Genesis: Chapter Fourteen (Abram Rescues Lot)

In which a completely nonsensical war breaks out and Lot becomes the only Sodomite worth a thought.

MEANWHILE!

Amraphel, Atrioch, Kedorlaomer, and Tidal (the kings of Shinar, Ellasar, Elam, and Goiim) start a war against Bera, Birsha, Shinab, Shemeber, and Zoar (the kings of Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim, and Bela). The latter group has been under the command of Kedorlaomer, and they don't like it. They rebel. (14:1-4)

This war rages on for fourteen years, when Kedorlaomer and his crew finally destroy the Rephaites, the Zuzites, the Emites, and the Horites, then turn back toward En Mishpat (also known as Kadesh) and conquer that entire region. (14:5-7)

Sodom amasses his forces in the Valley of Siddim, and that's where the final battle goes down. (14:8-9)

"Now the Valley of Siddim was full of tar pits, and when the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fled, some of the men fell into them and the rest fled to the hills." (14:10) Kedorlaomer's crew wins the battle (because the Sodomites and Gomorrans all ran away, so it's kind of a default thing), and they "seized all the goods of Sodom and Gomorrah and all their food" (14:11) and then they take off to return home.

But the plot thickens when Lot, who's living near Sodom, is taken away by the Elamese forces along with everything he owns (14:12).

One of the Sodomite escapees runs to Abram, somehow knowing that Abram and Lot were related despite their having split up in the last chapter. Abram gets angry (and you wouldn't like him when he's angry), and he gathers up the 318 men that had settled around him and allied with him over the past unknown amount of years to track down his nephew. (14:13-14)

One night, Abram hatches a devious plan. He separates his 318 men into smaller groups who each go out and attack different places in the dead of night. "He recovered all the goods and brought back his relative Lot and his possessions, together with the women and the other people." (14:15-16)

There's something particularly odd about all of this. Stay with me here --

An army made up of five kings' people go to war against an army of four kings' people. The slightly larger army runs away from the smaller one. Why? Was the other army noticably larger? Were there more able-bodied people on the "good" side than Sodom had? Besides, this was a rebellion, not a mild complaint. A true rebellion can't be slapped on the wrist. That's not going to stop anything. A true rebellion happens when people decide they hate the way they're living and they decide to fight against it, death being a completely viable alternative to the oppression.

Sodom, et al were one army ahead of the game, and yet they ran away! I know I'm being a bit nitpicky here, but this is not war! This isn't even an attempt at war. This was nothing more than a bunch of people making threats en masse about something they don't know or care enough about to die for.

And now, despite the fact that five entire armies went to war and lost to four entire armies, Abram thinks it's a really good idea to make his own go at those four armies with a little over three hundred men. I have speculated in previous chapters that Abram was one taco short of a combination plate, and this is proof of such.

But for whatever reason (probably because he's God's chosen one), he manages to succeed. What's more, "After Abram returned from defeating Kedorlaomer and the kings allied with him, the king of Sodom came out to meet him in the Valley of Shaveh." (14:17)

So Abram kills the king, and suddenly everyone in the Sodomite group is his best friend, but the guys from the Kedorlaomer camp don't do anything? They don't, say, amass four armies and come after Abram? They already know that, even though the Sodomites are Abram's good buddies, they just run at the first sign of trouble. And 318 men fighting four armies will not survive. As George Zimmer might say, "I guarantee it."

The king of Jerusalem breaks out the bread and wine. This king is also a priest, and he blesses Abram:

Blessed be Abram by God Most High,
Creator of heaven and earth.
And blessed be God Most High
who delivered your enemies into your hand.

Abram was chosen by God, so it's not like he needed the blessing. I'd also like to take a moment to point out that somebody just thanked the Christian deity for allowing people to be killed. Just sayin'.

That brings us up through 14:20, in which Abram gives a tenth of everything he recovered from his escapade to the priest/king for blessing him. Jeez, this Abram guy is really not smart at all.

The king of Sodom seems to be a mostly nice guy. He tells Abram that he doesn't want all the possessions that Abram is about to give to him. He only wants the people. (14:21)

But Abram rejects the offer because of how the Sodomites "were wicked and were sinning greatly against the Lord" (Gen 13:13). He says,

I have raised my hand to the Lord, God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth, and have taken an oath that I will accept nothing belonging to you, not even a thread or the thong of a sandal, so that you will never be able to say, "I made Abram rich." I will accept nothing but what my men have eaten and the share that belongs to the men who went with me — to Aner, Eshcol, and Mamre. Let them have their share.

What a prick! So I know that the Sodomites were supposedly working against God, but we haven't been told what exactly they were doing that was so bad. And I know that Abram was supposedly blessed by God. But still, this is taking it a bit far, don't you think? Abram saved his nephew Lot — who is somehow the only special Sodomite in the bunch, the only one who isn't "wicked" and "sinning greatly against the Lord" — and then rejects payment for it on the grounds that the Sodomites are evil people (God said so!).

That sounds familiar and relevant somehow. It sounds exactly like the way that the far right Christian fundamentalists sound when they try to speak politically. They're full of an uneducated, pompous self-righteousness that they believe is the only thing they need to make sense of the world, when in reality, they're just stupid people listening to a fake God telling them lies. They'll make exceptions for anything they feel doesn't match their worldview and make up excuses to match those decisions. They'll even warp truth. I imagine Abram is rationalizing this by thinking that Lot wasn't really a Sodomite. Lot was somehow forced into living there or something (he wasn't; it was his choice). That's a lot like killing someone, but thinking that you're exempt from the repercussions because God told you to do it.

Genesis: Chapter Thirteen (Abram and Lot Separate)

In which a fight between nephew and uncle is narrowly avoided by Abram being a generally cool guy, and in which God lies and lies and lies and lies and...

The first thing this chapter does is inform you that Abram and his crew have begun the journey home to the Negev, now extremely wealthy. They have an abundance of livestock and precious metals. (13:1-2) Abram "went from place to place until he came to Bethel". This is where, in Gen 12, he built the altar. Once again, he calls "on the name of the Lord". (13:3-4)

Lot, Abram's nephew, has been traveling all over the countryside with his aunt and uncle. His father, Haran (who is Abram's brother), died back in 11:28. In a way, I'm kinda glad that this crew is who it is. We learned from Gen 11 that people aren't afraid of committing incest, and I'm getting kinda tired of having to read about it. 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.

In 13:5-6, Lot has some possessions that he's been carrying around, but he has to stop and settle because "the land could not support them while they stayed together, for their possessions were so great that they were not able to stay together." I'm not sure what this means. And "I'm not sure what this means" is something I've said so many times by now that I'm not sure it holds any meaning any more. What's the problem? Is it that they simply can't find enough physical space for all of their cattle, silver, gold, and tents that they have to split up? There's no footnote here to explain what "the land could not support them" really means. Support, when referring to physical strength like I think this is, means the ability to assist and keep one on one's feet, but the land didn't just start caving in beneath them because it wasn't held up by enough support columns.

After deciding to split up, Abram's slaves who tend Abram's cattle start to argue with Lot's slaves who tend to Lot's cattle. Abram tries to calm things down by suggesting:

Let's not have any quarreling between you and me, or between your herdsmen and mine, for we are brothers [Figuratively, not literally; they're literally uncle and nephew. -Ed.]. Is not the whole land before you? Let's part company. If you go to the left, I'll go to the right; if you go to the right, I'll go to the left.

That's redundant, but peaceful, and it brings us all the way through 13:9.

Lot knows that the land of Jordan has enough water to support his cattle's drinking habit, and they split up without any further argument. Lot heads into Jordan while Abram moves back into Canaan. 13:10 mentions that "This was before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah," which doesn't happen in my Bible until Gen 19, and I have no idea why we need a note explaining that something hasn't happened yet when we had no idea that whatever that thing was ever happened, and when we weren't going to find out about it for another six chapters. Way to go, Bible, giving us spoilers for yourself. Ah, it's okay. The best parts were in the trailer, anyhow.

Lot finally settles down near the town of Sodom. The Sodomites "were wicked and were sinning greatly against the Lord" (13:13).

Meanwhile, Abram is visited by God. God instructs him to

Lift up your eyes from where you are and look north and south, east and west. All the land that you see I will give to you and your offspring forever. I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth, so that if anyone could count the dust, then your offspring could be counted. Go, walk through the length and breadth of the land, for I am giving it to you."

Yep. Once again, in 13:14-17, God makes another empty promise. He says that the land belongs to all of Abram's offspring, but we know from 11:30 that Abram's wife Sarai is barren, and cannot bear children. If Abram wants offspring, either Sarai is going to somehow become fertile or Abram's going to have to sneak off and have an affair. Surely, since Abram was chosen by God to make this two-chapter-long journey, and since Abram is such a shining example of a human being, and since this is the Bible where God manages to do impossible things (that's called a miracle), I'm betting that Abram stays loyal to his wife and Sarai's uterus begins to magically work.

Abram believes God's lies once again, and he moves to live "near the great trees of Mamre at Hebron," and then he builds another altar (13:18).

Abram and Sarai's journey to the center of the middle east is a long one, and they've left behind them a trail of altars and diseases like some kind of twisted, Arab Hansel and Gretel. One way or another, God is lying to his people here. Twice in the past two chapters has God mentioned Abram's offspring, but never once mentioning how that's going to be made possible. And he's very long-winded, at that.

Genesis: Chapter Twelve (The Call of Abram, Abram in Egypt)

In which God selects Abram at random to be falsely rewarded for doing nothing, and in which Sarai is kidnapped into sexual slavery by the Egyptian Pharoah.

God begins commanding again right off the bat in Chapter Twelve. "Leave your country, your people and your father's household," he says to Abram, "and go to the land I will show you." God promises Abram that he will start a "great nation" and that God will "make [Abram's] name great." God "will bless those who bless you and whoever curses you I will curse" (12:1-3). God really is down with this whole vengeance thing. Aside from choosing people who marry their infertile cousins at random and granting them a legacy, he sure does like to tell these people that anybody who isn't nice to them will feel the terrible wrath of the lord.

So Abram takes off with his nephew Lot and his wife Sarai. They take all their things and all of their slaves (God doesn't seem to have a problem with slavery) and leave town when Abram is seventy-five years old. Or like, six and a half if you're counting in real time (12:4-5).

They pass into the land of the Canaanites until they finally stop at the "great tree of Moreh at Shechem." God offers the land to Abram, saying, "To your offspring I will give this land." (12:7)

Wait... What? *rifles through pages, finds passage* AHA! Genesis 11:30 says, "Now Sarai was barren; she had no children."

I'm having trouble reconciling what it means when God says one thing knowing that it means nothing. This is an empty promise. Abram will have no offspring because his wife is barren. She is infertile. She is not a baby-making machine. So when God says that the offspring of Abram and Sarai will inherit the land, he is telling Abram comforting nothings, probably to convince Abram to do something. Does Abram realize he's been taken? Did he just want a change of scenery and take the opportunity when God handed it to him? Who knows? One thing's for sure. Whether Abram knows it or not, God is lying to Abram.

Abram must not be aware of this because in 12:8 Abram "built an altar to the Lord and called on the name of the Lord." Then in 12:9 he moves on to a place called Negev.

When famine encompasses Egypt, Abram decides to spend some time on the African continent (12:10). I'm left to assume that he does so to bring some kind of aid to the Egyptians because the Bible does not provide a reason for Abram's actions. But he does have a fear of the Egyptians. He thinks that when they see Sarai's beauty, they will kill Abram to take Sarai for their own. He proposes in 12:13 that she pose as his sister (which is not too far off from the truth) so that this will not happen.

Sure enough, when Abram and Sarai show up, the Pharoah's officials think Sarai is worthy of presentation to their king. They take Sarai to the palace. The Pharoah approves of Sarai and thinks her "brother" is so awesome that "Abram acquired sheep and cattle, male and female donkeys, menservants and maidservants, and camels." (12:14-16)

God takes pity on Sarai because of how unfairly she is treated by the Pharoah. The book doesn't say what kind of horrible atrocities are done to her, but one might assume sexual slavery. In 12:17, God "inflicted serious diseases on Pharoah and his household" because of it, fulfilling half of his promise from before.

The Pharoah, through his punishment, becomes aware of Abram and Sarai's ruse. He confronts Abram, reiterates Abram's plan back, returns Sarai to her husband, and tells them to get out of the country. Abram gets to take all of the cool stuff the Pharoah gave him. (12:18-20)

What's left unexplained at the end of this chapter is why Abram went to Egypt in the first place, and what he did while he was there aside from wind up in some wacky hijinks with the king. I understand there was a famine, but generally speaking, people don't move toward a place of dispair unless they are there to provide aid in some way. In a monarchy such as Egypt was, the people are going to get what the king gives them, and external help will be no help at all. Abram perhaps didn't understand this and went anyway. But while he was down there, he didn't do anything to that end. His wife got kidnapped, which obviously causes problems with the rest of the itenerary, and he spent the rest of his trip watching the Pharoah undergo various illnesses.

Personally, I think this chapter is nothing more than an illustration of God following through on something that didn't involve killing people. God did make a guy sick, however, and he did make a rather large empty promise to Abram. In the end, I'm still left making wild conjectures at why God selected Abram, what he selected Abram for, and why Abram went to Egypt. In literary jargon, God's selection of Abram and subsequent commandment for him to move about the countryside could be seen as a McGuffin, an event that takes place solely for the purpose of catalyzing an unrelated plot.

Genesis: Chapter Eleven (The Tower of Babel; From Shem to Abram)

In which God can't make up his mind whether to let humans live in peace or torment them endlessly, and people have sex with their blood relatives... Again.

Chapter Eleven explains that, since all people came from one ultimate source, everyone spoke the same language. Eventually, curiosity and exploration led to human settlement in a place called Shinar. (11:1-2) In the last chapter, 10:10 let us know that Shinar was one of the places that Nimrod the great warrior had settled.

The people of Shinar learned how to make bricks from mud and decided to stack those bricks, binding them with tar, to "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." (11:3-4) To this day, man makes structures of such towering grandeur that one can't help but be impressed by them. It's part of human nature, I think, to try and make a name for ourselves, to prove that we can do these things which seem impossible. It's why we climb Mount Everest, even though it's a dangerous and often deadly task. It's the birth of tourism.

But God didn't like what the Shinese were doing (Shinese is my word, since the Bible doesn't give me a better one). God reasons in 11:6-7, "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."

What an ambivalent god! He can't decide to love humans or hate us! First he removes our ability to reason for ourselves and then gets angry when we eat fruit against God's better judgment. Then he blames us for it and casts us aside, making childbirth painful. Punishment! But then he decides we're okay, and that we should populate the earth. Great success! But then we commit murder and make babies with the Nephilim, which are either angels, giants, both, or neither, so God floods the world and kills all but about a dozen of us. Not just a slap on the wrist! But then he gives us rainbows and promises that he won't kill us all again, and he says it's okay to populate the earth a second time. Reconciliation! But when he sees that the humans that he created in his own image — that all-knowing, all-powerful image — are capable of building things, he wants to destroy it all and take away our communication. Waffling! God is insecure! How is it that he can make man in his own image and then expect us to not be capable?

So God, in his obvious wisdom, does exactly what he said he'd do right around 11:8-9, and humans quit building the city, which became known as Babel, which sounds a lot like the Hebrew word for confused, which is what I am right now. It seems adequate.

This double-feature chapter then moves on to some more lineage. Like an independent movie, we start with the climax and everything after that is boring build-up to something which already happened.

11:10-17 recaps what we were told last chapter: Shem's bloodline wound through the ages all the way to Eber and his son Peleg, whose name you'll remember means divided. So that's what it meant! Nobody was speaking the same language like they used to. The Bible has its time sequencing all out of shape. But what did I expect from a book that begins with chronological impossibilities?

These same verses also give us ages for all the peoples deaths and ages of spawning. On the whole, people are living less than half as long as pre-flood people, most dying around 400 years or so. (Are you counting? That's about 33 years old.) They're also having kids when their ages range from 30 to 35 years. (2-3 years old and already sexing up the ladies! Those horndogs! No, I'm not letting this go!)

So Peleg has a son named Reu, Reu had a son named Serug, Serug had a son name Nahor, Nahor had a son named Terah, and Terah had three sons named Abram, Nahor, and Haran. (11:18-26) Quick statistic: the person who bears children at the youngest age is Nahor at 29 years (2 years, 5 months).

Blunt as always, 11:27 lets us know that "this is the account of Terah."

Terah's son Haran "became the father of Lot," but dies "while his father Terah was still alive." (11:27-28) The other boys marry, and for once, some women are mentioned by name. Abram's wife went by Sarai, and Milcah was Nahor's wife. But just when you thought it was a good thing, you find out that Milcah "was the daughter of Haran". A brief thought will lead you to the same conclusion I arrived at: Milcah is Nahor's daughter-in-law. (11:29) Creepy! By now, there's enough population that humans don't actually have to resort to incest to continue the species, but they're doing it anyway. Nahor and Milcah share genes. Their children will most likely be mentally incapacitated. Sounds like Nahor and Milcah were, as well.

Because we needed to know this, Abram's wife Sarai was barren. (11:30)

There are two Nahors. Terah's father was a Nahor, and I'll call him Nahor I. Terah also had a son name Nahor, who I'll call Nahor II. Terah had two other sons named Abram and Heran. Nahor II married Heran's daughter, meaning he married his own daughter-in-law. Abram married his father's daughter-in-law. So that means Terah had a brother or sister we don't know about, and that person is Abram's aunt or uncle. The daughter of that person is Sarai. Abram married his father's sibling's daughter — his cousin.

This incestuous little family made their way to Canaan, but "when they came to Haran, they settled there." (11:31) This confuses things a little further because they came to what is presumably a town called Haran, not Terah's son Haran. Maybe Haran founded Haran, and they stopped to stay with family. This family is really close, you know.

Finally, after living what was undoubtedly a fulfilling life full of watching his daughter-in-law marry his son and cooing at the utter cuteness of his son and his granddaughter tying the knot, Terah died in the town of Haran.

Not until now have the incestuous goings-on in this book been so intimately laid out for us. It's not clearly laid out; I had to diagram the whole family tree to be sure I was reading it correctly. Perhaps this is intentionally done to disguise what was going on, or perhaps the marriage and childbearing amongst blood relatives was considered acceptable back then. Maybe that's why Sarai was barren. Maybe this history has been somehow tampered with during the centuries of verbal transference before it was ever transcribed to paper. Maybe it was further altered during translations. Maybe when King James decided things needed to be more to his liking, he asked for the insertion of some good, old-fashioned incest. There are countless things that could lead to the eventual bastardization of the language and the story and the lineage and genealogy, but this is the way it ended up, and this is what Christians believe. This is what Christians think God likes. Therefore, as a closing message, I encourage every Christian to go make sweet love to their cousins and daughters-in-law this year. Do it for Christmas. Mentally retarded children really are the gift that keeps on giving.

Poe's Law

Before I get into this, let me place a disclaimer...

This post contains links to other sites on the Internet which are not safe for viewing at work. They are also not pornographic in the strictest sense, but I wouldn't click anything here with young'uns around.

Now that I got that out of the way, let's get away from the Bible for a bit and talk about Poe's Law (and that particular link should be safe for pretty much anybody). Poe's Law says that

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that SOMEONE won't mistake for the real thing.

Worded inversely,

Real fundamentalism is often indistinguishable from parodies of fundamentalism.

The idea is that some forms of fundamentalism are so extreme and so absurd that they appear to be only parodies, and the real parodies become indistinguishable from the real thing. As an example, I propose this image:

The image is funny. A grumpy atheist represented as a goat (a symbol of a demonic nature in Christianity) is described as "always sad" (I'm an atheist, and I'm rarely sad), and kids who spot an atheist should immediately report it to a holy person with great urgency while avoiding communication with the atheist. "Very advanced witnessing techniques are needed for these grouches." It could easily be a way to keep rationality out of children's heads until the fundies have them fully brainwashed. Or it could be a big joke put on by someone who likes to make fun of fundies.

Another example, the very unsafe-for-kids Sex In Christ, promotes anal sex, oral sex, and fisting as alternatives to other, pregnancy-prone sex acts, and claims that the Bible approves of them using quotes from scripture. Is this real or a joke? It's impossible to tell.

Anti-Spore is a website that was set up to protest EA's game Spore, which is a game built around natural selection and the evolution of creatures. The author of Anti-Spore later came out and admitted he had been fraudulently posing as a far-right Christian creationist as a joke, but even after that public admission, people still fell for it. Or maybe they didn't, and only continued sending him hate mail for the same reason he started the site in the first place. Poe's Law in action.

Genesis: Chapter Ten (The Table of Nations)

In which lots of people make lots of babies and Nimrod gets the short end of the naming stick.

Always right to the point, the chapter begins, "This is the account of Shem, Ham, and Japheth, Noah's sons, who themselves had sons after the flood." (10:1) A brief scan of the chapter tells me I'm about to read all about three different sects of people, the descendants of Japheth, Ham, and Shem. Those tribes are called The Japhethites, The Hamites, and The Semites. (Let it be known that I will, from here forward, be paying close attention to the bloodline of Shem. If we get the term Semites through Anglicisation of this tribe, then the term antisemitic is likely to share etymological roots, and I want to know what those are.)

In 10:2-4, Japheth has seven sons named Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshech, and Tiras. Gomer has three sons — Ashkenaz, Riphath, and Togarmah — while Javan has four — Elishah, Tarshish, the Kittim, and the Rodanim. The footnote in my Bible says that some other texts call this last group of people the Dodanim. It's probably just a translation thing.

10:6-7 sets up the Hamite tribe. Ham spawns Cush, Mizraim, Put, and Canaan (whose lineage was cursed into slavery in the previous chapter). Cush begets Seba, Havilah, Sabtah, Raamah, and Sabteca. Raamah has two kids, Sheba and Dedan.

But Cush had another son named Nimrod (yeah, seriously, check out 10:8), and Nimrod was "a mighty warrior on the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord." So he fought in wars, I guess. Wars that are conveniently not mentioned in the Bible. Or maybe he was a "soldier in Christ". 10:9 says, "That is why it is said, 'Like Nimrod, a mighty hunter before the Lord.'" So Nimrod was awesome enough to warrant his own regional saying.

Nimrod is a guy who builds cities and turns them into a kingdom. "The first centers of his kingdom were Babylon, Erech, Akkad, and Calneh." Later, "he went to Assyria, where he built Nineveh, Rehoboth Ir, Calah, and Resen." (10:11-12) Calah is called "the great city."

Another history lesson goes down in 10:13-17. Mizraim (son of Ham) birthed the lineages of the Ludites, Anamites, Lehabites, Naphtuhites, Pathrusites, Casluhites, and the Caphtorites. The Philistines are derivative of the Casluhites. Canaan had offspring as well: Sidon (who apparently failed to start a successful clan, much like my attempts at playing World of Warcraft), the Hittites, Jebusites, Amorites, Girgashites, Hivites, Arkites, Sinites, Arvadites, Zemarites, and Hamathites. No word on the Hermaphrodites.

But Canaan's offspring spread out across the world and their territory sprawled from Sidon to Gaza, then to Sodom and Gomorrah, and some other places that take up a lot of typing space. The point is that Canaan and his boys had themselves some territory. (10:19)

10:20 finally contradicts my triplets theory in full by saying that Shem's older brother was Japheth. So the Noah brothers were born in this order: Japheth, Shem, Ham. Japheth is the eldest, Ham the youngest.

Another history lesson goes down in 10:21-30, and I'll condense it for you because, quite frankly, this chapter has been boring so far. No character development whatsoever. Shem has five sons. One of them, Aram, has four. Another, Arphaxad, births Shelah, who in turn births Eber (who is important enough to warrant three mentions in this segment). Eber has a son named Peleg, which my footnotes tell me means "divided". Peleg was so named "because in his time the earth was divided." This could mean there was an earthquake that split the earth (common natural occurance) or it could mean that the people were divided (politically? culturally?), but again, the Bible isn't going to tell me. What good would the Bible be if it explained everything? Eber's other son is Joktan, and he makes lots of whoopee and thirteen kids. This tribe also had a lot of land.

The chapter ends nowhere near as eventfully as the rest of this story with a couple of verses (9:31-32) saying that we've now covered all of the clans of Noah.

Not much is going on in this chapter at the same time that lots of stuff is happening. The text has quit telling us how long people lived and at what age they began producing offspring, and that's a blessing, the least reason for which is that I no longer have to do math to figure out how old people really were when they made babies or died. But the text itself is pretty bland. This guy had this guy who had this guy and so on and so forth. Still, it's necessary to give us the history and genealogy necessary for me to keep in touch with the Semites like I promised. The only two people in this chapter to receive special attention from the author are the unfortunately-named Nimrod (face it, he's been made fun of ever since, by proxy) and Eber, who is a Semite, and whose lineage I will continue to follow.

On the other hand, the chapter's boring quality also kept it more or less within the bounds of my scrutiny. The closest thing to impossibility here is Joktan's thirteen kids. But that's not really unheard of. I've known larger Mormon families.

Predictably, only sons are mentioned in this lineage. Women are not so much casually discarded as they are completely ignored, despite the fact that we all know it takes a woman to make a baby. If you don't know that, you're probably too young to be reading the Bible.

Genesis: Chapter Nine (God's Covenant With Noah, The Sons of Noah)

In which God makes rainbows and swears he won't flood the world to death again; and in which Ham fists Noah, resulting in Ham's son's punishment.

God and Noah have a conversation. God gives his blessing to Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and tells them to "Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth." (9:1) In addition to run-on sentences, God really likes pushing that incest. Enough on that. I wonder why God didn't also bless Noah's wife and daughter-in-laws. God also says that from now on, all animals on earth will fear man. (9:2) "Everything that lives and moves will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything." (9:3)

Were humans vegetarians before now? God says that previously he had only given humans plants for food, but now they can eat meat, too. If humans didn't eat other animals before now, why did Abel keep track of the livestock like Genesis 4:2 tells us? Maybe this shines some light on why Abel's offering of animals to God was favored over Cain's offering of plants. Let's assume for a moment that God had a thing for animals and had kept them safe from human consumption. You know how when you're playing Jenga, it takes forever to set up the tower of blocks, three bricks at a time, but it's totally worth all that effort to watch it fall down at the end of the game? Maybe God goes through the same "destruction is a form of creation" thought process that humans do. After all, man was made in God's image, so it's entirely plausible (provided that you accept that God exists and that man was created - not evolved - in God's image). In other words, that's why we have things like Jenga and the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

And then, in 4:4-6, God puts some caveats in place. "You must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it." So don't eat raw meat. Okay. If they can make fire, they can avoid this. Also, kill the animals before you eat them. Also not a problem. I'm fairly sure that a cow would not let you take a bite out of it while its hooves were in good working order. Also, God says not to kill other humans because God "will surely demand an accounting." More poetically, he says:

Whoever sheds the blood of man,
by man shall his blood be shed;
for in the image of God
has God made man.

I believe that later on, in Exodus, God will make a similar commandment in the form of the infamous "eye for an eye" speech. In the case of murder, the murderer should also be killed. But to follow the example, Mahatma Ghandi might have said, "A homicide for a homicide leaves the whole world dead," which goes against verse 9:7, in which God tells the guys again to "be fruitful and increase in number; multiply on the earth and increase upon it." It seems hypocritical to finish up a speech advocating reciprocal murder with a heartlifting message about populating the earth. Or maybe it makes perfect sense. I really can't tell at this point.

Continuing, God establishes a covenant with Noah and his sons, with all of their descendants, and with every living creature that was on the ark with them. God's promise is that "never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth." (9:9-11) This is utterly laughable. God promises not to ever impossibly destroy all life on earth except for a very small percentage ever again. Imagine if World War II had ended with Adolf Hitler promising to never overtake most of Europe and kill every Jew, Catholic priest, and homosexual in sight to gain political advantage and advance his study of black magic. Furthermore, this is the oldest trick in the book. God's not saying he'll never destroy all life on earth again; he just won't use a flood to do it. Maybe next time he'll set the world on fire. Maybe he'll just explode the entire planet. Maybe he'll send a rain of flaming meteors the size of Switzerland. Or maybe he'll just kill all Christians, move them to Heaven, and force the rest of the heathens to fight it out amongst the rubble.

As a sign of his honesty, God invents the rainbow and makes them appear after rainfall so that "Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind." (9:14-15) If God's signature had an "i" in it, he would dot the letter with a heart. God goes on a little bit about the same thing ("This is the sign of the covenant I have established..." and so on) all the way through 9:17, where the second part of this compound chapter begins.

In The Sons of Noah, we relearn that Shem, Ham, and Japheth are Noah's sons (9:18-19). In 9:20 Noah plants a vineyard, and in 9:21 he makes some wine, gets drunk, and passes out naked in his tent. I can't tell you how many camping trips have ended up with me in the same situation. Ham, in 9:22, walks in on his father, sees that Noah is naked, and runs out to tell his brothers. Shem and Japeth "took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked in backward and covered their father's nakedness. Their faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father's nakedness." (9:23)

And so, homophobia is born. But seriously, I don't understand this. I mean, I understand that your father passed out in the buff may not be the most pleasant of sights, but walking in backwards to lay a shirt across his junk is a little overboard. Considering that only six chapters ago, humans were perfectly fine with being nude around each other, man certainly made a quick turnaround.

As if it wasn't bad enough that two of the boys took extra-special super care not to see their daddy's wee-wee, Noah really loses it when he wakes up. 9:24 says, "When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him..."

Wait. What? First of all, "his youngest son"? See 5:32 where Noah has three kids in the same sentence. Okay, so they're maybe not triplets, but I would have liked that to be more clear. But then... "what his youngest son had done to him"? Assuming he means Ham (as later verses will confirm), what exactly did Ham do to him? He came in, saw his dad was naked, then alerted his brothers so they could cover him up and spare him any further embarrassment. But really, what did Noah expect to happen? The old man got drunk on homebrewed wine and fell down naked!

I had to go to the Internet to find something more about this. The Church of the Great God says, "An illicit sexual act is indicated." But it's really not. Nowhere in that sentence, paragraph, chapter, or any other segment of this book is an "illicit sexual act" mentioned, alluded to, verbalized, printed, or communicated in any way. There is nothing here to suggest an illicit sexual act.

So I shall consult another Bible. King James, lend me your pages! In the KJV, 9:24 goes like this: "And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him." So it's the same thing. Still no mention of what other Bible commentors seem to believe was homosexual anal rape while his father was incapacitated after hitting the bottle. Jesus! The Bible is graphic and bloody enough already! Must we make up even worse stuff just to justify Noah's rage? Can't we just say that he was hungover?

Noah flips out and curses Ham's son, Canaan in 9:25-27 —

Cursed be Canaan!
The lowest of slaves
will he be to his brothers.
Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem!
May Canaan be the salve of Shem.
May God extend the territory of
Japheth
may Japheth live in the tents of Shem,
and may Canaan be his slave.

Supposedly, Ham commits the horrible, disgusting act of walking in on his drunk, unconcious father (or maybe he really plowed his dad's anus, but the Bible ain't sayin'; what happens in Noah's tent stays in Noah's tent), and his son gets cursed into slavery. That sounds like a really reasonable punishment, doesn't it? Tell you what, if it means that I get to commit all the sodomy I want, I'll gladly let you punish my son instead of me.

All this in a chapter that was supposed to be about rainbows.

The chapter closes out with a couple of quick verses about Noah's death. 9:28-29 say that Noah lived 350 years after the flood, for a grand total of 950 years. That's almost 80 fake, nonsensical, magic Gregorian years, if you're counting.

Genesis: Chapter Eight (The Flood Ends)

In which God ends the flood, his genocide having been a great success, and Noah kills a lot of the surviving animals to thank God for killing practically everyone he knew.

Finally, "God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded." (8:1) It's about time. Noah and the animals have spent roughly six Gregorian months (or a really uncertain number of Biblical years) on the ark, and no animal has died or gone hungry. But I wonder where the water receded to. I mean, it was covering the entire earth to the point where the tallest mountain was covered by twenty feet of water. All land was completely covered, so it's not like there were any separated oceans for the water to recede to. Wind doesn't implicitly cause evaporation, either, so it didn't just heat up until the floodwaters became clouds. The Bible is full of this kind of magic.

The water recedes over the course of the 150 days following the cessation of precipitation. So God didn't release a mighty wind after all, but instead made wind blow for that entire 5-6 month period, and slowly the water went away. Doesn't that generally happen anyway? It seems like a lot of acts of God are actually attributable to natural events. This one isn't wind, though. It's normal evaporation caused by energy from the sun exciting the water particles and turning them into gas. Exciting. Godlike.

Verse 8:5 gives us some more great insight and Biblical/lunar calendar debunking fodder: "The waters continued to recede until the tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains became visible." 150 days into 9 months (because we're only one day into the tenth month) shows us that there are an average of... *starts calculator software* ...16 ²/₃ days per month. That's 0.59 lunar cycles per month, on average. The Gregorian calendar's months are not an example in constant day distribution, some months being as short as twenty-eight days and others as long as thirty-one, so I will accept that some Biblical months are shorter than 16 days and some are longer. In fact, that must be true. If all months contained the same number of days, we would not have the two-thirds of a day on the average. Days are measured in whole numbers within the context of a month. Therefore, I continue to posit that one Biblical year cannot possibly be equal to a lunar cycle. Each month averages nearly seventeen days in length. Chapter Seven tells us that there are, at minimum, two months in one year. Therefore, at minimum, there are thirty-four days in one Biblical year, which exceeds the length of a lunar cycle by six days.

Okay. Back to the story.

Noah sends out a raven through his skylight, which is described here as a window, and it flies back and forth until all the water is dried up. (8:6-7)

But now I get confused because after the raven flies "until the water had dried up from the earth" (8:7), Noah then sends out a dove "to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground." (8:8) So what happened with the raven? Why did Noah bother with it if he was just going to send the dove later? Is there any explanation for why the dove "returned to Noah in the ark" when it "could find no place to set its feet," but the raven "kept flying back and forth"? How is it even possible that the raven could fly until the water was gone, but Noah could still send out a dove who then found no dry land anywhere? If the raven flew until the water was gone, why is it that Noah "waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark" (8:10) to search for land again?

And how is it possible that after 190 days of water completely covering the earth that there could possibly be a "freshly plucked olive leaf" (8:11) for the dove to return with? No olive tree could possibly survive 190 days of intense flooding, and even if it survived, it would be so drastically damaged that it wouldn't be able to recuperate and produce leaves within a week. None of this makes any sense whatsoever. Two birds fly out and find a lack of water at different times set two weeks apart. Neither of those birds suffered from weakness after 190 days with limited food supply (probably no substantial food existed past the first week, maybe two). I'm so lost. I think this is what the Bible counts on because I'm getting ready to just quit and accept that a bunch of rain fell, Noah and a bunch of animals survived for a really long time, and then everything was all better because...

MAGIC!!! Yes. Magic. Certainly that's it. I'll just skip over the whole funny business of two birds and impossible timelines and implausibly surviving olive trees and just resolve to call it all MAGIC!

But then, just as I've resolved to ignore all of this, the Bible pulls another one out of left field. First, it says that "the first day of the first month of Noah's six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth." (8:13) The very next verse contradicts this: "By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry." (8:14) Which is it? Did the flood go away on month one, day one, or month two, day twenty-seven? I'm not even going to mention the further timeline complications of this.

In 8:15-19, God commands Noah to get off the ark along with all the animals "so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number upon it." They comply. Then, in 8:20, Noah builds an altar to praise God and his wonderous acts of mass genocide. To solidify his praise, he takes some of the clean animals and burns them on the altar in sacrifice, finishing what God started and doing away with all of those excess diverse genes and reducing the entire planet to the point where incest is required for future generations to live.

God decides that "never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done." So that's good. It's also good that God makes this proclamation in 8:22 --

As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest,
cold and heat,
summer and winter,
day and night
will never cease.

I feel it necessary to mention what this implies:

• Before this proclamation, plants bloomed all the time, not requiring any time to germinate, and they produced edible food constantly.
• There was never any variation in heat, despite the fact that God already created day and night on the universe's first day of existence.
• There were no seasons beforehand.
• Day and night didn't exist despite what Chapter One says about God's first day of labor.

Or God could just be blowing smoke again like I suspect he did when he banished man from the Garden of Eden and made childbirth painful and took away the legs of all snakes.

Genesis: Chapter Seven (The Flood, cont'd)

In which God becomes judgmental of animals, then kills them all out of self-pity, promoting more incest in the process.

Chapter Seven begins with a recap of Chapter Six with a correction. God tells Noah to take his whole family on the ark and to "take with you seven of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and two of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate, and also seven of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth." (7:2-3) So God has changed his mind. Now Noah gets to take along seven males and seven females of each "clean" animal, but only two pairs of each "unclean" animal. Who makes this distinction? It doesn't say, but the fact that God approves of such a distinction suggests that God probably decided which animals lay on which side of the cleanliness line.

Noah gets a week's time to load up the ark (I don't think that even a zoo could be organized in a week alone) and then it will rain for forty days and forty nights. (7:4) This is how God plans to kill everything, but save everything at the same time.

Despite the apparent impossibility of the task he's been given, in 7:5, "Noah did all that the Lord commanded him."

7:6 gives us some fun numbers to play with. "Noah was six hundred years old when the floodwaters came on the earth." In Chapter Five, we were told that Noah was 500 years old (or 41, if you subscribe to the Gregorian calendar) when Shem, Ham, and Japheth were born, so 100 years later, when the flood takes place, the triplets are only 100 years old (roughly 8 Gregorian years). That seems pretty young to see this kind of death and destruction, but Noah does what God tells him to do, anyway.

An interesting passage appears now regarding the Biblical calendar. 7:11 says, "In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, on the seventeenth day of the second month - on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened." At first glance, this might just seem like an interesting way to say when death came to town. But a closer examination of this sentence shows us that one Biblical year contains months, and that each month contains at least seventeen days (or at least this month did). Well, if a lunar cycle is 28 days and a lunar cycle also is one Biblical year, how do you figure that there could be at least two months with at least seventeen days in each crammed into one single, 28-day-long lunar cycle? The lunar-Biblical calendar is wrong. Flat wrong. The math doesn't add up. People who came up with this theory to support claims that Adam could have viably lived for 930 years were either lying or completely ignoring the fact that it leaves men having sex and impregnating women at the age five, and also that the Bible itself refutes this theory. Or perhaps they're doing exactly what I just said: coming up with a completely unfounded theory in a failed attempt at defending a book which cites impossible things as truths.

At any rate, all the animals of all types are shuffled on board during 7:13-16. Noah's wife, Shem, Ham, and Japheth go with them. Noah heads in last, and "Then the Lord shut him in."

Rain falls for forty days solidly. The roof keeps the rain out of the boat (no further mention of the giant, foot-and-a-half wide skylight), but the water beneath the boat creates buoyancy and lifts the boat from the ground.

Regarding the properties of the flood itself, "all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet." (7:19-20) I'm going to assume that means that the water rose high enough to cover the tallest mountain, and then rose twenty feet beyond that point because when a mountain is only twenty feet tall, I don't call it a mountain. I call it a mound. Naturally, with no land or trees to perch on, even the birds died off. "Every living thing that moved on the earth perished - birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind." (7:21)

I had to read that sentence twice because for a moment, I thought it said, "swam over the earth." Obviously, not every creature died like the Bible said. I can think of plenty of flora and fauna that survive underwater. I know I mentioned seaweed in a previous chapter. What about fish? Can fish drown?

In the end, "only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark." (7:23) Verse 7:24 finishes this chapter on a cliffhanger: "The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days."

So it rains solidly for about a year and a half (considering previously debunked arguments about lunar cycles and Biblical years), and then the water that fell hangs around for another twelve and a half years. Overall, this was a fourteen-year-long flood. The Bible wants me to believe that Noah had enough food in the ark to last 190 days, enough to feed five humans, and at least four of every single species in existence at the time. Let me break this down a little more clearly.

It can be said that there are three basic types of animals in the world:

• Those that strictly eat various plants (herbivores),
• Those that strictly eat other animals (carnivores),
• And those that eat a little of both (omnivores).

So Noah would have needed enough plants to feed thousands upon thousands of herbivores for nearly 200 days. I can't even think of one single plant that could be edible, even if freshly plucked from the ground on Day 1, for that long. Not to mention that every herbivore requires a different diet, so it's not like Noah could have just gotten a bunch of hay and compressed it and thrown it in a corner to wait. He'd also need berries and fruits and vegetables and specific types of leaves and grass. He would need an extremely large variety of food just for the herbivores alone.

The carnivores surprise me. I think it's safe to say that enough meat to feed thousands upon thousands of flesh-craving lions and tigers and bears wouldn't fit into the ark any more than a large amount of veggies. Yet somehow, not a single lion tried to eat a single gazelle. Not one bear jumped overboard to snatch at a leaping fish. For that matter, animals like to move around. Being cramped into a tiny room is not the best way to work off the energy built up by consuming 190 days' worth of food. Animals tend to get antsy when that happens (their body tries to burn off the energy they've eaten), and Noah didn't lose an arm while feeding an angry wolf.

The omnivores fall somewhere in between. Their bodies require nutrition from both flesh and fruit, but they never got underfed, not even when, two days after the ark set sail, all the millions of pounds of unrefrigerated food stored in open air went to rot. I'm actually surprised that the ark floated at all with that much food and animal on it.

And I know this isn't a very glamorous question to ask, but how could they possibly manage all of the feces and urine put out by the menagerie?

We're left on another cliffhanger, but I can already see where this one is going. Just like in Chapter Four before this, we have a case where the human population is extremely thin. We have four males and an unknown (but small) number of females. The cast of characters has dwindled to Noah, his wife, their three sons, and their wives. Assuming all three sons are married, there are at least four females. But we know from Chapter Six that men can marry multiple wives. It's possible that Shem, Ham, and Japheth have two or more wives each, but I would venture to say that there are probably no more than ten or so females in existence. We know that exactly four males live on. No matter who they have kids with, they will share direct blood relation to one of the other surviving men. This means that, once again, incest is required for the existence of the human race. God just killed off every man, woman, and child in the world, save for these fifteen or fewer people because man had evil in his heart, but God appears to be completely fine with incest.

I'll close out with some food for thought. Saddam Hussein killed thousands of people during his too-long reign over Iraq. We called it genocide, and we called it a Very Bad Thing. When God brought on the great flood, he eviscerated all but four to fourteen individuals of every species of air-breathing animal in all the world. I call that genocide on a scale that Saddam Hussein never could even could have hoped to commit. But when he does it, it's somehow An Okay Thing To Do.

Genesis: Chapter Six (The Flood)

In which God devises a devious plot to commit genocide, but somehow save everyone in the process.

This chapter begins with a note about the expanding human population and polygamy. The "sons of God" recognized the beauty of the "daughters of men," so they "married any of them they chose." (6:2) Here we see another separation of the females of the human race from God. Men are the sons of God while women are the daughters of men. God dissassociates himself from women, but to men, he is a paternal figure. God is willing to admit a direct and loving relationship between himself and the male of his supposedly favorite species, but to the females, he remains distant, unrecognizing. As a matter of fact, in order for the human population to expand like it's mentioned here, there had to have been women. It's a fact of life that God confirmed already, and yet only one female name has been printed so far.

God decides that humans live too long and in 6:3 he shortens human life down to 120 years. 120 years is a little closer to actuality than the 930 years that Adam supposedly lived, but it's still a rarity, even in these days of advanced medicine. It also throws a major kink in the theory that one Biblical year is the same as one lunar cycle (28 days). By the latter logic, humans now live to be only ten years old before they die. I've had dogs that lived longer than that. Since Chapter Five involves sex and pregnancy among five-year-olds (in a more modern context, that's kindergarten age), this logic has it that people will produce offspring when they are halfway through their very brief lives, then die right around the time that their kids are making kids.

6:4 mentions a group or possibly race of people called the Nephilim, but describes them very loosely: "They were the heroes of old, men of renown." This makes them sound like war heroes. Having not heard of any wars so far in the Bible, I decided to do some more research on these people. Remember that the version of the Bible I'm reading is the New International Version. I decided to check out some other sources for possible clarification through translation differences.

TheNew International Reader's Version says, "The Nephilim were the heroes of long ago. They were famous men." The New King James Version doesn't use the word Nephilim at all, and instead uses an entirely different definition in 6:4 -- "There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown. The Amplified Bible (whatever that is) agrees almost word-for-word with the New King James Version.

So the Nephilim are either people that others hold in high esteem or they are literal giants who are very large. Other sources on the Internet suggest that the Nephilim are actually angels, and I agree that the word Nephilim shares common sounds (though I'm not sure of the etymology) with seraphim and cherubim, two other types of angels.

The King James Version contains a really strange sentence that seems to come out of nowhere and say nothing: "The sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them." This seems to want to explain the origin of the Nephilim, but it doesn't. It says that men and women copulated and "bore children to them." If this is supposed to explain to me the origin of the Nephilim, then I don't understand the sentence. The only way I can interpret this and make heads or tails of it is to think that maybe men and women sacrificed their children to these giants, but then we still have no explanation of how the Nephilim came to be. The same sources who tell me the Nephilim are angels say that this intimates that human had sex with Nephilim, resulting in enormous offspring.

No matter. I'm not reading the KJV. I'm reading the NIV, and that says the Nephilim are just well-respected members of society, and it sounds a lot like the way we think of war veterans. So that's what I'm sticking to until it makes more sense to use an alternate theory.

Directly after mentioning these amazing "heroes of old," God decides that every man on Earth is evil, "and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain." (6:5-6) God regrets ever having made man, and that hurts his feelings. His resolution? "I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth." That's right. Genocide. All men. And then some. "Men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air." (6:7) So it's mass genocide of every living thing on Earth. Awesome. This should become the plot of a Roland Emmerich disaster movie.

Movie Trailer Voice: In a world where man's heart was only evil all the time... *Shot of giant Nephilim devouring a human infant* One man stood against all odds... To help God destroy all life on Earth.

That's right. Because "Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time," (6:9) "Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord." (6:8). It's reiterated that Noah has three sons named Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

God tells Noah that there's going to be some trouble coming soon for the human race, and that Noah should build "an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out." (6:14) The boat should be 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet tall. God tells Noah to give it a roof with an 18-inch skylight. The ark should have "lower, middle and upper decks." (6:16)

Then God entrusts Noah with the secrets of the world's destruction. "I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth," God says in 6:17, "to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish." God will spare only Noah, his wife, their three sons, and their wives. Well, them and a male and female of every other species of animal on the planet.

Over the course of this chapter so far, God has decided that all men are evil except for one, that it hurts him to know he created all of that, that he should destroy all humans, all birds, all lions and tigers and bears (Oh, my!), but in the end, he should actually leave some of everything in existence around so that they can produce more. In other words, even if the two animals of each species are evil as well (not mentioned; they're just innocent bystanders), they get to live on to watch all of their brethren die. So what God is really doing here is just making an example of everyone. Noah, Shem, Ham, Japheth, their wives, the animals... They all get to watch as God eviscerates the entirety of the rest of their species for generic reasons (they're evil, but God isn't saying what makes them evil, probably because God made them and therefore God made them evil; we've already seen in Chapter Three that God can't stand it when he's wrong), and then get scared into ever being evil again, whatever that means.

Noah is also supposed to "take every kind of food that is to be eaten and store it away as food for you and for them." (6:21) Let's talk mathematics. The boat will be 450 feet by 75 feet by 45 feet. That's 1,518,750 cubic feet of space. In that, Noah is supposed to cram two of every animal on the planet, five humans, and enough food to feed them for... How long? God doesn't say. But it does say in 6:22 that "Noah did everything just as God commanded him."

Magic.

Tune in next time for the exciting conclusion to The Great Flood.

Chapter Seven

A Brief Break

We interrupt your normal broadcasting to bring a bit of humor in. This is an old sketch from The Kids in the Hall. Gavin was always my favorite character. He's full of non-sequiturs, and since the Bible is, too (two in the first five chapters), I've decided to share this video with you.

Okay, I know it's only marginally related, but it's hard to beat a drunken Kevin McDonald wrapped in a Twister mat and pouring tomato juice over his head. More of God's words coming soon.

Genesis: Chapter Five (From Adam to Noah)

In which Adam and his offspring have more offspring and they have some offspring, too, but most aren't even ten years old before they start having sex.

This chapter starts with a brief summary of the previous four chapters. It's as if everything up to this point has been a sort of prologue, a jumping-off point, for the rest of the story. The first verse is, "This is the written account of Adam's line," and then we start time travelling.

In five short verses, God creates man, both male and female, he blesses them, and then Adam lives for 130 years. At the lively young age of 130, Adam has a kid named Seth (no mention of proclamations of God's name like at the end of Chapter Four). Adam then lives for another 800 years and finally dies at the too-young age of 930.

Now, I've heard a theory (corroborated by a Ministry of God's Pure Word) that in Biblical times, one year was measured in cycles of the moon. This means that twelve Biblical years are the equivalent of one Gregorian year, give or take. That puts Adam at about 77 years old at the time of his death, which makes more sense than 930. I will nitpick briefly about how this should have been translated properly to modern English. There. I'm done.

Seth lives for 105 years (no, that's 8, almost 9) before he "became the father of Enosh" (5:6).

What the - ? Seth was not even a teenager before he was impregnating women? I mean, it's scientifically possible for that to happen, but extremely unlikely. Male sexual maturity isn't usually reached until between the ages of 12 and 15.

Still, even accepting the slim chance of this action being within the fringe of the realm of possibility, this tells me that either the Bible lies and tells us that people lived to be 930 Gregorian years and that they're still sexually active at the age of 105, or that God condones adolescent sex (and presumably marriage). Seth is the guy who was lauded at birth, and God does not punish him for having a child at whatever age he has the child.

Anyway, the Bible goes on to say in 5:8 that Seth lived to be 912 years old (or maybe 76, depending on who you ask), and then he died.

Briefly, all year issues included, Seth's son Enosh made a baby at age 90 (or 7 and a half), and that kid was called Kenan. Enosh died at 905 (or 75). Kenan begat Mahalalel when he was 70 (Seriously? He was almost six years old when he did that?) and died when he was 910 (75, almost 76). Mahalalel begat Jared when he was 65 (5 years old?) and died when he was 895 (74). Jared produced offspring when he was 162 (an almost believable 13 years old), then died when he was 962 (80).

*Deep breath*

Jared's son Enoch followed through with it at 65 (another five-year-old) and died at 365 (only 30) because "he was no more, because God took him away." (5:24) His son Methuselah wasn't a father until he turned 187 (15, the oldest yet) and lived the longest of any before him, finally dying at 969 (80) years old. His son Lamech waited a little longer before having kids. He did it at 182 (still 15 in calculated Gregorian years, but a few months older than when his father did it), and died at 777 (64; a young death is what awaits more abstinent people).

But Lamech's son was Noah, and he's where this story ends, with a note about how he waited until he was 500 years old (41!!!) to have triplets, which he named Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

This chapter is mostly just a history lesson that takes us to the next important event in Bible history, but I can't make heads or tails of the years. On the one hand, you could likely have people living to be nearly a thousand years old. To make that happen, you have to defy a long-running track record of people only even living to seventy or eighty commonly in the past few decades, what with the more recent advances in medical science. On the other hand, if you assume that one year in the Bible is the equivalent of one lunar cycle (28 days, roughly one month), you have a bunch of people impregnating women before an age when most people are even aware of what their sexual organs do.

My age calculations are not exact. I'm dividing the age given in the Bible by 12. That is, according to my calulations, one Bible year is the same as 0.083 Gregorian years. A more exact calculation would be to multiply by 0.076 (28 lunar days divided by 365 Gregorian days), which would actually yield smaller numbers than my near-accurate math. So I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt here.

In short, you've got impossibly old people or children having sex. Both are highly unbelievable, and the latter is something that most people today would consider morally wrong. And yet students are told that they can't read Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, while the Bible remains a staple for many families.

Chapter Six

Genesis: Chapter Four (Cain and Abel)

In which Eve thanks God for letting her give birth to a murderer.

Everyone knows about Cain and Abel. I'm about to recount the story as the Bible tells it, but before I do, I'd like to take a moment to bring everyone up to date on a genealogical point. According to the Bible, up to now, Earth's population is a whopping two people. There's a male named Adam and a female named Eve. That's all for now.

But in the first two verses, Adam and Eve make two babies, Cain first, then Abel. There is no measurement of time to say how much older Cain is than Abel, but I think it's safe to say that it's at least nine months. I won't accept a twin theory because the Bible uses the word "later" to suggest that there was significant time between the two births.

In the first verse, Eve thanks God for allowing her to bear children. This, in contrast to the fact that God supposedly just made childbirth really painful for her, leads me to conclude that she's either being sarcastic or she's brown-nosing.

4:2 says that "Abel kept flocks, and Cain worked the soil." Over the next two verses, both make offerings to God, Cain providing "some of the fruits of the soil" and Abel yielding "fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock."

An interesting thing happens, and I'm not sure what to make of 4:4-5, which say, "The Lord looked with favor on Abel and his offering, but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor. So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast."

How did God alert Cain and Abel of his feelings? Why did God accept the meat and refuse the vegetation? When Cain confronts God about it, God responds, "Why are you so angry? Why is your face downcast? 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." (4:6-7)

Apparently, God has mastered the non-sequitur argument. Instead of answering Cain's question, he tells Cain that in order to be accepted, he must only do what is right. But then the conversation devolves into a rant about sin, which is a strangely Christian word. That is neither here nor there, however, and only shows how easy it is to introduce a non-sequitur into an argument. Even if God's answer is direct, how could Cain possibly know what he did wrong?

At any rate, Cain is angered by his rejection, and in 4:8, he invites his brother into the field, "and while they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him."

I understand that Cain was angry, and I even understand why he would take it out on his brother. I have a brother, after all, and I can remember being angry at him sometimes for being more talented at certain things (he's far more athletic than I am, for instance), but fratricide is taking it a bit far.

Is God omnicient? I only ask because he then asks Cain, "Where is your brother Abel?" in 4:9, and Cain responds, "I don't know," followed by the famous question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" For the record, and totally off-topic, that's better than being your brother's Trapper Keeper.

Yes, God is omnicient. Abel's "blood cries out to me from the ground." (4:10). In 4:11, God curses Cain, saying that from now on, Cain will be unable to raise crops. Cain will be a "restless wanderer on the earth."

Cain is concerned. He believes God says true, and also that "whoever finds me will kill me."

Let me draw you back to the genealogy lesson that started this post. Before Cain and Abel, there were two people on Earth, Adam and Eve. Then there were four after both kids were born. Now there are three. Who is Cain going to run into, save his own parents? Not that it matters. God puts a mark on Cain so that people won't kill him (out of fear that they'll reap God's vengeance sevenfold). This is much like a child's security blanket. It won't actually help him, but it helps him feel better.

Cain then moves out of town, and the Bible makes it seem like he never went back to his parents. Instead, he heads off to "the land of Nod, east of Eden." (4:16) Immediately after this, we have verse 4:17, "Cain lay with his wife, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Enoch."

STOP! Hold the presses! Where has this wife come from? There is no mention of Adam and Eve producing any more children (yet). There is no mention of God ever creating any other humans. So, unless my knowledge of baby-making is misinformed, there are still only three people on Earth. Only one of them is female. The name of Cain's wife is not mentioned. Did Cain have intercourse with his own mother? Even if he was willing, I find this highly implausible for two reasons:

1. Cain jetted from town as soon as his conversation with God ended, never seeing his parents again. If this is untrue, the Bible doesn't mention an alternate action.
2. Cain just killed Abel, Eve's other son. This is not a turn-on, and the only other possibility would be rape.

I am left to conclude that God condones rape and/or incest when it's necessary (now I really can't wait for Noah's Ark).

At the end of this chapter, we have a large family tree splaying out, and the incest probably thins out a bit during the process, and a few minor events and details pop up here and there. I'll shorten it up for you, since this spans verses 4:17-22:

• Cain builds a city and names it after his son, Enoch.
• Enoch's son is Irad.
• Irad's son is Mehujael.
• Mehujael's son is Methushael.
• Lamech is Methushaels' son.
• Lamech marries two women (Adah and Zillah), and Jabal and Jubal are borne of those wives respectively.
• Jabal is "the father of those who live in tents and raise livestock" while Jubal is "father of all who play the harp and flute."
• Zillah has a second son who made tools from bronze and iron, whose name was Tubal-Cain. He has a sister named Naamah.

Although it's presented in a strange manner, 4:23-24 mention that Lamech admits to his wives that he's killed a man for hurting him, and that he deserves precisely eleven times the amount of God's vengeance that Cain received. "If Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy-seven times." Compare that to what God said to Cain in 4:15, and you'll find an inconsistency. God says then, "If anyone kills Cain, he will suffer vengeance seven times over." Is Lamech saying he killed Cain?

Probably not. He's probably just misunderstanding God's words (something which still seems to happen today, but more frequently). The very next verse talks about Adam and Eve having another child named Seth. Eve thanks God again, this time for replacing Abel. In the same paragraph, Seth has a kid named Enosh. Time sure moves fast in the Biblical era.

The last verse, 4:26, leaves us with what probably amounts to the Bible's version of a cliffhanger. It says, "At that time men began to call on the name of the Lord."

All in all, this chapter is really a classic story told over a long period of time. We start with jealousy, murder, punishment, and a little bit of good-ole Biblical-fashion banishment. We travel through time, the vengeance of God falls onto somebody other than who it started on, and we finish with the birth of a new child, who everybody sees and proclaims (in the film version, they probably do this in chorus) the name of God unto the Heavens.

My problem with this chapter is how the authors (whoever they are) deftly dodge the issues of rape and incest, even though they must have happened. Unfortunately for them, the problem still stands for anyone intelligent enough to count to three. Surprisingly, this is never an issue I hear brought up by anyone ever.

Chapter Five

Genesis: Chapter Three (The Fall of Man)

In which humans learn right from wrong and God hates them for it.

The first verse of this chapter says, "Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made." This verse leads into an entire chapter which suggests to me that God is not infallible as many Christians would have you believe. Follow my logic here. God created serpents, right? And if so, God must have made them crafty.

So in 3:2, the serpent tries to convince the unnamed woman to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The woman makes an all-too-common argument to the serpent: "God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.'" This tree is supposed to be a Tree of Knowledge, yet she acts like it's actually the Tree of Smallpox. After all, God did tell them that they "will surely die" if they eat the fruit. She is rightfully afraid.

But she reasons, and in 3:6, the woman sees three benefits to eating the fruit: it's food, it looks good, and it will bring her knowledge. So she eats it, and so does Adam, apparently without putting up a fight. This is another case of a person just doing what someone else tells them to do without thinking about it. The woman barely even argues with the serpent, only acknowledging that God said, "No," which reminds me of a great album.

After chowing down, Adam and the unnamed woman see that they are nude (3:7), something which they apparently couldn't figure out before, and fashion fig leaf clothing for themselves to avoid further embarrassment.

By the time we reach 3:11, God has discovered that Adam and his woman are no longer naked, and complains: "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?" So the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil gave humans the knowledge of simple opposite relationships, and God thinks it's the end of paradise. Actually, God makes it the end of paradise to appropriately match his immediate reaction.

Throughout verses 3:14-19, God rages and punishes both serpents and humans alike with the following stipulations:

• Serpents are cursed more than all other livestock and animals.
• Serpents are now destined to "crawl on [their] belly" and "eat dust" forever more.
• Serpents and humans no longer get along, and humans will "crush [serpents'] head" and serpents will "strike [man's] heel".
• Human childbirth is now more painful.
• Women are now subservient to men.
• Man must now toil all day in the sun to produce vegetation to eat, but the ground will produce thorny plants that are difficult to kill and dispose of, like thistles, and things which man cannot eat.
• Man will now eat food until he dies ("By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.")

That's quite a list, and it logically follows that the following statements are true:

• Serpents were not cursed before this incident.
• Before this incident, serpents did not crawl on their bellies. They had legs or something, which seems unlikely.
• Human childbirth was not going to be painful, but we can't prove that since Adam's woman had never conceived or birthed a child beforehand. The skeptic in me thinks God probably made childbirth painful from the get-go, but just never mentioned it.
• Women were not subservient to men beforehand, but we have other evidence from the Bible saying that they really were (see Chapter Two). God really likes to say things that aren't true and tell people they're the truth.
• God had not created things like thistles and weeds before now. Before, plants just grew, but now they need help from humans to survive. Tell that to things like wild strawberries and rosemary and banana trees (which I can't seem to ever kill no matter how hard I try and no matter how many machetes I swing at them).
• Man didn't eat food before, which is a contradiction to previous passages where God tells them to eat of all the plants in the garden. Really, this statement isn't so untruthful, though. I mean, men always eat. So do women. We eat two to five times a day. Sometimes more.

Adam finally gives his wife a name in 3:20, "Eve," since "she would become the mother of all the living." The Internet tells me that Eve is derived from one of two Hebrew words, one meaning "to breathe" and the other meaning "to live." So this makes a certain amount of etymological sense.

Finally, in 3:23-24, God banishes the humans from the Garden of Eden and prevents them from ever coming back by putting angels with flaming swords a-swingin' in front of it. He's not kidding around this time.

The anger and retaliation that God shows here sounds a lot like 'roid rage or alcoholic meanness. But I can't really blame Adam and Eve for this. Let's go back to my argument at the beginning of this post:

This verse leads into an entire chapter which suggests to me that God is not infallible as many Christians would have you believe. Follow my logic here. God created serpents, right? And if so, God must have made them crafty.

God created the Tree in question. God created man in such a way that man was easily convinced by talking serpents, since God knowingly removed knowledge from them and then put that knowledge directly in man's face, dangling it like a carrot before a horse. God also created talking serpents that would try to convince man to do things. So it seems like God set himself up for failure. He created everything that led to human disobedience. So why is he so angry with Adam and Eve and the serpent? A psychologist might say that God was really angry at himself, but unwilling to punish himself out of a false belief that he is infallible. In other words, God was projecting. Something tells me this isn't the last time we'll see this kind of activity. I look forward to reading about Babel and the Great Flood.

What staggers me most about this tale is that God lied to man. He told Adam and Eve that the fruit would kill them, but it didn't. Instead, it was God who made men mortal. Neither Adam nor Eve died from eating the fruit. They die in later chapters because God made them mortal. Why should anybody trust God when one of the first things he does to human beings is tell them a very big lie?

God shows a great desire for punishment here. Disobedience leads him to curl his fists up into balls, jump up and down, stamp his feet, and then punish humans and serpents in a method where the punishment hardly fits the crime. You ate fruit? Everyone who ever lives after you will be in unbearable pain when they reproduce! That's not smart. That leaves very little incentive to be fruitful and multiply. It's almost as if, lost in the throes of a temper tantrum, God has forgotten to be logical.

Something tells me this will not be the last time God overreacts.

Chapter Four

Genesis: Chapter Two (Adam and Eve)

Wherein God rests and then changes history so that the creation of woman makes less sense.

At the outset, God creates man when “no shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth and no plant of the field had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth ... but streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground – the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” (2:5-7)

This strikes me as chronologically inconsistent. Coming off the heels of Chapter 1, where God creates the earth in a very specific order, this passage screams in direct opposition to previously made statements. According to the timeline we're given in Chapter 1, God created:

Night/day → Earth/sky → Land/sea → Shrubbery → Sun/moon → Animals → Man

However, according to Chapter 2, it goes a little more like this:

Night/day → Earth/sky → Land/sea → Man → Other stuff

That is, this passage claims that many of the objects the previous passage said were made before man had not actually been made by the time man was created. Which is it? As hot as the creation/evolution debate is in the US these days, it's kinda weird that the creationist side of the argument can't even get its story straight. The evolutionists can manage to keep it together when their proposition spans billions of years. The creationsts can't manage to keep track of six days.

2:8 says, “Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed.” Again, the Bible has a time sync issue. Suddenly, the author(s) have decided that yes, there were actually plants and vegetation and the like before God made man. This is getting hard to follow.

A particular famous tree is described in 2:9 as “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”

2:10-14 mentions that the Garden of Eden is said to reside around the convergence of the Tigris, Euphrates, Pishon, and Gihon Rivers, a paradise with plenty of water to cool off and bathe in.

In 2:17, God tells the man, who still isn't named, “You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.”

I've always found this to be a particularly disturbing command. I've also heard this tree being referred to simply as “the tree of knowledge,” but even in its full description, it's still offputting. It's just that God is basically telling us not to know the difference between good and evil, or in the simpler form, we're just not supposed to know anything. We're supposed to remain unaware of how our actions affect others and just blindly do what God says, regardless of the outcome. Personally, I find that blindly doing what anybody says without seriously questioning the purpose is a huge failure of responsibility, especially in today's society where corruption exists in the highest and most respected of positions. When the president of the United States of America makes decisions blindly because God told him to do them, and he doesn't question those orders, we are being led by a total failure of a human being. Consider the perspective that God does not exist, and you'll realize that the USA, twice in the past decade, elected a dangerously schizophrenic man to run the country.

The first man finally gets named in 2:20. He's Adam, and he's lonely because the omniscient God who is so infallible conveniently created males and females of all other species and just forgot to do the same thing for humans (If you follow Time Thread Number One; following Time Thread Number Two bypasses this plot hole.)

God puts Adam into a deep sleep, removes one of his ribs, and makes a woman out of it. (2:21-22) Adam is unphased by this. God has good morphine.

God states through verses 2:23-24 that because woman was made from man, woman and man shall henceforth “become one flesh.” This is a really poetic way to say that male and female humans will have sexual intercourse with one another, something which should have been obvious if you're following Time Thread Number One, where other animals were created first. I guess that even if you follow Time Thread Number Two, there were animals around when woman was manufactured, proving that no matter how you slice it, God hates women and thinks they belong at the end of everything.

This chapter ends on a nonsequitur (2:25): “The man and his wife were both naked and they felt no shame.” This sentence does several things. First, it takes advantage of a previous sentence where it is said by no one in particular that every man shall depart his parents to marry a woman to draw the assumption that Adam and this new, unnamed woman are now married, despite the lack of any text specifying how that happened, and lending creedance to arranged marriages in the Christian faith (which I think are mostly a thing of the past, society having spoken out loudly against it in more recent years). Second, it makes sure we know that they are in total nudity, but don't feel bad about it. Contrasted against Genesis Chapter Three, it seems silly that Christians in modern society make such a big deal about nudity and sex in movies, novels, and on television. If we're all supposed to be nude, and there isn't supposed to be any shame in that, why the big stink?

Chapter Three

Genesis: Chapter One (The Beginning)

Wherein the Christian creation story is outlined, and thirty-one verses raise unending debate, even after thousands of years.

The fourth word of the Bible is “God”, but there is no definition of what God is anywhere in the first chapter. Certainly, that will come later. My point is that there's a presupposition in place that we're already aware of what “God” is.

In Chapter 1, God creates the universe over the course of six days:

• Day 1 – Creation of light, day, and night
• Day 2 – Separation of water on ground from water in sky
• Day 3 – Gathering together of waters to form ocean and land, creation of vegetation on land
• Day 4 – Creation of light sources
• Day 5 – Creation of sea creatures and flighted animals
• Day 6 – Creation of land creatures, “livestock,” and “wild animals.” Man is created.

In 1:7, “sky” is defined as a separation between “the water under the expanse [God's separation] and the water above it.” This tends toward a belief that beyond our sky, there is a giant bubble of water. The Internet tells me that people kinda just wash over this, paying no attention to the actual verbiage. All I could find was stuff that related 1:7 to 1:14, where the stars and everything beyond our atmosphere are created, which suggests that Christians accept that celestial bodies exist beyond our world. To extrapolate, the bubble of water is really more like a bubble containing the earth. Perhaps the Bible is referring to clouds with this verse. If so, it's not a very good definition of a cloud.

During the segment where vegetation is created, there is tons of mention of land vegetation, but no mention of underwater vegetation, which we know to exist. Interestingly, though I've heard the argument made that if the Bible doesn't mention something, it doesn't exist, I've never heard anyone ever doubt the existence of seaweed.

1:16 explains how, on the fourth day, God creates light sources, presumably the sun and moon. Those terms are not used. The Bible calls them “a greater light to govern the day and a lesser light to govern the night.” Two things should be noted here. First, science shows that only one of these is really a light source, and that's the sun. The light we receive from the moon is really a reflection of the sun's output. Second, this suggests that God created light before creating its source. By extension, should the sun ever run out of juice (a long-distant eventuality), we'd still have light on earth. I wonder how much of this stuff creationists really believe.

By 1:22, God has created sea creatures and birds and now says, “Be fruitful and increase in number.” I've always heard this as “Be fruitful and multiply.” This is just one blatant example of the frailty of words. Here they mean the same thing. I can't imagine this being the case for every translated difference, especially considering that original copies of these texts simply do not exist, and therefore, we have no way of translating the original source material. Furthermore, if these words are the closest thing we have to an accurate description of God and Christianity, I wonder why we pay any attention to them, knowing that they are fundamentally inadequate. For an example of how translations can go wrong, see Translation Party or Funny Engrish.

EDIT: "Be fruitful and multiply is mentioned elsewhere in the Bible. My point still stands.

In 1:26, God says, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness,” but then the text goes on to say in 1:27, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” This is expounded on in Chapter 2, which is the “woman from man's rib” story, but what I find particularly interesting about this passage is that God speaks of himself as if he is more than one being. Does this support the Catholic tradition of the Holy Trinity? Hard to say, because the text then goes on to use the pronoun “his” instead of the pronoun “their,” to suggest that God is indeed a single entity. Besides, this is the Old Testament, long before the alleged birth of Christ. The Holy Trinity doesn't exist yet. Perhaps I'm nitpicking, but it seems that a decent translator could at least get his subjects straight. If not the translator, then certainly the editor. Certainly I can't be the only person to have read the Bible at this level of detail. If I am, what does that say about Christianity? Does it perhaps say what I believe to be true of religion in general? That once a person is stuck in a particular mindset, it matters not where that mindset came from as long as nobody questions its current status?

Finally, God says in 1:28-31 that man should “subdue” all of the creatures of the earth and that all creatures of the earth, man included, are to eat of the plants of the earth. God doesn't explicity say that we should eat the animals, but I guess it's implied. At the very least, he grants man his first privilege of violence, an act that God takes particular glee in committing himself later on. I'm not suggesting that we should not eat animals, only that this is the first sign that God intended for things on earth to die.

Chapter Two