Genesis Chapters 15 - 19: Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash

This is one of the parts that makes me say WTF.  It's got a bit of everything...  forced sexual encounters, abuse of a slave, drunken incest...  I really should get a children's bible to see how this gets explained to kids...

I know I don't have many followers or anything, but maybe someone will get the Pogues reference.

God blesses Abram and tells him that his descendents will be as numerous as the stars in the sky. Abram reminds God that he and his wife have no children. God tells him not to worry, he'll take care of it.

Abram wants some proof that this land will be his forever. God tells him to bring him a cow, a goat, a ram, a turtledove, and a pigeon. Abram does this and splits the cow, goat, and ram in half and then lays the halves back over themselves and then sits back to receive a message. He waits and waits, then falls asleep and has a hideous dream. God tells him that his people will be slaves in a foreign land for 400 years, but that he will get them out and bring them back.

No, really, it's fine...

In the meantime, Sarai gets tired of waiting for kids, so she tells Abram to get her Egyptian slave Hagar pregnant. Abram does this and Hagar gets all "neener neener neener" because she's having a baby and Sarai's not. And Sarai's probably a tad jealous too, seeing that maybe this wasn't what she wanted after all. She complains to Abram, who tells her that it's her problem to deal with.

Sarai mistreats Hagar, abuses her, and is so utterly horrible to her that Hagar runs away. One of God's angels catches up to her and tells her to get her butt back to camp, but promises her that God will multiply her offspring. He says that this son, Ishmael, will be a "wild donkey of a man" and he'll fight with everyone and everyone will fight with him. Basically, Ishmael will be an ass.

After Ishmael is born, when Abram is 99, God again tells Abram that he's going to multiply him greatly. He renames him Abraham which means "father of nations," and changes Sarai's name to Sarah. Then he tells him that to mark this covenant, every male of the household, including purchased foreign slaves, must be circumcised. Any one who isn't gets banished.

God tells him that Sarah will have a child. Abraham has the nerve to laugh to himself at the thought, considering that he's 99 and Sarah is 90. But God says it will happen and that their next son Issac will be born in a year.

When they're done talking, it's circumcision time.

Shortly after, Abraham is sitting in the door of his tent and God appears to him as three men. Abraham invites them for snacks and foot baths. He makes them veal and bread and cheese curds and they sit under a tree for a picnic. Sarah is in the tent, but listening from the door, and when she overhears them say that she will have a child in a year, she laughs to herself at the thought. God hears this and asks why she laughed. She totally denies that she ever did but God calls her on it.

So the angels go on their way, and Abraham walks with them to show them out. They tell him that they are going to check out Sodom and Gomorrah because they've gotten some reports that things are not really going well over there.

Abraham asks him not to wipe out the whole city just for the sins of a few. He asks, "If there are fifty righteous people there will you wipe it out?"

God says, "Alright fine. If there are fifty righteous people there, I'll spare the whole place."

Abraham asks, "Well.... what if there are only 45?"

God says, "Sure. Forty-five."

"What about forty?"

"Sigh... ok forty."

"Thirty?"

"What? Really? Ok, thirty... is there anything else?"

"Twenty?"

"You are seriously pushing your luck, but ok.... twenty."

"Ummm.... ten?"

"Oh for crying out loud, FINE! TEN! But that's IT! Now get out of my way!"

The two angels (Two? Maybe the third had other plans?) get to Sodom and find Lot sitting there. Lot offers snacks and foot baths. They try to get out of it so they can go to the town square, plus they'd just had snacks and foot baths at Abraham's place.  But Lot insists.

Right at bedtime, the men of the town come knocking and want Lot to send the two men out so that they can "know" them. This isn't a social call as in, "Hey, lets go out and have a few beers and chat and get to know each other." This is down and dirty biblical knowing.

"Hey, why don't you two girls go see who's at the door?"

Lot is horrified at his town's attempt to rape his angelic house guests. He goes out to try to reason with them and in an attempt to appease the masses, he offers up his two virgin daughters instead.

The townsfolk would rather rape angels than Lot's virgin daughters, and they try to break down the door. The angels pull Lot back inside and strike the townsfolk blind, then tell Lot to gather up his family and get out because they're going to open up a half ton of hurt on this town.

Lot tries to convince his daughters' fiances that they need to beat feet out of the city. But they don't believe him. It could also be that they're a little angry that Lot had offered their future wives up for a mass raping.

So Lot and his wife and his two daughters are ushered out of the city and told not to look back. The angels tell them to go to the hills. Lot looks across the valley and says, "Hills? *sigh* So hard to walk up hills... But how about that little village down there? It's much closer..."

"FINE! Go to that village! Just get out! Why are you people always arguing with me all of a sudden?"

Sodom and Gomorrah get wiped out with sulfur and fire, but Lot's wife looks back and turns into a pillar of salt. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Abraham stands on a hill and sees the destruction.

Lot decides that maybe the hills were a better choice than this little village, so he goes up there with his daughters to live in a cave. His daughters come up with a scheme to get their dad drunk, have sex with him without him noticing, and have babies. Both end up having children by their father.

Genesis Chapters 6 - 9: God Starts Over and Noah Gets Trashed

God sees that the people that he made had gotten a bit out of control. They run amok and behave badly. He regrets making them at all and decides that in 120 years, he's just going to wipe it all out.

But he likes Noah. Noah and his family are ok. It's just the rest of humanity that sucks.

God tells Noah to build a boat, 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, 30 cubits tall. A cubit is about 18" so this ark is to be 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet tall.

Someone in the Netherlands built one. It's even seaworthy.

He tells Noah he's going to wipe out everything on the earth, but he should bring his wife, his sons, and his sons' wives, along with the animals. He's supposed to bring seven pairs of all the clean animals, seven pairs of each kind of bird, and one pair of each unclean animal, plus enough food for everyone.

How'd he fit them all in there? It would be tight. There are a lot of people who think it could work, depending on how you define "kind" of animal. If you bring one "horse-like" animal that could cover all the zebras, horses, ponies, donkeys, etc., that would keep the numbers down. But they'd need to evolve into different species pretty quickly after the flood because fairly soon afterward there is mention of horses and donkeys.  

But they need a full year's worth of food for all of them, too.  A single wild African elephant eats between 220 to 440 pounds of vegetation a day.

Shortly after Noah's 600th birthday, the flood starts. It rains 40 days and 40 nights. It covers the mountain tops by about 22 feet. For this to happen, there would have to be five times the amount of water that's currently on the earth. 

Then God blows a wind and makes the water recede. After 5 months, the ark grounds on the top of a mountain. Three months after that, they could see the tops of the mountain.

The dove gets all the attention...

40 days after that, Noah peeks out and sends a raven, and the raven just flies around. So he sends out a dove but it comes back. He waits a week and tries again and the dove comes back with the leaf of a very fast growing olive tree. A week later he sends the dove again and it never comes back.

A year and 10 days after the rains first started, God gives permission to disembark.

Noah promptly builds an alter and burns one of every clean animal and bird as an offering. God loves the smell of roasting animals so much that he promises to never wipe out all the animals and mankind again.

He blesses Noah and tells him that from now on all the animals are going to be afraid of man, but he can eat them, just so long as he doesn't eat the blood. He tells them to go repopulate the planet, with the warning that if a man kills another man, the killer will die. He promises again not to do the whole angry "wipe everything out with a flood" thing again, and says that a rainbow is a sign of this promise.

Noah plants a vineyard, makes himself some wine and gets so drunk that he passes out naked in his tent. His son Ham walks in and sees dear old dad laying there naked. No one likes walking in on their naked father, so he probably yells in surprise, wishes he could unsee everything, and goes to tell his brothers, Shem and Japheth. Shem and Japh walk into the tent backwards so they don't see their father and toss a blanket on him.

Noah is the Bible's first angry drunk. He wakes up and is completely pissed that Ham had walked in on him while he was passed out drunk and naked. He doesn't curse Ham directly, but curses Ham's son Caanan (who had nothing to do with any of this). He blesses Shem and Japh and makes Caanan their servant.

Can you imagine being Caanan? You're minding your own business, off hunting for some food or tending sheep or whatever, and you come back to camp to find that you're now a servant to your uncles because your dad accidentally walked in on your drunk, naked, passed out grandfather. THANKS!!!

Eventually Noah dies at 950 years old.