Genesis Chapters 20 - 22: You say you love me. Now prove it.

Abraham and Sarah pack up again and travel to Gerar. Again, Abraham tells Sarah to pretend she's his sister. And yet again, the king comes and takes Sarah away (because 90 year old women are totally hot). Before the king does anything with her, God comes to him and lets him in on the truth that Sarah is married to Abraham and suggests he return her to Abraham. Or sleep with her and die. His choice.

The king calls Abraham over and tells him he knows that Sarah's his wife and asks, "Why did you tell me that she's your sister?"

"Because this is a godless place and I thought you'd kill me so you could take her for your own. And besides..."

*drum roll*

"She is my half sister from my father."

In the same way that this worked out pretty well for Abraham in Egypt, he benefits again. The king gives him oxen and sheep and male and female slaves, and 1000 silver pieces, calls the whole thing even, and tells them they are welcomed to stay as long as they would like.

Just as God promised, Sarah gives birth to Isaac. There is much rejoicing. But Sarah doesn't like Hagar and Ishmael hanging around enjoying the festivities, so she tells Abraham to kick them out. He's a little disappointed, but God says to do it too. Abraham gives her some provisions and sends her off to wander the forests. God protects them and they survive.

The king and Abraham have a disagreement about a well, but they get it settled, and then the king goes back home anyway.

A while passes and God decides to put Abraham to the ultimate test. He tells Abraham to take his only son and BURN him as an offering to God.  Alright technically it's not his only son... he kicked the first one out to wander the wilderness with his mother. But I digress.

Abraham has questioned God in the past. He asked for proof that this land would belong to his descendants forever. He laughed when he was told Sarah would get pregnant. He questioned God's decision to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah and negotiated terms for destruction of the cities.

But this request to kill and burn his son inexplicably goes completely unchallenged.

No.  To this, Abraham says, "Hey Isaac! Wanna go for a donkey ride? C'mon! Let's go!"

They ride off with a couple of servants and a pile of wood so they can have a nice sacrificial fire. They ride for a few days and come to a good spot. He tells the servants, "You guys wait here by this rock with the donkey. We're going to go... pray... over there behind those bushes. You stay here no matter what you hear. No peeking. I mean it."

Right about now Isaac notices that something is up and asks, "Hey Dad... we brought wood for the burnt offering but didn't we forget the lamb?"

"Oh... yeah... Um. God will have a lamb waiting for us when we get there!"

"Wow, Dad! God sure is terrific!"

"Yeah. Yeah, he's a heck of a guy..."

He builds and altar, piles the wood up, then ties up his son and tosses the kid up on top. He is JUST about to slit his son's throat when God yells out, "DUDE! STOP!"

"God, you scared me! What?"

"Don't kill your son. Seriously, I just wanted to see if you actually would do it. Here. Burn this goat instead." 

Abraham looks over and there's a goat with its horns stuck in a shrub. Abraham burns the goat instead of his son and names this place, "The Lord will provide." I can think of a lot of other names for this place, like, "The place where the Lord messed with my head." Or "The spot where my child was scarred for life."

God's love and trust is not unconditional.

God again blesses Abraham and tells him again that his offspring will be numerous and powerful and blessed because he obeyed his voice. He also informs him that his brother Nahor has had eight children with his wife and four more kids with his concubine.

Sarah lives to be 127 and dies in Hebron. Abraham asks the locals for a place to bury her and Ephron offers a nice cave to the east of Hebron. Abraham asks, "How much?"

Ephron answers, "Aw, just take it. It's fine."

"No, really. I insist. How much?"

"It's worth 400 shekels of silver but seriously, you can have it for free."

Abraham give him the money and buys the cave and the field and the nice trees all around it and buries Sarah there.

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 10 - 14: Abram Travels the World

Bring on the begats!

First is a list of Japheth and Ham's descendants. They have lots of kids and they all live a long time.

"Wow. That's a really nice tower! These people have some

 ambition.... Hmmm.... maybe a little too much."

Their people start spreading out and some of them decide to build a tower to show how awesome they are and make a name for themselves. God comes and sees this and thinks it's a bit much.

So he goes and scrambles up their language so that they can't talk to each other and make such ambitious plans, and he scatters them all away from the city they were building.

Next is a list of Shem's descendants. On and on. Lots of kids, everyone lives a long time. But kind of less and less time with every generation. After eleven generations, we get to Abram (eventually known as Abraham) and Abram's nephew Lot.

Abram's father, Terah, takes Abram, Lot, and Sarai (Abram's wife) and travels toward Caanan. But they stop in Haran and Terah dies there. God tells Abram to keep going to Caanan, so he and Lot and Sarai pack up and go. In Caanan, God tells Abram that he'll give this land to his descendants and Abram builds an altar there.

And then he keeps on walking... all the way to Egypt.

Abram is worried that the people there will see how beautiful his wife is and kill him and steal her away, so he tells her to lie and say she's his sister. And of course, the Pharaoh thinks she's beautiful and takes her to be his wife. And he treats Abram nicely and gives him livestock and slaves because he thinks he's the pretty lady's brother.

God brings down some nastiness on Pharaoh and he realizes that it's because Sarai is Abram's wife. He yells at Abram for lying to him and tells them to take their stuff and go.

The moral (?) of the story: It's ok to lie and let your wife be carried off by a king to save your own skin. You might even get very wealthy in the process! Totally worth it!

Abram, Sarai and Lot and all their male and female slaves and camels and sheep and oxen and donkeys and silver and gold go back to Caanan. Abram and Lot both have tons of stuff and are starting to get in each others' way, so they split up. Lot chooses to go east toward the Jordan Valley toward Sodom. Once Lot is gone, God tells Abram that everything he can see is going to be given to his offspring forever. Abram moves his tent to Hebron and builds an altar.

It would make a good movie.

Lot's decision to go to Sodom is a poor one. There are quite a few wars going on and Sodom and Gomorrah get overrun by four allied kings. Lot and his family and possessions get taken away by the enemy. Abram hears of this and takes 318 trained fighting men and rescues Lot and all his people from the four kings. I wish there was more detail about this against-all-odds rescue.

Abram returns and the priest-king of Salem blesses Abram and Abram gives him a tenth of everything. The king of Sodom offers Abram all the spoils of his conquest (except for the slaves... the king wants those). Abram declines so no one can say that the king made him rich, but he tells the other people who fought with him to take their share.

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.

Genesis Chapters 4 - 5: God Hates Fruit

Adam and Eve settle down and have a couple kids.  Cain, the oldest, grows up to be a farmer.  Abel, the second, grows up to be a shepherd.

Squee!

Cain brings God an offering of fruit that he grew.  God says, “Oh…. A fruit basket.  Um, thanks… I guess…”

Abel brings God the firstborn of the flock.  God says, “OH MY SELF!  How cute is that!  Thank you so much!  You’re the best!”

You can see how Cain might not take this well, especially since he’s the firstborn son (firstborn son is kind of a big deal back then).  God tells him if he would just do well he’d be accepted, but that if he doesn’t do well then he’ll be consumed by sin.  Some interpretations say that Cain didn’t really give his gift with faith or that his gift was sort of a half-hearted afterthought while Abel gave the very best that he had.  But he was a farmer…  Farmers work pretty hard.

Cain isn’t happy with what God has said.  He first talks to his brother, then kills him in a jealous rage. 

Sin now has won over 3 out of the 4 people introduced in this story so far, and the fourth person is dead.  We’re not off to a promising start.

God asks, “Hey… where’s that brother of yours?”

Cain shrugs his shoulders.  “It wasn’t my day to watch him.”

God realizes what’s happened and banishes Cain to a life of a fugitive and a wanderer, cursing him so that the ground will not yield anything up to him any more.  Cain’s a bit worried that whoever finds him will kill him, though at this point the population of the earth is sparse enough that he could probably evade capture.  God reassures him at least that if he gets killed, the person that kills him will get it back seven times worse.  He marks Cain so that everyone who meets him on the road will know not to mess with him and sends him on his way.

Cain, by the way, has a wife.  Who is she?  Cain’s wife was even brought up at the Scopes Trial.  It was probably a sister or some other relation.  This is banned later, but at this point, there’s not a lot of choice.  God did start us off with only two people and told them to go forth and multiply.

Answers in Genesis has a diagram to illustrate:

Just wait til we get to Leviticus.... it's awesome.

Cain and his wife have some kids.  He also builds a city, which is pretty good for someone who was supposedly doomed to be a “wanderer on the earth.”  A few generations go by and his great-great-great grandson Lamech has two wives.  Lamech kills someone for striking him and he tells his two wives that since Cain’s revenge was sevenfold, the revenge for killing Lamech is 77 times worse.  It doesn’t seem like God told him this.  He just claims it.

Adam and Eve have another son named Seth and other sons and daughters.  Lots of them… Adam lives to be 930 years old.  There’s a list of Adam’s descendents all the way up to Noah, and they all live between 365 and 969 years.  Noah descended from Adam’s son Seth, and is Adam’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandson.

Genesis Chapters 1 - 3: Let there be light and big tempting apples!

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

How pretty is that? I think that's the part that everyone knows.

Day 1: God makes light, then separates day and night. Awesome.

Day 2: God makes an expanse (or a firmament) and separates the waters under the expanse from the waters above the expanse. He calls this Heaven. This is kind of odd.... it sounds like Heaven is a layer of space between two layers of water. I'm guessing that the top layer of water might be clouds.

Day 3: God makes dry land separated from water, then made plants and fruit trees.

Day 4: God makes some more lights - sun, moon, and stars to separate day and night. We kind of already had this in day 1, but now these lights also help us figure out seasons, days, and years. So let there be more specific light.

Day 5: Fish and birds.

Day 6: Animals, creeping things, and beasts. After he makes the animals, he makes man and woman and tells them to go check out their new digs.

[Chapter 2] Day 7: He is understandably exhausted from all this creating and takes a day off.

After this, Chapter 2 gets a little confusing. It’s like the creation story starts over again, but in a slightly different order. Someone explained to me that the first chapter is just a summary and then the second part is the more detailed telling of the story. But the sequence is still off.

The previous chapter says Day 3 was “plant day.” Now in chapter two it says that before there were bushes or plants, God takes some dust and makes man by blowing into its nostrils. THEN he makes the garden in Eden and pops man down in there. Then a bit later he notices the man is lonely so he makes some animals and birds for him, even though in the previous chapter Day 5 was “bird day” and Day 6 was “beasts/creeping things/man day.”

Regardless, the man is still lonely and needs a helper, so God knocks him out, takes a rib, and makes him a woman and they get to run around naked with the explicit warning not touch that pretty tree in the middle of the garden OR YOU SHALL SURELY DIE!!!

Why have a forbidden death-tree in the middle of the garden? That's like putting a box of donuts in a fat person's kitchen and saying, "Don't eat these! Or you'll get high cholesterol and diabetes and DIE!!!" It's just asking for trouble.

We know how the rest of this goes in Chapter 3. The snake says to Eve, “Stop being all dramatic, you won’t actually die. That fruit will let you guys know good and evil like God, so it’s pretty awesome.” Eve somehow falls for this argument and eats it and passes some along to Adam and he eats it and they realize that they’re naked and make some quick fig leaf clothing.

They hear God walking in the garden and they hide. God finds them out and wants to know why they’re wearing fig leaves and asks if they ate the fruit off the inconveniently placed temptation tree.

"Not MY fault!"

Adam points to Eve. "She gave it to me!"

Eve points to the snake. "The snake tricked me!"

But the snake was right… They don’t die. Not immediately anyway. Maybe they would have been immortal if they hadn't eaten it, but there's nothing that says that specifically.

So, God is understandably annoyed with everyone and doles out some harsh punishments. He makes snakes crawl on their bellies from now on (I’m assuming then that they used to have legs) and makes Eve’s childbirth painful and makes her subservient to her husband. Adam now has to work and farm his own food instead of just romping around without a care in the world eating the things that God provided. They get kicked out of the garden and God puts a guard at the tree so people leave it the heck alone.

So hi...

A note before you go any further... I am a non-believer, specifically a Pantheist. As a kid, I didn't learn much beyond the basics of generic protestant Christianity. I did a brief stint as a Catholic (I even put on nice clothes and went to church every Sunday for over a year).... but my views are much more liberal and that didn't stick.

Still, every New Year I decide I'm going to read the Bible. People are so passionate about it. They quote it, hold up signs at football games, argue about it, post inspirational Facebook pictures, and base their entire lives around its teachings... I'd like to understand what it says.

But every year I start reading, I get about 1/3 of the way through Genesis and I get all hung up in the begats and begots and give up. Yes, I could skim it or skip over it, but that would mean I'm not actually reading it. Of course, the same thing happened this year...  I got to the begats and wandered off...

I checked iTunes podcasts and lo and behold... Jesus Christ Saves Ministries (JCSM) has each book as a podcast in the iTunes shop! I downloaded Genesis, skipped up to the part where I'd gotten stuck, and continued on.

I am so glad I did! Once I broke that "begat barrier," the story gets more and more awesome. But I really feel like I needed to write a cliff notes version in my own words, asking my own questions, summarizing things so I can remember them and refer back. Thus the blog.

I've also just found out that Pennsylvania's House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution (H.R. 535) declaring 2012 the “Year of the Bible.” I'm not in PA, but I could practically throw a rock and hit it, so close enough. So there's where the blog name came from.

I am using a combination of the JCSM iTunes podcasts (I think it's the NIV translation, though they have the NKJV on their website), and a free Kindle ESV from CrosswayBibles. Sometimes I just read, sometimes I just listen. Sometimes (like on the treadmill) I do both, even though the texts don't exactly mesh word for word, it's pretty close. I'm also referring to several Bible study websites (both religious and secular) to better understand parts that I am not exactly sure about. I'll provide links and references as I go along.

I would love intelligent comments giving thoughtful debate, opinions, and explanations of things that I don't understand or misinterpret.

As of this post, I'm about 75% of the way through Joshua, and according to my Kindle, that's about 20% through the whole thing. I'm going to have to go back and re-cap my thoughts on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers.

I will start at the very beginning...

So.... In the beginning....