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 Nine (God's Covenant With Noah, The Sons of Noah)

In which God makes rainbows and swears he won't flood the world to death again; and in which Ham fists Noah, resulting in Ham's son's punishment.

God and Noah have a conversation. God gives his blessing to Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and tells them to "Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth." (9:1) In addition to run-on sentences, God really likes pushing that incest. Enough on that. I wonder why God didn't also bless Noah's wife and daughter-in-laws. God also says that from now on, all animals on earth will fear man. (9:2) "Everything that lives and moves will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything." (9:3)

Were humans vegetarians before now? God says that previously he had only given humans plants for food, but now they can eat meat, too. If humans didn't eat other animals before now, why did Abel keep track of the livestock like Genesis 4:2 tells us? Maybe this shines some light on why Abel's offering of animals to God was favored over Cain's offering of plants. Let's assume for a moment that God had a thing for animals and had kept them safe from human consumption. You know how when you're playing Jenga, it takes forever to set up the tower of blocks, three bricks at a time, but it's totally worth all that effort to watch it fall down at the end of the game? Maybe God goes through the same "destruction is a form of creation" thought process that humans do. After all, man was made in God's image, so it's entirely plausible (provided that you accept that God exists and that man was created - not evolved - in God's image). In other words, that's why we have things like Jenga and the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

And then, in 4:4-6, God puts some caveats in place. "You must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it." So don't eat raw meat. Okay. If they can make fire, they can avoid this. Also, kill the animals before you eat them. Also not a problem. I'm fairly sure that a cow would not let you take a bite out of it while its hooves were in good working order. Also, God says not to kill other humans because God "will surely demand an accounting." More poetically, he says:

Whoever sheds the blood of man,
by man shall his blood be shed;
for in the image of God
has God made man.

I believe that later on, in Exodus, God will make a similar commandment in the form of the infamous "eye for an eye" speech. In the case of murder, the murderer should also be killed. But to follow the example, Mahatma Ghandi might have said, "A homicide for a homicide leaves the whole world dead," which goes against verse 9:7, in which God tells the guys again to "be fruitful and increase in number; multiply on the earth and increase upon it." It seems hypocritical to finish up a speech advocating reciprocal murder with a heartlifting message about populating the earth. Or maybe it makes perfect sense. I really can't tell at this point.

Continuing, God establishes a covenant with Noah and his sons, with all of their descendants, and with every living creature that was on the ark with them. God's promise is that "never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth." (9:9-11) This is utterly laughable. God promises not to ever impossibly destroy all life on earth except for a very small percentage ever again. Imagine if World War II had ended with Adolf Hitler promising to never overtake most of Europe and kill every Jew, Catholic priest, and homosexual in sight to gain political advantage and advance his study of black magic. Furthermore, this is the oldest trick in the book. God's not saying he'll never destroy all life on earth again; he just won't use a flood to do it. Maybe next time he'll set the world on fire. Maybe he'll just explode the entire planet. Maybe he'll send a rain of flaming meteors the size of Switzerland. Or maybe he'll just kill all Christians, move them to Heaven, and force the rest of the heathens to fight it out amongst the rubble.

As a sign of his honesty, God invents the rainbow and makes them appear after rainfall so that "Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind." (9:14-15) If God's signature had an "i" in it, he would dot the letter with a heart. God goes on a little bit about the same thing ("This is the sign of the covenant I have established..." and so on) all the way through 9:17, where the second part of this compound chapter begins.

In The Sons of Noah, we relearn that Shem, Ham, and Japheth are Noah's sons (9:18-19). In 9:20 Noah plants a vineyard, and in 9:21 he makes some wine, gets drunk, and passes out naked in his tent. I can't tell you how many camping trips have ended up with me in the same situation. Ham, in 9:22, walks in on his father, sees that Noah is naked, and runs out to tell his brothers. Shem and Japeth "took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked in backward and covered their father's nakedness. Their faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father's nakedness." (9:23)

And so, homophobia is born. But seriously, I don't understand this. I mean, I understand that your father passed out in the buff may not be the most pleasant of sights, but walking in backwards to lay a shirt across his junk is a little overboard. Considering that only six chapters ago, humans were perfectly fine with being nude around each other, man certainly made a quick turnaround.

As if it wasn't bad enough that two of the boys took extra-special super care not to see their daddy's wee-wee, Noah really loses it when he wakes up. 9:24 says, "When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him..."

Wait. What? First of all, "his youngest son"? See 5:32 where Noah has three kids in the same sentence. Okay, so they're maybe not triplets, but I would have liked that to be more clear. But then... "what his youngest son had done to him"? Assuming he means Ham (as later verses will confirm), what exactly did Ham do to him? He came in, saw his dad was naked, then alerted his brothers so they could cover him up and spare him any further embarrassment. But really, what did Noah expect to happen? The old man got drunk on homebrewed wine and fell down naked!

I had to go to the Internet to find something more about this. The Church of the Great God says, "An illicit sexual act is indicated." But it's really not. Nowhere in that sentence, paragraph, chapter, or any other segment of this book is an "illicit sexual act" mentioned, alluded to, verbalized, printed, or communicated in any way. There is nothing here to suggest an illicit sexual act.

So I shall consult another Bible. King James, lend me your pages! In the KJV, 9:24 goes like this: "And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him." So it's the same thing. Still no mention of what other Bible commentors seem to believe was homosexual anal rape while his father was incapacitated after hitting the bottle. Jesus! The Bible is graphic and bloody enough already! Must we make up even worse stuff just to justify Noah's rage? Can't we just say that he was hungover?

Noah flips out and curses Ham's son, Canaan in 9:25-27 —

Cursed be Canaan!
The lowest of slaves
will he be to his brothers.
Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem!
May Canaan be the salve of Shem.
May God extend the territory of
Japheth
may Japheth live in the tents of Shem,
and may Canaan be his slave.

Supposedly, Ham commits the horrible, disgusting act of walking in on his drunk, unconcious father (or maybe he really plowed his dad's anus, but the Bible ain't sayin'; what happens in Noah's tent stays in Noah's tent), and his son gets cursed into slavery. That sounds like a really reasonable punishment, doesn't it? Tell you what, if it means that I get to commit all the sodomy I want, I'll gladly let you punish my son instead of me.

All this in a chapter that was supposed to be about rainbows.

The chapter closes out with a couple of quick verses about Noah's death. 9:28-29 say that Noah lived 350 years after the flood, for a grand total of 950 years. That's almost 80 fake, nonsensical, magic Gregorian years, if you're counting.

Genesis: Chapter Eight (The Flood Ends)

In which God ends the flood, his genocide having been a great success, and Noah kills a lot of the surviving animals to thank God for killing practically everyone he knew.

Finally, "God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded." (8:1) It's about time. Noah and the animals have spent roughly six Gregorian months (or a really uncertain number of Biblical years) on the ark, and no animal has died or gone hungry. But I wonder where the water receded to. I mean, it was covering the entire earth to the point where the tallest mountain was covered by twenty feet of water. All land was completely covered, so it's not like there were any separated oceans for the water to recede to. Wind doesn't implicitly cause evaporation, either, so it didn't just heat up until the floodwaters became clouds. The Bible is full of this kind of magic.

The water recedes over the course of the 150 days following the cessation of precipitation. So God didn't release a mighty wind after all, but instead made wind blow for that entire 5-6 month period, and slowly the water went away. Doesn't that generally happen anyway? It seems like a lot of acts of God are actually attributable to natural events. This one isn't wind, though. It's normal evaporation caused by energy from the sun exciting the water particles and turning them into gas. Exciting. Godlike.

Verse 8:5 gives us some more great insight and Biblical/lunar calendar debunking fodder: "The waters continued to recede until the tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains became visible." 150 days into 9 months (because we're only one day into the tenth month) shows us that there are an average of... *starts calculator software* ...16 ²/₃ days per month. That's 0.59 lunar cycles per month, on average. The Gregorian calendar's months are not an example in constant day distribution, some months being as short as twenty-eight days and others as long as thirty-one, so I will accept that some Biblical months are shorter than 16 days and some are longer. In fact, that must be true. If all months contained the same number of days, we would not have the two-thirds of a day on the average. Days are measured in whole numbers within the context of a month. Therefore, I continue to posit that one Biblical year cannot possibly be equal to a lunar cycle. Each month averages nearly seventeen days in length. Chapter Seven tells us that there are, at minimum, two months in one year. Therefore, at minimum, there are thirty-four days in one Biblical year, which exceeds the length of a lunar cycle by six days.

Okay. Back to the story.

Noah sends out a raven through his skylight, which is described here as a window, and it flies back and forth until all the water is dried up. (8:6-7)

But now I get confused because after the raven flies "until the water had dried up from the earth" (8:7), Noah then sends out a dove "to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground." (8:8) So what happened with the raven? Why did Noah bother with it if he was just going to send the dove later? Is there any explanation for why the dove "returned to Noah in the ark" when it "could find no place to set its feet," but the raven "kept flying back and forth"? How is it even possible that the raven could fly until the water was gone, but Noah could still send out a dove who then found no dry land anywhere? If the raven flew until the water was gone, why is it that Noah "waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark" (8:10) to search for land again?

And how is it possible that after 190 days of water completely covering the earth that there could possibly be a "freshly plucked olive leaf" (8:11) for the dove to return with? No olive tree could possibly survive 190 days of intense flooding, and even if it survived, it would be so drastically damaged that it wouldn't be able to recuperate and produce leaves within a week. None of this makes any sense whatsoever. Two birds fly out and find a lack of water at different times set two weeks apart. Neither of those birds suffered from weakness after 190 days with limited food supply (probably no substantial food existed past the first week, maybe two). I'm so lost. I think this is what the Bible counts on because I'm getting ready to just quit and accept that a bunch of rain fell, Noah and a bunch of animals survived for a really long time, and then everything was all better because...

MAGIC!!! Yes. Magic. Certainly that's it. I'll just skip over the whole funny business of two birds and impossible timelines and implausibly surviving olive trees and just resolve to call it all MAGIC!

But then, just as I've resolved to ignore all of this, the Bible pulls another one out of left field. First, it says that "the first day of the first month of Noah's six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth." (8:13) The very next verse contradicts this: "By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry." (8:14) Which is it? Did the flood go away on month one, day one, or month two, day twenty-seven? I'm not even going to mention the further timeline complications of this.

In 8:15-19, God commands Noah to get off the ark along with all the animals "so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number upon it." They comply. Then, in 8:20, Noah builds an altar to praise God and his wonderous acts of mass genocide. To solidify his praise, he takes some of the clean animals and burns them on the altar in sacrifice, finishing what God started and doing away with all of those excess diverse genes and reducing the entire planet to the point where incest is required for future generations to live.

God decides that "never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done." So that's good. It's also good that God makes this proclamation in 8:22 --

As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest,
cold and heat,
summer and winter,
day and night
will never cease.

I feel it necessary to mention what this implies:

• Before this proclamation, plants bloomed all the time, not requiring any time to germinate, and they produced edible food constantly.
• There was never any variation in heat, despite the fact that God already created day and night on the universe's first day of existence.
• There were no seasons beforehand.
• Day and night didn't exist despite what Chapter One says about God's first day of labor.

Or God could just be blowing smoke again like I suspect he did when he banished man from the Garden of Eden and made childbirth painful and took away the legs of all snakes.

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