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

Preface

In which the author describes his position and methodologies for the production of this project.

This blog is not just another random commentary on life or nothing at all. It is a project. In this project, I will read the entire Christian Bible from cover to cover. Why? Well, kinda to prove a point. I imagine that by the time I read the entire Old Testament, I will have read two to three times as much of the Christian Bible than 90% of all Christians. And by the time I read the rest of it, I should be somewhere in the top one percentile.

Along the way, I will make notes about the words I am reading. I will raise questions and remark on anything that astounds, amazes, confounds, confuses, or even marginally interests me. When I'm done, this blog should contain more words than the Bible itself, and I presume, given my viewpoint on religion and Christianity, will probably serve as a pretty good source for denouncing the Bible and making it look stupid. That's not so much a goal as it is an eventuality.

Let me begin by making a few notes about the Bible I'm reading. It's the “New International Version” given to my wife on February 22, 1999 (so says the dedication page in the book itself). The church that approves of this version of the Bible is the Comfort Baptist Church in Comfort, Texas.

I don't presume to know exactly what that means, if it means anything at all, but anybody who would like to place a claim that my Bible is somehow invalid can tell me which passages I quote that they take umbrage with and how their version differs from mine. I will try to address all differences when possible if they are left in the comments.

Also, it is only fair to state in advance that the commentary in this blog comes from my perspective. That is, an atheist and humanist perspective. I was born, baptized, and raised in Catholicism, but have since realized the problems inherent in such a method of personal growth. I now lean toward logic and rationality while recognizing that fiction makes for great entertainment. Any other related opinions of mine should become apparent over the course of this blog. Hopefully I find the Bible to be at least good fiction.

Begin with Genesis