GENESIS 20, or, "GENESIS 12"

Abraham and Sarah go to Gerar, where Abraham tries to pull the ol' "she's my sister not my wife" routine.

Oh Abraham.... When are you going to learn that when you feel threatened by a ruler in a foreign land, you're only going to get that ruler in trouble when you pretend that your wife is your sister and he then kidnaps her unaware that she's a married woman?

This is basically Genesis 12 all over again, except instead of Egypt, they're in Gerar, and instead of Pharaoh it's Abimelech.

What is the punishment for trying to sleep with Abraham's wife? Death to you and the infertility of all the women in your household, that's what. So don't even think about trying it.

By the way, isn't Sarah supposed to be ninety something by now? Why are men still trying to kidnap and have their way with her?

God on Blogs: Someone compiled the nine most badass verses in the Bible. Why don't they teach more of this stuff at Sunday school?

GENESIS 19, or, "Okay, everyone who's going to escape the wrath of God, please take one step forward... Oh, not so fast Lot's wife"

Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed, Lot escapes with his daughters, incestuous activities ensue.

Having failed to find just ten good people in Sodom and Gomorrah, God sends two angels to the cities to destroy them. After decades of scrutinizing the Dead Sea Scrolls, the consensus among modern theologians is that the angels looked something like this:



If you remember back to Genesis 13, Lot and Abraham decided to go their separate ways, with Lot settling to the east near Sodom. When the angels arrive at Sodom, they find Lot at the city gates. My NIV Bible tells me this is a significant detail - "Traditionally, city fathers gathered in the gateway to make important decisions. Lot's presence suggests that he had become 'one of them' during his time in Sodom, which may explain why he struggled against leaving."

Lot persuades the angels to stay in his house for the evening. Their presence does not go unnoticed by the townsfolk. Every man from the town gathers around Lot's house and they call out to him - and I swear that I'm not making this up - "Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them."

Lot, being the good father that he is, offers the rape-hungry crowd his two virginal daughters. But no: Man-love is what the townsfolk want, and man-love is what they shall get.

The mob tries breaking down the door, but the two angels fend them off by blinding them. The angels tell Lot that they are going to destroy the town, and to gather his family and leave. They warn him not to look back as the destruction ensues.

As Lot, his wife and his two daughters flee the city, Lot's wife looks back at Sodom while it is being burned by sulfuric rain and she is turned into a pillar of salt. Here's a picture of a rock formation overlooking the Dead Sea called "Lot's Wife":



After a short stay in the town of Zoar, Lot and his daughters take shelter in a cave. The problem with caves is that they make horrible places for meeting guys. So Lot's daughters do what what any reasonable girls would in that situation - Get their father so drunk that he won't mind having sex with them. Both daughters become pregnant, and the Bible gives us no clues as to whether their children were born with the correct number of fingers and toes.

A big question surrounding this chapter these days is whether or not it's an example of God's condemnation of homosexuality. I think though that one can make a pretty strong argument that it's more rape than homosexuality that is the sin of the Sodomites here. Also, some have argued that the original Hebrew text can be translated as "to meet with" rather than "to have sex with."

Also, for me this chapter is another instance where I wonder "Why I'm a being told about this?" What lessons am I supposed to learn from Lot unknowingly having sex with his daughters? They aren't punished or rewarded for it. It just happens as a sort of weird epilogue to Lot's story.

God on YouTube: An excerpt from Dogma where the angels played by Matt and Ben reference Sodom and Gomorrah.

GENESIS 18, or "GPAASASBAASWSBTWTOTBC"

The Lord pays Abraham another visit, Abraham tries to stop him from laying the smack down on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.

You know what? I'm getting pretty tired of typing out "God promised Abraham and Sarah a son but Abraham and Sarah were skeptical because they were too old to bear children." So from now on, I'm just going to use the acronym GPAASASBAASWSBTWTOTBC.

The chapter begins with Abraham being visited by God in the form of three men. Whenever they talk the Bible writes it as "they said" this and "they said" that, making me imagine that the three men always spoke in unison, which had to be eerie. Food and water is exchanged. Then GPAASASBAASWSBTWTOTBC. After GPAASASBAASWSBTWTOTBC, Sarah laughed, because, again, just to clarify, she was SBTWTOTBC.

When God asked why she laughed though, Sarah lied and said she didn't.

The Lord then tells Abraham that he plans to destroy the nearby cities of Sodom and Gomorrah because He has caught wind of how evil it has become. Abraham thinks this is a tad hasty. What about all the good people in Sodom and Gomorrah? He tells God, "Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike." Obviously Abraham wasn't around during the flood days when God did exactly that.

God says that if He finds fifty righteous people in Sodom and Gomorrah, He'll spare the cities. Then Abraham asks what would happen if instead of fifty, He only finds forty-five good people? So God replies that He would spare the cities for the sake of forty-five righteous people.

Abraham continues to talk God down in this fashion until God has finally agreed to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if He finds just ten good people there.

Sex and the Bible: Even though the word "sodomy" implies homosexuality in most people's minds, the term is more general than that. Sodomy can refer to any form of sexual intercourse held to be unnatural or abnormal, including masturbation, oral sex, anal sex (hetero or homosexual), or bestiality. So the Sodomites weren't just gay, they were into all kinds of kinky stuff.

GENESIS 17, or, "Foreskin's Lament"

God tells Abram - for what, the zillionth time? - that he'll make a great nation of him, that his children will outnumber the stars, etc. Only this time, God tacks on one, tiny condition...

So. In case you didn't get the memo, God likes Abram a lot and wants him to be the father of many nations, of kings, of generations stretching on into the far future. God even gives Abram Canaan to sweeten the deal. To celebrate, God gives Abram a new name - "Abraham". "Abram" means exalted father, while "Abraham" means "father of many". Sarai is also renamed "Sarah", which means, well, nothing really. God just likes the sound of it better.

God promises to give Abraham a son through Sarah, that this son will be made into a great nation. Abraham wants God to bless the son he already had by his maidservant Hagar, and God says that yes, Ishmael will be blessed and his descendants too will makes a great nation of themselves (Today we call this great nation Islam). But God says that even though Ishmael will be blessed, it is Isaac, the son of Sarah with whom he, God, shall keep his covenant.

God promises all this great stuff to Abraham, but he says that there needs to be something Abraham and his descendants will do to keep their part of the bargain. God tells Abraham that to be apart of the covenant, every one of his male descendants will need to be circumcised - "My covenant in your flesh is to be an everlasting covenant. Any uncircumcised male, who has not been circumcised in the flesh, will be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant".

So Abraham, at age 99, is circumcised, and then Ishmael, and then every male in the household. It couldn't have been pretty.



Shalom Auslander in his new book, "Foreskin's Lament", discusses what I think has to be a pretty common dilemma to modern day Jews and Christians. Here in Genesis 17, circumcision becomes a foundational tenant of all Abrahamic religion, yet today the practice of circumcision is being seriously questioned. Have we been mutilizing ourselves for millennia for nothing? Circumcising your child is a black and white testament of your faith in a time where the certainty of people's faith is more gray than ever.

Shalom Auslander, a writer deeply conflicted about his thoughts on God, talked about this difficult decision in an interview he gave on NPR's Fresh Air. This is my own transcription:

Terry Gross: You know, your memoir is called "Foreskin's Lament, and part of what your memoir is about is deciding whether or not you wanted to circumcise your son, and of course, circumcision is like part of what signifies you as Jewish. It's like the most basic of ceremonies for male babies... Must've been a really hard decision for you to make.

Shalom Auslander: It was incredibly difficult and it was at that point or afterward when I realized that that's really what the book was about. I had spent most of the time writing stories that took place in the past, and I was furious... I was enraged that when a nurse turned to me and said, "This is a boy", it turned my life upside-down. I wasn't sitting there saying, "I can't wait to get him a little Ranger's uniform", or, "It's going to be so much fun playing football with him", or, "Isn't it going to be great having a little boy". Instead, what my mind became incredibly occupied with was, "Do I mutilate this kid or don't I?" And I was furious that because a maniac 6000 years ago did this, and somebody wrote a story about it, here I was and the joy of becoming a father was utterly overwhelmed by this process, this decision. And I didn't get to enjoy the prospect of being a father. It was this craziness from the past coming out and stealing something that should have been purely joyous.

TG: So, would you tell our listeners whether or not you decided to circumcise your son?

SA: I think it's very funny that talking about my sons willy ruins the book. So, his name is Pax, and if you're listening to this in 20 years, apologies ahead of time. The birth was difficult. We didn't decide, we went into labor - isn't that great how I say "we went into labor" like I had to do all the work? - we went into labor not knowing what we were going to do. And our son kind of had a very difficult time getting into this world. And, without going into too many details, I was afraid that God might make it very easy for him to leave. And, it was right after that, right after he was born and everything was sort of okay, after a very harrowing few hours, that a doctor came in and asked us if we were going to circumcise, and we looked at each other and my wife shrugged and I shrugged and I thought, 'I'm not messing around with this guy right now'. There's this tiny little boy hooked up to a bunch of tubes and I said "Yeah, we will". And I also mention in the book how the next day, they came and they took his little sealed cart that he was in and rolled him down the hall and did it and I couldn't watch, I walked out and heard him screaming and I say in the book that the moment my son became a Jew was the moment I felt least like one.

God on You Tube: More Shalom!

GENESIS 16, or, "You're sure? Really? I mean, you're not going to be mad or anything right? Just so we're clear - I absolutely have your permission?"

At the ripe age of 86, Abram is still trying to conceive a child with his wife Sarai. Failing that, Sarai suggests that Abram have a child with their maidservant. Drama ensues of Lifetime movie-of-the-week proportions.

I wonder if Genesis 16 is the earliest recorded account of the oh-so-familiar situation in which a woman gives her man permission to do something even though she doesn't really want him to do it. Abram would be the kind of guy to think that Sarai is truly cool with him going to watch the game with the guys down at the bar.

Abram is getting old, and even though God keeps promising him all these children, none have come along. Sarai gets impatient and tells Abram that he should sleep with their maidservant Hagar so that he can at least have children through her. It works, Hagar becomes pregnant and Sarai becomes jealous.

Sarai "mistreats" Hagar (the vagueness of the word "mistreats" intrigues me) and Hagar flees to the desert. There, an angel of the Lord tells Hagar that her children, like Sarai's, will one day be too numerous to count. The angel tells Hagar to go back to Abram and Sarai, where she gives birth to her son Ishmael.

There's a lot to say about Ishmael, but I'll hold my commentary until his brother is born.

In the meantime, here's an interesting fact: With about 2 billion followers, 33.06% of the world is Christian, making it the world's largest religion. 20.8% are Muslim, making Islam second largest. What would you guess would be the third largest? If you guessed Judaism, you'd be wrong. Hindiusm is third largest. In fact, with only 14 million followers, Judaism is the sixth largest religion in the world, accounting for only 0.23% of the population. I guess living in LA, I forget that Jews are rare breed.

God on YouTube: Shalom Auslander explains in his new book, Foreskin's Lament, why it's not easy being a Jew.

GENESIS 15, or, "Looks like Eliezer of Damascus is SOL"

Abram worries about dying without a child for an heir, God assures him he won't and reiterates that he will have many descendants who will own lots of land.

I was talking with my girlfriend about this blog, particularly about what I was reading about Abraham, and she asked how God communicates with Abraham. Is he a voice in Abraham's head? Does he appear as a man, like George Burns in "Oh God"? An angel maybe?

It's a good question. How does God appear to the people he communicates with? Most of the time the Bible simply tells us "God said..." but doesn't specify how; I've always pictured those passages as God speaking in some kind of booming, disembodied voice. The one exception I can recall is in Genesis 3, where it's written that God was "walking" through the Garden of Eden before he speaks to Adam, implying a physical form.

Here in Genesis 15, God appears to Abram in a vision. It's up for interpretation exactly what that vision was like, but it's safe to imply that Abram seeing some form of God as they spoke.

Abram tells God about his worry that he will die without a child, and have to leave all his fortunes to his servant Eliezer instead of a blood relative. God assures him that he will have a child, and that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars in the sky.

Abram wants to know how he can be certain that this will happen. God asks him for several animal sacrifices. Afterwards, Abram falls into a deep sleep, where God tells Abram that "descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years. 14 But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions" This is, I assume, a reference to Moses in Exodus. More on that later.

God also gives Abram the exact boundries of the land he is promised: "To your descendants I give this land, from the river [d] of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates- 19 the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, 20 Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, 21 Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites" That would be where Israel is today, except with wider borders.

Point of interest: Nowhere in Genesis is it outlined the exact ritual of sacrificing animals, yet Abram does it anyway. Where did animal sacrifice come from and how does Abram know how to do it? It seems like a tenant of the idolatrous religions that God expressly wanted Abram to break away from. And if Abram and others did it in the old Testament, why aren't we still ritualistically slaughtering animals today?

In fact, the Jewish word for animal sacrifices in the Torah is "Korbanot". Korbanot was a regular fixture in Jewish religious practice until the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD, where korbanot were offered. With Temple services no longer at the center of Judaism, the religion turned to text study, prayer, and personal observance, and thus korbanot offerings ceased to be seen as necessary. There is also a scriptural basis for the discontinuation of koranot in passages such as "Doing charity and justice is more desirable to the Lord than sacrifice" (Proverbs 21:3).

Korbanot may be reinstated after the construction of the prophesied Third Temple. But given the current state of the Israel, I wouldn't hold my breath.

Don't know your Amorites from your Canaanites? Don't worry, here's a map of the land God promises to Abram in Gen 15:

GENESIS 14, or, "Abram kicks some Biblical butt"

We get a history lesson about a war of George R. R. Martin proportions that was going on during Abram's time. Lot becomes a POW and Abram stages his rescue.

I won't lie... Keeping up these posts is getting more difficult. Part of the reason is that the teen chapter of Genesis have a lot less written about them than the first ten chapters, so it's harder to find interesting contextual information.

Take this war that happens in Genesis 14. You'd think it'd be easier to find more information on Google about this war, the many people that are mentioned as being involved in it, and how the Gen 14 story stacks up to historical fact. But the pickings are slim.

Anyway. War. On one side you have four kings. We'll call this the red corner:
1) Amraphel king of Shinar
2) Arioch king of Ellasar
3) Kedorlaomer king of Elam
4) Tidal king of Goiim

In the blue corner we have five other kings:
1) Bera king of Sodom
2) Birsha king of Gomorrah
3) Shinab king of Admah
4) Shemeber king of Zeboiim
5) An unnamed king of Bela (or Zoar)

The kings in the blue corner used to be subjects of Kedorlaomer of the red corner, until the blue corner kings banded together to rebel.

The red corner starts going out and conquering various lands (they're actually listed in the text, but I'll spare you). There's a big battle between the red corner kings and the blue corner kings in the Valley of Siddim. The reds start overtaking the blues, the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah of the blue corner fall back, leaving behind some of their men and possessions. The reds scoop up what Sodom and Gomorrah left behind, including Lot of Sodom (who you will recall moving out that way in the previous chapter)

Abram catches wind of this, gathers a small army of his men and proceeds to march into the red corner's territory. Here the text gets a little vague. Without going into what the details of what would have to be the most daring, against-all-odds victory of all time, Abram defeats all the kings of the red corner, rescues Lot, and takes back all the possessions and people the red corner had claimed.

Bera, the king of Sodom, goes to Abram and asks to have his people back, but tells Abram that he can keep the goods he captured. Abram tells Bera that he made an oath with God to not keep anything of his, so that he, Bera, would never be able to say, "I made Abram rich". Abram gives everything back to Bera.

Again, supplemental information on this chapter is scarce. However, Wikipedia does give us this insight into when these events may have taken place (though it is not well cited):

In the biblical account, the text begins in the days of, but the remainder of the sentence is missing, and is not found in any surviving manuscript (some modern translations run this sentence together with the next to bridge the gap)[4]. The missing text would have helped to identify the date range for the events described by the narrative, and, aside from deliberately obscuring the date (perhaps because it proved inconvenient), it is unclear why the text would be missing. The tentative identifications of Tidal, however, enables the date period to be somewhat determined:

* Assuming Tidal is the proto-Hittite Tudhaliya, this would place the events of the narrative in the 18th century BC, shortly prior to the rise of the Hyksos Empire
* Assuming Tidal is Tudhaliya I (of the Hittite New Kingdom), this would place the events of the narrative in the 14th century BC.
* Assuming Tidal is Tudhaliya IV this would place the events at the end of the Late Bronze Age.
* Assuming Tidal is one of the Neo-Hittite kings by that name, he dates to the period of the Neo-Hittite period, at the time of the Aramaean states, just prior to the rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.


Just For The Heck Of It
The king of Sodom was named Bera. Here are some other famous/semi-famous Beras:
Bera, Count of Barcelona.
BERA (Branford Electric Railway Association).
Berra, municipality in the Province of Ferrara, Emilia-Romagna, Italy
Steve Berra (born 1973), American skateboarder
Tim Berra, American biologist and author
Yogi Berra (born 1925), American baseball player and manager

GENESIS 13, or, "Mo' money mo' problems"

Abram returns from Egypt, quarrels with his nephew Lot, and they go their separate ways. God promises Abram land and offspring.

Abram, Sarai and Lot return from Egypt as a result of the whole "sister/wife" fiasco with the Pharaoh. No matter though. They return far richer than when they left. Only now, they were going to suffer from having too much rather than too little. The land Abram and Lot shared could not support their combined number of livestock and herdsman. The amount of bickering and rude hand gestures increased at an alarming rate. Something had to be done.

Not wanting to argue anymore, Abram and Lot decide that they should split up. Abram allows Lot to choose which way he wants to go. He tells Lot, "If you go to the left, I'll go to the right; if you go to the right, I'll go to the left." Lot saw that the land to the east was well-watered so eastward he went, while Abram stayed in the west.

After Lot leaves, God speaks to Abram again, telling him to look around, that all the land he can see belongs to him, and that his offspring will be an numerous as all of the grains of dust on Earth.


The song that came into my head while reading this passage: "Landlocked Blues", by Bright Eyes. This one's for you, Abe:

If you walk away I walk away
first tell me which road you will take
I don't want to risk our paths crossing somday
so you walk that way I'll walk this way

and the future hangs over our heads
and it moves with each current event
until it falls all around like a cold steady rain
just stay in when it's lookin' this way

and the moon's laying low in the sky
forcing everything metal to shine
and the sidewalk holds diamonds like a jewelry store case
they argue "walk this way," "no walk this way"

GENESIS 12, or, "Wanderlust"

The Lord calls on Abraham and his family to leave their home without much reason or idea of a destination. Wandering ensues.

I think what most people don't know is that Christianity, Judaism and Islam all share the same roots in Abraham. For Christians and Jews he goes on to father Jacob, or Israel, and for Muslims he is a forefather of Muhammad. It's ironic that a reason there is so much turmoil in the Middle East is because the religions of Islam and Judaism are so closely related, warring over land they both hold sacred - a lot of that land being where Abraham had traveled.

God tells Abraham (at this point his name is simply "Abram") that if he leaves his homeland:

"I will make you into a great nation
and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing.

I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
will be blessed through you."

And really, how can you pass an offer like that up? Abram, his wife Sarai, and his nephew Lot set out to wander around the Middle East for a while.

They travel from their home in Haran (a city that might have been in modern day northern Syria or southern Turkey) to Schechem. Abram builds an alter. They travel from Schechem to east of Bethel. He builds another alter. They go to Negev. See the map below, because I didn't know where any of these places were either.

There's a famine that forces them to move again, this time into Egypt. Abram realized this wife Sarai was beautiful - beautiful enough to make the Egyptians want to kill him so they could take her away from him. Abram tells Sarai to tell people that she is his sister.

They get to Egypt and sure enough, those Egyptians take an immediate shine to Sarai. The Pharaoh takes Sarai into his palace and treats Abram well, giving him sheep and whatnot. Then God plagues Pharaoh and his household for messing around with Sarai, Pharaoh catches on that Saria is actually Abram's wife and the jig is up. He tells them to get lost, so Abram and Sarai leave, but still in possession of all of Pharaoh's gifts to them (the aforementioned sheep and whatnot - actually, at this point Abram has become a rich man. Sheep were worth a lot more in those days).

Some things I wonder about as I read Genesis is, where's the mention of Heaven? Or Hell? Or, you know, rules and stuff? What qualifies Abram as a "good" person? This was all taking place well before our current idea of Christianity was full formed, so it kinda makes you wonder what kinds of rules Abram lived by. Were people even being sent to Heaven or Hell in those days, because the Bible doesn't even mention their existence at this point.

GENESIS 11, or, "Say What?"

People build a big tower only to have God knock it down. We trace the lineage of Noah's son Shem down to Abram

I had always understood the Tower of Babel story as a cautionary tale about the dangers of hubris. In my mind, the story always went something like this: Back in the days when there was only one language, man arrogantly thinks he can build a tower higher than Heaven, God becomes angry, destroys the tower and makes it so that everyone speaks different languages.

This turns out to not quite be what the Bible actually says. Indeed, the Bible tells us that there was once only one language. And indeed, people are trying to build a really big tower. But when reading the story for myself, it didn't seem like the people were building the tower out of some desire to be greater than God. In the chapter, the people say to themselves, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth."

I guess your interpretation hinges on the use of the phrase "the heavens". If "heavens" is meant as capital H "Heaven", then yeah, I can see how the story becomes about man's hubristic desire to become more powerful than God. But if "heavens" is supposed to be read as "sky", then it seems to me that the people in the story just want to build this awesome tower. After all, they do say that they want to build the tower so that they "may make a name" for themselves. To me, this makes the Tower of Babel like the Trump Tower of antiquity - an amazing structure you can put your name on and have a bunch of people gather in.

It never mentions in the chapter that God is upset by the people' arrogance. Instead, God seems to be threatened by the power people have when they unite. In the chapter, God says to himself, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other." Here, God seems more fearful of man's power than angry at their arrogance.

The chapter doesn't even mention the destruction of the tower. It is, however, described in the Book of Jubilees, a non-cannonical book of the Bible that is widely considered to be pseudepigraphal.

Also, in the chapter we get to see how Abram, one of the Old Testament's greatest figures, is descended from Shem. It turns out that Shem is Abram's great - great - great - great - great - great - great - grandfather.



Pop Culture References to Gen 11:

Intermission

Wherein I take a break from focusing on specific chapters and talk about whatever I want.

I've been listening to a phenomenal radio program called Radio Lab recently (www.radiolab.org). Like This American Life, in each episode they explore one theme.

In their morality episode they try to explain what morality is and where it comes from. One point they make is that humans like to think that morality is unique to our species, that it makes us special in some way.

This turns out not to be the case though. Chimpanzees display what we would characterize as moral behavior as well. They give the example of a scientist dropping some food into a habitat where a large group of chimps live. Two chimps start fighting over the food and the alpha male intercedes, takes the food, and marches all the chimps into one area where the food will be divided equally among them.

There are many more examples of moral behavior like this in chimps, which of course causes us to suspect that maybe humans aren't that special after all in our ability to tell right from wrong.

Then one of the hosts tries to sort this out, determined to show that human morality is different from chimp morality in some fundamental ways. To do this, he poses a thought experiment, one that a chimp would not be able to answer:

Say you are in a village under attack by an enemy force. You have a small child, only a few months old, and you, your child, and others from the village are hidden in some secret chamber as the enemy is searching for you.

Then the child begins to whimper and you know that it is on the verge of crying, making enough noise to draw the enemy to you and kill all of you. So the horrible dilemma is you can either smother the baby, killing it but saving you and your fellow villagers, or you can allow the baby to cry, killing all of you.

There's no real right answer. When asked this question, about half the people say they'd kill the baby while half say they wouldn't. Indeed, of the two hosts of the show, one takes one side and one takes the other.

The first argues the logic of killing the baby. Sure, it's a terrible choice to have to make, but the baby is going to die in either scenario, so you might as well save yourself and your fellow villagers.

The other host concedes the logic of that choice, but as a father himself, he knows that he would never be able to kill his own child.

What makes this a uniquely human question is that humans, unlike chimps or any other animals, have the capacity to feel guilt and shame. The guilt and shame that would be attached to killing your own child. The scientist whom they are interviewing agrees that both shame and guilt are expressions that primates don't have. So the hosts conclude that guilt and shame are at the center of our unique human morality.

I think this idea dovetails quite nicely with what the Bible has to say about human morality as well. Because if you recall, after Adam and Eve have eaten the fruit from the tree of knowledge between good and evil, the emotion that they suddenly able to feel is shame. That is why they cover up their nakedness and hid from God.

Maybe this is just a coincidence. But I think it is very compelling how the Bible is very specific in linking the emotion of shame with the knowledge between good and evil.

GENESIS 10, or, "The Table of Nations"

Another Biblical genealogy lesson, this one tracing the descendants of Noah.

Noah had three sons: Japeth, Shem, and Ham. Those sons had many more sons, and their sons had many more sons, and their sons... Well, you get the idea.

Descendants of Japeth (The Japethites): Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshech and Tiras, Ashkenaz, Riphath and Togarmah, Elishah, Tarshish, the Kittim and the Rodanim.

Descendants of Ham (The Hamites): Cush, Mizraim, Put, Canaan, Seba, Havilah, Sabtah, Raamah, Sabteca, Sheba, Dedan, Nimrod, the Ludites, Anamites, Lehabites, Naphtuhites, Pathrusites, Casluhites, and Caphtorites. Not to mention Sidon, the Hittites, Jebusites, Amorites, Girgashites, Hivites, Arkites, Sinites, Arvadites, Zemarites and Hamathites.

Descendants of Shem (The Semites): Elam, Asshur, Arphaxad, Lud, Aram, Uz, Hul, Gether, Meshech, Shelah, Eber, Peleg, Joktan, Almodad, Sheleph, Hazarmaveth, Jerah, Hadoram, Uzal, Diklah, Obal, Abimael, Sheba, Ophir, Havilah and Jobab.

Some believe that the descendants of the three sons represent and would become three different races. Africans are the sons of Ham, Europeans are the sons of Japeth and Jews and Arabs are the sons of Shem. Interestingly enough "Shem" is where the word "semitic" is derived from.

In another case of the Bible being used to justify racism, Genesis 10 played a supporting role in the Rwanda Genocide. It's a little convoluted, but I'll try to untangle it for you.

First we must understand that the Rwanda Genocide was the 1994 mass extermination of hundred of thousands Tutsis by Hutu militia groups.

"Hamitic" used to be used to describe Africans, and the "curse of Ham" used to justify slavery. So "Hamitic" was a very pejorative term.

But after Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, Europeans became increasingly interested in Africa in general. As European countries explored Africa, it was decided that some Africans were superior to other Africans (the "superior" Africans displaying traits similar to white people). These superior Africans were referred to as "Hamitic", now being used as a positive term.

I believe, though I am not positive, that this has to do with the fact that when Noah cursed Ham, he actually cursed Ham's son Canaan. Ham had four sons: Cush, Mizraim, Put and Canaan. All of Ham's sons are associated with Africa, but only the Canaanites were cursed. Others, such as the Cushites in Sudan were not.

So there's a scramble to colonize Africa in the 1800's and at the Berlin Conference of 1885, Rwanda is given to Germany. Germany decides to rule Rwanda indirectly by appointing an elite class of indigenous inhabitants to act as functionaries. The "Hamitic Theory of Races" (Not all black people are created equal) was used in part to decide that the Tutsis would be appointed as that elite ruling class. This exacerbated tensions between the Tutsis and the Hutus and historians see it as a root cause for the genocide that would occur a century later.

GENESIS 9, or, "Noah gets tanked"

God reiterates his promise not to flood the world again, Noah gets drunk and naked in front of his three sons. Things get awkward.

Okay, there's a lot of ground to cover in this chapter so I'm going to divide things up into four handy categories...

1) God officially endorses capital punishment
"Whoever sheds the blood of man,
by man shall his blood be shed;
for in the image of God
has God made man."

2) God gives the first rule of eating kosher
"Everything that lives and moves will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything. But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it."
Because of this passage, kosher meat must be thoroughly removed of blood using one of several methods such as soaking and salting, or broiling. This means that you won't catch an orthodox Jew ordering his steak rare.

3) Noah curses Ham (his child, not the meat)
Noah plants a vineyard and one night he gets drunk off his own wine and lays naked in his tent. A similar thing happened to me in college. His son Ham comes in and gets a mental picture that no one wants stuck in their head. He goes outside to tell his two brothers Japeth and Shem what he saw, and the two brothers cover Noah up without looking at his naked body.

As if seeing his drunk father naked wasn't bad enough, Noah then wakes up (probably with a wiked hangover) and curses Ham, saying his son Canaan will be a slave for Shem and Japeth. Kind of a raw deal in my opinion.

Like the "Mark of Cain" the "Curse of Ham" has also been used to justify racism and slavery. Africans were traditionally thought to be descendants of Canaan, and so it makes it okay for white people (descendants of Shem and Japeth of course) to enslave them.

Also, Wikipedia tells us that "Some Biblical scholars see the "curse of Ham" story as an early Hebrew rationalization for Israel's conquest and enslavement of the Canaanites, who were presumed to descend from Canaan."

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about Canaan: "[Canaan] is an ancient term for a region approximating to present-day Israel and the West Bank and Gaza, plus adjoining coastal lands and parts of Lebanon and Syria."

4) My Thoughts
Did you know that Noah's story ended with him getting drunk, naked, and then cursing his son for no good reason? Neither did I. It's funny how some parts of the Bible have become so ingrained in our cultural consciousness, while others have become mostly forgotten. Shouldn't each chapter in the Bible carry roughly equal weight in the minds of its believers? And if not, how do we determine which parts are more worthy of our attention than others?

High Culture References to Gen 9: Giovanni Bellini's "The Drunkeness of Noah"

GENESIS 8, or, "Land ho!"

Noah, his family, and the entire animal population of the world continue to float in the ark, God recedes the waters.

This is the chapter where we derive the olive branch as a symbol of peace. After floating on the ark for months, Noah sends out a dove to check for dry land and first it returns with nothing. The next time he sends it out, it returns with an olive branch. The next time the dove is released, it doesn't come back.

Once Noah and his family are on dry land, God thinks to himself that he'll never destroy living things on that scale again. The chapter closes with God thinking, "As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and sinter, day and night will never cease." Which to me is an odd statement. It'd be like me saying, "As long as I'm alive, I'll live."

High Culture References to Gen 8: Picasso's line drawing "Dove with Olive Branch"

Genesis 7, or, "God Katrinas the World"

God follows through on his promise of flooding the world; only Noah, his family, and a boat-load of animals are saved. Noah gets the worst case of prune fingers in history.

Genesis 7 continues the familiar story of Noah's ark. Noah takes the animals into the ark that he has built, and then God makes it rain for forty days and forty nights.

Forty, like seven, is a number repeated many times in the Bible. Other mentions of the number forty: the forty days Moses spent on Mount Sinai with God; the forty days and nights Elijah spent walking to Mt. Horeb; the Hebrew people wandered forty years traveling to the Promised Land; Jonah in his prophecy of judgment gave the city of Nineveh forty days grace in which to repent; and Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness fasting and being tempted by Satan, an event that is celebrated by Christians during Lent - the forty days between Ash Wednesday and Easter.

The chapter ends with the ark still floating, the earth left in ruins in the water below.

Stories like Noah's ark make me wonder about the nature of God. In Gen 6, God sees how man has become corrupted, and we are told "The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain."

Passages such as these bring up questions like - Can God make a mistake? And, is God all-knowing? An omnipotent God, the kind of God most of us have grown up thinking of, would know the consequences of his actions before he makes them. If that were the case, then why would God create man only to then realize it was a mistake?

Thinking back on it now, I don't believe there has been any mention of God being "omnipotent", or "all-knowing"in Genesis so far. I will definitely be on the look-out for future passages that describe God in this manner. But for now, God is described as an entity who doesn't know the upshot of his actions.

A lot of people much smarter than myself have already thought through this type of question. One of them is phycist John Polkinghorne:

"I think we live in a world of true becoming. That's to say, I don't think that the future is fixed; I don't think God fixed it. I think God allows creatures to be themselves. If we live in a world of true becoming so that we play our little parts in making the future — and I believe God's providence also plays a part in making the future, and also the laws of nature that God has ordained play a part in constraining the form of the future — if that's the sort of world in which we live, then I think actually even God doesn't know the future. And that's not an imperfection because the future is not yet there to be known. Now, that's a very controversial view, and not everybody, by any matter of means has agreed with me about that, but that's how it seems to me.

And I think that, you see, there's been a very important development in theological thinking in the 20th century, and it's reflected in all sorts of quite different theologians, but they have this thing in common: They see the act of creation, the act of bringing into being a world in which creatures are allowed to be themselves, to make themselves, is an act of love and it is an act of divine self-limitation. The theologians like to call it kenosis from the Greek word, and so that God is not the puppet master of the universe, pulling every string. God has taken, if you like, a risk. Creation is more like an improvisation than the performance of a fixed score that God wrote in eternity. And that sort of world of becoming involves God's accepting limitations, and I believe, accepting limitations not knowing the future. That doesn't mean, of course, that God will be caught out by the future in the same way that you and I are. I mean, God can see how history is moving, so to speak, but God has to react to the way history moves."*

I think Polkinghorne gives compelling reasons to believe that perhaps God is not all knowing, and doesn't know exactly how his decisions will play out. I've pretty much given up on trying to reconcile what Genesis has to say with what science says, but looked at through Polkinghorne's lens of "true becoming", at least the story can make a little more sense with regards to God's character and motivations.

Pop References to Gen 7: Penn and Teller give Noah's ark a thorough shakedown in their HBO series Bullshit. While I take issue with them pshawing the Noah story simply as a "bullshit myth", I think they do raise a lot of good points.



*Excerpt taken from John Polkinghorne's interview on NPR's "Speaking of Faith" with Krista Tippett. Read the full trascript HERE

GENESIS 6, or, "You want me to build what?"

A heroic race of half-angel half-humans are created (maybe), humanity falls into corruption, and God commissions Noah to build a really big boat.

Here's an origin story ripped out of the pages of a Marvel comic...

Born out of the forbidden love of fallen angels and beautiful yet corrupt human women, a mysterious and heroic race of giants known as the "Nephilim" patrol the lawless land of a new and increasingly evil world.

That's not too far from what the Bible says at the beginning of Genesis 6 - "The Nephilim were on the earth in those days-and also afterward-when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown."

This passage requires some context and translation. "Nephilim" can be loosely translated into "giants", though it is arguable as to whether this refers to someone who is literally gigantic in size, or more figuratively gigantic in intelligence or personality.

"Sons of God" can also be interpreted in at least two ways. First, the phrase could be taken to mean "angels", since the phrase "Sons of God" is used again in the book of Job to explicitly mean angels. www.rationalchristianity.com tells us that in both cases of Job and Genesis, early Jewish writers interpreted "Sons of God" to mean angels.

The second way the phrase can be interpreted is as "Sons of Seth". The logic here is that the sons of Seth were godly men who followed God's path. Contrastly, the cursed sons of Cain were not godly, so people who interprete Gen 6 in this way believe that the phrase "daughters of men" refer to the daughters decended from Cain.

So one could either read the "Nephilim" as being a giant super-race of heroic angel/human half-breeds, or simply virtuous men descended from Seth.

---

For reasons that are not too clear, the world starts to increase in wickedness and violence. God sees this, becomes unhappy and decides to press the giant reset button in the sky by summoning a world-wide flood. I'd like to point out here that God becomes upset with man's violence, and then kills all but eight of them as punishment.

God decides that Noah and his family are the only people righteous enough to carry on the human race. He tells Noah to build a giant ark that will house two of every kind of animal, protecting them from the impending flood.

Have you ever wondered to yourself, if Noah's ark had to carry two of every kind of animal in the world, how big would the ark need to be? Well, the Bible answers this question very specifically: 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high, with lower, middle and upper decks. I'm too lazy to do the math myself, but www.christiananswers.com says that's 100,000 square feet, or more floor space than 20 standard size basketball courts.

Would that be enough to house two kinds of every animal? I suppose you could figure out the mathematics to support that (like this), but it seems unlikely to me, unless you account for some kind of space-saving divine intervention on board.

Pop Culture References to Gen 6: Evan Almighty, a SNES game that no one has ever played.

GENESIS 5, or, "You don't look a day over 400"

We get a quick genealogy lesson that leads us from Adam to Noah, and learn that people back in old Biblical times must have really taken good care of themselves.

In this chapter we trace Adam's lineage down to Noah. It turns out that Adam was Noah's great - great - great - great - great - great - great - grandfather. For anyone who cares, here's the exact lineage:

Adam - Seth - Enosh - Kenan - Mahalalel - Jared - Enoch - Methuselah - Lamech - Noah

We also learn these people's ages as we go down the list. It turns out that people back then lived a lot longer than people do now. Adam lived a whopping 930 years, and ol' Methuselah tops everyone by living to be 969. For people worried about having kids later in life, like in their 40's or 50's, have no fear... Seth fathered Enosh when he was 105, and Lamech had Noah when he was 182.

These passages in the Bible are what Young Earth Creationists point to when they claim that the Earth is only 6000 years old. Why go through the trouble of carbon-dating fossils when all you have to do is count up how long people lived in the Bible?

I went to a Creationist website (www.creationists.org) for answers. How can the Earth only be 6000 years old despite the mountains of scientific evidence that state otherwise? If Adam, Eve and Cain were the only people on Earth at the beginning, then where did Cain's wife come from, who is mentioned in Gen 4? Was everyone incestuous at the beginning of time, and if so, doesn't that contridict God's laws?

Unfortunately, the answers given in the FAQ section of creationists.org did not satisfy me. The arguments use circular reasoning, begging the question by assuming what they claim to be proving.

If you put enough effort into it, you can twist the words of the Bible, along with your own logic, to defend anything the Bible says as being the literal truth, the way creationists.org works hard to prove that Cain's wife was Adam's daughter, and that incest was okay back then because it was before God restricted it in Leviticus.

When I consulted www.biblestudy.com about the question of Adam's inexplicably long life, it told me that:

"After the [Biblical] flood the earth was completely different than the earth before. There were widespread global differences. These would include changes in the climate, composition of the atmosphere, hydrologic cycle, geologic features, cosmic radiation reaching the earth, ozone concentration, ultra violet light, background radiation, genetics, diet, and a host of other subtle and/or profound chemical and physiological changes. These changes caused a rapid decline of the longevity of post flood humanity."

Uh-huh...

Bible literalists always seem outraged when people (other Christians, even) suggest that the Bible is speaking in symbolic language. To them, if the Bible says Adam lived to be 930 years, then Adam lived to be 930 years, and they'll figure out ways to argue the logic of that. To me though, it seems a more egregious offense to the Biblical text to so forcefully twist its words around in an effort to explain away the inconsistencies and anamolies it contains.

It makes more sense to me that God intended the Bible (or at least at this point Genesis) to be read as an allegory, rather than as a literal text that needs to be supplimented by countless rationalizations and apologias.

Pop References to Gen 5: Okay, this is hardly a "popular" culture reference, but I still thought it was interesting. There's an organization called The Methuselah Foundation that holds a scientific competition each year "designed to draw attention to the ability of new technologies to slow and even reverse the damage of the aging process, preserving health and wisdom in a world that sorely needs it." The foundation is named after Methuselah, the oldest person mentioned in the Bible.

More Pop References to Gen 5 (Added 7/3/07): I stumbled across a news article that described an old episode of the original Star Trek titled "Requiem for Methuselah" about Kirk falling in love with an android created by a five-thousand year old man named Flint, who has also been known as Leonardo DiVinci and William Shakespeare throughout his lifetime. Both Kirk and Flint want the robot for themselves, she is torn between the two of them, resulting in her short circuiting.

GENESIS 4, or, "Kinda makes those indian burns your big bro gave you not such a big deal"

Adam and Eve have children, taking the entire human population up to a record breaking 4. One of those children kills the other one, knocking it back down to three. I try to ignore the logistics of how a father, a mother, and one son will go on to populate an entire species.

Adam and Eve give birth to two children - Cain the older and Abel the younger. Chores are quickly handed out. Abel is in charge of the family's flocks, and Cain is in charge of working the soil. Both of them bring offerings to God, Cain brings some fruit, and Abel fat portions from the firstborne of his flock. God likes the fat portions better, and thus sibling rivalry is born.

Cain is upset, and God tries to console him by saying that as long as he is good, he will be accepted. Cain ignores this advise, takes his brother out into a field and kills him.

God being omnipotent and all figures out what Cain has done and curses him, telling him that he will no longer be able to grow crops (a big deal back then), and that he will forever be a restless wanderer. Cain tells God that this punishment is too much for him to bear, that people everywhere will want to kill him. So God agrees to put a mark on Cain and makes it so if anyone kills him, they will "suffer vengence seven times over". Cain leaves for the land Nod, east of Eden. Adam and Eve have more children, as does Cain.

Something I was unaware of until now is that the "mark of Cain" mentioned in Gen 4 had been widely used to justify various forms of racism. According to Wikipedia, certain (though not all) Christian traditions interpreted the mark of Cain as being expressed by black skin, The mark of Cain doctrine has been used to justify racism, slavery, bans on interracial marriage, and as a way of preventing black people from advancing into certain roles in the chuch. Mormonism has been especially criticized for using the mark of Cain to keep black people from becoming priests, though that ban was lifted in 1978.

I've also heard of Cain's curse being used as an explanation for the origin of vampires, though I think this is a very fringe idea.

But let's stick to what the Bible actually says. The passage I like best from Gen 4 is God's consoling words to Cain - "If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it." This chapter is first and foremost a cautionary tale against jealousy. Sometimes, just as a matter of arbitrary indiviual taste, a person will favor others over you. Gen 4 is trying to tell us that that's okay. Keep doing good, and you will be approved. "Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny."

Oh wait. Sorry. That last quote was Yoda.

Quotable Quotes: "Am I my brother's keeper?"

Pop References to Gen 4: Whether they know it or not, the band Avenged Sevenfold is referencing Gen 4:15, "if anyone kills Cain, he will suffer vengeance seven times over"

Steinbeck's masterpiece "East of Eden" has many, many references to Gen 4.

GENESIS 3, or, "Oops"

A serpent convices Eve to eat from the forbidden Tree, humans are given the power to tell good from evil, Adam and Eve are banished from the Garden, God becomes majorly POed.

There are two assumptions people make about Gen 3 that aren't actually in the text: That the forbidden fruit from the Tree of knowledge is an apple, and that the serpent in the Garden is the devil. It makes you wonder about how, through time, a non-specific fruit becomes an apple in people's imaginations. A quick Google search tells me that the forbidden fruit has been written about in midrashes and other texts as possibly being several kinds of fruit, including a tomato, though interestingly enough, the apple is not one of the suggestions of the midrash (1). However "in ancient lore the apple had various meanings and were a tempting love fruit with possible sexual overtones" so that is one explanation of why it has stuck (2).

Genesis 3 is about the fall of man. God tells Adam and Eve they can eat from any tree in the Garden except for the Tree of the knowledge between good and evil, because eating fruit from that tree will make them die. A serpent in the garden tells Eve that this is not true, so Eve eats the fruit and shares it with Adam.

God finds out, curses the serpent and kicks Adam and Eve out of the garden. Now they'll have to work to survive, and suffer to give birth to their children.

Something that stood out for me is how Eve eats the fruit not only because it looks appealing, but also because she wanted to gain wisdom. This chapter seems to be telling us that total happiness and the pursuit of wisdom are mutually exclusive things.

How would God want humans to function? As contented yet oblivious automotons? Or as imperfect, complicated and questioning free agents? With my understanding of Christianity being a religion about choosing righteousness over wickedness, positioning that choice at the very center of what it is to be human, doesn't God want us to the latter?

Already, there seems to be a disconnect between what God says and what God has planned. After all, God says that the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge will kill Adam and Eve if eaten. This turns out to be untrue.

Maybe we weren't meant for perfection. And even though God may get angry at us for disobeying Him, our disobedience must have some function in His plan.

Pop references to Gen 3: I didn't see it when it came out, but from the previews, I'm sure that the Darren Aranofsky film "The Fountain" must give a nod to Gen 3. The chapter explains that there are two mystical trees in the Garden: The tree of knowledge, and the tree of life. After God throws Adam and Eve out of the Garden, He guards the tree of everlasting life with cherubim (the plural for cherub, another word for angel) and a flaming sword, so that man will never be able to eat from it and become immortal. From seeing pictures from The Fountain, this must be the movies explaination for the fountain of youth.





1. http://www.shaareytefilla.org/summaries/Bereshit%20Torah.htm
2. http://judaism.about.com/library/3_askrabbi_c/bl_genesis_eden.htm

GENESIS 2, or, "Strategically Placed Leaves are in Fashion This Season"

Doing nothing on the weekend gets invented, the Garden of Eden is erected, God creates man in His own image, then creates woman apparently as an afterthought. "Womyn" to be created thousands of years later.

After a hard six days of creating, God finally rests on the seventh then blesses it. God likes his lazy Sundays as much as anyone.

Even though people are mentioned in Gen 1, we back pedal here to the first man, Adam, whom God creates in his own image, then puts in the Garden of Eden. God tells him he can eat from any of the trees, except for the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It's like those episodes of "Curb Your Enthusiam" where Cheryl will say something like, "Now Larry, no matter what you do, DO NOT TOUCH my uncle's urn."

Instead of the Garden of Eden being in some ambiguous mystical place, the Bible is surprisingly specific about where it was located: "A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was seperated into four headwaters", the four headwaters being the rivers Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, and the Euphratis. That would put the Garden somewhere in Turkey. Why hasn't an Indian Jones movie been made about this yet?

After man is put in the Garden, God tries to find him a companion, trying out various beasts, until finally coming up with the idea of a woman. God takes Adam's rib and creates a woman from it. Ew. Both are naked, but feel no shame.

I'm a little struck by the differences between Gen 1 and Gen 2 about man's creation. In Gen 1, God blesses men, tells them to be fruitful and multiply. But here, he creates one man and one woman. And it's only after they disobey God and get thrown out of the Garden that they are told they will have to toil the Earth and painfully give birth to children. This is slightly less cheery than Gen 1. But I'm getting ahead of myself. By the end of Gen 2, Adam and Eve are happily living in the Garden together, unaware of the fate that awaits them.

Pop References to Gen 2: The movie title "Adam's Rib" (never seen it, but stars Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn). A season 10 episode of "The Simpsons"

GENESIS 1, or, "You Gotta Start Somewhere"

God creates everything in six days, laughs in the face of Big Bang theorists.

Already, I can see that a literal reading of the Bible will be problematic for me. A quick Wikipedia search has informed me that scientists believe that the Big Bang created the universe 13.7 billion years ago, and Earth came about 9 billion years later, emerging out of the solar nebula left over from the creation of our sun. This is a pretty different story from the one Genesis 1 tells us. Why I'm more inclined to believe the scientific facts of Wikipedia (a site that can be edited by anyone, experts or not) over the Bible is a long discussion I'll have to write more about later.

In Buddhism, enlightenment can't be explained, so it is compared to a hand pointing to the moon. If you only focus on the hand, you never see what it's trying to direct your attention to.

I think the Bible can be seen the same way. Too much focus on whether or not the universe was created in six actual days diverts our attention away from the bigger picture. For example, if taken figuratively, one could read into Genesis 1 close parallels with how the scientific community views creation. God creating light and separating it from the darkness could be a poetic way of describing the Big Bang. God creating earth, then animals, then man roughly follows the same timeline Wikipedia lays out for our planet.

On a smaller note, I already caught one contradiction within the text. In Genesis 1, God tells man "I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it." This is obviously not true, because in the next chapter, man will be punished for eating the fruit of a certain tree in the Garden of Eden.

Pop References to Gen 1: The song "God Moving Over the Face of the Waters" by Moby is, I assume, a reference to Gen 1:2 - "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."

The Bible: What the dealio?

The Bible is a really long book. Because of this, lots of people have never read it (myself included), and yet its contents impact so much of our world.

I've tried reading it in fits and starts, always resolving to get through it from beginning to end. But it's a daunting task. So many begats, archaic cities and unrecognizable names (Zaphnath-paaneah... ZAPHNATH-PAANEAH?!?!?!?)

So I'm going to attempt to read it all the way through. Again. Except this time, I thought it might help to keep a journal as I read, and I thought, why not post it online?

First, a little about me... I have liberal leaning views, so there's a conflict right there. I believe in things like gay marriage and a woman's right to choose. Premarital sex is alright with me, though I respect those who want to wait unitl marriage. I'm a voting Democrat, and I live in LA.

While both my parents and my brother are Catholic, I haven't settled on one religion yet. I have a very strong feeling that there is something bigger than ourselves out there, but I've never been comfortable saying I'm a Christian, because it seems like to say your a Christian means that you believe whole-heartedly everything in the Bible. Since I don't know 99% of what's written in that text, I just can't bring myself to believe it blindly.

I figure that the best way to find out what this whole Christianity thing is about is for me to really sit down and read every word of the Bible. Hopefully, this blog will help me with that.

There's a story in Genesis I know of where Jacob, a descendant of Abraham, is attacked in the desert by an angel. Jacob fights for hours until he's pinned the angel down and demands a blessing, which the angel gives him, along with a new name - Israel.

It's my hope that through reading and analyzing the Bible, really struggling with it, trying to reconcile what it has to tell me with my own beliefs, I'll become a better person for it. Just like Jacob became blessed through his struggle with higher powers.