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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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
