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.