Genesis Chapters 16-19

Genesis 16-19

In this post:  Abraham bangs the maid and has a bastard son named Ishmael, God shows that he is pro-slavery as well as supportive of beating and raping your slaves, Abraham goes on a circumcision bender, God has a bit of fun with Genocide, and Biblical family values on display.

Chapter 16

The First Key Party

This chapter opens with Sarai feeling bad that she hasn’t given Abram any children (16:1), so she comes up with the idea of letting Abram impregnate her maid.  Abram is fine with the idea so he and the maid Hagar get it on and she gets pregnant. Years later, when the Governor of California does this people lose their minds over it, but Abraham does it and he’s a great man.  Go figure.  

Anyway, when Hagar learns that she’s pregnant she gets upset, probably over Sarai pimping her out to Abram. (16:2-4)

Sarai whines to Abram about Hagar’s attitude.  Abram tells Sarai that Hagar belongs to her so she can do what she wants to with her, so Sarai beats her pregnant servant like any good slave owner would, and Hagar runs away. (16:5-6)

God tracks Hagar down and tells her to go back to her mistress so she can be beaten some more and have more kids.  He then tells her that the bastard she’s carrying will be a boy named Ishmael, and that he will be a wild man.  So Hagar does as she’s told and goes back. (16:7-14)

When she gets back Ishmael is born.  He is born in 1952 BC when Abram is 86 years old. (16:15-16)

Chapter 17

13 years later, in 1939 BC, God comes back to visit with Abram, and after bragging about how wonderful he is, he changes Abram’s name to Abraham, and offers him a deal. (17:1-5)

God says he will give Abraham many kids, some of whom will be kings, and that these kids, and their offspring, and so on will rule over the lands of Canaan forever.  In return, God wants a bunch of foreskins.  Abraham, his sons, and every man slave or free in his kingdom must have their foreskin cut off for God, and from then on every male baby must have his foreskin cut off when he turns eight days old.  Anyone who doesn’t give up his foreskin will be cut off from God.(17:6-14) It is never explained why God has such a foreskin fetish,

Then God says that Abraham has to change the spelling of his wife’s name from Sarai to Sarah, and that he will give him a son through her. (17:15-16)

Abraham laughed to himself about the idea of him having a son with his 90 year old wife when he’s 96.  But, God says it will happen and that they will call him Isaac, and he will grow up to be a great king in good standing with God. (17:17-19)

God then says that Abraham’s slave bastard will do well also, but not as well as Isaac, and then he leaves. (17:20-22)

So, Abraham rushes home and starts cutting off everyone’s foreskin.  He cuts off his foreskin, Ishmael’s foreskin, all his subjects’ foreskins, and all his slaves’ foreskins.  It’s one big foreskin party. (17:23-27)

Chapter 18

This chapter starts out with Abraham lounging on the porch of his tent with God, when three men suddenly appear in front of him.  It seems that the men are angels and Abraham immediately offers to wash their feet and feed them. The men look at him and say “…So do, as thou hast said (18:1-5) So, we have hungry, uppity angels, with dirty feet.  Abraham has Sarah and one of his cowboys fix up a nice meal for his guests and they chow. (18:6-9)

After the angels eat, they, God, Sarah, and Abraham have a discussion about how Sarah will soon have a child even though she is old and has gone through menopause (18:10-15), then the  Angels, and God get up and head toward Sodom and Abraham walks with them. (18:16)

God decides to tell Abraham about the destruction he has planned for Sodom and Gomorrah.  Abraham asks if he intends to kill the good people along with the bad, and he and God start haggling about the number of good people it will take to spare the rest; God really wants to kill these people, but Abraham not so much.  So, after some negotiation, God says that if he can find 10 good people he will let the rest live, but if not then they all die. Then God goes his way and Abraham goes home. (18:17-33)

Chapter 19

This chapter starts with Lot lounging at the Sodom city gate when two of the angels that we saw earlier come by. Lot convinces them to come to his house and have dinner and spend the night (19:1-3)  What happened to the third guy is never mentioned.  As they are getting ready for bed, a crowd of people surround the house and demand that Lot turn over his guests to them.  Lot goes outside and says that he can’t give them his guests, but he’ll give them his two virgin daughters to rape if they want. (19:4-8) The crowd turns down Lot’s offer and rushes the door. (19:9)

The angels grab Lot, pull him inside and strike the crowd blind. (19:10-11) Then they tell Lot that he needs to get his family and all his stuff and leave the city, because God doesn’t like the people here and they are here to destroy them. (19:12-13)  So, Lot tells his sons-in-law about it and they don’t listen. (19:14)

When morning rolls around the angels tell Lot to grab his wife and the two girls that he had offered up for rape and leave so they won’t get killed with everyone else.  So, they all hold hands and leave the city. (19:15-16)

Once outside the city, the angels tell them to run for their lives, not to look back, and escape to the mountains. But Lot is scared of a monster or something getting him in the mountains, so they decide that he can go to a small nearby town named Zoar and be safe there, and by sunrise Lot and his family are in Zoar. (19:17-23)

So, with Lot out of the way God sent fire and hot rocks down on Sodom and Gomorrah as well as the rest of the area around them destroying all the cities and towns in the area as well as all the people, plants, and animals (19:24-25)  It can be assumed that there were no more than 9 babies in the whole mess, because God had said 10 would stop it all.  So, 9 dead babies is OK, at least to God.

Lot’s wife got a little nosey and looked back (she probably heard all the babies screaming).  God promptly turned her into a pillar of salt. (19:26) Here we learn that God doesn’t like witnesses to his massacres.

When Abraham got up that morning he saw all the smoke and destruction, but wasn’t turned to salt. (19:27-29)

Lot decides that he doesn’t trust God’s promise about being safe in Zoar, and heads for the mountains where he finds a nice cozy cave for him and his daughters (19:30)

Once settled in the cave, the daughters began talking about how there aren’t any men around for them to have sex with. So, they decide to get their old man drunk and that the oldest girl will have sex with him. (19:31-32)

A Family That Plays Together…Is Sick

So Lot gets stupid drunk and bangs his oldest daughter. The next night the youngest has her turn with her drunk father. and both girls end up pregnant. It seems that Lot was quite a horn-dog when he drank, and would have sex with anything that got near him, including his virgin daughters. (19:33-36)

The first girl’s son became the father of all Moabites, and the second girl’s son became the father of all of Ammon. (19:37-38)

Next time:  We find out Abraham’s dirty little secret, Abraham lies again and makes money off of it, Isaac is born, Hagar gets uppity again, Abraham tries to kill one kid and the other almost dies due to neglect, and Sarah dies.  A good time to be had for all.  I hope you will join me.  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