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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Genesis 19: Total Insanity

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

Genesis: Chapter Twenty (Abraham and Abimelech)

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

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

Well, he does it again here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Genesis: Chapter Nineteen (Sodom and Gomorrah Destroyed, Lot and His Daughters)

In which we learn that rape and incest are okay as long as there aren't any balls touching.

God promised in the last chapter that he wouldn't destroy the city of Sodom if he could find so many as ten good men in its entire population. Not being omnicient and not being one to do legwork, God sends two angels. They are greeted by Abraham's newphew Lot at the gates of the city. He recognizes them as angels, kowtoes, and offers them his house, where "you can wash your feet and spend the night and then go on your way early in the morning."

They're here on business, not just passing through, so they refuse and say, "we will spend the night in the square." (19:1-2)

But Lot insists and they give in. He feeds them unleavened bread. But before they can make it to their beds, the entire male population of Sodom surrounds the house and ask for the angels to be turned out into the street for sex. No, I'm not making this up.

...all the men from every part of the city of Sodom — both young and old — surrounded the house. They called to Lot, "Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them." ~ Gen 19:4-5

Lot refuses. He pleads with the men, "Don't do this wicked thing." (19:7)

How nice of him. Lot's standing up for the visiting angels and telling them not to engage in this terrible, wicked act, this rape of the two angels staying with him.

"Look," Lot continues in 19:8, "I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them. But don't do anything to these men."

Apparently, I was mistaken. The "wicked thing" he's trying to convince the entire male population of Sodom to not do isn't rape at all! It's homosexuality! He's just told them, "Hey, entire male population of Sodom, don't rape these guys! That's gay and icky and stuff. Here, rape my two virginal daughters instead. That's way more acceptable than doing any of that nasty queer stuff!"

But the men will not relent. They don't want his surely attractive virginal daughters. These men are hell-bent on raping angel dudes. In 19:9, they become quite xenophobic, claim Lot is an alien to their city and therefore can't possibly bear a considerable opinion, and threaten that if Lot doesn't give up the visitors, they'll rape him worse than the angels. Nice guys!

They even try to break down Lot's door, but the angels are there to save Lot. They immediately blind the crowd in punishment. They tell Lot that they're about to destroy Sodom (ignoring all of the women, of course — they never really count, do they? — there certainly weren't ten straight men in the city) and that Lot and his relatives will be spared for their hospitality.

Lot rounds his daughters up, but the men they're pledged to be married to don't believe him when he says the angels are going to tear the place up.

As dawn rises on Sin City, the angels try to hurry Lot up. Lot hesitates (for no reason stated here), so the angels get fed up and lead Lot and his daughters out of town. "Flee for your lives!" one of them says. "Don't look back, and don't stop anywhere in the plain! Flee to the mountains or you will be swept away!" (19:17)

In 19:18, Lot tells them the mountains are too near and that he and his daughters won't survive the oncoming debacle. This is an interesting thing for him to say, though. It suggests either or both of these things:

1. Lot doesn't trust the angels to contain the blast. They've already told him that his family will be spared, yet Lot doesn't trust their judgment in safe locations.
2. A tragic natural event happened to a town called Sodom (or whose name eventually became Sodom through centuries of people telling the story orally until it was finally written down by someone intelligent enough to do so), and the main character of this story thought that the mountains were not distant enough to escape such a disaster. In other words, there are no angels, this is not a story of God's revenge for debauchery, and science is about to happen. Having half a brain, Lot is trying to guage the best place for his own safety because he fears imminent death at the hands of Mother Earth.

At any rate, Lot suggests that he go to a nearby town (which is somewhat contradictory to his problem with the mountains being too close — why would he give up the shelter of apparently close mountains for a nearby town if proximity is an issue?), and the angels agree.

So Lot and his daughters make toward this town, Zoar (which means small, and whose meaning bears some significance to 19:22 that I can't make sense of). Zoar is apparently close enough that he can walk there with two women in tow in a few hours or so. After all, the angels hurried him out of town "with the coming of dawn" (19:15), yet "by the time Lot reached Zoar, the sun had risen over the land" (19:13).

And then God rains down his sulphur on both Sodom and Gomorrah. "He overthrew those cities and the entire plain, including all those living in the cities — and also the vegetation in the land." (19:25)

But Lot's heretofore unmentioned wife looks back at the city as it's being destroyed. This is against the commands of the angels in 19:17, so "she became a pillar of salt." (19:26) So believable. Surprisingly, it's more believable that she turned into Epsom salt (magnesium sulfate, which is what you get when you mix magnesium with sulphur and oxygen: MgSO₄) considering that magnesium is the earth's eighth most common element and found in the crust (and I think we all know where to find oxygen).

In the morning, Abraham wakes up and sees the smoke from the burning cities.

This portion of the chapter ends with an interesting passage which confirms the common theory (which is ubiquitous in this particular chapter) that Christians tend to attribute common things to God:

So when God destroyed the cities of the plain, he remembered Abraham, and he brought Lot out of the catastrophe that overthrew the cities where Lot had lived. ~ Gen 19:29

Even (read: especially) if you accept the entire story up to this point as truth, it's hard to believe the previous quote. According to the story we've just read, God didn't remember Abraham once in his freeing of Lot from certain death. No, Lot just stood up for some people who wanted to have man-sex with what must have been some truly attractive angels. That's all. Lot decided that homosexuality was such a sin that it would be better for his virgin daughters to be raped by an entire freaking town than to allow gay sex to occur.

Lot wasn't saved because God was thinking of Abraham. Lot was saved because he hated gay men. I guess the Westboro Baptist Church has it right. God hates fags.

In 19:30, Lot moves to the mountains because he's afraid of living in the city.

*sigh* Why didn't Lot just go to the mountains in the first place like the angels said he should. They obviously weren't affected, and now "he was afraid to stay in Zoar." So they up and leave and go live in a cave. Seriously.

But then his daughters get to talking. The eldest daughter says, "Our father is old, and there is no man around here to lie with us, as is the custom all over the earth. Let's get our father to drink wine and then lie with him and preserve our family line through our father." No, seriously.

Apparently, in their rush to get out of Sodom and later during their fear of Zoar, they managed to pack up enough wine to get their father so trashed he'll fuck his own daughters. That's the plan, at least.

And it works. No, seriously, guys. This stuff's in the Bible.

That night they got their father to drink wine, and the older daughter went in and lay with him. He was not aware of it when she lay down or when she got up. ~ Gen 19:33

See? Rape's okay! Even incestuous rape with a male victim and a female perpetrator. If we were living by the rules of the Bible, this would be a seriously broken world.

But then the next day, the older daughter suggests that it's her sister's turn to do it. So they get him drunk again and then the younger daughter has sex with her drunken father. Seriously! This is like Norman Bates's fantasy! And Lot still doesn't notice!

Not radical enough for you? How about this? Both of the daughters get pregnant from doing it with their own dad. Both of them! And evidently, Lot never questions how those babies got made. My opinion: Lot knew. He wasn't that drunk. But since his wife turned into salt and it's really hard to keep it up when you're having sex with salt, he just didn't say anything. Those virginal daughters of his had probably been looking better and better since he offered them up for sex to the entire city.

Both of the kids turned out to be boys. One of them was Moab and the other was Ben-Ammi, and they both went off to father entire cults of people named, respectively (and predictably), the Moabites and the Ammonites.

So let's not forget the values that we should be instilling in our children through use of the Bible:

• Hate fags.
• Fuck your dad.
• Unless you're a dude.

Genesis: Chapter Eighteen (The Three Visitors, Abraham Pleads for Sodom)

In which Abraham orders his wife to make bread out of two gallons of flour, and in which God decides it's okay to kill up to fifty good people if you think they're surrounded by evil.

The first two verses of this chapter are disconnected.

18:1 — It's mid-day in the middle east. It's hot. While Abraham sits beneath a shady tree, God appears to him.

18:2 — Abraham looks up and sees three men who are not God.

The second verse is the important one. The first one only establishes the presence of God (because he's apparently not as omnipresent as Christians would have me believe). But then in 18:3, Abraham speaks to the three men (whose feet he is bowing at) as if they were God, and offers them water and food. Through 18:5 he refers to himself as their servant, and he is acting very much like a sycophant to these men.

The men demand that he do what he offered.

Being a man, Abraham's not one to take on a woman's duties, so he commands Sarah to "get three seahs of fine flour and knead it and bake some bread." (18:6) In case you were wondering, a seah is "a unit of dry measure ... which equals one-third of a bath", which is about twenty-two liters, making one seah about 7 1/3 liters or nearly 2 gallons. Of flour alone. That's way too much bread for three men.

Being a slave-owner, Abraham's also not about to take on a slave's duties, so he has a slave kill and cook a calf as well as bring along some milk and curds (18:7-9).

Abraham watches them eat while they question him about the location of Sarah. He answers, and suddenly God is back saying that he'll be back in about a year "and Sarah your wife will have a son." (18:10)

Apparently, Abraham never bothered to tell his wife that God had spoken to him and told him that they'd have some babies eventually (she probably would have thought Abraham delusional) because she overhears the conversation and laughs. I wonder what she thought Abraham was doing that one time when he went around and chopped everyone's dick off. It's not like that's a rational thing to do. She must have asked what the deal was. She must have wondered why Isaac was hobbling around bowlegged looking despondant and in massive amounts of pain. Something's amiss here, and it smacks of an abusive relationship.

Back to the point. In 18:12 Sarah laughs and makes the rational thought, "After I am worn out and my master is old, will I now have this pleasure?"

But she's caught red handed! God says to Abraham, "Why did Sarah laugh ... Is anything too hard for the LORD?" Then he confirms, "I will return to you at the appointed time next year and Sarah will have a son." (18:12-14)

And then this exchange happens, which is too funny not to print in full:

Sarah was afraid, so she lied and said, "I did not laugh."
But he said, "Yes, you did laugh."

At first she was all :P but then she serious'd. (18:15)

Later on, the three visitors get up to leave. They start heading in Sodom's direction, and Abraham follows them briefly to see them off into the desert heat. God randomly thinks to himself throughout 18:17-21:

Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all nations on earth will be blessed through him. For I have chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing what is right and just, so that the LORD will bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.

The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know.

Cliff notes: God's heard rumors about the kinds of terrible things they do down in Sodom (even though the Bible's audience doesn't know what those are yet), but he wants to verify that the rumors are true (because he's not as omnicient as everyone would have me believe), so he's going to physically travel to Sodom (because God has a physical form that he designed man after, being that it's such an intelligently designed one that men are born with the foreskins he despises so much) and take a peek around, and he's going to do all of this because... Well, because Abraham's awesome.

The visitors leave. Abraham grows a pair of balls and talks Serious Business™ to God. I feel the words in 18:23-25 are of particular importance, so I'll let them speak for themselves:

Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing — to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?

Abraham is basically asking God if God's history of amounting innocent deaths to collateral damage is the right kind of impression that the being we're all supposed to follow, worship, obey, and (most of all) mimic should be making. It's an important question that can be applied to any time of war the human population has ever been involved in. With one difference. God is the judge of all humanity. He decides what's wrong and right. God's answer to Abraham's question will be an insurmountable, immutable law seared into the very flesh of time, history, society, and government forever. God must choose his answer wisely. And what he comes up with in 18:26 is:

Well, if the collateral damage is less than fifty, it's acceptable.

Did you hear that, warlords and world leaders? Did you hear that, Dead Hitler? If you reckon something to be wicked, just kill it. As long as there aren't a whole fifty good people in range, just drop that bomb. Words of wisdom from the Amazing God Almighty. Praise Jesus! Hallelujah! Amen!

Abraham is no more a fan of this (non-)logic than I am, and he further questions God (after a little brown-nosing) throughout 18:27-32, saying, "Well, what if there are less than fifty good people in Sodom? Will you still kill them?"

And God changes his mind. "Okay," says God, "If there are forty-five good people, I will spare the city."

Abraham says, "What if there are forty good people there?"

"For the sake of forty, I will not kill everybody."

"How about thirty?"

"Fine," says the Lord, "I won't kill everyone if I find thirty nice guys."

Abraham pushes his luck: "Twenty?"

"Okay, okay," says God, "I will suffer them if there are twenty good people."

Abraham: "Ten?"

"For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it."

Abraham's a hell of a negotiator. Having talked the odds of God comitting genocide again down to something favoring the continued existence of the Sodomites (Abraham may have been motivated to do this by caring for his Sodomite nephew Lot), God leaves Abraham to his thoughts. After a while, Abraham goes home.

Genesis: Chapter Seventeen (The Covenant of Circumcision)

In which God is a paedophile and wants a collection of penis skin.

Right out, God asks Abram (who is now one year short of being a centenarian) to "walk before me and be blameless" (17:2). God tells Abram that it's time for him to make good on his former agreement, so God will make Abram have lots of children. No word yet on if Abram will have to rape all of his servant girls to make this happen.

God renames Abram (which means "exalted father") to Abraham (which means "father of many") "for I have made you a father of many nations" (17:4-5). God frames this claim with an air of importance, claiming that some of Abraham's offspring will be kings and rule nations. God gifts the entire land of Canaan to Abraham.

I can't wait to see what happens when Abraham walks into Canaan — the land in which even God admits Abraham is an "alien" (17:8) — and runs up to its leader shouting, "I'm the king now! God says so! Haha! Get down from that throne!"

But then God throws a curveball in 17:10-14:

This is my covenant with you and your descendants after you, the covenant you are to keep: Every male among you shall be circumcised. You are to undergo circumcision, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and you. For the generations to come every male among you who is eight days old must be circumcised, including those born in your household or bought with money from a foreigner — those who are not your offspring. Whether born in your household or bought with your money, they must be circumcised. My covenant in your flesh is to be an everlasting covenant. Any uncircumcised male, who has not been circumcised in the flesh, will be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.

Okay, so all humans forever and ever must have their foreskins cut off at the age of eight days old. That foreskin is a constant sacrifice from Abraham and his future family so that they can remain on top and in good favor with God. This all makes perfect sense.

What makes even more sense is that God now claims that Abra(ha)m's wife is no longer called Sarai, but Sarah. "I will bless her," God says, "and will surely give you a son by her." (17:16)

But Abraham is getting used to God's trickery, laughs, and argues, "Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old? Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninety?" God confirms this is true despite its apparent ridiculousness, then tells Abraham to name his child with Sarah Isaac. Isaac will be fruitful and have many kids, and twelve rulers will spawn from him. That's where the covenant for future population will be upheld. (17:17-21)

So Abraham takes Ishmael (the illegitimate child of Hagar and the Arab Formerly Known As Abram) and removes his foreskin, which I'm sure was a very clean and surgical procedure thousands of years ago, then does the same to every other male he's living with (these are all servants, since he has only one son and his nephew Lot is living far away), and finally circumcises himself. That's right, "Abraham was ninety-nine years old when he was circumcised" (17:24).

That sounds very painful, but what's worse is that Ishmael was thirteen at the time. This may be difficult for females to associate with, but imagine that you're a thirteen-year-old boy, confused by adolescence and puberty, trying to figure out what to do with that thing in your pants that keeps getting hard and feeling good for no reason at all, when all of a sudden your father comes to you with a crude knife and truncates your penis. It would be scarring in both the physical and emotional way. All in the name of God.

Another point of interest in this chapter is that we have some direct evidence against the whole "lunar month/year" theory. I can understand the disbelief that Abraham had about bearing children at the age of 99. There's no way Abraham is spry. He's past his prime. And Sarah is not significantly younger. At ninety, she's certainly gone through menopause and is no longer producing eggs for fertilization. Even if Abraham were still fertile, there's simply no way that Sarai could get pregnant.

But when you look at it from the perspective of a lunarist (my word), they were both around eight Gregorian years old. It's not feasible that they could have had a child a year ago (Ishmael), and it's still not feasible that they should have a second child now.

Once again, either God is making the impossible possible (and that's the general assumption of this chapter) or God is promoting sexual relationships between children under the age of ten.

Genesis: Chapter Sixteen (Hagar and Ishmael)

Genesis: Chapter Sixteen (Hagar and Ishmael)

In which God condones adultery and slavery while admitting to being either powerless or uncaring, and in which an illegitimate child is born and destined to be mean to everyone he ever meets because God says so.

Previously on All God's Words...

Nothing has been done to help Sarai recover her fertility. Certainly, if God has the power to be Abram's shield, to help Abram and his army of 318 people destroy four entire armies run by kings, to flood the earth and destroy all life thereupon, to even create new universes, planets, and life to live on them, then certainly — certainly — he has the power to give a single woman a functional reproductive system, after he's promised her husband offspring! Certainly, God must know how that particular system works if he created it!

He apparently doesn't know how the reproductive system works or he doesn't have the power to take care of Sarai's problem (or he just doesn't care). At the outset of Genesis 16, Sarai tells Abram, "Go, sleep with my maidservant; perhaps I can build a family through her" (16:2). In 16:3 she gives her servant woman, Hagar, to Abram "to be his wife."

"He slept with Hagar, and she conceived. When she knew she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress." (16:4) Sarai feels bad because Hagar hates her, even though it was her own decision to let Abram sleep around. Still, she accuses Abram of wrongdoing in 16:5

You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my servant in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge between you and me.

So Abram gives Hagar back to Sarai and tells Sarai to "do with her whatever you think best." Naturally, "Sarai mistreated Hagar; so she fled from her."

So now Abram and Sarai are without child because their only offspring (which was only half theirs) is in the womb of a woman who has run away from the marital conflict. It's about now that Hagar, near a spring in the desert called Beer Lahai Roi (The Well of the Living One Who Sees Me) meets with an angel who tells her:

Go back to your mistress and submit to her. I will so increase your descendants that they will be too numerous to count.

You are now with child
and you will have a son.
You shall name him Ishmael,
for the Lord has heard of your misery.
He will be a wild donkey of a man
his hand will be against everyone
and everyone's hand against him,
and he will live in hostility
toward all his brothers.

It's worth noting here that the name Ishmael literally means "God hears." Apparently it implies that God's a belligerent asshole as well because God is going to make Ishmael a very mean person. Somehow, this is supposed to coerce Hagar into returning to the woman who mistreats her and continue to live in agony and suffering.

There are two outrageous streams of thought here.

Sarai's Logic

• I am barren.
• My husband needs a legacy to give all this land and property to.
• We have a fertile servant girl.
• Therefore, my husband can mate with the servant and produce offspring.
• Now the servant girl is pregnant.
• She hates me because she's carrying a child she won't be allowed to raise while I will return her to servitude after the child is born.
• Therefore, I should treat her like hell.

Hagar's Logic

• There's a woman who hates me because I am bearing her husband's child even though she told me and her husband to do it.
• She's treating me worse than even her other normal slaves.
• RUN AWAY!
• An angel tells me my child is going to be a total dick to everybody.
• I should go suffer the wrath of crazy people so this kid can be a privelidged douche.

So she does. She goes back and gives birth to a kid. Abram names him Ishmael when he is 86 years old.

This all makes total sense.

A Modern God

God makes a lot of demands in the Bible. What to eat. What to wear. How to act. Who gets to live. Who must die. Sometimes, his demands just don't jive with what we as a modern society hold to be valuable facets of life. So I thought I'd take a moment to cover some of them from recent readings.

Chapter Eleven shows that God likes it when his followers are incestuous, or at least he doesn't mind. Sure, Abram doesn't marry within his own family, but other family members of his do. They're not punished at all for marrying their cousins. Nowadays, the miracles of modern science show us that reproducing with close blood relatives can produce genetic problems leading to decreased mental activity and retardation. A study from the US National Library of Medicine reports that in a group of 21 children of incestuous relationship, twelve showed genetic abnormalities (57%). Nine of those abnormalities were considered severe (43%). Abram was no doubt the product of several generations of incest, which could explain his numerous delusions and his honest belief that God would give land to the offspring that his wife is incapable of producing.

God also endorses lying. He never offers up any shame or guilt about lying to Abram, his chosen one, about his offspring's inheritance. These days, lying is considered a crime under certain circumstances. Perjery and fraud are two such examples, yet we swear people into oath before these very court cases on a Bible.

That's just something to think about when trying to bring Christianity into a modern context. Commonly, Christians claim to understand that the Old Testament is very old and that its relevance is slim, but all too often they seem to forget that much of their faith is based on these books. The ten commandments are there as is the creation story (both of them). A critical look at everything so far causes all of it to just fall apart.

Keep your eyes open in the near future for strange approvals of things like adultery as well.

Genesis: Chapter Fifteen (God's Covenant With Abram)

In which Abram starts thinking and is so shocked that he has that capability that he thinks it's God speaking to him, and in which God proves himself to be functionally useless

After helping the Sodomite sinners defeat their Elamese oppressors, "the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision" (15:1). Yep. Abram imagines that God is speaking to him, so he automatically assumes that God really is speaking to him, which is like dreaming that you can fly and then assuming that you can safely jump off the Sears tower.

God says:

Do not be afraid, Abram.
I am your shield,
your very great reward.

But Abram is beginning to doubt the Lord. He finally comes to the realization that his wife is barren and the "offspring" who will inherit his belongings is a slave named Eliezer of Damascus. When he queries God about this, God tells him in 15:5:

This man will not be your heir, but a son coming from your own body will be your heir. Look up at the heavens and count the stars — if indeed you can count them. So shall your offspring be.

God drops the line once more. Does Abram bite?

Yes, he most certainly does. "Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness." (15:6)

But when God tells Abram that the land he stands on all belongs to Abram, Abram's still a little skeptical, as well he should be. He asks, "O Sovereign Lord, how can I know that I will gain possession of it?" (15:8)

"Trust me," says God, and Abram believes him.

Actually, that's not the whole truth, but I almost wish it were. God's actually got something more insidious planned out. "Bring me a heifer," God says in 15:9, "a goat and a ram, each three years old, along with a dove and a young pigeon."

It's either ritual time or time for stew. Abram takes notes.

Abram's Grocery List

• 3-year-old heifer
• 3-year-old goat
• 3-year-old ram
• Dove
• Young pigeon
• Milk
• Eggs
• Those little chocolates that Sarai likes

So Abram gets all of this stuff together, chops everything in two, and "arranged the halves opposite each other" like an obsessive serial killer, but he leaves the pigeon whole. He has to keep the buzzards from chowing down on his bloody animal sacrifice. (15:10-11)

Abram promptly falls asleep "and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him" (15:13). And then God makes his covenant while Abram's passed out, hardly giving Abram a chance to retort:

Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions. You, however, will go to your fathers in peace and be buried at a good old age. In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.
...
To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt, the Euphrates — the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites."

I am a powerful fortune teller. I predict that in the next four hundred years, war will break out, but afterward there will be a period of relative peace. People will die and other people will be born. At least one newborn will be named Robert, and one Frances.

God's prediction here is not something so specific that no human could have guessed it. He predicts that a person with no education will become a slave, as will his entire family and every generation that passes from his loins, but that four hundred years later, they'll get pissed off and revolt. The only thing obviously wrong about this prediction is that Abram's wife is still barren!

Nothing has been done to help Sarai recover her fertility. Certainly, if God has the power to be Abram's shield, to help Abram and his army of 318 people destroy four entire armies run by kings, to flood the earth and destroy all life thereupon, to even create new universes, planets, and life to live on them, then certainly — certainly — he has the power to give a single woman a functional reproductive system, after he's promised her husband offspring! Certainly, God must know how that particular system works if he created it!