Genesis Chapters 12-15

Genesis 12-15

In this post we follow Abram/Abraham and Lot around the Middle East, Witness God’s first plague, see Abraham the Liar in action, watch Lot’s and Abraham’s relationship change in the blink of an eye, see Abraham the Warlord in action, and discover that God can’t read a compass

Chapter 12

For the next few chapters of Genesis we follow the life of Abram or as he will be called later, Abraham.  At the beginning of this chapter we fade in on Abram as God tells him to take Sarai his wife, Lot his nephew, all their possessions and slaves, and leave Haran on a journey to Canaan, which Abram promptly does in 1963 BC at the age of 75 (Gen 12:1-5)

Since we learned at the end of chapter 11 that Haran was in the land of Canaan, Abram and his posse basically journeyed from Canaan to Canaan, or to put it another way, they walked in a big circle. And settled on “the plain of Moreh (tree)” (Gen 12:6) in modern Day Israel, not to be confused with Moria which was not in Canaan, but rather in the Misty Mountains.

God appears to Abram by the tree, and gives him the land around it, Abram builds an altar, says “thanks” and heads south. (Gen 12:7-9)

Abram then finds out that there is a famine in the south, so he heads for Egypt. (Gen 12:10)

While on the way to Egypt, Abram tells Sarai that since she is so hot the Egyptians will kill him and take her if they think she’s his wife, so she should pretend to be his sister. (Gen 12:11-13)  Had the Egyptians known about Abram’s family’s history of incest, they would have killed him anyway thinking that sister would also mean wife.  Sure enough, when they get into Egypt, the Egyptians see the hottie with Abram and take her to the Pharaoh who gives Abram some animals and slaves for her while under the impression that she’s his sister but not wife. (Gen 12:14-16)  Apparently sisters were worth drought animals and slaves back then.  Abram seems to be OK with his wife living with the Pharaoh, after all he got new slaves and camels, but God doesn’t approve.

God sees what is going on and sends his very first plague down on the Pharaoh and his family (Gen 12:17) thus beginning God’s habit of hurting children to get his way. There is no mention by Egyptians of any plagues during Senusret 1’s reign, but they may have been embarrassed about the whole sister/wife mix up and told everybody in the Middle East who could write to ignore it.

Pharoah goes to Abram and asks him why he lied about Sarai being his sister, and thus getting him in trouble with the plague god, then tells Abram to take his hot wife, and all his stuff and leave.  Abram does as he’s asked and leaves along with all the new stuff he had gotten for pimping out his wife. (Gen:18-20)

Chapter 13

So, having been ejected from Egypt, Abram and his posse take all their stuff and go to Bethel. (Gen 13:1-4)  13:1 says that they headed south, but Bethel is north-east of Egypt in modern-day Israel.  So, either Abram circumnavigated the globe going south to north, the poles have changed since then, or the divinely inspired word of God or God himself has problems with a compass.  The latter would explain the whole walking in circles thing earlier.

It seems that Lot had been doing quite well for himself also, because we learn that Lot went along with Abram, but they each had so many sheep and goats, that the cowhands of the two of them started getting into fights.(Gen 13:5-7)

So Abram and Lot have a meeting to sort hings out.  Abram tells Lot that with all the land around them, that there shouldn’t be any reason to fight, and told Lot that he could pick half and Abram would take the other half. (Gen 13:8-9)

So, Lot looked around and decided that he liked the “plain of Jordan”, and headed east toward Jordan where the wicked city of Sodom was. (Gen 13:10-13)  Lot, it seems, could read a compass and went the right way.

After Lot left, God told Abram to stand in the place where he lived:  now face north, east, west, and south, and that all of the land he could see would belong to him and his descendants forever. (Gen 13:14-17)  So, having figured out a compass, Abram packed up and moved to Hebron which ironically, is in the land now called the West Bank or Palestinian territories, where he built another altar. (Gen 13:18)

Chapter 14

As it turns out, Lot hadn’t made a very good choice about where to live.  It seems that war was rampant in the area, and eventually Lot ended up being captured along with all of his stuff, by the kings who defeated the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah. (Gen 14: 1-12)

One guy escaped from the whole mess and went and told Abram what had happened. (Gen 14:13)  When Abram heard what had happened to Lot (who was now suddenly his brother, and not his nephew) he armed his servants and they went and smote the bad guys and rescued Lot and his lot, as well as the other people who had been captured in Sodom and Gomorrah. (Gen 14:14-16)

Why God had decided to make Lot, Abram’s brother is not explained.  It’s possible that he was trying to correct the mess with Lot’s uncle also being his brother-in-law.  Though this made it worse, because now his brother was also his brother-in-law.  Well, as the old saying goes: incest is best, put your sister to the test.

So, when Abram got back from his smoteing trip, the King of Sodom who had been stuck in a slime pit since 14:10, came out to meet him.  He heaped a bunch of flattery on Abram and then said that he could keep the spoils looted from his kingdom, if Abram would just give his subjects back to him. (Gen 14:17-21)  Seems like a nice enough offer.

Abram got a little holier-than-thou with the king and said that he wouldn’t keep a dime of the spoils other than what his men had already eaten or taken, so that the king wouldn’t be able to say that Abram was rich because of him. (Gen 14:22-24)

Chapter 15

So, after the smoteing, God came to Abram in a dream and took credit for everything that Abram had accomplished.  Abram whined about not having any kids, and God promised him that he would eventually have lots of kids, and Abram took his word for it. (Gen 15:1-6)

Then Abram asked for another dream, so God told him to get a three-year old heifer, a three-year old “she goat”, a three-year old ram, a turtle-dove and a young pigeon as an offering (Gen 15:7-9)

So Abram got the animals, cut the cow and goats in half, placed butchered animals side by side with the birds on top like cherries.  He kept the vultures off of the carcasses, and when it got dark fell asleep and had a nightmare. (Gen 15:10-12)

In his nightmare, God told Abram that his descendants would end up slaves for 400 years in a foreign land, but, with God’s help, would come out with “great substance”, and that Abram himself would die peacefully of old age. Then, four generations after Abram dies, his descendants would come back to the land he was in and win a war with the Amorites who would by then deserve it. (Gen 15:13-17)

The same day, God gave Abram all the land between the Nile and the Euphrates. (Gen 15:18-21)  Apparently, nobody told the Egyptians about this, because there is no record of the Egyptians losing half their kingdom during the 12th Dynasty.  In fact it is one of the more stable periods in their history.  But, God’s divine authors seem to overlook reality quite a bit, so why be historically accurate at this point.

So, next time we continue on with the stories of Abraham when he starts having bastard children, he and his wife get name changes, guys start losing foreskin to the knife, and God spots sin in Sodom.  Sounds like a lot of fun, see you then.  Ron

Genesis Chapters 8-11

Genesis Chapter 8-11

In this post: The flood comes to an end, I explain where the water went, more divine senility, Noah the Drunk, God gives away the first slave, Tower of Babel, Noah’s family line to Abraham

Chapter 8:

When we last saw our heroes they were floating around on a small boat with millions of animals and a few thousand tons of manure.

We pick up our story in Gen 8:1 when God recovers from another bout of senility and “…remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all the cattle that was with him in the ark… .”  Then God causes a wind to stop the rain, and the other water coming from the sky as well as the water shooting up from the bottom of the ocean (Gen 8:2-3).

The water starts slowly receding.  Where did all the water go?  Well literalists will tell you that God lowered the ocean floor and raised the land so the water is still here.  Aside from there being no basis for that in this story or in any geological record, and its being an ignorance-based version of plate tectonics, it’s just plain stupid.  I find it much easier to believe that it all went down a drain at the bottom of the ocean, next to the spigot that it was coming out of in 8:2-3.  The spigot and drain are as of now undiscovered, but that in no way definitively proves that they aren’t there.  Then God put a stopper (also undiscovered…yet)  in it which left us with the water we have.  My version has just as much evidence as theirs and is better written.  Na Nanna, Boo, Boo.

Mt. Ararat

Anyway, after 150 days it had gone down about 13,000 feet to around 16,850 ft, so that on July 17th 2348 BC the Ark settles on Mt. Ararat, and by the first of October the mountain tops could all be seen.(Gen 8:3-5)  Actually the story says “mountains of Ararat” so it could have landed on any peak in the Armenian Highlands, but Mt. Ararat is a good choice because it is a volcano, and many early cultures loved their volcano gods.

After forty days of sitting on top of a mountain in a boat full of 10s of millions of pounds of manure, Noah opens the little window on top of his boat, and lets out a raven and a dove.  The raven flew around in circles for the next few months landing on the stinking boat, nevermore, while the dove flew around for a while and came back. (Gen 8:6-9)

After a week, Noah let the dove out again, and this time it came back with a newly sprouted olive leaf, which told Noah that the water was “abated from off the earth”,  or at least the hill that the olive tree was growing on. (Gen 8:10-11)  How an olive tree had survived almost six months under water is never explained, though I guess it could have been growing in one of the many empires that survived the flood intact with no water damage.

Noah waits another week and lets the dove go again, and the dove doesn’t come back. (Gen 8:12)  He probably got sick of the smell like the raven had.

8:13 tells us that on New Year’s Day “in the six hundredth and first year” Noah opens the Ark to reveal dryland.  Now obviously this isn’t the 601st year because the World had been around over twice that long, we can only assume that it means Noah’s 601st year, which would mesh with the rest of the story.  What doesn’t mesh is why Noah waited 37 days to open the boat if the land was already dry.  You would think he would want to air the place out as soon as possible.

Anyway, 8:14 says that the Earth wasn’t dry until the 27th of February which means 8:13 lied, or the author forgot.

Whenever the drying out happened, God told Noah to get his family and all the animals out of the boat, and Noah happily complied. (Gen 8:15-19) I’m sure everybody was getting tired of the piles of manure that by now were surrounding the boat.

It wasn’t to be a happy day for all involved because Noah immediately took one of every “clean” animal and bird, and set them on fire. (Gen 8:20)  We can’t be sure if this means that these animals had babies before they were put to death, or if this offering led to the extinction of these animals whose significant other was left without a mate.

Anyway, God catches a whiff of burning flesh and seems to like it.  It was probably a welcome smell since the millions of dead bloated people, and the 10s of millions of dead bloated animals that surely littered the ground, along with the heaping piles of manure surrounding the Ark, were most likely quite smelly.  Because of Noah’s animal scent-candle, God vows to never again kill everything on the planet: (Gen 8:21-22) I would just like to thank Noah for his flood-stopping Bar-B-Que.

Chapter 9

Chapter 9 starts with God telling Noah and his boys to go make babies, lots of babies. (Gen 9:1)

Not the Least Bit Scared of People

Then God tells the guys that every animal on the planet will now be scared of them.  (Gen 9:2)  It would have been nice if that fear had passed down through the generations, but alas, it hasn’t. It would seem that God cared more for Noah than he does for 13 year old admirers.  God then goes on to explain that animals should be scared of them because “every” animal is now to be considered food.  The one caveat is that they can’t eat hearts or blood. (Gen 9:3-4)

Verses 5-6 re-establish capital punishment, but this time for murderers instead of for killers of murderers.

God tells them to have babies again, in case they didn’t hear him the first time. (Gen 9:7)  And, this isn’t the end of his repeating himself:

In verses 8-13 Gods promises to never kill everything with a flood again and creates rainbows as a reminder of this.

In verses 14-17 God promises to never kill everything with a flood again and creates rainbows as a reminder of this.

Is God repeating things because he thinks Noah and his sons are thick-headed?  Is divine senility rearing its ugly head again?  Were there multiple authors?  You decide.  My money is on senility.

Gen 9:18 starts a rather odd side story.  In this story, Noah plants a vineyard, makes some wine from the grapes, gets blackout drunk, and passes out naked in his tent.  His son Ham stumbles upon his drunk, naked father and tells his two brothers, Shem and Japheth about it.  Shem and Japheth go to great lengths to cover their drunkard of a dad with a blanket without looking at him. (Gen 9:18-23) There is no mention of where Mrs. Noah is during this.

When Noah wakes up from his drunken coma, does he apologize to his family for getting blind drunk and passing out naked in a tent?  No, he gets mad at his son Ham for stumbling onto the sight of his alcoholic naked father, and curses Ham’s son Canaan to be a servant to his uncles. (Gen 9:24-27)

Then we are told that the drunk lived for 350 years after the flood and dies (liver cirrhosis) at the age of 950 in 1998 BC. (Gen 9:28-29)   Did you see the math error?  According to Gen 7:6 and 11 Noah was 600 when the flood started.  According to Gen 8:13 Noah was 601 when the flood ended, and 8:14 reiterates that the flood lasted for a year.  601 + 350=951, not 950.  God’s divinely guided messenger isn’t very good at math, or maybe God isn’t.  Either way a big mistake.

Chapter 10

This chapter is a series of begats.

Nimrod’s Nemisis

First we get  Noah’s oldest son Japheth’s family tree. (Gen 10:1-5) Then Ham’s. (Gen 10:6-20) Then Shem’s. (Gen 10:21-31)  Chapter 10 ends by telling us that this  was how the Earth was repopulated (Gen 10:32)  The only name of any interest is Nimrod the Hunter (Grandson of Ham) who rules Babel, and then goes on to fight the X-Men.

Chapter 11

Our final chapter for this post starts by telling us that everyone was speaking one language (Gen 11:1)  This should have been obvious since everyone at this point is descended from one family.

Then we are told that all of these people got together and started to build a huge tower toward the heavens as a way to unite them as a people.  (Gen 11:2-4)

So, God wonders out from where ever he had been hanging out since completing his first genocide and sees the tower (Gen 11:5)

When God sees the tower he tells his female companion that it is a sign that people have become smart, and full of ingenuity, and that if they can do such a wonderous thing then there is nothing that they can’t do if they put there minds to it (Gen 11:6)  Generally, such words spoken about children by a parent would be considered a good thing.  Not so to humanity’s kind and loving father.  Instead of congratulating his children, he and his female companion make it so the children can’t understand each other thereby creating the different languages and scattering the people all over the planet. Which is why the tower came to be called Babel. (Gen 11:7-9)

What God didn’t know was that there were at least four recorded languages before this: Sumerian , Egyptian, Akkadian, and Eblaite.  But, since these languages were different from Noahnese God probably didn’t understand them and ignored them, especially since speakers of these languages had all managed to survive the flood.

Then the chapter starts another begat list. This time just from Noah’s son Shem to Abram (Abraham born 2038 BC) and Abram’s nephew Lot. (Gen 11:10-27)  All the men mentioned in this list live longer than God’s set lifespan for humans.  It seems that God forgot again and let these guys live too long.

11:29 tells us that Abram marries a woman named Sarai, and that Abram’s brother Nahor marries their niece, Lot’s sister, Milcah.  It aint love if it aint in the fam’ly.

Then God gets a little personal and lets us know that Abram’s wife was barren. (Gen 11:30)

Then Abram’s dad takes Abram, Sarai, and lot from Ur where they had been living to live in a city named after Abram’s brother, and Abrams’ brother’s father-in-law, and lot’s father, Haran, in Canaan. (Gen 11:31)  Where Abram’s father dies in 1903 BC (probably from shame about his son marrying his granddaughter) (Gen 11:32)

Why they moved from a city that had survived the flood to a place designated as bad, we are not told.

Next time:  Abram, Sarai, and Lot wander around the Middle East making money.

See you then, Ron