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.