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.