Genesis: Chapter Twenty-Five (The Death of Abraham, Ishmael's Sons, Jacob and Esau)

In which God's ineffectualism is made clear (again), and in which the first politician is born.

On the heels of his wife's death and his son's marriage, Abraham realizes he's lonely, and he remarries. Her name is Keturah, and they spawn a handful of other children (at his old age!), all of which have names that sound like rejected Star Trek alien names: Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, and Shuah. Jokshan fathers Sheba (presumably two-armed) and Dedan. Dedan's descendants "were the Ashurites, the Letushites and the Leummites" (25:3). Midian spawns Ephah, Epher, Hanok, Abida, and Eldaah, which are all male names.

"Abraham left everything he owned to Isaac" (25:5). 25:6 tells about how Isaac banged and impregnated a significant number of "concubines" while Abraham was still alive, though, and Abraham gave gifts to the illegitimate children, essentially paying off the whores, a fine display of Christian family values.

Finally, in 25:7, Abraham dies at 175 years old. God's powers are shown to be very weak indeed. Back in Genesis 6:3 God swore that nobody would live longer than 120 years. Abraham proved him wrong, I guess.

Isaac and Ishmael bury their father in the same place Sarah was buried (25:9-10). God blesses Isaac.

Ishmael (recall that he's the illegitimate child of Abraham and his slave Hagar, the result of God holding out on a promise) has a bunch of kids: Nebaioth, Kedar, Adbeel, Mibsam, Mishma, Dumah, Massa, Hadad, Tema, Jetur, Naphish, and Kedemah. They each separate and starts a tribe. Ishmael dies at 137, also proving that God's magic sucks. His sons all settle in the eastern Egypt region "as you go toward Ashur" (25:18). "If you get to the train tracks, you've gone too far."

That verse ends on an additional note: "And they lived in hostility toward all the tribes related to them." I'll bet it was a big religious dispute.

Isaac was forty when he and Rebekah got married (read: rape-bonded). "Isaac prayed to the LORD on behalf of his wife, because she was childless." Sound familiar? "The LORD answered his prayer, and his wife Rebekah became pregnant." (25:21) I wonder if she got pregnant because of the prayer or because they fucked a lot.

"The babies jostled each other within her," so she asks God why.

God prophecizes in 25:23:

Two nations are in your womb,
and two peoples from within you will be separated;
one people will be stronger than the other,
and the older will serve the younger.

But they're twins. Neither is really older than the other. I mean, sure, maybe they'll be born a few hours apart at most, but they were conceived on the same day, and they'll likely be born on the same day. Technically, if their births happen to cross the midnight boundary... But that still wouldn't make them any older than the hour or two difference.

But I guess I'm just being pedantic.

The first to be born "was red, and his whole body was like a hairy garment; so they named him Esau" (25:25). The footnote says that "Esau may mean hairy." The translators must be making an assumption here. It seems a decent assumption to make, given the context, but I wonder how much of the original text of the Bible is mistranslated due to translators making assumptions like this. Perhaps Esau actually means werewolf.

The second son comes out grasping Esau's heel, so they name that kid Jacob, which translates to a Hebrew idiom, "he grasps the heel", meaning "he deceives". Why would you name your son that?

Esau becomes a good hunter as he grows up, and Jacob stays at home. He's a mama's boy. Rebekah favors him, while Isaac favors Esau. Isaac has "a taste for wild game". Still, Jacob stands to take power over Esau, provided God's earlier prophecy holds true. So far, it's all kind of iffy. The 120-year age prophecy certainly hasn't held true.

Esau comes home hungry one day, and demands some stew that Jacob's cooking. "First," Jacob responds devillishly, "sell me your birthright." (25:31)

But Esau is famished. Not just kinda famished. Like, super famished. "Look, I am about to die," he says, not exaggerating in the least. "What good is the birthright to me?" (25:32)

But in 25:33, Jacob the deceitful dickhead forces Esau's hand. "Swear to me first." And Esau does, and Jacob gives up some stew, and so Esau sells his entire inheritance to his brother for the price of a bowl of lentil stew.

Genesis: Chapter Twenty-Four (Isaac and Rebekah)

In which Abraham sends a slave to make sure that Isaac marries a Nahorite and God makes sure that Isaac marries his cousin.

"Abraham was now very old," (24:1) but how old is very old? Sarah died at 127. At 100, she questioned her ability to bear child at that age. Noah died at 950, but that was right after God promised shorter lifespans.

Abraham gets his top-ranked slave (talk about a glass ceiling) and makes that slave swear an oath. Obviously, they didn't have Bibles around to swear by, so Abraham has the slave display his sincerity by placing his hand underneath Abraham's thigh. (24:2-4)

And the promise made? That the servant will not allow Isaac to marry a Canaanite. That the servant will return to the land of Abraham's origin and bring back a wife from there.

This is a good display of the kind of in-group selection and out-group exclusion that so much religion iconifies. This is why different religions and even different sects of the same basic religion don't get along. This is why Catholics decry Protestants who decry Episcopalians who decry non-denominational churches, and so on. It began in the Bible as a racial or tribal thing. Abraham doesn't want his son to marry an impure Canaanite.

But the slave suggests that it's unlikely a woman will follow him. After all, it's a very scammy-sounding thing. Imagine for a moment that you're a woman living in the middle east. One day a random slave claiming to be the servant of a guy named Abraham (who, by the way, was known by a different name, Abram, before he left his home) shows up, claiming the Arab Formerly Known As Abram (later known simply as ‽) has died. The slave asks you to traverse the desert to meet a kid who needs a bride. The kid, of course, will claim to be Abraham's son, but won't be able to prove it because Abraham is dead and can't speak, and may not even be recognizable what with the months of rot and decay that's eaten away at his flesh in the intervening months, and now you've been conned into marrying this Isaac dude with half his dick cut off.

The slave suggests that, given the above proposal, it's unlikely Abraham's last will and testament will be executed according to plan. The slave asks if he should instead take Isaac back to Nahor to pick up chicks.

Abraham declines on the basis that God has granted the entirety of the Canaanite land to Isaac's descendants.

So what's the big deal with him marrying a Canaanite, then? If it's all his land in the first place, why aren't the people therefore his people? Why not start a new breed of mixed race people and call them Isaacites?

Abraham makes a promise on behalf of God: "He will send his angel before you so that you can get a wife for my son from there. If the woman is unwilling to come back with you, then you will be released from this oath of mine." He fails to mention that if the woman is unwilling to return to the land of the Canaanites, then God has failed, and is either not omnipotent or not willing to act on behalf of his Chosen One.

They complete their oath, and the slave takes off with ten camels carrying various goods. (24:5-9) A nonspecific amount of time later, the slave arrives in Nahor. He waits by the town well until dusk, hoping to catch some lady friend eyes there. He says a brief prayer asking for a specific dialogue to take place.

"Please let down your jar," he will say, "that I may have a drink."

She will respond, "Drink, and I'll water your camels too."

And with that, the unnamed slave will know he's found the right woman for Isaac. No, he doesn't need to know about the girl's physical beauty or if she and Isaac have compatible personalities or if the girl is already betrothed. He only needs a commonplace response to a commonplace question to know that this is the girl for Isaac.

And so it happens that a similar conversation takes place between Slaveboy and a girl named Rebekah. No, it's not identical. Actually, it's rather different by any legitimate standard of comparisons.

Slaveboy doesn't even start the conversation right to begin with: "Please give me a little water from your jar."

She responds, "Drink, my lord. I'll draw water for your camels too, until they have had enough to drink." (24:17-19)

She does as she says she will. Meanwhile, Slaveboy prepares a bribe of a gold nose ring and two gold bracelets. He asks who she is. She claims to be the daughter of Milcah and Nahor.

I rifled through pages to discover that this makes her and Isaac first cousins. Again, Abraham has gone out of his way to make sure that the family remains as incestuous as possible.

He asks to spend the night, offering the aforementioned payment, and she agrees to loan him some sleeping arrangements. Slaveboy somehow takes this as evidence that God has named Rebekah to be the woman that he should return to Canaan with.

Rebekah takes him back to her family's home and gives Slaveboy some food. He refuses to eat until she hears out his proposition, however. Rebekah's brother Laban encourages him. Slaveboy recounts the story of this chapter from the beginning, in about as many words (this part runs through verses 24:34-49), making sure to mention that Abraham is super rich because God.

"Because God?" says Laban and his father Bethuel. "Can't say no to God! Take Rebekah when you leave! Let her marry this half-dicked guy you speak of!"

Bronze Age desert nomads were evidently very gullible.

In 24:52-54, Slaveboy pays them off and demands that he and Rebeka leave the next morning.

But finally he meets some resistance. They argue for several verses about whether or not the paid-for whore gets to stay at home for ten more days before leaving. They eventually agree to see what Rebekah thinks about this whole thing.

She agrees to leave immediately because, as Kanye "Jesus" West might say, she ain't messin' with no broke niggas.

So they send her on her way, and say a little prayer for her in 24:60...

Our sister, may you increase
to thousands upon thousands;
may your offspring possess
the cities of their enemies.

How nice. They might as well have just said,

Our sister, may you fuck a lot
and have lots of inbred babies;
may your babies make lots of enemies
and then slaughter them all.

So Rebekah gets on one of Slaveboy's camels, and they head back toward Canaan.

They meet Isaac in a Negevian field meditating one evening. Rebekah covers herself as they approach because being seen by him is probably punishable by cactus rape or something. Slaveboy fills Isaac in on what took place (but manages to do it all in a single verse, 24:66, this time).

In the span of a single final verse, Isaac moves into his dead mother's tent with Rebekah, and they marry, and he falls in love with her (that's the cactus rape part), and Issac is now "comforted after his mother's death" (24:67).

Genesis: Chapter Twenty-Three (The Death of Sarah)

In which Sarah dies at a ridiculously old age, and Abraham negotiates a burial site for her.

"Sarah lived to be a hundred and twenty-seven years old." (23:1) That's very old by Gregorian years and very young by Biblical years. I have to assume Bible years are getting closer to Gregorian years now because Sarah was incredulous a few chapters back that she should be able to have a healthy child at over 100 years of age. Since that's a reasonable concern by today's standards (hell, it's a reasonable concern that one might not have a healthy baby at the age of forty), so I'll make the asumption.

Sarah dies, and Abraham weeps. He then asks the Hittites to sell him some land so he can bury her. He's "a foreigner and stranger among" them (23:4), and doesn't feel comfortable placing her into the ground just anywhere.

However, the Hittites call him a "mighty prince" and offer up "the choices of our tombs. None of us will refuse you his tomb for burying your dead." (23:6)

A quick Google search reveals nothing about why the Hittites regard Abraham so highly. I thought that perhaps I'd forgotten something from earlier in Genesis — maybe something in one of the long tables of genealogy — and I was kind of right. Genesis 10:15 shows us that the Hittites are descendants of Canaan (and therefore a clan of Canaanites), and in Genesis 15:18-20, God assigns a bunch of land to Abraham's descendants, to include the land that at that time belonged in part to the Hittites. At the time, I didn't remark much on that specific aspect of the passage because there were some other, more glaring errors that I was focused on. Thinking back, I can't imagine the Hittites being terribly pleased with some random stranger from another tribe suddenly thinking he owns all their land. I have no idea why they should be this nice to Abraham.

They give Abraham an inch, and he takes a mile by asking that they "intercede with Ephron son of Zohar" and convince Ephron to sell Abraham Ephron's cave. To be fair, Abraham offers to pay full price for the cave.

Turns out that Ephron is rather conveniently present at the audience, and he randomly offers to give it away for free. Abraham offers once again to pay for it. Ephron says, "The land is worth four hundred shekels", but tells Abraham to just up and bury Sarah already without paying.

Abraham pays up the four hundred shekels (the footnotes inform me that this amounts to about ten punds of silver), and Ephron signs over the deed to his cave and the surrounding field. Abraham puts his wife in the cave.

The End.

This uneventful chapter happens to be the first in which my objections to the goings-on are very minor all around. A woman dies (at an improbably old age, like everyone else), and Abraham pays for a place to bury her (despite the sellers not having any real reason to sell the land). I'm afraid there's not much to discuss here.

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: 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!

Genesis: Chapter Fourteen (Abram Rescues Lot)

In which a completely nonsensical war breaks out and Lot becomes the only Sodomite worth a thought.

MEANWHILE!

Amraphel, Atrioch, Kedorlaomer, and Tidal (the kings of Shinar, Ellasar, Elam, and Goiim) start a war against Bera, Birsha, Shinab, Shemeber, and Zoar (the kings of Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim, and Bela). The latter group has been under the command of Kedorlaomer, and they don't like it. They rebel. (14:1-4)

This war rages on for fourteen years, when Kedorlaomer and his crew finally destroy the Rephaites, the Zuzites, the Emites, and the Horites, then turn back toward En Mishpat (also known as Kadesh) and conquer that entire region. (14:5-7)

Sodom amasses his forces in the Valley of Siddim, and that's where the final battle goes down. (14:8-9)

"Now the Valley of Siddim was full of tar pits, and when the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fled, some of the men fell into them and the rest fled to the hills." (14:10) Kedorlaomer's crew wins the battle (because the Sodomites and Gomorrans all ran away, so it's kind of a default thing), and they "seized all the goods of Sodom and Gomorrah and all their food" (14:11) and then they take off to return home.

But the plot thickens when Lot, who's living near Sodom, is taken away by the Elamese forces along with everything he owns (14:12).

One of the Sodomite escapees runs to Abram, somehow knowing that Abram and Lot were related despite their having split up in the last chapter. Abram gets angry (and you wouldn't like him when he's angry), and he gathers up the 318 men that had settled around him and allied with him over the past unknown amount of years to track down his nephew. (14:13-14)

One night, Abram hatches a devious plan. He separates his 318 men into smaller groups who each go out and attack different places in the dead of night. "He recovered all the goods and brought back his relative Lot and his possessions, together with the women and the other people." (14:15-16)

There's something particularly odd about all of this. Stay with me here --

An army made up of five kings' people go to war against an army of four kings' people. The slightly larger army runs away from the smaller one. Why? Was the other army noticably larger? Were there more able-bodied people on the "good" side than Sodom had? Besides, this was a rebellion, not a mild complaint. A true rebellion can't be slapped on the wrist. That's not going to stop anything. A true rebellion happens when people decide they hate the way they're living and they decide to fight against it, death being a completely viable alternative to the oppression.

Sodom, et al were one army ahead of the game, and yet they ran away! I know I'm being a bit nitpicky here, but this is not war! This isn't even an attempt at war. This was nothing more than a bunch of people making threats en masse about something they don't know or care enough about to die for.

And now, despite the fact that five entire armies went to war and lost to four entire armies, Abram thinks it's a really good idea to make his own go at those four armies with a little over three hundred men. I have speculated in previous chapters that Abram was one taco short of a combination plate, and this is proof of such.

But for whatever reason (probably because he's God's chosen one), he manages to succeed. What's more, "After Abram returned from defeating Kedorlaomer and the kings allied with him, the king of Sodom came out to meet him in the Valley of Shaveh." (14:17)

So Abram kills the king, and suddenly everyone in the Sodomite group is his best friend, but the guys from the Kedorlaomer camp don't do anything? They don't, say, amass four armies and come after Abram? They already know that, even though the Sodomites are Abram's good buddies, they just run at the first sign of trouble. And 318 men fighting four armies will not survive. As George Zimmer might say, "I guarantee it."

The king of Jerusalem breaks out the bread and wine. This king is also a priest, and he blesses Abram:

Blessed be Abram by God Most High,
Creator of heaven and earth.
And blessed be God Most High
who delivered your enemies into your hand.

Abram was chosen by God, so it's not like he needed the blessing. I'd also like to take a moment to point out that somebody just thanked the Christian deity for allowing people to be killed. Just sayin'.

That brings us up through 14:20, in which Abram gives a tenth of everything he recovered from his escapade to the priest/king for blessing him. Jeez, this Abram guy is really not smart at all.

The king of Sodom seems to be a mostly nice guy. He tells Abram that he doesn't want all the possessions that Abram is about to give to him. He only wants the people. (14:21)

But Abram rejects the offer because of how the Sodomites "were wicked and were sinning greatly against the Lord" (Gen 13:13). He says,

I have raised my hand to the Lord, God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth, and have taken an oath that I will accept nothing belonging to you, not even a thread or the thong of a sandal, so that you will never be able to say, "I made Abram rich." I will accept nothing but what my men have eaten and the share that belongs to the men who went with me — to Aner, Eshcol, and Mamre. Let them have their share.

What a prick! So I know that the Sodomites were supposedly working against God, but we haven't been told what exactly they were doing that was so bad. And I know that Abram was supposedly blessed by God. But still, this is taking it a bit far, don't you think? Abram saved his nephew Lot — who is somehow the only special Sodomite in the bunch, the only one who isn't "wicked" and "sinning greatly against the Lord" — and then rejects payment for it on the grounds that the Sodomites are evil people (God said so!).

That sounds familiar and relevant somehow. It sounds exactly like the way that the far right Christian fundamentalists sound when they try to speak politically. They're full of an uneducated, pompous self-righteousness that they believe is the only thing they need to make sense of the world, when in reality, they're just stupid people listening to a fake God telling them lies. They'll make exceptions for anything they feel doesn't match their worldview and make up excuses to match those decisions. They'll even warp truth. I imagine Abram is rationalizing this by thinking that Lot wasn't really a Sodomite. Lot was somehow forced into living there or something (he wasn't; it was his choice). That's a lot like killing someone, but thinking that you're exempt from the repercussions because God told you to do it.

Genesis: Chapter Thirteen (Abram and Lot Separate)

In which a fight between nephew and uncle is narrowly avoided by Abram being a generally cool guy, and in which God lies and lies and lies and lies and...

The first thing this chapter does is inform you that Abram and his crew have begun the journey home to the Negev, now extremely wealthy. They have an abundance of livestock and precious metals. (13:1-2) Abram "went from place to place until he came to Bethel". This is where, in Gen 12, he built the altar. Once again, he calls "on the name of the Lord". (13:3-4)

Lot, Abram's nephew, has been traveling all over the countryside with his aunt and uncle. His father, Haran (who is Abram's brother), died back in 11:28. In a way, I'm kinda glad that this crew is who it is. We learned from Gen 11 that people aren't afraid of committing incest, and I'm getting kinda tired of having to read about it. 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.

In 13:5-6, Lot has some possessions that he's been carrying around, but he has to stop and settle because "the land could not support them while they stayed together, for their possessions were so great that they were not able to stay together." I'm not sure what this means. And "I'm not sure what this means" is something I've said so many times by now that I'm not sure it holds any meaning any more. What's the problem? Is it that they simply can't find enough physical space for all of their cattle, silver, gold, and tents that they have to split up? There's no footnote here to explain what "the land could not support them" really means. Support, when referring to physical strength like I think this is, means the ability to assist and keep one on one's feet, but the land didn't just start caving in beneath them because it wasn't held up by enough support columns.

After deciding to split up, Abram's slaves who tend Abram's cattle start to argue with Lot's slaves who tend to Lot's cattle. Abram tries to calm things down by suggesting:

Let's not have any quarreling between you and me, or between your herdsmen and mine, for we are brothers [Figuratively, not literally; they're literally uncle and nephew. -Ed.]. Is not the whole land before you? Let's part company. If you go to the left, I'll go to the right; if you go to the right, I'll go to the left.

That's redundant, but peaceful, and it brings us all the way through 13:9.

Lot knows that the land of Jordan has enough water to support his cattle's drinking habit, and they split up without any further argument. Lot heads into Jordan while Abram moves back into Canaan. 13:10 mentions that "This was before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah," which doesn't happen in my Bible until Gen 19, and I have no idea why we need a note explaining that something hasn't happened yet when we had no idea that whatever that thing was ever happened, and when we weren't going to find out about it for another six chapters. Way to go, Bible, giving us spoilers for yourself. Ah, it's okay. The best parts were in the trailer, anyhow.

Lot finally settles down near the town of Sodom. The Sodomites "were wicked and were sinning greatly against the Lord" (13:13).

Meanwhile, Abram is visited by God. God instructs him to

Lift up your eyes from where you are and look north and south, east and west. All the land that you see I will give to you and your offspring forever. I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth, so that if anyone could count the dust, then your offspring could be counted. Go, walk through the length and breadth of the land, for I am giving it to you."

Yep. Once again, in 13:14-17, God makes another empty promise. He says that the land belongs to all of Abram's offspring, but we know from 11:30 that Abram's wife Sarai is barren, and cannot bear children. If Abram wants offspring, either Sarai is going to somehow become fertile or Abram's going to have to sneak off and have an affair. Surely, since Abram was chosen by God to make this two-chapter-long journey, and since Abram is such a shining example of a human being, and since this is the Bible where God manages to do impossible things (that's called a miracle), I'm betting that Abram stays loyal to his wife and Sarai's uterus begins to magically work.

Abram believes God's lies once again, and he moves to live "near the great trees of Mamre at Hebron," and then he builds another altar (13:18).

Abram and Sarai's journey to the center of the middle east is a long one, and they've left behind them a trail of altars and diseases like some kind of twisted, Arab Hansel and Gretel. One way or another, God is lying to his people here. Twice in the past two chapters has God mentioned Abram's offspring, but never once mentioning how that's going to be made possible. And he's very long-winded, at that.

Genesis: Chapter Twelve (The Call of Abram, Abram in Egypt)

In which God selects Abram at random to be falsely rewarded for doing nothing, and in which Sarai is kidnapped into sexual slavery by the Egyptian Pharoah.

God begins commanding again right off the bat in Chapter Twelve. "Leave your country, your people and your father's household," he says to Abram, "and go to the land I will show you." God promises Abram that he will start a "great nation" and that God will "make [Abram's] name great." God "will bless those who bless you and whoever curses you I will curse" (12:1-3). God really is down with this whole vengeance thing. Aside from choosing people who marry their infertile cousins at random and granting them a legacy, he sure does like to tell these people that anybody who isn't nice to them will feel the terrible wrath of the lord.

So Abram takes off with his nephew Lot and his wife Sarai. They take all their things and all of their slaves (God doesn't seem to have a problem with slavery) and leave town when Abram is seventy-five years old. Or like, six and a half if you're counting in real time (12:4-5).

They pass into the land of the Canaanites until they finally stop at the "great tree of Moreh at Shechem." God offers the land to Abram, saying, "To your offspring I will give this land." (12:7)

Wait... What? *rifles through pages, finds passage* AHA! Genesis 11:30 says, "Now Sarai was barren; she had no children."

I'm having trouble reconciling what it means when God says one thing knowing that it means nothing. This is an empty promise. Abram will have no offspring because his wife is barren. She is infertile. She is not a baby-making machine. So when God says that the offspring of Abram and Sarai will inherit the land, he is telling Abram comforting nothings, probably to convince Abram to do something. Does Abram realize he's been taken? Did he just want a change of scenery and take the opportunity when God handed it to him? Who knows? One thing's for sure. Whether Abram knows it or not, God is lying to Abram.

Abram must not be aware of this because in 12:8 Abram "built an altar to the Lord and called on the name of the Lord." Then in 12:9 he moves on to a place called Negev.

When famine encompasses Egypt, Abram decides to spend some time on the African continent (12:10). I'm left to assume that he does so to bring some kind of aid to the Egyptians because the Bible does not provide a reason for Abram's actions. But he does have a fear of the Egyptians. He thinks that when they see Sarai's beauty, they will kill Abram to take Sarai for their own. He proposes in 12:13 that she pose as his sister (which is not too far off from the truth) so that this will not happen.

Sure enough, when Abram and Sarai show up, the Pharoah's officials think Sarai is worthy of presentation to their king. They take Sarai to the palace. The Pharoah approves of Sarai and thinks her "brother" is so awesome that "Abram acquired sheep and cattle, male and female donkeys, menservants and maidservants, and camels." (12:14-16)

God takes pity on Sarai because of how unfairly she is treated by the Pharoah. The book doesn't say what kind of horrible atrocities are done to her, but one might assume sexual slavery. In 12:17, God "inflicted serious diseases on Pharoah and his household" because of it, fulfilling half of his promise from before.

The Pharoah, through his punishment, becomes aware of Abram and Sarai's ruse. He confronts Abram, reiterates Abram's plan back, returns Sarai to her husband, and tells them to get out of the country. Abram gets to take all of the cool stuff the Pharoah gave him. (12:18-20)

What's left unexplained at the end of this chapter is why Abram went to Egypt in the first place, and what he did while he was there aside from wind up in some wacky hijinks with the king. I understand there was a famine, but generally speaking, people don't move toward a place of dispair unless they are there to provide aid in some way. In a monarchy such as Egypt was, the people are going to get what the king gives them, and external help will be no help at all. Abram perhaps didn't understand this and went anyway. But while he was down there, he didn't do anything to that end. His wife got kidnapped, which obviously causes problems with the rest of the itenerary, and he spent the rest of his trip watching the Pharoah undergo various illnesses.

Personally, I think this chapter is nothing more than an illustration of God following through on something that didn't involve killing people. God did make a guy sick, however, and he did make a rather large empty promise to Abram. In the end, I'm still left making wild conjectures at why God selected Abram, what he selected Abram for, and why Abram went to Egypt. In literary jargon, God's selection of Abram and subsequent commandment for him to move about the countryside could be seen as a McGuffin, an event that takes place solely for the purpose of catalyzing an unrelated plot.

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 Seven (The Flood, cont'd)

In which God becomes judgmental of animals, then kills them all out of self-pity, promoting more incest in the process.

Chapter Seven begins with a recap of Chapter Six with a correction. God tells Noah to take his whole family on the ark and to "take with you seven of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and two of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate, and also seven of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth." (7:2-3) So God has changed his mind. Now Noah gets to take along seven males and seven females of each "clean" animal, but only two pairs of each "unclean" animal. Who makes this distinction? It doesn't say, but the fact that God approves of such a distinction suggests that God probably decided which animals lay on which side of the cleanliness line.

Noah gets a week's time to load up the ark (I don't think that even a zoo could be organized in a week alone) and then it will rain for forty days and forty nights. (7:4) This is how God plans to kill everything, but save everything at the same time.

Despite the apparent impossibility of the task he's been given, in 7:5, "Noah did all that the Lord commanded him."

7:6 gives us some fun numbers to play with. "Noah was six hundred years old when the floodwaters came on the earth." In Chapter Five, we were told that Noah was 500 years old (or 41, if you subscribe to the Gregorian calendar) when Shem, Ham, and Japheth were born, so 100 years later, when the flood takes place, the triplets are only 100 years old (roughly 8 Gregorian years). That seems pretty young to see this kind of death and destruction, but Noah does what God tells him to do, anyway.

An interesting passage appears now regarding the Biblical calendar. 7:11 says, "In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, on the seventeenth day of the second month - on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened." At first glance, this might just seem like an interesting way to say when death came to town. But a closer examination of this sentence shows us that one Biblical year contains months, and that each month contains at least seventeen days (or at least this month did). Well, if a lunar cycle is 28 days and a lunar cycle also is one Biblical year, how do you figure that there could be at least two months with at least seventeen days in each crammed into one single, 28-day-long lunar cycle? The lunar-Biblical calendar is wrong. Flat wrong. The math doesn't add up. People who came up with this theory to support claims that Adam could have viably lived for 930 years were either lying or completely ignoring the fact that it leaves men having sex and impregnating women at the age five, and also that the Bible itself refutes this theory. Or perhaps they're doing exactly what I just said: coming up with a completely unfounded theory in a failed attempt at defending a book which cites impossible things as truths.

At any rate, all the animals of all types are shuffled on board during 7:13-16. Noah's wife, Shem, Ham, and Japheth go with them. Noah heads in last, and "Then the Lord shut him in."

Rain falls for forty days solidly. The roof keeps the rain out of the boat (no further mention of the giant, foot-and-a-half wide skylight), but the water beneath the boat creates buoyancy and lifts the boat from the ground.

Regarding the properties of the flood itself, "all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet." (7:19-20) I'm going to assume that means that the water rose high enough to cover the tallest mountain, and then rose twenty feet beyond that point because when a mountain is only twenty feet tall, I don't call it a mountain. I call it a mound. Naturally, with no land or trees to perch on, even the birds died off. "Every living thing that moved on the earth perished - birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind." (7:21)

I had to read that sentence twice because for a moment, I thought it said, "swam over the earth." Obviously, not every creature died like the Bible said. I can think of plenty of flora and fauna that survive underwater. I know I mentioned seaweed in a previous chapter. What about fish? Can fish drown?

In the end, "only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark." (7:23) Verse 7:24 finishes this chapter on a cliffhanger: "The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days."

So it rains solidly for about a year and a half (considering previously debunked arguments about lunar cycles and Biblical years), and then the water that fell hangs around for another twelve and a half years. Overall, this was a fourteen-year-long flood. The Bible wants me to believe that Noah had enough food in the ark to last 190 days, enough to feed five humans, and at least four of every single species in existence at the time. Let me break this down a little more clearly.

It can be said that there are three basic types of animals in the world:

• Those that strictly eat various plants (herbivores),
• Those that strictly eat other animals (carnivores),
• And those that eat a little of both (omnivores).

So Noah would have needed enough plants to feed thousands upon thousands of herbivores for nearly 200 days. I can't even think of one single plant that could be edible, even if freshly plucked from the ground on Day 1, for that long. Not to mention that every herbivore requires a different diet, so it's not like Noah could have just gotten a bunch of hay and compressed it and thrown it in a corner to wait. He'd also need berries and fruits and vegetables and specific types of leaves and grass. He would need an extremely large variety of food just for the herbivores alone.

The carnivores surprise me. I think it's safe to say that enough meat to feed thousands upon thousands of flesh-craving lions and tigers and bears wouldn't fit into the ark any more than a large amount of veggies. Yet somehow, not a single lion tried to eat a single gazelle. Not one bear jumped overboard to snatch at a leaping fish. For that matter, animals like to move around. Being cramped into a tiny room is not the best way to work off the energy built up by consuming 190 days' worth of food. Animals tend to get antsy when that happens (their body tries to burn off the energy they've eaten), and Noah didn't lose an arm while feeding an angry wolf.

The omnivores fall somewhere in between. Their bodies require nutrition from both flesh and fruit, but they never got underfed, not even when, two days after the ark set sail, all the millions of pounds of unrefrigerated food stored in open air went to rot. I'm actually surprised that the ark floated at all with that much food and animal on it.

And I know this isn't a very glamorous question to ask, but how could they possibly manage all of the feces and urine put out by the menagerie?

We're left on another cliffhanger, but I can already see where this one is going. Just like in Chapter Four before this, we have a case where the human population is extremely thin. We have four males and an unknown (but small) number of females. The cast of characters has dwindled to Noah, his wife, their three sons, and their wives. Assuming all three sons are married, there are at least four females. But we know from Chapter Six that men can marry multiple wives. It's possible that Shem, Ham, and Japheth have two or more wives each, but I would venture to say that there are probably no more than ten or so females in existence. We know that exactly four males live on. No matter who they have kids with, they will share direct blood relation to one of the other surviving men. This means that, once again, incest is required for the existence of the human race. God just killed off every man, woman, and child in the world, save for these fifteen or fewer people because man had evil in his heart, but God appears to be completely fine with incest.

I'll close out with some food for thought. Saddam Hussein killed thousands of people during his too-long reign over Iraq. We called it genocide, and we called it a Very Bad Thing. When God brought on the great flood, he eviscerated all but four to fourteen individuals of every species of air-breathing animal in all the world. I call that genocide on a scale that Saddam Hussein never could even could have hoped to commit. But when he does it, it's somehow An Okay Thing To Do.