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 Five (From Adam to Noah)

In which Adam and his offspring have more offspring and they have some offspring, too, but most aren't even ten years old before they start having sex.

This chapter starts with a brief summary of the previous four chapters. It's as if everything up to this point has been a sort of prologue, a jumping-off point, for the rest of the story. The first verse is, "This is the written account of Adam's line," and then we start time travelling.

In five short verses, God creates man, both male and female, he blesses them, and then Adam lives for 130 years. At the lively young age of 130, Adam has a kid named Seth (no mention of proclamations of God's name like at the end of Chapter Four). Adam then lives for another 800 years and finally dies at the too-young age of 930.

Now, I've heard a theory (corroborated by a Ministry of God's Pure Word) that in Biblical times, one year was measured in cycles of the moon. This means that twelve Biblical years are the equivalent of one Gregorian year, give or take. That puts Adam at about 77 years old at the time of his death, which makes more sense than 930. I will nitpick briefly about how this should have been translated properly to modern English. There. I'm done.

Seth lives for 105 years (no, that's 8, almost 9) before he "became the father of Enosh" (5:6).

What the - ? Seth was not even a teenager before he was impregnating women? I mean, it's scientifically possible for that to happen, but extremely unlikely. Male sexual maturity isn't usually reached until between the ages of 12 and 15.

Still, even accepting the slim chance of this action being within the fringe of the realm of possibility, this tells me that either the Bible lies and tells us that people lived to be 930 Gregorian years and that they're still sexually active at the age of 105, or that God condones adolescent sex (and presumably marriage). Seth is the guy who was lauded at birth, and God does not punish him for having a child at whatever age he has the child.

Anyway, the Bible goes on to say in 5:8 that Seth lived to be 912 years old (or maybe 76, depending on who you ask), and then he died.

Briefly, all year issues included, Seth's son Enosh made a baby at age 90 (or 7 and a half), and that kid was called Kenan. Enosh died at 905 (or 75). Kenan begat Mahalalel when he was 70 (Seriously? He was almost six years old when he did that?) and died when he was 910 (75, almost 76). Mahalalel begat Jared when he was 65 (5 years old?) and died when he was 895 (74). Jared produced offspring when he was 162 (an almost believable 13 years old), then died when he was 962 (80).

*Deep breath*

Jared's son Enoch followed through with it at 65 (another five-year-old) and died at 365 (only 30) because "he was no more, because God took him away." (5:24) His son Methuselah wasn't a father until he turned 187 (15, the oldest yet) and lived the longest of any before him, finally dying at 969 (80) years old. His son Lamech waited a little longer before having kids. He did it at 182 (still 15 in calculated Gregorian years, but a few months older than when his father did it), and died at 777 (64; a young death is what awaits more abstinent people).

But Lamech's son was Noah, and he's where this story ends, with a note about how he waited until he was 500 years old (41!!!) to have triplets, which he named Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

This chapter is mostly just a history lesson that takes us to the next important event in Bible history, but I can't make heads or tails of the years. On the one hand, you could likely have people living to be nearly a thousand years old. To make that happen, you have to defy a long-running track record of people only even living to seventy or eighty commonly in the past few decades, what with the more recent advances in medical science. On the other hand, if you assume that one year in the Bible is the equivalent of one lunar cycle (28 days, roughly one month), you have a bunch of people impregnating women before an age when most people are even aware of what their sexual organs do.

My age calculations are not exact. I'm dividing the age given in the Bible by 12. That is, according to my calulations, one Bible year is the same as 0.083 Gregorian years. A more exact calculation would be to multiply by 0.076 (28 lunar days divided by 365 Gregorian days), which would actually yield smaller numbers than my near-accurate math. So I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt here.

In short, you've got impossibly old people or children having sex. Both are highly unbelievable, and the latter is something that most people today would consider morally wrong. And yet students are told that they can't read Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, while the Bible remains a staple for many families.

Chapter Six