Holy Moly: Side Characters

In Genesis 14 we begin with a story which sounds way, way more interesting than Abram's fruitfulness and multiplicity.

While Amraphel was king of Shinar, Ellasar’s King Arioch, Elam’s King Chedorlaomer, and Goiim’s King Tidal declared war on Sodom’s King Bera, Gomorrah’s King Birsha, Admah’s King Shinab, Zeboiim’s King Shemeber, and the king of Bela, that is, Zoar. These latter kings formed an alliance in the Siddim Valley (that is, the Dead Sea). For twelve years they had served Chedorlaomer, and in the thirteenth year they revolted. In the fourteenth year, Chedorlaomer and the kings of his alliance came and attacked the Rephaim in Ashteroth-karnaim, the Zuzim in Ham, the Emim in Shaveh-kiriathaim, and the Horites in the mountains of Seir as far as El-paran near the desert. Then they turned back, came to En-mishpat (that is, Kadesh), and attacked the territory of the Amalekites, as well as the Amorites who lived in Hazazon-tamar.

Then the kings of Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim, and Bera (that is, Zoar) took up battle positions in the Siddim Valley against King Chedorlaomer of Elam, King Tidal of Goiim, King Amraphel of Shinar, and King Arioch of Ellasar, four kings against five.

Now the Siddim Valley was filled with tar pits. When the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah retreated, they fell into them; and the rest fled to the mountains.

I have no idea who any of these people are.  I'm not an early near-eastern historian.  But boy, doesn't this sound like something straight out of Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings?

We've got place names and characters I can't pronounce (I could take a stab at it but fortunately I don't have to, this being a textual medium).  We've got rebellions and kings and infighting.  We've got armies being swallowed up by tar.

But there's no escaping the fact that this is the Bible, not the Silmarillion, so the only reason all of this is important is that Lot, who is living in Sodom, gets captured when the victorious kings sack the city.  We don't hear about pitched battles or strategy.  This is the Bible, and Abram and Lot are the important part.

Did any of this actually happen?  No idea.  The Bible as historical record is... well, we're still in Genesis, and Genesis is as old as dirt.  We're only a few scant chapters away from a great flood which wiped out everyone on earth.  We've covered a lot of ground, what with generations of men who were considered young at 300.  But still, we're in myths and legends territory here.

And beyond that, I have no reason to doubt that all these places and kings had some deep meaning to people in late Stone Age/early Bronze Age Mesopotamia.  It's likely that, as they sat around the fire, proto-Jews would have heard this story and thought, "Oh boy, King Chedorlaomer, he's the king who defeated fifteen dragons in the story we heard last night.  You do not want to fuck with him.  Just more stupidity on the part of those idiots in Sodom, huh?"  But they didn't bother to write down the story of King Chedorlaomer, so he makes this brief appearance in the Bible and then is gone again.  Maybe his story wasn't popular.  Maybe it didn't have a good lesson, just plenty of gratuitous sex and senseless violence.  Maybe King Chedorlaomer would have been played by Bruce Willis.

It's useless to speculate.

It's not fair to say that Abram and Lot are minor characters in this story: they're just not in the epic battle.  Abram mounts a daring rescue and manages, with a small strike force, to see off Lot's captors and bring him, his people, and the loot back to Sodom.

And here we meet King Melchizedek.  King Melchizedek has a terrific name, and if he showed up in a fantasy movie fighting dragons I would not be in the least surprised.  He's the high priest of what I'm somewhat reliably informed is a deity of some sort, although possibly not the same deity worshiped by Abram.

It's important to note here (and elsewhere, but we'll get there) that Abram might have worshiped the god who winds up being the head honcho in the Bible, but he believed in other gods.  These proto-Hebrews were polytheistic.  This is prior to the Ten Commandments (and even then, monotheism only meant worshiping one god before others, not only believing in one god, but we'll get there when we get there).  So Abram, being a pragmatic man, gives a tithe of 10% to Melchizedek, who then goes back into the background (or possibly Melchizedek gives a tithe to Abram; the text is ambiguous, but it makes more sense to me that Abram is tithing to the priest-king rather than the other way around, rescuing hero or not).  We'll run into Melchizedek's name again, way after we've all forgotten who he is.

The King of Sodom offers Abram the loot as a reward, but Abram says, "No, sorry: god says I shouldn't take anything from you so you can't take credit for me being awesome."  I have to imagine that this the King of Sodom had somewhat mixed feelings about this response.  On the one hand, Abram's refusing a reward, so Sodom gets the loot back.  Sodom has just lost its army and its city has been sacked, so I imagine that the king is happy enough to have a little loot.  But on the other hand, Abram is being a dick.  He's refusing a kingly gift and saying, "Um, sorry, no, I don't need your shit; I'm awesome."

Abram does make sure that his followers are rewarded, so it's possible that this should be read as humbleness and care, and maybe that's how it was received.  Still, if I were king and I just offered you loot, to decline would be a bit rude, but to decline because you say god told you not to owe me any favors... that's got to make me wonder just why you don't want to owe me any favors.

Abram talks about the god who told him this using the same name as the god for whom Melchizedek is priest, so maybe this should be read differently.  Maybe Melchizedek passed on a message from his god in exchange for the tithe, and El Elyon said for Abram not to take the reward.  Maybe El Elyon is the Hebrew God, and it's all very confusing.  This latter possibility is certainly borne out later when later writers use Melchizedek as the ancestor of Hebrew priests.  Still, since Melchizedek doesn't seem to have any purpose in this story beyond being name-dropped (he clearly had other stories about him which didn't make it into the Bible) I think believing that maybe he had something to do with Abram's refusal is justified, if not certified.

In any case, this should probably all be read as, "Abram is special.  Abram is awesome.  You are descendants of Abram.  Therefore, you are special and awesome."  Just so.  There's nothing wrong with this.  All tribes and groups tell founding stories about how special they are.  No need to fret: God and the Bible will continue to reinforce this message.

Holy Moly: Family Strife

So Abram and his family, and Lot and his family, have been kicked out of Egypt.  Why Lot got kicked out when it was Abram who did the things necessitating being kicked out is uncertain.  Maybe Abram made Lot come along.  "So Egypt is getting too hot to hold someone of my awesomeness.  Come on Lot, let's hit the road."

"But I've got a home and lands and friends here..."

"They're not your friends.  You need to come with us."

"But..."

"Come on Lot."

Well, turns out that the land they go to can't support both of their families and flocks.  Or maybe Lot remembered being dragged out of Egypt by Abram.  There's fighting between the clans.

Abram has a solution.  "Why don't you go over there, and I'll go over here.  The land is wide and full of resources.

Or maybe Lot said, "Listen, Abram, I... need to be alone for a while.  It's not you, it's me."

The Bible makes sure we know that there were Canaanites and Perizzites living on the land too.  That's probably because we're foreshadowing some things, but it might also be to point out that Abram and Lot were in hostile territory.  To me, it just points out the total land grab that's going on here.  I'm not bashing Abram and Lot; they're not going around lopping off Perizzite heads or anything to conquer the territory.  But it does smack a bit of the white man landing on the shores of America and claiming the land because hey, no one's living... sorry, could you brown people move out of my sight line... as I said, no one is living here.

Lot heads to Sodom.  Sodom is a wretched hive of scum and villainy.  We'll get back to them.

God says to Abram, "Hey, so this land is all yours and you're going to have so many descendants that they'll be like specks of dust."  Are the Canaanites and Perizzites consulted?  Of course not.

But there are other ways to read this: God is still obsessed with the "being fruitful and multiplying" thing.  At the time, if you were an extremely beset-upon tribe like Israel, pumping out the offspring was probably not just a good idea but a matter of survival.  I'm not even talking about the horrifying infant mortality rates: they're living in lands which, while God has given the land to them, are still occupied by other tribes who might not be friendly.  Increasing the size of the clan was for safety as well as anything else.

These are just-so stories, people.  There's nothing wrong with that.  Why does Israel live here now?  Why do we have these lands?  Why are people trying to oppress us?  See, there was this guy named Abram...

Holy Moly: Land Grab

Genesis 12 begins with Abram, Sarai, and Lot, along with the family, continuing the journey to Canaan.  Only it doesn't.  It begins with God telling Abram to leave his home and head to Canaan.  Let's remember the strange chronology of the Bible and move on.

God says to Abram, "Head to Canaan and I will bless you and all people through you.  This land will be yours."

I can't help but wonder what the Canaanites thought about this.  Some guy shows up, says, "Hey, so, this land is mine because God gave it to me."

But the Bible doesn't really care about the Canaanites, as has been amply demonstrated already.  So this part is more important because it's a continuation of God making certain people His chosen.  Abram is, if not the first Jew, at least the father of Judaism.  He's the chosen.

Where's Canaan?  Why, it's the area where Israel is today.  See, God gave it to His chosen people, which is why that particular area of the globe is so peaceful and no one ever fights about land.

I'm not going to bash Israel (the state, not the character in the Bible) because I'm not really interested in being called anti-Semitic.  But if you want to know the origins of the problems in that part of the Middle East, they're right here, where God gives Canaan to the ancestor of the Israelites.  I'm not blaming the Israelites for taking God up on the offer at all.  It's choice real estate.  But that's why Israel is where it is and not, say, North Dakota.

Abram doesn't stay long though.  He's a nomad so he travels the land, going where the flocks go or where the water is or where the food is available.  He becomes something of an absentee landlord of Canaan, which I can't help but thinking that the Canaanites probably appreciated.

Famine strikes the land and Abram and his retinue head for Egypt.  Egypt, at this point, was probably the place to go if famine was striking.  The Nile delta is a fairly reliable food source, and the infrastructure could support a larger population.  That's not to say that Egypt never had famines, but it was more stable than the desert of Canaan.

So Abram heads there.  I imagine that he was probably just one of many refugees from the famine, and I can also imagine that the Egyptians might have been a little hesitant to take in more people.  But the problem isn't that Abram will be turned away at the border, but rather than apparently the Pharaoh wants to increase his harem.

Abram knows his wife is a looker, and he knows that Pharaoh tends to take a shine to new female faces, but he also knows that Pharaoh doesn't like those new faces to be married.  He's worried that if the officials find out that Sarai is his wife, they'll kill him and she'll wind up with the Pharaoh.

So he does the only logical thing and attempts to disguise her as an ugly woman... no, just kidding, he totally tells them she's his sister, and yes, absolutely, she would love to join the Pharaoh's court.  It doesn't say, but I'm pretty sure Sarai didn't just go to court to be a pretty face.  Pharaoh makes her his wife.  So Abram is pimping out his own wife to save his skin.  Classy.

God gets pissed, as God is wont to do, and sends plagues down on Pharaoh.  Which seems like a pretty shitty thing to do: Pharaoh may be in the market for wives, but he didn't know the woman was already married.  He even treats her and her "brother" quite well.  But God doesn't care.

Pharaoh finds out what's happening and kills Abram... no, only kidding again, he tells Abram, "Jeez dude, why did you tell me she was your sister?  Now your God is pissed at me.  I wouldn't have married her if I knew.  So, be a bro, take her back and get the fuck out of dodge before God makes it worse."

That, at least, is what he means.  Maybe we're supposed to read it as Pharaoh punishing Abram by exiling him, but frankly, had I been Pharaoh and had I gotten a reputation for killing men and taking their hot wives, I would have just killed Abram.  We never see any evidence that Abram was right in his paranoia.  Again, maybe we're supposed to just know that Egyptians are bad and everything Abram says is true, but if so, why does Pharaoh let him keep all his profits from pimping his wife?

I'm pro-Egyptian, as has probably become evident.  I'm not anti-proto-Israelite, but it seems like Abram gets off lightly in this story.  Maybe Pharaoh doesn't kill him because Pharaoh's pretty sure that if marrying Abram's wife makes God pissed, then God will be really pissed if Pharaoh kills Abram.  It's a story written from the point of view of worshipers of Yahweh rather than Horus, so Yahweh is obviously going to be the most powerful.

The Egyptians didn't survive to pass on a Bible, or at least their religion didn't.  It's a shame, because I'd like to read the opposite side of this story.  But frankly, I have a feeling that even if the ancient Egyptian Pantheon were still being worshiped today, Abram wouldn't merit a mention in their Bible.  That's not to say that the story is false, just that people tell legends of things which make them look good or make their gods look powerful.  Maybe it's spin.  Maybe it's not.  But in any case, I feel like Pharaoh acted pretty well, given the circumstances.

Holy Moly: Shem's Descendants

We're going to breeze through some more geneology here because we should now all understand that yes, it's important, but no, it's not terribly interesting.  Shem begets Arpachshad, who begets other (male) people, and it's not until the children of Terah (or rather, the male children, because I bet you there were some daughters in there) that it gets interesting.  But let's step back for a moment.

Who the hell built the Tower of Babel?  Because according to the Bible, everyone but Noah's family was wiped out by a great flood.  See, if I were writing the Bible I would have put the Babel story somewhere else, after Noah and kin have gotten to the business of repopulation.  But I didn't write the Bible.  Nobody did.  It's a collection of stories and legends and history that got lumped together thousands of years after the fact.

So let's assume that Babel actually took place somewhere in the hundreds of years of geneology which comes after it and move on, shall we?

Terah's son Abram is going to be important.  So is his grandson Lot.  And it's important that we know right up front that Abram's wife Sarai is unable to bear children.  That will come up later.  But at the end of the passage, Terah and his sons Abram and Nahor, plus his son Haran's son Lot, plus their assorted family units, have left the land of their birth and are heading to Canaan.  Cliff hanger!

Since this is a short one, let's talk briefly about the division of chapter and verse in the Bible.  It's not very good.  It breaks up stories or puts stories together.  I'm not sure exactly how it came to be, but I can tell you that it didn't come to be because some guy named Moses sat down at a certain point and wrote it all down and divided it thus.  Why am I dividing my discussion of the Bible up by chapters?  It's easier.

Also, Haran is a place and a person.  Who came up with this?  It probably means something, but I'm not even sure the people who collected the stories know for certain.  Maybe Haran just happened to be on the way to Canaan.  Anyway, that's where Terah dies, and his descendants are going to head to Canaan because God told them to.

Holy Moly: Babble

The start of Genesis 11 is a story which doesn't get brought up much by the "literal" Bible folks because it's just such a just-so story that it's hard to read it as anything but. But it's worth talking about for two reasons.

The first is that God comes off as quite a dick.

You've probably heard a version of the story that runs something like this:

Humans decided that they were going to build a tower to Heaven because they could.  It was pride, pure pride, and they thought they could rival God by building a tower so high that it would put them higher than Him.  God saw that and, because He wasn't in the commandment-giving mood, decided to change the languages all the people were speaking so they wouldn't be able to understand each other.  Thus, the people weren't able to work together any more and they failed in their pridefulness.

And that's how humans all came to speak different languages, kids.

You've probably heard that it all relates to Babylon too.  The writers of the story certainly thought it related to Babylon, because they set the story there.  I have a feeling the Babylonians might have taken issue with this reasoning behind the name of their city, but if they wanted to complain, they should have written their own Bible.

The thing is, that's all bogus.  Let's read the real story from the Bible... or rather one translation of it (The Contemporary English Version; while I frequently use the Common English Bible, this translation read a bit more like the story to me in this instance), because I don't read Hebrew and I'm willing to be that most of you don't either.  If you do, feel free to correct the translation.  I've looked at plenty of translations and they all seem reasonably consistent on the details.

At first everyone spoke the same language, but after some of them moved from the east and settled in Babylonia, they said:

"Let’s build a city with a tower that reaches to the sky! We’ll use hard bricks and tar instead of stone and mortar. We’ll become famous, and we won’t be scattered all over the world."

But when the Lord came down to look at the city and the tower, he said:

"These people are working together because they all speak the same language. This is just the beginning. Soon they will be able to do anything they want. Come on! Let’s go down and confuse them by making them speak different languages—then they won’t be able to understand each other."

So the people had to stop building the city, because the Lord confused their language and scattered them all over the earth. That’s how the city of Babel got its name.

Let's unpack that a bit.  First of all, a footnote tells us that "from the east" might also be "to the east" which tells you the problems of translation.  Second, some translations use "Shinar" instead of "Babylonia" which is probably more accurate but means essentially the same thing to the ancient Jew.  Thirdly, some translations give more explicit explanations of what Babel really means to your average ancient Jew, but the crux of it is that it's a play on words based on the Hebrew for "to mix up" or something similar.  Essentially, the city was called Babel because God mixed the people up there.

There's a very interesting translation (The Amplified Bible, which is entirely too Christian for my taste but which does provide some parenthetical context not present in the text itself) which spells out exactly what's going on.

They said, “Come, let us build a city for ourselves, and a tower whose top will reach into the heavens, and let us make a [famous] name for ourselves, so that we will not be scattered [into separate groups] and be dispersed over the surface of the entire earth [as the Lord instructed].” Now the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. And the Lord said, “Behold, they are one [unified] people, and they all have the same language. This is only the beginning of what they will do [in rebellion against Me], and now no evil thing they imagine they can do will be impossible for them.

So now we see what the ancient Jew would have understood: that the problem wasn't pride, but rather that God had said previously that the descendants of Noah were supposed to go forth across the Earth and be fruitful and multiply and so forth, and these folks were gathering together and not spreading out.  Sure, there's a certain pridefulness there, but basically, God said to move on and these people weren't doing it.

Well fuck you, people who yearn for stability and cohabitation.  No communication for you.

So God fucks their shit up and they get back to wandering around the Earth being unable to communicate with one another.  Like the Lord intended.  Seems a bit dickish to me.  But it's a just-so story.  Why are there different languages and cultures?  Babylon.  Now go fetch Grandpa another bourbon.

The second reason this story is worth talking about is the questions it raises about "literal" readers of the Bible.  Firstly, while there's all sorts of furor about evolution, you don't hear too many Christians protesting the teaching of linguistics in schools.  Probably because it's too complicated for them to satisfactorily protest, but that's neither here nor there.  If there was a Noah and an ark and Genesis is literal truth and not myth, then there should be no evidence that languages evolved either, because clearly that's not true: languages all came into being at some point several thousand years ago.

Similarly, sociology should be a problem too.  Culture as we know it didn't evolve, it came into being at some point several thousand years ago when God cast our ancestors to the four winds.  I'm not even talking about the problems of a 6000 year timeline for this; there should be no evidence that culture evolved.  It simply came into being.

Beyond that, if gathering together to build great cities with great towers is evidence that humanity is violating God's will, why don't we see people standing in front of skyscrapers with placards reading, "God Hates Cities?"  I know that the fundamentalist types are worried about one world government and language and so forth, but it seems to me that Genesis 11 trumps anything later than it in the Bible, and all the homosexuality stuff didn't inspire God to create the division of languages and cultures, so all of that seems like small potatoes.  If you're a Biblical "literalist" then you should abandon civilization and move to Antarctica or something to make sure you're not in violation of one of the original instructions given by God to mankind.

Of course, we don't see any of that happening because it's much easier to tell the kiddies that the story of Babel is about people trying to build a tower to Heaven and God punishing their pride.

In the end, it's a just-so story about why we don't all talk and act the same way.  I think I prefer space aliens.

Holy Moly: Why We Hate Them

I'll take the opportunity to skim Genesis 10 because it's entirely genealogical.  Not that it's not important, but there's no plot.  Before I skip over him, I'd like to point out a passage:

Cush fathered Nimrod, the first great warrior on earth. The Lord saw him as a great hunter, and so it is said, “Like Nimrod, whom the Lord saw as a great hunter.”

Yeah, like I always say, "Like Nimrod, whom the Lord saw as a great hunter."  And at a certain point, possibly Calvin and Hobbes, "Nimrod" became a pejorative.  One can only imagine the stories of Nimrod which got left out of the Bible to make room for more genealogy.  Once again, the Bible was clearly not written by people looking to pitch movies to Hollywood.

But enough of poor Nimrod.

Myths are awesome.  They tell us how people thought about the world when the myth was created, or written down, or whatever.  And much of the early parts of Genesis are myth.  We learn why the rainbow got its... rainbow?  We learn why man is the master of the earth.  We learn why we don't live forever in paradise.  And we learn why it's okay to hate certain people.

Remember Ham and his unfortunate son Canaan?  Well, let's see if we recognize any of Ham's other children.  "Ham’s sons: Cush, Egypt, Put, and Canaan."  Egypt is a gimme.  Cush refers to a region of Africa to the south of Egypt.  Put is probably the legendary Punt, an ever farther portion of Africa that even the Egyptians were pretty vague about.  And Canaan is a region of the Middle East.  Together, we've got all the unpleasant (to the Israelites) peoples of the world to the south.  Cush fathers Nimrod, who goes on to found Babylon (Babel, about which more later) and Nineveh.  From Cush is also descended Sheba (the Queen of Sheba, anyone?).  Egypt even fathers children "from which the Philistines came."  And we really hate the Philistines.

So sure, if you've got a degree in ancient history, you probably recognize the names of some of Noah's other descendants.  You can probably even talk about how it's terribly anachronistic to have them all happen at the same time, when their civilizations weren't contemporaneous.  The Bible is older than dirt.  I get that.  Hopefully you get that.

But notice that Ham, who saw his father's robe serpent, is the father of all the bad guys in what will be our story from here on in.  And we haven't gotten there yet (that will take a bit more genealogy) but Shem is the progenitor of Abram, who grows up to be the first Jew.  And remember what Noah said?

“Bless the Lord,
the God of Shem;
Canaan will be his servant.
May God give space to Japheth;
he will live in Shem’s tents,
and Canaan will be his servant."

 So in other words, this, kids, is why it's okay for us to hate Egyptians, Africans, and Babylonians, and why it's okay for us to subjugate pretty much everyone who isn't us.  Just so.

Now the Israelites have plenty to dislike about Egypt and Babylon.  We'll get there, believe me.  But when you start telling stories about how there's a primal reason, beyond simple grievances, that it's okay for you to hate someone because they're different from you, that's why myths stop being awesome.

Don't tell your kids that it's okay to hate people because it just is.  Because their great great great great great granddaddy saw his father in the alltogether.  Because their great and so on granddaddy stole your great and so on granddaddy's plot of land in a place that doesn't even exist any more because it's older than dirt.  Because of anything that's "just so."

Holy Moly: Poor Canaan

So the first thing Noah does upon being told that the Earth is his is to plant a vineyard so he can get blotto.  I suppose that would be a priority for a lot of people: survive horrible flood, find dry land, get shitfaced.  I guess when you've been alive for 600 years, you can wait the months it takes to make wine from your newly-planted grape vines.

But Noah is a crazy drunk, so he gets stinking and gets naked.  He does it in his tent, so who's complaining really?  Haven't we all hit that point in the drinking day where clothes seem not only superfluous but downright restrictive?

Ham, one of Noah's three sons, sees his dad's junk.  Which turns out to be a HUGE mistake.  I guess it was a thing back then.  Anyway, Ham sees Noah naked and goes to tell his brothers.  We're not told what he told them, so I asked Ham, who said, "Yeah, I told them Dad was drunk, again, and naked, again, and that if they didn't want to see that, they'd better avert their eyes."  Seems reasonable.  If my father was wandering around the house stark, I would probably warn people.

Shem and Japheth, Noah's other sons, pull off an elaborate plan involving walking backward in order to throw a robe over their drunken father.  Why they couldn't just cover their eyes, I don't know.  But anyway, Noah is now sleeping off his drunk, covered in a robe.  Seems like crisis averted, huh?

Noah, upon waking up and wondering just whose robe he's wearing and what the hell was in those grapes, learns of his son Ham's iniquity.  Specifically, that he saw Noah's John Thomas.  Again, I guess it was a thing back then (seeing your father naked, not Noah's tallywacker, although that I'm sure was a thing too, given that he had at least three kids).  And Noah gets butt-hurt and curses... Canaan?

Canaan is Ham's firstborn son.  Canaan did absolutely nothing in this story.  But Noah lays into the kid (although maybe he's 300, since Noah's 600 at this point) like Canaan had stolen Noah's stereo or something.

“Cursed be Canaan:
the lowest servant
he will be for his brothers.”

He also said,
“Bless the Lord,
the God of Shem;
Canaan will be his servant.

May God give space to Japheth;
he will live in Shem’s tents,
and Canaan will be his servant.”

Seems a bit harsh, right?

---

Now I'd like to take a moment to talk about incest before we continue.  Because if you thought Adam and Eve were the problem, they aren't.  We hear from the Bible that the Nephalim were also there, and the sons of Adam and the Nephilim interbred, so it's possible to hand-wave away any concerns that all the humans who are and have ever been might be the product of siblings getting down.  Also, it's never explicitly said that Adam and Eve are the only people God made.  Maybe God made a bunch more.  You can read the Bible "literally" and skirt the incest there.

But not with Noah.  Because Noah and family are the only people left.  No more Nephilim.  No more rest of society.  Noah and family are it.  God wiped out everyone else.  Which means that everyone who is and has ever been, if you read the Bible "literally" is a product of Noah's kids boning.  And since we never hear about Noah's daughters, that's even more problematic.

I don't personally hold this to be true.  For one thing, I don't believe it ever happened "literally."  And for another, I'm pretty sure that we're all the product of siblings boning anyway.  There's a lot of incest in human history and prehistory.  It happened.  It's not really worth worrying about.

Why am I bringing this up right now?  Because it's important to remember that Noah and family are it, and the logical problems that come therewith.

---

Now, back to Canaan.  Why is it important that Noah and family are it?  Because Canaan becomes a very important name later on in the Bible.  And this extremely unjust curse of Noah is a just-so story about how the Canaanites are fit to be subjugated by the Israelites.

So when Israelite kids asked their parents, "Why are we always bashing the Canaanites?" their parents could respond with this story.  Because Canaan's dad saw his dad's junk.

Bullshit.  I'm calling bullshit on Noah.  Canaan did absolutely nothing to deserve this.  And I'm pretty sure the Canaanites did nothing to deserve being subjugated by the Israelites.  The Bible isn't always pleasant.  And if you read it "literally" it'll probably make you unpleasant too.

Holy Moly: All the Animals?

And God said to Noah, "Everything that lives and moves will be your food. Just as I gave you the green grasses, I now give you everything."

God then introduces the kosher concept that one cannot eat meat which still has blood in it.  But God just said, "Bro, eat all the animals.  Like, all of them."

Because Genesis 9 doesn't originate from when kosher was a thing, kids. Remember that. It's just as silly to believe that kosher has always been a thing as it is to believe that hala'al has always been a thing. Or that parts of Daniel are talking about 21st century life.  Or, despite the fact that the writers of the Gospels definitely want to convince us that Jesus is the fulfillment of the prophecies, that the prophets in the Old Testament would have agreed.  The Bible is a collection of oral history written down way later and collected way later than that.

I also spoke to Noah, briefly, with regard to the covenant, and he said, "Note that God didn't say He would never wipe out all life again.  He just said it wouldn't be a flood.  So if you're worried about climate change being divine wrath, just remember that all life isn't going to be wiped out in a flood.  Mass starvation, wars, disease, drought, wildfires, and tornadoes maybe, but you just stay put in your coastal cities because you're the most important people in the history of ever and God said there wouldn't be another flood.  To me, a proto-Jew.  Yeah, you people are idiots."

I tried to get him to elaborate, but he just chuckled and took a sip of his beer.  Then he devoured a giant ham hock.

Holy Moly: The Thing About Birds

I've been through this already but I'm going to have to go through it again.  And then again.  And pretty much every single time I hit it in the Bible, which is going to be a lot.

This book was not handed down by God to King James I, who then had some type-setters print it out.  It's a collection of extremely old stories which were told for a long, long time before they ever got written down, probably in a language which changed as the stories were retold.  And then it was written down.  Not in English.  And then it was copied.  Still not in English, but into other languages than the original.  For a long time.  And then it was translated into English.  By a bunch of different people.  This cannot be stressed enough.  Basically, the Bible I'm reading is about as far from the stories in the Bible, textually, as... well, as anything can be.  Yes, there are a few works which have come down from a longer history, and probably some which had a more convoluted history before they were ever translated for the first time, but the Bible is up there.  One could even make the argument that the Christian Bible is more convoluted than the Jewish Torah, which has a lot of what I've just said baked into it.

So the Bible is as old as the hills.  Older than the hills.  As old as dirt.  But there are, as I said, possible a few things older than it, and one of them is the story of Gilgamesh.  We've got written versions of Gilgamesh from back when Noah was probably just a Semitic name that some tribal storyteller gave to a part of the Gilgamesh story to make it applicable to his particular tribe.  Or hers.  I'm better his, because of what we know about Semitic tribes, but who knows?  We don't.

Oddly enough though, that Gilgamesh has a flood story in it isn't proof that Noah was just ripping off Gilgamesh.  There are other flood stories too, all of them from the "older than dirt" school of literature.  And the thing is, the Flood isn't in Gilgamesh so much as it's talked about in Gilgamesh.  Utnapishtim, the immortal man, tells Gilgamesh his story, which involves the Flood.  And that story is found elsewhere too.

Why am I telling you all this?  What does this have to do with birds?  Give me a second.

Let's get back to Noah.  After some more time jumps (told you, collected oral history and that means it doesn't always make sense with itself) Noah gets the bright idea to check whether the flood has gone down enough that he can finally let all of the passengers out of what must have been a stinky boat.  So he sends out some birds to check things out.  This isn't the stupidest idea in the Bible, let me tell you.  Maybe not the smartest, but certainly well within the realm of smartness.  He sends out one bird and it flies around until the water dries up.  Then he sends out another because this is collected oral history and it doesn't make any goddamn sense, again to see if the water has dried up.  No dice; the bird comes back without being able to land anywhere.  He sends it out again and it brings him back some plant material, so he knows that the water has subsided.  Then he sends it out again and it doesn't come back, so... he knows the water, etc.

Let me race through the rest so I can get back to the point at hand: Noah then opens up the hatch and takes a shufty and low and behold, water gone.  And then the water was gone, and the water was gone again.  You'd think that they would have edited out the repetitions that internally conflict, but they didn't.  I'm really not trying to say that the Bible is bad because it contains these internal inconsistencies.  It is what it is and I'm just addressing them as I come to them.  Wait until we hit David and Goliath.

Then, in the capstone to this story, the part that everyone takes away, God says to Noah, "Okay, I promise I will never again kill everyone with a flood, so no need to freak out if you see a storm brewing.  And here's a rainbow to remind me and you that I said that."  And that should have been the end of Chapter 8, but instead it's dragged into Chapter 9, half and half.  I am going to criticize the later, much later, people who numbered and divided chapters and verses.  That's your button, assholes.  Come back when you've workshopped it a bit more.

So that's the point of the story and Noah is great and God isn't mad any more.

But let's go back to Utnapishtim.  Turns out Utnapishtim had the same bright idea about birds when he washed up on what could easily have been the only dry land in the universe.  He sent out three birds, one after another, until the last one didn't come back and he knew there had to be dry land somewhere.  Why he didn't just look out the damn window is anyone's guess, but they didn't have glass back then and maybe the windows had to stay shut so as not to swamp the boat.  Whatever.

Utnapishtim sent a dove, a swallow, and a raven, and the raven didn't come back.  Ravens are smart birds.  Maybe there's a just-so story there.  But for our purposes, the raven was last.

Noah also sent out a raven.  First.  And it, seemingly, found dry land, because, if you read it, "it flew back and forth until the waters over the entire earth had dried up."  So I'm calling shenanigans on the Noah story here.  This, more than anything, is my textual clue that there might be a bit of borrowing going on.  And if that had been all there was to it, I wouldn't highlight this particular part, but rather I'd go on and hit that Covenant button like everyone else.

But that's not all there is to it.  Noah sends a second bird, and he sends a dove this time.  Ravens can probably fly further than doves, so maybe it was insurance to make sure that the raven hadn't found dry land fifty miles away or something.  And if the dove had flown out and not flown back, that would be all there is to it.

But the dove brings back proof.  It brings back a plant, specifically an olive leaf.  That's good proof: olives are important and if the water has gone down in the olive groves, that means the cast-aways have something to snack on.  And maybe that's all there is to it.

But remember the last time you saw a dove bearing an olive branch?  It wasn't the international symbol for, "Floodwaters Receding."  Before Noah leaves the ark, before he burns those offerings that are somewhat anachronistic, before God even thinks to Himself, "I don't think I should do that again," let alone tells Noah or sets up the rainbow, before all that, a bedraggled dove, who failed previously to find any dry land, brings back a scrap of olive branch.

And that's why the Bible is the Bible and Akkadian myths are Akkadian myths.  Because the Bible doesn't end with the raven or with dry land.  The Bible lets you know that the dove is the important bird.  Because even way, way back then, God wasn't just concerned with power or intelligence or greatness.  Even back then, God, and God's people, loved a bedraggled dove and the message it brought to those who thought they'd never see the end of the Flood.

And that's what God's about.  God's not just about rainbows and promises and being fruitful.  God's about terrified people huddling in a ship on the top of a mountain, just praying that their dove comes back to them.

Holy Moly: You're Gonna Build an Ark-y Ark-y

And God saw that things had gone to shit.

That's basically the crux of the early part of Noah's story.  God regretted making everything and decided to wipe the slate clean.  Creation hadn't gone the way He'd planned.

Seems to me like God should have seen this coming right after Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the Tree of Wisdom, frankly.  My reaction to that would probably have been to squash Adam and Eve back into the clay from which they came and to make some tentacle monsters instead or something.  But God is both capricious and forgiving, so He let it get to this point before deciding to hit that great cosmic Undo button.

I take this as proof of our free will.  And while the question always is: "Could God create a stone so big even He couldn't lift it?" I think the interesting question is, "Could God create a world which would go to so much shit even He couldn't put up with it any more?"  The answer: yes.  So God decides He's going to destroy the world.

But there's this one guy, Noah, who "walk[s] with God."  God likes him.  And I'm pretty sure we all know the story from here because of the fables of our culture or because of Aronofski movies.  God tells Noah, "Build an ark using a large number of cubits.  Take two of each animal, male and female and put them on the ark.  Then get in yourself, for I am going to flood the world."  And that's where Genesis 6 leaves us, waiting in anticipation for the CGI tsunamis and the wailing and gnashing of teeth among the wicked.

But Genesis 7 picks up with God saying to Noah, "Take seven pairs of every clean animal and one pair of every unclean animal and get in the ark with your family."  What gives?  Did God stutter?

We'll come back to this, but remember that the Bible was written on several stone tablets that Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai from a burning bush which apparently could chisel tablets.  So what it says goes, right?

Not exactly.  The Bible was definitely not written in stone by a burning bush, nor did it spring full-formed into Moses' head on Mt. Sinai.  It's a collection of writings by people who were collecting oral tradition thousands of years after said traditions were hatched.  The thing is, clean and unclean animals weren't even a thing for Noah because Kosher wasn't a thing until after Moses.  So that's an anachronism right there.

I'll leave it for smarter people than me to determine why it's there or why the same passage in two forms appears, but I think it probably has to do with an injection of Mosaic Law into a legend from a much earlier time in order to bring some additional "just-so" to bear on this particular legend.  But it's pretty inelegant, especially since a few lines later we've got clean and unclean animals, a pair each, being loaded up.  And then again a few lines after that, with no mention of cleanliness.

Anyway, however many pairs Noah took, he loaded them all into the ark.  Possibly twice, with a flood happening.  Must have been a schlep.

There's a similar confusion with time.  The flood rose for 40 days and 40 nights, or maybe 150 days, or something else.  Again, we're talking about old, old stories being written down much later.  And then collected later than that.  And then edited later than that.  At a certain point, someone must have just said, "Screw it, put it all in there.  Better that than maybe losing something important."  So there was a flood and everything died.

Note also that the waters rose to 23 feet high, which was apparently enough to cover the mountains, plate tectonics not having been invented yet so mountains were much shorter.  I'm sure the Creationists have answers for that too, but why listen to Creationists?

Genesis 8 starts out with some more time strangeness, but suffice it to say that everyone was in the ark for a long time.  I think that's probably all that the ancient authors wanted to convey, and it must have been shitty, both metaphorically and literally, in that ark by that point.  Then the ark comes to rest on Mt. Ararat.

Except it doesn't, because we've got an interlude with some birds first.

Holy Moly: Nephilim

Oh, the Nephilim.  There are so many different translations of this passage and different commentaries, and it's difficult to untangle them all.  I don't think I'm even going to try, because I'd just like to say something different here.

But first, here's the Common English Bible's translation of Genesis 6:4.

In those days, giants lived on the earth and also afterward, when divine beings and human daughters had sexual relations and gave birth to children. These were the ancient heroes, famous men.

They footnote "giants" as "Nephilim" because that's the Hebrew word and we can't be sure whether the authors meant literal giants or just that "Nephilim" was a tribal name, or possibly that by "giants" they meant the same thing as we mean when we say we "stand on the shoulders of giants," meaning great men (this seems the most likely).

Sometimes "divine beings" is translated as "sons of God," which has led some people to speculate that what is actually meant is that the children of Adam through Seth were uniquely blessed, being these sons of God, and meanwhile there were other strains of humanity, either descendants of Cain or of Adam's other, unnamed children, and the children of Seth polluted their divine bloodline by intermarriage (as opposed to, say, incest, which would seem like the only other option, but don't judge too harshly; it was pretty common in the old days when one wanted to keep one's tribe pure).

And sometimes it seems like these "giants" are the result of the sons of God and daughters of men having sex, but other times it seems like the Nephilim might actually be those sons of God or divine beings.  Like I said, it's confusing.

Before I leave that by the wayside, people who believe in the literal Bible have to believe in this stuff too.  Because if there's one thing that "ancient heroes, famous men" and "giants" says to me, it's that we should be taking everything we read literally.  And also, they're not reading the Hebrew original, so they're probably taking King James' version literally, which is:

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

Yeah, so they're literally believing that about 6000 years ago, humans and giants literally interbred.  I've heard justifications, but they don't hold much water.  Nor do I care to make any wild theories, because... well, give me a second.

See, here's how I read it:

Once upon a time, when the world was young, there were great men, heroes, who arose from the divine bloodline.  We've already given you the names of some of them.  Remember Enoch?  He was a giant and lived for 365 years.  Now let me tell you the story of when one of those great men, Noah, was the last righteous man in the world, and what God did to save him from destruction.

Gods intermarrying with mortals?  Yep, the Greeks did that.  So did the Egyptians.  So did pretty much every other ancient culture.  How else to explain great deeds and great men?

So I don't think it's that strange a passage, really.  It's setting up the story.  But what annoys me is that clearly there were plenty of good stories about the Nephilim because they were great men and so forth, but we don't hear about any of them.  If you start a story with, "Once upon a time there were great heroes on the Earth..." I want to hear about more than just, "... and then God got mad that the heroes were falling into sin and decided to wipe them all out with a flood."

How many of these great heroes, these Nephilim, are we missing out on?  Gilgamesh has a great flood too (as do many other traditions and stories) but we also get to see him kicking some ass and adventuring.  Did the writers of the Bible take all the old stories and just pick this one?  Did there used to be whole other books of the Bible where other Nephilim fought Enkidu, invented fire, forged magic rings, or any other adventures that other "giants" of myth have got up to?

I tend to think that there was probably some recycling going on.  Likely some of the stories of these heroes made it into the Bible in other places where they needed great heroics.  But still, wouldn't it be amazing to hear some of the stories as they originally were told?

But be that as it may, we've got the set-up: there were and still are heroes in the world, and one day the last righteous man was Noah, descended from a long line of giants.  And so God said... well, we'll get to that next.

Holy Moly: Generations

When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness, in his own image; and he named him Seth. After Seth was born, Adam lived 800 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Adam lived a total of 930 years, and then he died.

And then there's more like this. We get the family tree, or rather a branch of it, stretching from the first man Adam to his distant relative Noah. And we skim the hell out of it, right?

This isn't a regularly-quoted part of the Bible.  In fact, I'd wager that most if not all of the generational charting in the Bible, Old and New Testament, isn't preached on much.  It's hard to do.  You've got these men who are clearly living way, way longer than they actually did, siring children who mean nothing to anyone, and proceeding to the good parts of the Bible where we actually get to hear something about what someone who was sired (in his father's 182nd year, no less) actually did for someone.

Which is why the Bible is tricky.  See, we don't care that Noah's father... well, let me let the book tell it:

When Lamech had lived 182 years, he had a son. He named him Noah and said, “He will comfort us in the labor and painful toil of our hands caused by the ground the Lord has cursed.” After Noah was born, Lamech lived 595 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Lamech lived a total of 777 years, and then he died.

But for your average ancient Hebrew, genealogy was incredibly important.  How can we tell?  Well, for starters, they took the time to write it down.  We can also see parallels in other traditions such as the Norse, who were obsessed with genealogy to the point that, well, they wrote it down in their important books too.  We skim those parts as well, because as Monty Python has show us, it's damned hard to get an exciting Icelandic saga going if we get hung up on the fact that Thorgeir was son of Thorkel Braggart who took to wife Gudren, daughter of Helm the priest of Ljosawater... and so on and so on.

But they found this stuff fascinating.  Most ancient peoples thought that it was extremely important to your own character who your father (possibly mother, but rarely) was, and his character came from his father, and so on back to the beginning.  There are still cultures that believe strongly in these lineages, and your own last name is a vestige of this, albeit that for most people their last name only traces back to the time when their family became important or confused enough to warrant one.

So Noah being a descendant of Adam was very important, and to prove that he was the writers of the Bible set down his lineage because for them that was right back to the beginning.

Nowadays we'd be more likely to skip this stuff and go on to the next chapter, beginning with, "So there was this guy called Noah who..." and assume that people would get that he must be descended from Adam because everyone is.  But the Bible doesn't assume that, and probably because there were tales and legends of all of the people in Noah's line.  Seth might have been the first guy to realize that planting seeds in rows made it easier to harvest the crops.  We don't know.  Lamech might have been the first guy to decide that bathing was a good idea sometimes.  There are simply vast reams of legends, stories, and fables which the Bible doesn't record because it's a collection of some but not even most stories, written down thousands of years after those stories had passed into legend.

It's also important to note that genealogy was a powerful tool for bringing people together.  Maybe Seth was the primogenitor of a tribe that the original tellers of these genealogies wanted to name-drop, for whatever reason.  They picked him, of all of Adam's children, to be the sire of the line of Noah.  We'll probably never know exactly why.

Life back then was all about family and extended family.  We haven't even gotten to the origin of the tribes of Israel, but these would have been tribes too, small ones, family units and cousins and so forth.  Keeping track of to whom you were related was important.

But let's also look at what it says about Seth.  He was, "a son in [Adam's] own likeness, in his own image..."  And Adam was created in the image of God.  So the Bible is telling us that Seth too was created in the image of God, and so would be his sons, and their sons, and so on.

Then the Bible is careful to tell us that each of these men, after their firstborn who would be the inheritor, had other sons and daughters.  Why?  These people would have been keen on procreation, on being fruitful and multiplying, so all of our Biblical ancestors would have to have been fruitful.  They may have been living under God's curse, but they were blessed with many children and long lives.

And those lives.  Oy.  If only we could live half as long and remain so fruitful in our old age. The age numbers doubtless mean something too, because they're not just "a great many years," or "1000 years," (which, to the audience, would have meant "a great many years").  But as to what they mean, I can't guess.  Again, fact passes into story, story to myth, myth to legend, and then it gets written down much later when I'm not even sure the writers knew exactly what was meant.  The fact that they are said to have lived so long may be a way to show that these were truly legendary dudes, or to decry the decline of the "modern" audience who aren't so sainted, or perhaps to imply that these guys were special, unlike the unmentioned other people who perhaps didn't live as long.  But it's a legend.  Don't take it at face value.

We get to Enoch, who, "walked faithfully with God 300 years..."  There's a story here.  He lived 65 years before fathering Methuselah, where we're not told he walked faithfully with God, then after his firstborn son is born he does the faithful bit for 300 years, and then, "he was no more, because God took him away." Why Enoch gets this extra-special treatment I can't say.  But remember the phrasing there: "[Enoch] walked faithfully with God..."  That's an interesting way of saying it.  Not just, "he was faithful to God," but he walked with God. Maybe there's a missing travelogue of Enoch's journey with God.

And finally we come to Noah, who will be important later on as a sort of renewal, a rebirth of mankind.  It's the first of many.  His name sounds like the Hebrew for "comfort," which must not have been much comfort to him during his travails.  But that's next chapter.

Holy Moly: My Brother’s Keeper

So Cain and Abel bring gifts to God and God plays favorites once again.  Poor Cain, bringing wheat to a fatted lamb fight.

“I am not my brother’s keeper,” is perhaps the most important part of this story. Remember those words, because Cain says them. Cain the fratricide, the primordial bad guy, the first murderer, says them. Not some good guy who is saying something pleasing to God.

So what can we take from this? A list of genealogy and a desire to sacrifice fat to God rather than the fruits of the soil (I’d like to believe Cain showed up with some turnips, personally)? Yes, that’s what folks for thousands of years have been getting out of Genesis 4.  And it certainly sets a precedent to hate the descendants of Cain (who are, I should point out, not vampires). We even get the terrific name Tubal-Cain to use as a Masonic symbol.

But that’s not the important thing.

“I am not my brother’s keeper,” is synonymous with, “I killed my brother.”  So if you say it, you’re identifying with murder.

Holy Moly: The Fall

Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.

Pretty strong meat from the Lord there. Let’s back up.

The serpent (not, I would like to point out, the Devil, who appears in Paradise Lost) talks Eve into eating from the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. She, in turn, tells Adam to eat. Bam. The Fall.

I’m not here to justify this passage. Sure, it’s all allegory and myth. But seriously, fuck God. Ephraim, who has since been to some Lib meetings, is pretty ashamed of how the whole thing plays out. “Sure, we could have said that because Adam and Eve ate the fruit they were cursed, Eve to suffer the pain of birth, Adam to suffer the pain of working for his food. Sexist, but not that sexist. But no, we had to include this part:”

Your desire will be for your husband,
and he will rule over you.

At its heart, the whole thing is about adulthood. Adam and Eve are children, eating for free, roaming around shamelessly naked, cared for by their awesome Father figure. Then they grow up, gain knowledge than cannot be ungained, and have to deal with the fact that it’s not all Eden in life. Why? Because this story. Just so.

But there are problems. The Fall is portrayed as being humanity’s fault, like perpetual childhood is something in which God would want humans to stay. Not much free will there, amiright? I guess God gave them free will to listen to the serpent.

From a mythical standpoint, it’s perfectly fine to have forbidden knowledge: Pandora (not the streaming music service) anyone? But usually either the knowledge is the curse or there’s some positive part of the knowledge or both. Pandora keeps hope in the box. What do Adam and Eve get?

See, legalism again: break God’s rules and get a good smiting. Never mind that knowing good and evil is a bit of a curse in and of itself; without knowledge of good and evil, everything is good.

And why couldn’t the serpent have tricked Eve into eating the fruit from the tree of life? God would be pissed but we’d all live forever.

This part doesn’t sit well with me. I want a rewrite, more progressive, and less with God cursing and more with God being disappointed that God can’t keep God’s children safe and children forever.

And that’s all you’re getting on the Fall.

Holy Moly: Two Beginnings?

Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done. Gen 2:1-3

This can only be explained as the writer being lazy and sticking a paragraph of the previous chapter at the beginning… wait, Ephraim is telling me that the original writers of the Torah didn’t come up with the chapter headings. So… someone in the middle ages fucked up royal, huh?

Why break the chapters like this? Could it be to make it so that it doesn’t seem quite as much like two different origin stories hastily cobbled together? To make Adam and Steve… sorry, Eve, seem like part of the previous story?

Adam and Eve

So here we are, where we all want to be, Genesis 2 (the not-scribal-error part). We don’t know what day it is because, well, it’s a different story. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. Adam and Eve are to “the six days of creation” what Khepri the creator is to Atum the creator: both of the latter are creation myths by the same culture that lasted thousands of years, and both can coexist happily, but neither have to be part of the other for it to work. So it is with Genesis 1 and 2.

Genesis 1 tells the story of creation, the genesis of the world if you will. Human beings are put on the world but other than “Get fuckin’!” they don’t get much air time. So now we’re going to trace the roots of the chosen people way, way back to the father of it all, Adam, whose name means “The Man,” by the by. He’s the primeval man. And his creation from dust is very, very similar to the creation myths of numerous other Middle Eastern cultures, except for some reason without the whole jacking off onto the dust to make mud aspect of things. Ephraim tells me they discussed that but wanted to avoid a hard R rating.

So God makes Adam, and he’s obviously a chosen guy because God made him told him to give names to things; which, as we saw in Genesis 1, is a pretty big deal. I can’t help but wonder what would have happened had Adam decided to name everything “Burton Q. Lindquist Jr.” but that’s neither here nor there. God is on the hunt for a partner for Adam, so Adam gets to name everything.

Here’s where a culture which placed value in a particular animal might have changed this myth. Say the Israelites had placed particular value in goats, for instance. Then God would have gone looking for a partner for the primeval man and when God brought forth the goats to be named, that would have been the partnership. And maybe the whole thing with the Fall and ancient mysoginy would have wound up differently.

But the ancient authors of this myth wanted to make it pretty clear that only woman was fit to be a partner to man. Now, let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room: this is a Just-So story about how men and women came to get together, and it rather places women in the subservient role in the relationship. “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.” And that’s how the leopard got his spots. Woman is part of man, she is his helpmeet, etc.

But think about it for a minute based on what I just said: no other partner for man would do than woman. It’s an acknowledgment that human relationships are going to be paramount to this particular story, the story of the chosen people, not the story of the chosen people and also their goats. Livestock are important, but husband and wife are one fucking flesh, yo.

And nowhere does God say, “And by the way, only a man and a woman can do this; if you’ve got two dudes screwing, forget it, out of the pool, I’m tearing it down and starting over. Two chicks doing it is totally cool though, as long as they’re hot.” God just says, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.” Man does pretty much all the talking, and it’s clear he’s straight, so when he says that’s how it is, take that as how he thinks it should be, not how God says. Adam’s doing all the naming in this chapter anyway, and God lets him, but God doesn’t say it’s all correct, just that if that’s the name Adam decides on, that’s the name he decides on.

In all seriousness, I don’t want this to all be about liberal theology. The men (pretty much all men) writing the Bible were living in a time when things were a certain way. Moving on.

Holy Moly: In the Beginning

I'm embarking on a little project inspired by some far better folks. I'll be reading through the Bible, bit by bit, tackling it as it comes, speaking with my various sources, and just generally cutting it to pieces. Because it's a book. I promise you'll find something in here by which to be scandalized. Get that out of the way. No, I'm not going after the Bible as a book of history and tearing it down. No, I don't believe it's the inerrant word of God, any more than my conversations with God are. God doesn't err, but humans do plenty of that to make up for it.

So, without further ado...

---

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. Gen 1:1-2 NIV

Let's get this out of the way: I don't read Hebrew. I'm not using the KJV here, although sometimes I might. I'm going for the NIV because it's a neutral territory.

This is one, count 'em, one of the two creation stories in the beginning of Genesis. Genesis means creation, so why isn't the whole thing taken up with what seems like a pretty darned important story: that first sentence there. We want God to go all Minecraft on shit. We want to hear the precise recipe used to create the heavens and the earth. And where was God before all this went down?

But Genesis is about how the chosen people (not Christians, for those keeping score at home) came to be the chosen people. And the writers of Genesis pretty much threw up their hands and said, "Fuck it, He's God, He did it, who are we to argue?"  I spoke with Ephraim, who sat on the committee, and he said to me, "Look, we weren't setting out to make a scientific account of things. That the universe was created was the important thing at the time. If we'd known you would all be taking our work as science, we probably would have said something about the Big Bang."

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day. Gen 1:3-5 NIV

I think you'll agree that light is a pretty important first step. We can't see without light, even if there isn't anything to see. I find it interesting that God created the heavens and the earth first, then created light. It shows that the writers were pretty sure that light couldn't exist without something to shine on. We now know this is bullshit.  But they did get the fact that darkness is merely an absence of light correct, so kudos to them.

The order of creation here is really more fascinating than my flip observation above. There was a period of time when the earth, without form though it was, existed without the traditional observations of time. No light means no cycle of day and night, which was only created after God brought it into existences later in the passage. So how long was it? It's traditional to lump all of the stuff prior to "the first day" into one day, but that's utter crap: evening and then morning constituted the first day, and all of that takes place after God creates the earth, light, and names day and night.

Also notice (I only did after thinking about it) that the day cycle is evening-morning, not the other way around. Which means that not until God turned out the lights for the first time did time start cycling. Also, how hopeful is the thought that the day may start out dying but it's reborn before the end. I like that thought. It's not about Jesus; these folks were writing way, way before that was a thought. But I like the idea that day follows night, not that night follows day.

I don't know about you, but I love the magic of Genesis 1. God gives form to things by speaking them. To jump way ahead, in the beginning was the word. Words give humans power over things; we can name and therefore identify, count, segregate, and even specify the future of things because we name them. What else could writers of a sacred text do but believe that their words were small echoes of the primal creative force of the God who spoke things into being?

The idea is hardly unique to Judeo-Christian religious types either. The Egyptians believed that hieroglyphs (from the Greek for holy marks or letters) were magical writing, creative symbols which brought that which they represented to life.  In fact, anywhere there is writing, there is a creative impulse. Only by defacing or destroying the symbols can you destroy. That's pretty fucking neat, when you think about it.

And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. God called the vault “sky.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day. Gen 1:6-8 NIV

Here we go a bit off the rails again, because we all know there's no great ocean above the sky, don't we? Unless you take it a bit more figuratively (that's a word I like to use a lot when talking about the Bible) in which case, hell yes, let's have some Steampunk up in this bitch and picture God creating some mighty sky-craft that ply the spaceways between worlds and hunt mighty Leviathan in the deep reaches of the cosmos.

Or we could just take Ephraim's word that it was just a metaphor, and how were ancient Jews supposed to know what space was like anyway? Look up. Doesn't that look like a giant vaulted ceiling to you? Me too. Fair enough. No illithids in the Pentateuch.  Not that it wouldn't have been better with them included.  Look for that in a few thousand years.

And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good.

Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so. The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day. Gen 1:9-13 NIV

I don't get into the Bible as science; it's not. But notice how they don't get it too far from wrong sometimes.

Note also that when God says it, it happens just like God says. The authors are very, very interested in you knowing this. God's word is the way things happen. Remember that. Much more important than which day had which thing in it.

But notice also that God says it, it happens, and then God sees it. We'll come back to that.

And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day. Gen 1:14-19 NIV

We finally get around to a source for light. Whoa, messed up, right? Or could it be that obviously there's light which comes from the sun and moon and stars but also from firelight, from ambient light, from reflections, from the light inside all of us? Deep, man.

Also here we get some timekeeping proper.  Because what if you fell asleep and woke up and didn't know what day it was?  Light-dark-light-dark is a good way to tell whether it's day or not, but not what day.  And even back then, on day 4 (God can count them because God is God) God is thinking about sacred times. Judaism is big on sacred times. Could be that's why it's mentioned so prominently.

And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.” So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day. Gen 1:20-23 NIV

They get the seas right but the birds a bit off.  Can you really blame them? Seems like they're homing in on something.

God's big on being fruitful and multiplying. God wants the animals to be happy.  I like that.

And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so. God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. Gen 1:24-25 NIV

 Even at this early stage, the Linnaean impulse to taxonomy is strong. We've got swimming things, flying things, livestock, slithering things, and wild animals. Not awful, although is a lizard a wild animal, a slithering thing, or a swimming thing? "Not the fucking point," said Ephraim, and he's right.

You can see where folks who believe this stuff is science might get mighty screwed up and believe things like spontaneous generation.  If the land produces living creatures, where's the sex? I guess the swimming things and birds get to get their freak on at all times with divine sanction, but land-dwellers have to arise from dung heaps and rotten meat.  Yet another example of biblical prudishness, I guess.  Or I could be reading too much into this. Ephraim says I am.

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. Gen 1:26-27 NIV

 Holy shit, wait a minute. Male and female he created them? I thought it was Adam, and then Eve was his rib, and anyway there are no indications we're only getting two of the little bastards.

Wait for it.

The "rule over" part is worrisome except it isn't. This isn't the Bible according to slithering things. This is the Bible written by ancient mankind-be-ers (humans?) which means of course they get created last and they get to lord over the rest of creation.

Let's skip that part and look at the real emphasis here, repeated twice: you're created in God's image.

I could spend probably the rest of my life talking about that, but it only becomes really important later on.  Right now, it's just important that you know that you're special.

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so. Gen 1:28-30 NIV

Interesting observations: we're all supposed to be vegetarians, God speaks to us, and God wants us to
be happy and make with the fuckin'!

Let's tackle that middle point. God speaks to us. How amazing is that shit? But he spoke to the other creatures too. Food for thought there.

God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day. Gen 1:31 NIV

And on the seventh day he rested... wait, where's that part?

Wait for it.

We now circle back around to God speaking, it happening, and God seeing it. What does that mean? I choose to believe that it means that while God can create, God makes it so that things don't just happen well. God is pleased with God's creation, but for more reasons than just pride of creation. Six days have gone by and things are going well. God named things and gave them instructions, but those things went off and did well by themselves, and God saw that it was very good. That's heartening. It's also terrifying. Free will is like that.

But more than that, God sees that creation is good. That's important. It didn't end, "And God saw that he'd royally fucked up with the platypus and also that the insects were fucking creepy, and he would have trashed the whole thing but he was tired and feeling like a good stiff drink, so he left it and went off somewhere else to get smashed."  God takes an active interest in creation, but God is pleased, and God is only pleased because creation turned out well, not because it turned out according to God's design. God is stepping back, taking a gander at the canvas, and saying, "Holy Moly, that worked out better than I thought it would."

Heartening thought, that.  Sometimes shit works out to be very good.