it was wrong to decide for himself that his brother should be killed.  Full stop.

With that out of the way, lets pick apart the story.

At no point does God indicate his preference for fat portions.  At this point in the narrative, God has not declared what type of sacrifice is better.  Both Cain and Abel provide from what they can: Cain from the field, Abel from the flock.  The first question is why would God prefer dead animal fat to harvest.  This is completely arbitrary.  Cain and Abel chose their professions, one would assume, out of necessity.  On the face of it, meat and vegetable,  being both necessary for life, make keeping flocks and working the soil appear as equally valid pursuits.

Yet in Gen 4:4-5 God appears to randomly show favor on Abel’s work and in Gen 4:6-7 appears to bitch him out for having a reaction to it.  The literal creator of the universe decides you offering is crap and you aren’t supposed to be upset?  The same question keeps coming back: If God created these people, how is he so inept at predicting their actions?

Well, Cain goes and kill his brother.  God punishes him by making it harder to work the ground (which seems kinda pointless, considering God clearly didn’t want him doing it in the first place).  He send him out into the wild world with a mark (so no one would harm him) and found himself a wife.  Wait, wha?

There are a boatload of continuity issues up to now, but this one takes the cake!  Up to now, according to the narrative, there are exactly 3 people on the earth.  In the whole of the universe, in fact.

Since we are given no context of these events in time, we don’t know how these events fit with other events.  Adam and Eve go on to have another son, Seth, to replace Abel.  Seth, in this chapter had a son named Enosh.  Gen 4:26 mentions other men, who being calling on the name of the Lord.  Who are these men and where did they come from?

In the next chapter we hear about other sons and daughters, and the ages of the important ones, but we are left to wonder if these entirely unconnected lines of narrative do in-fact converge.

We hear about the lineage of Cain and the apparent exploit of his descendant, Lamech, in Gen 4:23-24 who tells his wives about killing someone for wounding him.  We get some odd “curse math” about Lamech’s vengence being 77 times.  Cain’s was 7 times.  How does 4 generations get you 77-fold?

I don’t even thing they’re trying to be coherent.  Yet, if you view it in the light of creation folk-lore, it’s no weirder than all the other ones.