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!