Genesis: Chapter Twenty-Five (The Death of Abraham, Ishmael's Sons, Jacob and Esau)

In which God's ineffectualism is made clear (again), and in which the first politician is born.

On the heels of his wife's death and his son's marriage, Abraham realizes he's lonely, and he remarries. Her name is Keturah, and they spawn a handful of other children (at his old age!), all of which have names that sound like rejected Star Trek alien names: Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, and Shuah. Jokshan fathers Sheba (presumably two-armed) and Dedan. Dedan's descendants "were the Ashurites, the Letushites and the Leummites" (25:3). Midian spawns Ephah, Epher, Hanok, Abida, and Eldaah, which are all male names.

"Abraham left everything he owned to Isaac" (25:5). 25:6 tells about how Isaac banged and impregnated a significant number of "concubines" while Abraham was still alive, though, and Abraham gave gifts to the illegitimate children, essentially paying off the whores, a fine display of Christian family values.

Finally, in 25:7, Abraham dies at 175 years old. God's powers are shown to be very weak indeed. Back in Genesis 6:3 God swore that nobody would live longer than 120 years. Abraham proved him wrong, I guess.

Isaac and Ishmael bury their father in the same place Sarah was buried (25:9-10). God blesses Isaac.

Ishmael (recall that he's the illegitimate child of Abraham and his slave Hagar, the result of God holding out on a promise) has a bunch of kids: Nebaioth, Kedar, Adbeel, Mibsam, Mishma, Dumah, Massa, Hadad, Tema, Jetur, Naphish, and Kedemah. They each separate and starts a tribe. Ishmael dies at 137, also proving that God's magic sucks. His sons all settle in the eastern Egypt region "as you go toward Ashur" (25:18). "If you get to the train tracks, you've gone too far."

That verse ends on an additional note: "And they lived in hostility toward all the tribes related to them." I'll bet it was a big religious dispute.

Isaac was forty when he and Rebekah got married (read: rape-bonded). "Isaac prayed to the LORD on behalf of his wife, because she was childless." Sound familiar? "The LORD answered his prayer, and his wife Rebekah became pregnant." (25:21) I wonder if she got pregnant because of the prayer or because they fucked a lot.

"The babies jostled each other within her," so she asks God why.

God prophecizes in 25:23:

Two nations are in your womb,
and two peoples from within you will be separated;
one people will be stronger than the other,
and the older will serve the younger.

But they're twins. Neither is really older than the other. I mean, sure, maybe they'll be born a few hours apart at most, but they were conceived on the same day, and they'll likely be born on the same day. Technically, if their births happen to cross the midnight boundary... But that still wouldn't make them any older than the hour or two difference.

But I guess I'm just being pedantic.

The first to be born "was red, and his whole body was like a hairy garment; so they named him Esau" (25:25). The footnote says that "Esau may mean hairy." The translators must be making an assumption here. It seems a decent assumption to make, given the context, but I wonder how much of the original text of the Bible is mistranslated due to translators making assumptions like this. Perhaps Esau actually means werewolf.

The second son comes out grasping Esau's heel, so they name that kid Jacob, which translates to a Hebrew idiom, "he grasps the heel", meaning "he deceives". Why would you name your son that?

Esau becomes a good hunter as he grows up, and Jacob stays at home. He's a mama's boy. Rebekah favors him, while Isaac favors Esau. Isaac has "a taste for wild game". Still, Jacob stands to take power over Esau, provided God's earlier prophecy holds true. So far, it's all kind of iffy. The 120-year age prophecy certainly hasn't held true.

Esau comes home hungry one day, and demands some stew that Jacob's cooking. "First," Jacob responds devillishly, "sell me your birthright." (25:31)

But Esau is famished. Not just kinda famished. Like, super famished. "Look, I am about to die," he says, not exaggerating in the least. "What good is the birthright to me?" (25:32)

But in 25:33, Jacob the deceitful dickhead forces Esau's hand. "Swear to me first." And Esau does, and Jacob gives up some stew, and so Esau sells his entire inheritance to his brother for the price of a bowl of lentil stew.

Genesis: Chapter Twenty-Four (Isaac and Rebekah)

In which Abraham sends a slave to make sure that Isaac marries a Nahorite and God makes sure that Isaac marries his cousin.

"Abraham was now very old," (24:1) but how old is very old? Sarah died at 127. At 100, she questioned her ability to bear child at that age. Noah died at 950, but that was right after God promised shorter lifespans.

Abraham gets his top-ranked slave (talk about a glass ceiling) and makes that slave swear an oath. Obviously, they didn't have Bibles around to swear by, so Abraham has the slave display his sincerity by placing his hand underneath Abraham's thigh. (24:2-4)

And the promise made? That the servant will not allow Isaac to marry a Canaanite. That the servant will return to the land of Abraham's origin and bring back a wife from there.

This is a good display of the kind of in-group selection and out-group exclusion that so much religion iconifies. This is why different religions and even different sects of the same basic religion don't get along. This is why Catholics decry Protestants who decry Episcopalians who decry non-denominational churches, and so on. It began in the Bible as a racial or tribal thing. Abraham doesn't want his son to marry an impure Canaanite.

But the slave suggests that it's unlikely a woman will follow him. After all, it's a very scammy-sounding thing. Imagine for a moment that you're a woman living in the middle east. One day a random slave claiming to be the servant of a guy named Abraham (who, by the way, was known by a different name, Abram, before he left his home) shows up, claiming the Arab Formerly Known As Abram (later known simply as ‽) has died. The slave asks you to traverse the desert to meet a kid who needs a bride. The kid, of course, will claim to be Abraham's son, but won't be able to prove it because Abraham is dead and can't speak, and may not even be recognizable what with the months of rot and decay that's eaten away at his flesh in the intervening months, and now you've been conned into marrying this Isaac dude with half his dick cut off.

The slave suggests that, given the above proposal, it's unlikely Abraham's last will and testament will be executed according to plan. The slave asks if he should instead take Isaac back to Nahor to pick up chicks.

Abraham declines on the basis that God has granted the entirety of the Canaanite land to Isaac's descendants.

So what's the big deal with him marrying a Canaanite, then? If it's all his land in the first place, why aren't the people therefore his people? Why not start a new breed of mixed race people and call them Isaacites?

Abraham makes a promise on behalf of God: "He will send his angel before you so that you can get a wife for my son from there. If the woman is unwilling to come back with you, then you will be released from this oath of mine." He fails to mention that if the woman is unwilling to return to the land of the Canaanites, then God has failed, and is either not omnipotent or not willing to act on behalf of his Chosen One.

They complete their oath, and the slave takes off with ten camels carrying various goods. (24:5-9) A nonspecific amount of time later, the slave arrives in Nahor. He waits by the town well until dusk, hoping to catch some lady friend eyes there. He says a brief prayer asking for a specific dialogue to take place.

"Please let down your jar," he will say, "that I may have a drink."

She will respond, "Drink, and I'll water your camels too."

And with that, the unnamed slave will know he's found the right woman for Isaac. No, he doesn't need to know about the girl's physical beauty or if she and Isaac have compatible personalities or if the girl is already betrothed. He only needs a commonplace response to a commonplace question to know that this is the girl for Isaac.

And so it happens that a similar conversation takes place between Slaveboy and a girl named Rebekah. No, it's not identical. Actually, it's rather different by any legitimate standard of comparisons.

Slaveboy doesn't even start the conversation right to begin with: "Please give me a little water from your jar."

She responds, "Drink, my lord. I'll draw water for your camels too, until they have had enough to drink." (24:17-19)

She does as she says she will. Meanwhile, Slaveboy prepares a bribe of a gold nose ring and two gold bracelets. He asks who she is. She claims to be the daughter of Milcah and Nahor.

I rifled through pages to discover that this makes her and Isaac first cousins. Again, Abraham has gone out of his way to make sure that the family remains as incestuous as possible.

He asks to spend the night, offering the aforementioned payment, and she agrees to loan him some sleeping arrangements. Slaveboy somehow takes this as evidence that God has named Rebekah to be the woman that he should return to Canaan with.

Rebekah takes him back to her family's home and gives Slaveboy some food. He refuses to eat until she hears out his proposition, however. Rebekah's brother Laban encourages him. Slaveboy recounts the story of this chapter from the beginning, in about as many words (this part runs through verses 24:34-49), making sure to mention that Abraham is super rich because God.

"Because God?" says Laban and his father Bethuel. "Can't say no to God! Take Rebekah when you leave! Let her marry this half-dicked guy you speak of!"

Bronze Age desert nomads were evidently very gullible.

In 24:52-54, Slaveboy pays them off and demands that he and Rebeka leave the next morning.

But finally he meets some resistance. They argue for several verses about whether or not the paid-for whore gets to stay at home for ten more days before leaving. They eventually agree to see what Rebekah thinks about this whole thing.

She agrees to leave immediately because, as Kanye "Jesus" West might say, she ain't messin' with no broke niggas.

So they send her on her way, and say a little prayer for her in 24:60...

Our sister, may you increase
to thousands upon thousands;
may your offspring possess
the cities of their enemies.

How nice. They might as well have just said,

Our sister, may you fuck a lot
and have lots of inbred babies;
may your babies make lots of enemies
and then slaughter them all.

So Rebekah gets on one of Slaveboy's camels, and they head back toward Canaan.

They meet Isaac in a Negevian field meditating one evening. Rebekah covers herself as they approach because being seen by him is probably punishable by cactus rape or something. Slaveboy fills Isaac in on what took place (but manages to do it all in a single verse, 24:66, this time).

In the span of a single final verse, Isaac moves into his dead mother's tent with Rebekah, and they marry, and he falls in love with her (that's the cactus rape part), and Issac is now "comforted after his mother's death" (24:67).

Genesis: Chapter Twenty-Three (The Death of Sarah)

In which Sarah dies at a ridiculously old age, and Abraham negotiates a burial site for her.

"Sarah lived to be a hundred and twenty-seven years old." (23:1) That's very old by Gregorian years and very young by Biblical years. I have to assume Bible years are getting closer to Gregorian years now because Sarah was incredulous a few chapters back that she should be able to have a healthy child at over 100 years of age. Since that's a reasonable concern by today's standards (hell, it's a reasonable concern that one might not have a healthy baby at the age of forty), so I'll make the asumption.

Sarah dies, and Abraham weeps. He then asks the Hittites to sell him some land so he can bury her. He's "a foreigner and stranger among" them (23:4), and doesn't feel comfortable placing her into the ground just anywhere.

However, the Hittites call him a "mighty prince" and offer up "the choices of our tombs. None of us will refuse you his tomb for burying your dead." (23:6)

A quick Google search reveals nothing about why the Hittites regard Abraham so highly. I thought that perhaps I'd forgotten something from earlier in Genesis — maybe something in one of the long tables of genealogy — and I was kind of right. Genesis 10:15 shows us that the Hittites are descendants of Canaan (and therefore a clan of Canaanites), and in Genesis 15:18-20, God assigns a bunch of land to Abraham's descendants, to include the land that at that time belonged in part to the Hittites. At the time, I didn't remark much on that specific aspect of the passage because there were some other, more glaring errors that I was focused on. Thinking back, I can't imagine the Hittites being terribly pleased with some random stranger from another tribe suddenly thinking he owns all their land. I have no idea why they should be this nice to Abraham.

They give Abraham an inch, and he takes a mile by asking that they "intercede with Ephron son of Zohar" and convince Ephron to sell Abraham Ephron's cave. To be fair, Abraham offers to pay full price for the cave.

Turns out that Ephron is rather conveniently present at the audience, and he randomly offers to give it away for free. Abraham offers once again to pay for it. Ephron says, "The land is worth four hundred shekels", but tells Abraham to just up and bury Sarah already without paying.

Abraham pays up the four hundred shekels (the footnotes inform me that this amounts to about ten punds of silver), and Ephron signs over the deed to his cave and the surrounding field. Abraham puts his wife in the cave.

The End.

This uneventful chapter happens to be the first in which my objections to the goings-on are very minor all around. A woman dies (at an improbably old age, like everyone else), and Abraham pays for a place to bury her (despite the sellers not having any real reason to sell the land). I'm afraid there's not much to discuss here.

Genesis: Chapter Twenty-Two (Abraham Tested, Nahor's Sons)

In which God exhibits the behavior of a psychopathic murderer, but decides that's a bad thing when he realizes his orders would prove himself to be a logical fallacy.

A nonspecific amount of time after Abraham double-lies to Abimilek, God calls upon him, and, without explanation, instructs Abramam to take his son Isaac to Moriah and burn him in sacrifice. It's bad enough that God should ask his chosen one to do this, but that Abraham begins working toward this end without question is more fucked up than I can express in words.

Abraham chops wood, saddles his donkey, and takes Isaac and two slaves to the mountain that God specifies. It's three days' travel, but they finally arrive within viewing distance of the mountain. Abraham tells the slaves to wait behind while he and Isaac go to pray. "We will worship and then we will come back to you," he says in 22:5, which is a lie, and none of us are surprised to see Abraham lie at this point. With all the lies God's been telling Abraham, it seems to have become part of Abraham's psyche. Or maybe God is just a projection of man, human nature, and culture, and since man has an innate ability and necessity to lie to get by in any culture, God takes on those qualities. Or I could be some nutbag who doesn't believe in God.

So Abraham takes Isaac up the mountain. Abraham makes Isaac carry the very wood upon which he will burn. Abraham carries a torch and a knife. Isaac, the precocious little bastard, begins to wonder out loud, "The fire and wood are here, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?"

Abraham's satisfactory reply: "God himself will provide the lamb." (22:8)

They reach the top of the mountain. Abraham builds an altar from the wood. Abraham ties Isaac to the altar. Isaac doesn't complain at all. He doesn't struggle. Abraham raises the knife (it would be terrible if he burnt his son alive, wouldn't it?). And then, at the very last moment, an angel calls out, "Abraham! Abraham!" Abraham holds off for a moment. (22:9-11)

"Don't hurt that kid!" screams the angel. "Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son." (22:12)

And this is all very frightening to me. This can be read (and I'm sure it is) as a message to Christians: FEAR GOD! Do what God says blindly out of fear! Even if God tells you to commit murder — filicide — you should do it immediately and without question! Do not ask why you should commit such an atrocity! Just do it!

The thought that a Christian might think that even murder is acceptable and excusable under God's command chills me to my core. That a Christian is supposed to do this out of fear for an ambivalent God that doesn't exist is another matter.

Abraham looks around and sees a ram caught in something by the horns, and he kills and burns it instead. The Chosen One names the mountain "The LORD Will Provide" because obviously, God provided Abraham with an excuse not to kill his son — the very one that God previously said would be the beginning of a massive amount of offspring to populate the world — right after giving Abraham an excuse to kill his son. (22:13-14) This is seriously fucked up! People read this stuff to their children before bed!

God speaks to Abraham again: "Because I told you your son would spawn generations and then told you to kill your son and because you were going to, but then stopped because I told you not to, I will now say again that your son will spawn generations, which is something that couldn't have possibly been true had you actually killed your son. Had you managed to follow my initial instructions, you would have proved wrong a prophecy of mine, thus showing that I am fallible and not omnipotent, and we can't have that, so I had to stop you. Wouldn't want you proving that I don't exist or anything." (22:15-18)

So they go to meet the servants they left behind, then go back to Beersheba. Abraham stays there.

So you'll remember way back in Chapter Eleven all about how Nahor (Abraham's brother) married his daughter-in-law, Milcah, even though it wasn't really necessary to. Well, Chapter Twenty-Two now ends with a quick addendum to Chapter Eleven's stream of genealogy.

Milcah and Nahor give birth to Uz, Buz, Kemuel, Kesed, Hazo, Pildash, Jidlaph, and Bethuel. Nahor also bangs a woman on the side, Reumah, and they have four sons together, Tebah, Gaham, Tahash, and Maacah. No word on how many were burned as a living sacrifice to angry, waffling gods.

Genesis: Chapter Twenty-One (The Birth of Isaac, Hagar and Ishmael Sent Away, The Treaty at Beersheba)

In which Sarah's a bitch and Abraham's an asshole and Hagar is in a really bad situation, but then Abraham lies after saying he's done lying in order to look like a better person.

Back in Chapters 12, 13, 15, 17, and 18, God assured Abraham over and over again that his wife, Sarah, who is barren and incapable of reproducing, would actually reproduce, but many years passed, and it never happened. When Abraham impregnates Sarah's servant, Hagar, it's made clear that that child, Ishmael, is not the one that God is blessing Abraham's family with. In Chapter 19, God makes an entire family incapable of reproduction, but later cures every last one of them, but at the end of all of that, God still has not cured Sarah, showing that God is evidently capable of it, but unwilling to do it for the wife of His Chosen One. (Although, if you've read Gen 19, you'll know how sketchy God's healing magic is.)

Finally, in the opening five verses of Gen 21, God finally "was gracious to Sarah", and he makes her fertile. They conceive, and the child is named Isaac. Isaac is born when Abraham is 100 years old (something Abraham doubted the possibility of previously), and Isaac is circumcised (quite surgically, I'm sure, with a sharp-edged rock or something) at the age of eight days old.

Sarah is disbelieving, but happy. (21:6-7)

When Isaac is off the tit, Abraham throws a feast (so Isaac can eat a bunch of food, no doubt). At the party, Ishmael (Isaac's somewhat illegitimate step brother) mocks the child. This cheeses Sarah off more than it cheeses Isaac off, and Sarah orders that Ishmael and his mother, Hagar, be sent away. "Get rid of that slave woman and her son," she orders Abraham, "for that woman's son will never share in the inheritance with my son Isaac." (21:8-10)

God, being a sensible family man, says to Abraham, "Look, don't freak out about this. Just, you know, banish those people. Isaac's the one that matters. Don't even worry about Ishmael. I know he's your kid, too, but you don't need to take care of him. I'll pay your child support this time." (21:11-13)

So Abraham gives Hagar some leftovers and a canteen the next day, and he kicks them out of camp. Water skin slung over her shoulder, pack of food in one hand, and screaming child in the other, Hagar slumps off into the Desert of Beersheba. (21:14)

Eventually, Hagar runs out of water, so she puts Ishmael under a bush for shade. She steps away for a little while, terrified that she's going to have to watch her son die a slow and agonizing death, even as she dies the same painful way, and cries. God hears Ishmael's cries (not Hagar's), and he responds. "What is the matter, Hagar?" God asks, as though he wasn't the one who agreed that they should be kickbanned from #abraham. "Look," he says for the second time today, "don't freak out about this." And he creates a well full of water that Hagar fills her skin with to slake hers and her son's throats. (21:15-29)

So... I guess they just settled down here around the magic well. The Bible just kind of leaves off with a rushed denoument saying Ishmael grew up to be an archer and married an Egyptian. (21:20-21).

There's a sign that some literary license may have been taken with this story, though. In 21:20 it says he became an archer, and in 21:16 Hagar is said to step "about a bowshot away" from Ishmael under the bush. This may represent an attempt at being poetic or creating parallelism or somesuch. Truth be told, if this is actual history, creative license shouldn't really be granted. If creative license is granted to historical writings, it's no longer history. It's myth. Like Homer's Iliad or Odyssey, which are each more believable than this shill.

A while later, Abimelek (the guy Abraham lied to as a way of proving that he was now the judge of all humankind, not God, back in Gen 20) and his army commander approach Abraham and ask him to swear that he won't be a dick and lie to them anymore. Abraham swears he won't, but then goes on to bring up an event that's rather important to him that he's kind of pissed off about, but hasn't yet mentioned.

See, Abimelek's army siezed a particular magic well a few days ago. Suddenly Abraham gives a shit about Hagar and Ishmael. Abraham is the only character so far who's more ambivalent than God himself. (21:22-26)

So they make a pact. Abraham brings seven sheep to Abimelek "as a witness that I dug this well". They call the well Beersheba, which means both "well of seven" and "well of the oath," (more creative license?) and make a treaty over it. Abimelek's army backs off, and Abraham the nomad "stayed in the land of the Philistines for a long time." (21:27-34)

This chapter has some odd timing issues that aren't readily comprehended, but with a little literary license, they can mostly be made sense of. The first section has Abraham and Sarah banishing Hagar and Ishmael into a desert that's already called Beersheba. Later, the well appears. Then, even later, Abimelek's men take control of the well. Later still, Abraham claims to have dug the well. Even later, the well is named Beersheba. I'll grant some license here and say that the author probably wrote this after the well was named, and the desert was probably named after the well (Desert of the Well of Seven/the Oath makes a certain amount of sense). This explains away the naming sequence. From a post-facto standpoint, it would be all too easy to refer to a geographical region by its current name, especially if it had no official name before.

What doesn't add up here is who dug the well. 21:17-18 has God hearing the crying child and responding that they should not be afraid because God "will make [Ishmael] into a great nation." Immediately in 21:19, "God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water." No, it doesn't explicitly state that God created the well, but the juxtaposition of these two ideas implies it.

21:30 has Abraham claiming he dug the well, and at the time, he's just gotten done telling Abimelek that he "will not deal falsely with [Abimelek] or [his] children or [his] descendants" (21:23). So if Abraham isn't lying, then he dug the well.

That's all well and good (snort), except this means that Abraham sent Ishmael and Hagar away from his camp, waited a while, then ran around them to a point a good distance ahead, dug the well knowing that Hagar would stop from exhaustion at that exact point in the vast, vast desert, then ran back to his camp without actually telling Hagar that he was doing this, which is way more effort than it would take to just follow Hagar with a few extra water skins and dig the well. Also, it makes Hagar not realize that Abraham's an alright guy who would dig a well for his mistress ill-begotten child who are lost in the friggin' desert, which works against what should be Abraham's intention.

I'm not buying it. Someone's lying here. Either God dug the well or Abraham dug the well, or someone else dug the well and left it. Not surprisingly, that last option is the only one I'm willing to buy, and that means that I think Abraham's a lying sack of shit.

Genesis 19: Total Insanity

We've seen some crazy stuff in the past few chapters, and I thought that the attitude and content of this video pretty accurately sums up Genesis 19. Have fun!

Genesis: Chapter Twenty (Abraham and Abimelech)

In which God is still not omnicient and inflicts punishment on people for doing things they didn't know were wrong on account of God's Chosen One telling an ambiguous lie.

Remember how in Gen 12 Abraham (then Abram) tried to pass Sarah (then Sarai) off as his sister to the Egyptian Pharoah? Remember how that got him into all sorts of trouble like, you know, his wife being forced into sexual slavery? Remember how God had to bail them out by inflicting all sorts of illnesses on the Pharoah?

Well, he does it again here.

Abraham moves again, aiming for the Negev, but he and his wife and their son and their crew of slaves stop for a while in a place called Gerar. For no explained reason, "Abraham said of his wife Sarah, 'She is my sister.'" So Abimelech (the local king) "sent for Sarah and took her." (20:1-2)

So Abraham still hasn't learned a single thing. God has picked a total imbecile to be his Chosen One, and that may be completely intentional.

But God's just as dumb (or at least he's leveraging his Chosen One's dumbness), because he comes to Abimelech in a dream and tells him he's "as good as dead" because Sarah is a married woman. He's actually planning on killing this king because the king believed a lie that God's own Chosen One told! So much for honesty, integrity, tolerance, understanding, patience, love, and fairness! So much for God's omnicience, for that matter. Seems like God should somehow know that Abraham lied to the king if he's, you know, all-knowing.

Abimelech is just as confused. "Lord," he says, "will you destroy an innocent nation? Did he not say to me, 'She is my sister,' and didn't she also say, 'He is my brother'? I have done this with a clear conscience and clean hands." This is debatable. After all, sister or wife, he did take a random woman to be his slave.

God's ambivalence shines through again when he says that he knows Abimelech did this unknowning of their actual relationship, and he says that by his divine hand, Abimelech has been disallowed from touching her until now. God's always late to these situations and he seems to resolve problems after they've arisen instead of making sure that they don't happen in the first place, you know, by maybe not letting Abraham lie about his relationship to his wife.

At any rate, he spells out the terms of Abimelech's salvation:

• If Abimelech lets Sarah go:
• Abraham will pray for Abimelech
• Then God will spare Abimelech's life
• If Abimelech does not let Sarah go:
• God will kill Abimelech
• God will additionally kill all the people in Gerar

So if he obeys God's directive, he still has to count on Abraham to pray for the man who took his wife in order to live. If he disobeys, he dies, plus there's the added bonus of everyone in his country dying as well. Presumably, God will exclude Abraham himself from this tragedy. Still, this seems like light punishment coming from the deity that has now twice committed genocide, once because people had sex with angels (as though the angels didn't consent) and once on account of people being too successful. But then, the Pharoah of Egypt got off easier.

So by 20:8, Abimelech is calling all of his officials together to interrogate Abraham. Abimelech demands that Abraham explain why Abraham lied and put Abimelech in his current position.

At first Abraham suggests that he didn't think the place feared God quite enough, so he wanted God to try to exact specifically this type of judgment. That's right. Abraham now reckons himself the judge of all humanity by proxy for God. I believe you could simply call this The Christian Syndrome considering how righteous so many Christians consider themselves (even declaring that the Beach Boys were in cahoots with the devil because their hit album Pet Sounds involved a goat in the cover art).

Abraham further suggests that he wasn't actually lying since Sarah is his sister, "the daughter of my father though not of my mother" (20:12). This wasn't mentioned back in Gen 11 when the entire family line was laid out for us. So in a way, we the readers have been operating under the same assumption that Abimelech is now operating under. We have also been lied to, and this has led me to make some false assumptions such as this one here:

Sarai is not immediately blood related to either of her companions, so unless Abram and Lot decide to go at it, incest among these three is impossible.

Great. Now God's going to smite me because his ghostwriters weren't good enough to include details. Also, this is incest. Again. Still.

So in 20:14, Abimelech brown-noses Abraham by giving him all kinds of cattle and livestock and telling him that he can live anywhere in Gerar that he likes. He gives back Sarah and tells her in 20:16, "I am giving your brother a thousand shekels of silver. This is to cover the offense against you before all who are with you."

Well that was nice of him. He took Sarah as a slave and as payback, he gives money to her brother/husband combination (brosband). Because as a woman she has no need for money, only flour so she can get back in the kitchen and make bread.

Satisfied that he has his wife/sister back, Abraham prays. Then it's mentioned that beforehand (bad asynchronous storytelling), God "had closed up every womb in Abimelech's household" (20:18), and he now "healed" them all "so they could have children again" (20:17).

This short chapter has further confirmed one of my previously formulated theories. God is actually human or an embodiment of what humans cannot or refuse to understand as natural events. He's not omnicient or else he would have known Abraham lied. Also, due to his alliance with Abraham, he sides with Abraham in the extreme, resorting to destroying wombs as a threat and then reversing it later. Of course, no human could do this, but if you're making up a story about a deity, you've got to give him super powers. The Bible just gives him super powers of hate and destruction.

It's also an interesting literary technique to lie to the audience even as the characters lie to other characters. It almost makes me feel as cheated as the king does here. Is this suggesting that I'm to blame for not knowing Sarah and Abraham were blood relatives, despite not having been told so? It follows, then, as many Christians will tell you, that I as an atheist am doomed to hellfire for all eternity simply because I see no evidence that God exists or that Jesus was his physical embodiment.