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 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.

Genesis: Chapter Six (The Flood)

In which God devises a devious plot to commit genocide, but somehow save everyone in the process.

This chapter begins with a note about the expanding human population and polygamy. The "sons of God" recognized the beauty of the "daughters of men," so they "married any of them they chose." (6:2) Here we see another separation of the females of the human race from God. Men are the sons of God while women are the daughters of men. God dissassociates himself from women, but to men, he is a paternal figure. God is willing to admit a direct and loving relationship between himself and the male of his supposedly favorite species, but to the females, he remains distant, unrecognizing. As a matter of fact, in order for the human population to expand like it's mentioned here, there had to have been women. It's a fact of life that God confirmed already, and yet only one female name has been printed so far.

God decides that humans live too long and in 6:3 he shortens human life down to 120 years. 120 years is a little closer to actuality than the 930 years that Adam supposedly lived, but it's still a rarity, even in these days of advanced medicine. It also throws a major kink in the theory that one Biblical year is the same as one lunar cycle (28 days). By the latter logic, humans now live to be only ten years old before they die. I've had dogs that lived longer than that. Since Chapter Five involves sex and pregnancy among five-year-olds (in a more modern context, that's kindergarten age), this logic has it that people will produce offspring when they are halfway through their very brief lives, then die right around the time that their kids are making kids.

6:4 mentions a group or possibly race of people called the Nephilim, but describes them very loosely: "They were the heroes of old, men of renown." This makes them sound like war heroes. Having not heard of any wars so far in the Bible, I decided to do some more research on these people. Remember that the version of the Bible I'm reading is the New International Version. I decided to check out some other sources for possible clarification through translation differences.

TheNew International Reader's Version says, "The Nephilim were the heroes of long ago. They were famous men." The New King James Version doesn't use the word Nephilim at all, and instead uses an entirely different definition in 6:4 -- "There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown. The Amplified Bible (whatever that is) agrees almost word-for-word with the New King James Version.

So the Nephilim are either people that others hold in high esteem or they are literal giants who are very large. Other sources on the Internet suggest that the Nephilim are actually angels, and I agree that the word Nephilim shares common sounds (though I'm not sure of the etymology) with seraphim and cherubim, two other types of angels.

The King James Version contains a really strange sentence that seems to come out of nowhere and say nothing: "The sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them." This seems to want to explain the origin of the Nephilim, but it doesn't. It says that men and women copulated and "bore children to them." If this is supposed to explain to me the origin of the Nephilim, then I don't understand the sentence. The only way I can interpret this and make heads or tails of it is to think that maybe men and women sacrificed their children to these giants, but then we still have no explanation of how the Nephilim came to be. The same sources who tell me the Nephilim are angels say that this intimates that human had sex with Nephilim, resulting in enormous offspring.

No matter. I'm not reading the KJV. I'm reading the NIV, and that says the Nephilim are just well-respected members of society, and it sounds a lot like the way we think of war veterans. So that's what I'm sticking to until it makes more sense to use an alternate theory.

Directly after mentioning these amazing "heroes of old," God decides that every man on Earth is evil, "and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain." (6:5-6) God regrets ever having made man, and that hurts his feelings. His resolution? "I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth." That's right. Genocide. All men. And then some. "Men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air." (6:7) So it's mass genocide of every living thing on Earth. Awesome. This should become the plot of a Roland Emmerich disaster movie.

Movie Trailer Voice: In a world where man's heart was only evil all the time... *Shot of giant Nephilim devouring a human infant* One man stood against all odds... To help God destroy all life on Earth.

That's right. Because "Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time," (6:9) "Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord." (6:8). It's reiterated that Noah has three sons named Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

God tells Noah that there's going to be some trouble coming soon for the human race, and that Noah should build "an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out." (6:14) The boat should be 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet tall. God tells Noah to give it a roof with an 18-inch skylight. The ark should have "lower, middle and upper decks." (6:16)

Then God entrusts Noah with the secrets of the world's destruction. "I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth," God says in 6:17, "to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish." God will spare only Noah, his wife, their three sons, and their wives. Well, them and a male and female of every other species of animal on the planet.

Over the course of this chapter so far, God has decided that all men are evil except for one, that it hurts him to know he created all of that, that he should destroy all humans, all birds, all lions and tigers and bears (Oh, my!), but in the end, he should actually leave some of everything in existence around so that they can produce more. In other words, even if the two animals of each species are evil as well (not mentioned; they're just innocent bystanders), they get to live on to watch all of their brethren die. So what God is really doing here is just making an example of everyone. Noah, Shem, Ham, Japheth, their wives, the animals... They all get to watch as God eviscerates the entirety of the rest of their species for generic reasons (they're evil, but God isn't saying what makes them evil, probably because God made them and therefore God made them evil; we've already seen in Chapter Three that God can't stand it when he's wrong), and then get scared into ever being evil again, whatever that means.

Noah is also supposed to "take every kind of food that is to be eaten and store it away as food for you and for them." (6:21) Let's talk mathematics. The boat will be 450 feet by 75 feet by 45 feet. That's 1,518,750 cubic feet of space. In that, Noah is supposed to cram two of every animal on the planet, five humans, and enough food to feed them for... How long? God doesn't say. But it does say in 6:22 that "Noah did everything just as God commanded him."

Magic.

Tune in next time for the exciting conclusion to The Great Flood.

Chapter Seven