Genesis 15: Tough Love or Manipulation?

One of the things I’ve tried dutifully to avoid while writing this blog, is rehashing the same nonsense that can be found on hundreds, if not thousands, of atheist blogs across the internet. I’m not really interested in going over arguments that every edgy teenage atheist has used to make their parents clutch their pearls in horror. I have no interest in impersonating Christopher Hitchens in my writings, I’m not nearly as clever or funny to fill those shoes anyway.

Instead, what I do hope, is that my revisiting the good book will unearth some of the core disagreements that underlie the sometimes-venomous conversations between the religious and the irreligious. I’m hoping to find important differences between people who take this book to be holy and the rest of us, so that I might have a better understanding of why people believe.

Here, in Genesis 15, I’ve encountered, what I think, is one of these core differences. At the very least, I’ve found significant differences between myself and Matthew Henry, whose commentary I’ve been reading.

Genesis 15 is often given the title “The Lord’s Covenant with Abram” and that pretty much sums it up. Here we get the famous quote from God in which he guarantees that Abram’s offspring will be as numerous as the stars.

Image result for the lords covenant with abram — Abram wondering if he really wants to deal with THAT many kids…

God also promises Abram’s progeny the land of Canaan. However, he doesn’t just promise them land, he also promises them a few hundred years of slavery and oppression. And, just for good measure, God indicates to Abram that he’s going to wipe out the Amorites as well, but we’ll save conversations about God-sanctioned genocide for a later date.

For now, I want to turn to Matthew Henry’s commentary. Henry, upon reading Genesis 15, seems to see God’s covenant with Abram as, on the whole, a good covenant. Not surprisingly, I had a rather different reaction.

In Henry’s commentary on Genesis 15, he says this about the Egyptian slavery:

“They must first be in the horror and darkness of Egyptian slavery, and then enter with joy into the good land; and therefore [Abram] must have the foretaste of their sufferings, before he had the foresight of their happiness.”

Notice that Henry does not try to argue that the Hebrew bondage in Egypt is the result of freely made choices by the Egyptians. In Henry’s mind, Egyptian slavery is part of God’s design for the Hebrews, it isn’t an accident God was powerless to stop. So Henry seems to agree with me that God is ultimately behind the slave driver as much as he is behind the liberator. While God credits himself for the liberation, we must also grapple with the fact that God was cracking the whip that the Hebrews ultimately had to escape.

But here’s the key difference between me and Mr. Henry: when I see God promising Abram that his progeny will be oppressed in Egypt for generations, only to be eventually freed and exalted, I have to ask myself, why did God allow the torment and oppression in the first place? If God loves his people, why not skip to the good part?

This is the disagreement that I was alluding to earlier. When religious folk see their God liberating them from oppression, I tend to see God as the oppressor. In this view, God no longer seems like our friend, but like a sinister manipulator, who torments people only to demand thanks and praise when he finally releases them.

Now, I can already hear the reaction in your mind, so I’ll save you the energy. Life can’t all be flowers! the indignant, conservative evangelical replies after reading my snarky, skeptical commentary, Sometimes, life is hard, God never promised us that it would be easy, but that doesn’t mean He doesn’t love us!

The obvious comparison is to a father who takes away his son’s phone when he gets a bad grade in school as a way of motivating him to work harder. God, in the eyes of many, is a stern but ultimately caring patriarch. The argument would be that God doomed the Israelites to servitude in Egypt as a way of disciplining them. This kind of suffering would ultimately lead to growth that would in the long run make the suffering all worth it.

Indeed, this is the argument Mr. Henry’s commentary makes:

“Holy fear prepares the soul for holy joy; the spirit of bondage makes way for the spirit of adoption.”

But this view is limited here in the case of Genesis 15. It might be that individuals need to suffer in order to become strong, but in Genesis 15 we aren’t talking about individuals, we’re talking about entire nations of people, some of whom likely have no relationship to each other and may even be separated by generations. To see what I mean, let’s take a look at the actual text of the covenant between the Lord and Abram found in Genesis 15:13-16:

“Then the Lord said to him, “Know for certain that for four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own and that they will be enslaved and mistreated there. 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 ancestors 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.””

Notice how God talks about entire nations as if they were people. He talks about punishing the Egyptians for enslaving the Hebrews as if infants in Egypt had any part in determining the social hierarchy of Egyptian civilization. And indeed, we will see that God punishes the Egyptians as a monolith instead of focusing on the political leaders and elites who were largely responsible for the social order of the day. Apparently, God was not a Marxist.

Furthermore, God talks about how the Hebrews will emerge with great possessions, how is this supposed to comfort all of the innocent men, women and children who will die in chains in Egypt? Will they think to themselves: “well at least my ancestors will have lots of livestock” as a brutal slave driver works them to death moving rocks around in the desert? This makes no sense.

That is, it makes no sense, if you look at this through the lens of God as the all-knowing, all-powerful creator of the universe. But from where I’m sitting, all of this makes perfect sense. If God, as presented in the Bible, is a character written and created by human beings, then we should expect him to have all the bizarre and confusing inconsistencies that human beings have. We should expect God to conflate nations with human beings at a time when small, localized nations were fighting for their existence against other sometimes larger nations. We should expect God to be largely unconcerned with the rights of individuals at a time when individual rights were more or less nonexistent.

This is why I find the “stern but loving father” defense of God’s more egregious acts in the Old Testament to be incredibly unconvincing. Because God is not just punishing us to make us stronger, that might be the case in Jonah, but it isn’t the case here. Instead, God is punishing children for the sake of their predecessors, no one is being made stronger in this scenario. There is no justice in that, there is no love in that unless you fail to draw the distinction between a person and their ancestors.

Genesis 14: War Is Hell

Military History Now opens their article about history’s earliest wars in an excellent way: “WARFARE IS AS OLD AS CIVILIZATION ITSELF.” And of course, this is true. Humanity has yet to find a way to get along with one another. A look through the history of warfare reveals that moments of peace are few and far between for humanity and any seeming gaps in the history of violence can likely be attributed to a lack of historical data, and not a true absence of conflict.

In Genesis 14, we get the first biblical war. This isn’t the first war that we have a historical record for, but it’s the earliest war that’s mentioned in the Bible. In short, five kings rebelled against Chedorlaomer, the king they ruled under. Chedorlaomer called upon three other allies to put down the rebellion and this whole conflict became known as the Battle of Siddim. Amongst the kings who rebelled against Chedorlaomer were the kings of Soddom and Gomorrah (who will of course be important later when God torches their cities).

The kings of Sodom and Gomorrah were presumably not winning the Battle of Siddim, and so they both fled, leaving all of the goods of Sodom and Gomorrah behind for Chedorlaomer and his allies to take. Amongst all of these goods was Lot, Abram’s nephew, and he was taken away. When Abram learns of this, he wages a war of his own to rescue his friend who has been captured.

The story is pretty remarkable and strange. When I imagine a war between nine kings, I imagine a massive war between very powerful people, and if the five kings that challenged Chedorlaomer were defeated, it’s outlandish that Abram would have defeated Chedorlaomer with an army of just 318 men. But this is the Bible we’re talking about, it’s full of wild underdog stories.

One interesting point for a Christian reader would probably be Abram’s commitment to his nephew Lot. In Matthew Henry’s commentary, he says this about Abram’s war:

We have here an account of the only military action we ever find Abram engaged in, and this he was prompted to, not by his avarice or ambition, but purely by a principle of charity; it was not to enrich himself, but to help his friend. Never was any military expedition undertaken, prosecuted, and finished, more honourably than this of Abram’s.

Now, the historicity of Abram’s war is disputed, but if it is a true event, then this does seem to have been what we might be tempted to call a noble war. This was not an imperial war over resources or money, it was a war Abram fought for the liberation of his friend.

Another interesting point for a Christian reader is Abram’s rejection of Sodom’s goods. Instead of reaping the rewards of his goods, he returns the goods to Sodom. This wasn’t really meant as an act of charity towards the Sodomites but rather it was an act of tremendous principle on the part of Abram. If you’re familiar with the Old Testament, you know that God doesn’t have a good opinion of Sodom which tells us that Abram probably didn’t either. Abram’s stated reason for not accepting the goods is that he didn’t want the King of Sodom to be able to say, “I made Abram rich.” So, in a sense, Abram is defending his reputation here.

There are some broadly applicable life lessons here. Abram’s principled stance against the King of Sodom is certainly admirable and the war he wages against a powerful enemy for the sake of his friend seems pretty inspiring. But reading this from my modern perspective, I can’t help but think that there are quite a few things left out here.

In Wikipedia’s entry on Abraham, Abram’s war against Chedorlomaor is described as a slaughter. Now granted, we’re talking about Wikipedia here, but this seems consistent with scripture, which says that Abram “routed” Chedorlomaor. The trouble here, is that Abram didn’t defeat Chedorlomaor, Abram’s army defeated Chedorlomaor’s army. And we know very little about either army.

One of the things I find disturbing about the way war is reported to us throughout history (and even in the modern day), is that it often erases the real experiences of the human beings who were involved. We talk about Abram defeating Chedorlomaor, but we don’t talk about all of the soldiers that were killed or maimed in the process. The “slaughter” that Wikipedia talks about is not the slaughter of Chedorlomaor, but the slaughter of a group of young men that probably had no stake in Chedorlomaor’s war. The Bible is not unique in this, this is the way war is reported even in the modern day, but I think that the victims of war deserve better. They deserve a more complicated analysis. To say that Abram’s war was noble because he was fighting for the sake of his friend doesn’t seem to be exactly right considering the fact that he probably sacrificed the lives of people who weren’t involved in his conflict in order to rescue Lot.

It’s probably true what Military History Now says about war. War is probably as old as civilization itself, and perhaps we may never find a way to live at peace. But I think the first step in achieving real and meaningful peace is to acknowledge the true costs of war. The real human beings who are lost forever in all the “glorious” battles in history. Perhaps then we’ll see that war is never glorious, it’s never beautiful, it’s never noble. It’s always brutal and horrifying and sad.

Genesis 12 and 13: Abram, King of the Soil

In Genesis 12 and 13, an interesting character is introduced to us (technically he’s introduced in Genesis 11, but only briefly and I was too focused on the Babel stuff to talk about him there). When we meet him here, he’s called Abram, but God will later rename him Abraham and Abraham is, in a sense, the Father of monotheism.

The big three Abrahamic Religions are Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but there are others such as Rastafarianism and Baha’ism. These religions all claim some sort of distant connection to Abraham who is often considered a revered ancestor or significant prophet.

But in Genesis 12 when we meet Abram (as he is originally called), he’s not as mythic as he would become. At the beginning of Genesis 12, God tells Abraham to pack up his things and move. We don’t know how long Abram spent at his current residence, but God clearly felt it was too long and so seventy-five-year-old Abram packs up his things and prepares to move to Canaan (it’s worth noting that these guys lived to be like 900 apparently so seventy-five-year-old Abram is basically a toddler). God’s cited reason for asking Abram to leave his home is that he was going to make a great nation out of Abram.

I couldn’t find a reliable source for exactly how long of a walk it is. Answers.com said it was about 500 miles and according to this little map I found on another site, it does seem to be a nice long walk along the Mediterranean Sea. So, I guess Abram feels pretty strongly about what God tells him and I guess being turned into a great nation is reason enough to walk 500 miles on foot with all your belongings.

Abram goes with his wife Sarai and his nephew Lot and when he arrives, there’s a famine so he has to leave Egypt (a bit rude for God to call him out to a place where there’s literally no food but I guess that’s none of my business). As Sarai and Abram arrive in Egypt, Abram realizes that his wife is super-hot and when the Egyptians see this, they’re going to want to have sex with her. Abram deduces that the Egyptians will probably kill him if they know he’s married to Sarai so he suggests to Sarai that she should claim to be Abram’s sister, that way the Egyptians don’t kill him.

So, Pharaoh takes Sarai as his wife and, as a result of this, Abram was treated really well. But this didn’t seem to affect Abram so much as it affected God. Outraged at the whole ordeal, God afflicted Pharaoh’s family with a plague (this wouldn’t be the first time either, so maybe God just got a kick out of it we can’t really tell). Pharaoh sends Abram and Sarai on their way, and they leave Egypt a plague-ridden mess.

Following this bizarre story, in Genesis 13, Abram returns to a place called Bethel in Canaan. At this point Lot, who had been following Abram this whole time, had acquired so much stuff that it was difficult for Lot and Abram to travel together because their herders kept bickering with each other. So, Lot and Abram part ways. After Lot leaves, God reminds Abram that all this land around him is going to belong to him one day.

I don’t have too much to say about Genesis 12. I didn’t really find it to be a hotbed for meaningful commentary. A Christian commentary on this chapter would probably say something about the courage Abram exhibits by following God anywhere he’s asked to go. They might also note something about how God doesn’t give us guarantees and he might uproot your life at any point in order to ask that you follow him, and at the end there will be a greater reward for you if you have faith that God has good plans for you. And we can probably expect that a Christian commentary would include some mild apologetics for the latent sexism involved in Abram’s venture into Egypt. They’d remind us that this was a different time and we can’t read our morals into an ancient book and blah blah blah. And as the atheist, it’s my job to emphasize the latent sexism and perhaps even argue that the Bible ordains it. Then I could guffaw at all the backwards Christians who believe in this evil book that hates women. When I’m done with that, I could probably add something about how inconsiderate God was when he just uprooted Abram’s life without even asking him how he felt about it. But these points have been hashed and rehashed so many times now it makes me nauseous to even think about having to write that nonsense.

With regards to the latent sexism, I’m not going to comment on that too much here. Generally, I agree with the Christians that in this instance, this was written in a different time and I think as long as it’s pointed out that this book is loaded with misogyny because it was written by human beings, I don’t feel the need to write a post about sexism every time I come across a sexist act in the Bible (I’d be writing all day). I’ll talk about the misogyny of the Bible for verses that have been historically wielded against women or if there’s something particularly important I want to take note of, but other than that, I’m not going to overemphasize the point, because everyone knows it nowadays.

However, I do think Genesis 13 contains some interesting content. Here, God tells Abram that a vast portion of land belongs to him and his posterity. This might not seem unusual, it wasn’t to me as I was rereading it recently, but it should be unusual. In light of modern science, I think this view of nature is actually quite backwards. The idea that God (were he to exist) would promise a piece of land to someone makes no sense when you understand that the vegetation and all the creatures on that piece of land are living things. Wouldn’t it be akin to slavery to hand over a piece of land full of life to the will of a group of human beings?

This is an implicit assumption that I’ve always felt was problematic about Christianity. The assumption that the Earth is an object to be owned and exploited, is one of the fatal errors of Christianity that has created many of the problems we face as a world today. Its why climate change is slowly killing us, it’s why the fish are dying out, and it’s why there are still wars being fought to this day on that land that God gave Abraham so many years ago.

There’s an old Arapaho saying that, I think, gives us a much better ethical framework for how to treat the Earth: “All plants are our brothers and sisters. They talk to us and if we listen, we can hear them.” This may not sound like much, but it draws a sharp distinction from the implicit assumptions about property present in the Abrahamic traditions. It is also far more in line with modern science. The message from the Arapaho is that the plants which, to us, seem to be inanimate objects, are living things that can feel, think and even speak to us.

Of course, it seems pretty unlikely that trees are able to think, but what’s indisputably true here is that the trees are living things. In fact, an oft repeated truism in the modern day tells us that there are more living organisms in a handful of soil than there are people on planet Earth. How then, could we justify owning a plot of land, which is full of a diverse array of living, breathing creatures?

This might sound like New Age woo woo magic, but this is a reality and it shows that the Abrahamic traditions committed what may be a fatal error for humanity. This belief that the Earth is property is what has led us all to believe that we can treat it any way we please without any repercussions whatsoever. I think that the best way forward for us as a species, is to recognize that the beliefs that underpinned our society for so many years are fundamentally toxic. We must replace these beliefs with an understanding that the Earth is something we live in harmony with, and not something that we dominate. Or, put another way, we must teach Abram another old Arapaho saying: “When we show our respect for other living things, they respond with respect for us.”

Genesis 11: The Tower of Babel

The Tower of Babel is one of the more interesting tales in the Biblical canon. The myth was designed to make sense of the fact that humans speak so many different languages. The story is often told like this: in the early days of humanity, some time after the flood, a group of humans decided they were going to build a city and, in that city, there would be a giant tower called Babel. God passively watched from above but when he saw what they were up to, God couldn’t help but become angry with the humans. The humans were trying to build a tower so that they too could sit on the clouds like God. The humans were beginning to fancy themselves Gods. So, God responded by toppling this little tower and forcing all the humans to speak different languages, so that they couldn’t communicate with one another. Without the ability to communicate, the humans presumably gave up on the project and decided to form independent countries and endlessly go to war with each other instead. The end.

If you were raised Christian, you’ve probably heard some variation of this story before. The way the story is often told seems to parallel the story of Icarus. Humanity flew too close to the sun, so God melted their wax wings and sent them plummeting back to Earth. Hubris is the tragic flaw of humanity in this story as it is usually told. But, having read it with a fresh pair of eyes, I think we’ve misunderstood this story.

The story is only 9 verses long, so we haven’t got a lot to work with here. The details of the traditional story are all in agreement with the actual text. Humanity, under one language, does decide to build a city with a tower named Babel in the middle. God does get angry at this and he does destroy the tower and give each of the people new languages. But God’s reasons for doing this, and humanity’s reasons for building the tower are a little bit different than we’re usually taught.

Genesis 11:4 is usually the text cited to justify the position that humanity was building the tower to be arrogant. This verse tells us that humans wanted to build the tower to “make a name for ourselves.” This sounds pretty damning until you read the full quote: “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” So, it seems like humans were building a tower to make a name for themselves, but for the purpose of unifying all people under one common banner.

We see further evidence of this in Genesis 11:6. God descends to the city and sees what’s going on and responds, “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.” Notice there’s no mention of hubris here, it doesn’t even seem to be implied. It almost sounds as though God is frustrated with how successful humans are. It almost sounds as though God is the enemy of humanity in this moment.

Could it be that the ancients saw God as an obstacle? Why not? Most gods were personifications of abstract natural forces. Most natural forces, it seems, are working against humans, not with them, so why not assume that God is standing in your way? Why not assume that God is against you?

We tend to assume that the ancients would have believed in a cheerleader god who shows up to all our soccer games and takes us for ice cream whether we win or lose, but that’s only because that’s what we want to believe. The ancients would probably have been expecting a God who didn’t think much of humanity or, quite possibly, even a God that hated humanity and actively worked to undermine them.

Perhaps, then, God didn’t topple the Tower of Babbel because he thought humans were arrogant, perhaps he did it because he couldn’t stand the thought of human beings becoming united and self-sufficient. Perhaps God realized that if there were no wars, no violence, no oppression, there would be no need for humans to run to God for comfort. If there were no suffering, there would be no need for God. And God couldn’t stand such an idea.

This whole story reminds me of a conversation between Russel Brand and Yuval Noah Harari on Brand’s Under the Skin podcast. Harari notes that most sci fi films depict AI as having some sort of flaw. The robots don’t work the way we wanted them to, they turn on us and they try to kill us. But, Harari notes, this is actually not the most terrifying scenario. The most terrifying scenario is that the robots do work the way we want them to. They work so well that suddenly there’s no place for us in this world anymore. Maybe that’s how God felt; humans were working so well together that God felt useless. And it was better, in God’s eyes, to have humans that fight and go to war and kill each other, than to have humans that don’t need God.

Genesis 9:18-29: Peeping Ham and the Curse of Canaan

In one of my previous posts, I talked about the ancient belief that sin could be inherited but I didn’t dig too deep into the multitude of egregious manifestations of this belief throughout history. I didn’t forget about this, I simply figured there would be many opportunities to discuss it, starting with the latter half of Genesis 9.

Recall that in Genesis 6-8, God decided he was going to drown the entire world because the humans were being shitty. But God decided he’d save Noah and his family, so he told them to build a giant boat and put a pair of every single species of animal on that boat. Then God flooded the world and killed everyone.

Afterwards, Noah and his family were tasked with restarting the world. God promised he wouldn’t destroy everything this time (although he provided a neat little loophole in his promise, in case he changed his mind) so the only thing Noah and his family had to do was procreate and everything would be back to normal.

After the flood, Noah did the next logical thing, he planted a vineyard, made some wine and got drunk. After forty days of tending to a literal floating zoo, Noah needed to kick his sandals off and drink away some of that stress. Now, if you’ve ever been to college, you probably know that the craziest people are the people that have never drank before. And as we know, prior to the flood, Noah was God’s favorite student, so we can imagine he was something of a goody two shoes. This means that when Noah got drunk, he got really drunk. We’re told that, when the party was over, Noah was found naked in his tent.

Unfortunately, Noah was found naked in his tent by his son Ham. Genesis 9:22 tells us “Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father naked and told his two brothers outside.” Now, modern readers tend to read this part and think that it’s rather gross. Nobody wants to walk into a tent and find their dad naked (especially if their dad is 600 years old…) but apparently this would have meant something more to the original readers of this text. We know this because, after Ham tells his two brothers (Shem and Japheth), the brothers walk in backwards and cover their father with a blanket. The reason they walk in backwards is to avoid seeing Noah naked like Ham did. Why take such precautions? Apparently, seeing your dad naked wasn’t just gross, apparently it was a mortal sin. When Noah woke up and found out that Ham had seen him naked, Noah cursed Ham’s son Canaan and doomed his entire bloodline to a life of slavery.

If you’re confused, you’re not alone. Why did Noah curse Canaan when it was Ham who he had beef with? Is it really the end of the world that Ham saw Noah naked? The folks at gotquestions.org are also puzzled by this one, they present a couple of possible answers but even they agree that most of them don’t add up and ultimately, they’ve got questions but no answers. Answers in Genesis, on the other hand, always has the answers. And as usual, their answers misread the text in order to justify their preconceived beliefs. They’re response more or less boils down to, “well Canaan must’ve done something wrong, otherwise God wouldn’t have let Noah curse him.” But apparently there are no Answers in Genesis as to what exactly it is Canaan did wrong.

I’m no Bible scholar but maybe the reason it’s so hard to find an answer here is because we’re expecting it to make sense in our time. We assume that their must be a good reason for Noah to curse an entire bloodline of people, so there must be something the Bible isn’t telling us. But maybe the Bible is telling us all the information it wants us to know. Maybe the Genesis writers have given us all the pieces to the puzzle, but we just don’t like the big picture. Is it possible that this Curse on Canaan happened because Noah was embarrassed that his son saw him naked? Then, when he woke up with a serious hangover, he was pissed off (and perhaps a little drunk still). He was so pissed off that he accidentally cursed the wrong person.

Genesis was probably written sometime between 900 and 700 BC. In the centuries preceding Genesis, Canaan apparently had some rough years. Canaan was a colony of Egypt and many Canaanites are included in a list of prisoners of war to Egypt. So, something happened to the Canaanites that might have led one to suggest that the Canaanites were cursed to become slaves. The Bible has its own account of what happens to the Canaanites and it’s rather horrific, but we’ll get to that later. For now, what’s important is that the writers of Genesis would have been trying to explain why Canaan had drawn such a bad lot. In my view, this bizarre tail of Noah’s nudity and peeping Ham was all just a way of explaining the misfortunes of a fallen nation and perhaps even a way of justifying the actions of the Israelites.

But regardless of the justification for these verses, the problem is the way they’ve been used. In the 18^th and 19^th centuries when African slavery became prominent in America, Genesis 9 was used as a justification for the enslavement of blacks. According to this view, the Africans were descended from Ham and Canaan and since Genesis 9:25 says “Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers,” this apparently means that God ordained slavery.

Now of course, you could argue, I’m being unfair. There’s nothing in the Bible that explicitly states that the Africans were descended from Ham and Canaan. The slave apologists were being dishonest, and we shouldn’t blame the Bible for the way it’s been interpreted over the years. But my argument is a bit more nuanced. I’m not saying that we should blame an ancient text for having ancient views. What I’m saying is that, when we read the Bible as an infallible, perfect text, we will inevitably just read in whatever views we want to read into it. This is why the Bible has been used to justify slavery, genocide, greed and all sorts of other egregious things over the years. It’s not because there’s anything wrong with the book, it’s because there’s something wrong with the way we read it.

What Christians often fail to understand is that nothing can be read objectively. As the old saying goes “there is no view from nowhere.” You cannot simply read the Bible; you have to interpret it and the way you interpret it is greatly impacted by the culture you’re living in. This is why the Bible has always been used to affirm the status quo, because the human mind is always looking for affirmation of the current form of reality. The human mind is always looking to be told that everything is perfectly fine the way it is and that nothing needs to change. Reading the Bible as the inerrant word of God allows us to read our own beliefs into the text and then ordain them as if they had come straight out of God’s mouth. In this way, Biblical Inerrancy hinders progress and change in society. We can’t change because the Bible says so, and if we can’t change we can’t grow.

Genesis 6-8: Noah, the Flood and the Not-So-Good God (Part 2)

God Flip-Flops on Murder

There’s something very awe inspiring about the story of the Noachian Flood. The grandeur and enormity of it hearkens to a mythical age that I wish I actually believed in. It reminds me of the story in the Song of Ice and Fire series about Brandon the Builder crafting an enormous ice wall with the help of giants. The writing is lacking in detail compared to the poetic Epic of Gilgamesh or other ancient epics, but the underlying story is pretty cool as far as myths go.

However, it’s a disturbing tail for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it shouldn’t be ignored that the underlying assumption of the story is that killing animals is no big deal, but I already discussed the Bible’s views towards animals and nature in my post on Genesis 1, so I won’t belabor the point. Second, by the end of the story, after God has flooded the world and killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, God realizes that mass murder won’t solve the problems of the human heart.

In Genesis 8:21, God says to himself “Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done.” Which at first glance, might seem like an apology from God, but it really isn’t. Here God is saying he’s just not going to kill humans for being bad anymore since it seems to be in their nature. Of course, as many of us know, he will go on to kill more human beings for being evil, he just won’t destroy the entire Earth again, but I suppose we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. So, long story short, God was angry because human beings are evil, so he killed all the humans. Then after he was finished, he decided he wouldn’t do that again because human beings are evil, and they can’t really help it. Pretty toxic behavior from the man upstairs.

A Comforting Promise

I’m losing sight of my goal with this whole project so to get back on track, let me try to step in the shoes of an ancient reader. The ancients probably would have perceived God as being unforgiving since they were living in a world prone to famines and drought. A world where, in the blink of an eye, nature could snatch away everything they worked for. Maybe their crops wouldn’t grow, maybe their children would grow sick and die, maybe they would be unable to have children. At the whims of God, everything could be taken away in a matter of seconds and God, it seemed, didn’t need any justification for doing so.

So, this story, where God changes his mind and decides that, even though humanity isn’t perfect, they’re still worth keeping around, is actually quite beautiful, if we look at it through an ancient lens. It also starts to make a little bit more sense when we look at it this way. First of all, if the writers of Genesis had created a God that fit the modern standards of a perfect God, the ancient readers would’ve called bullshit right away. If God had been portrayed as loving and kind, or even rational, the ancient readers would never have believed it. Most of these readers probably lost children and family to starvation or harsh winters, so if the writers of Genesis had portrayed God as being someone who was understanding and patient, it would obviously have been nonsense to readers at the time. The only reason we expect such a thing today is because we are insulated from the harsh reality of nature.

The only way to get readers on board with the promise made in Genesis 8:21 is to first demonstrate that the God who’s making the promise, is in fact God. So, the Flood becomes a necessary device for describing the God that the ancient people would have been familiar with. It wouldn’t seem out of character for God to flood the Earth since he was prone to allowing children to starve and women to die in childbirth. So, an ancient reader would probably think, if nothing else, the writers of Genesis are talking about the right God. Once the writers of Genesis got the ancient people on board with their story by depicting God accurately, they tacked a hopeful promise on at the end. They promised that, no matter how bad things get, God is not interested in destroying you (anymore).

Genesis 8 closes by offering the reader a reassuring mantra. “As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.” I kind of like this verse, it’s a little bit like the old saying that life goes on. If nothing else, the ancient people could know that the sun would rise tomorrow.

Genesis 3 and 4: The Hereditary Stain

In my last post, I talked about the difference between essentialism and existentialism. This theme is probably going to come up a lot, so if you don’t know what those terms mean, I’ll refresh your memory. Essentialism is the belief that essence precedes existence, or in other words, the purpose of your life (essence) was determined before you were born (existence). Existentialism is the belief that existence precedes essence, meaning your purpose is somehow determined throughout your life. While most people probably don’t think about it in these terms, most modern people could probably be defined as existentialists. Today, most people do not think there is a predefined destiny laid out for them but rather that we create our own destiny. However, as you can probably imagine, in the old world, things were different. Your destiny was given to you by God before you were born, and you were powerless to change it. This is why kingdoms were passed down from father to son and this is one of the reasons why genealogies were important to ancient people. It mattered who your parents were because it said something about your destiny.

This point will be important in understanding Genesis 3 and 4. In Genesis 3, we see the final act of the creation story. Namely, the eating of the forbidden fruit which leads to “The Fall” as Christians will call it. Adam and Eve are convinced by a serpent to eat the fruit from the forbidden tree, thus committing the first sin. This appears to be a pretty important moment for Christians. According to Paul, it is the moment that both sin and death entered the world (Romans 5:12) and the folks at Answers in Genesis believe that literally nothing died prior to this moment. But the result of this which is undisputed by most Christians is the birth of Original Sin.

According to a Catholic Encyclopedia written by the people at New Advent, Original Sin may be taken to mean “a consequence of [Adam’s] first sin, the hereditary stain with which we are born on account of our origin or descent from Adam.” So, Adam, by committing that first sin, left a stain on all of us that requires us all to be dunked underwater as babies in order to cleanse ourselves. Thanks a lot, Adam.

If you’re anything like I was growing up, your first question is “What the hell did I do??” Adam’s the one that ate the apple, why did I get the “hereditary stain”? It’s hard to construct an answer to this question that would be satisfying to the modern person, since we tend to be existentialists. The closest thing to a satisfying answer that I could find was given by St. Augustine. Augustine argued that Adam was acting as a representative for humanity when he sinned. But when did we elect Adam as our representative? When was the referendum? While modern people read this text and feel that it is a bit lacking, to an ancient person, it would probably have been obvious that sin was inherited. In the same way that those who were descended from kings inherited some divine right to rule, human beings inherited Adam’s first sin.

Following Genesis 3 is Genesis 4 which is one of the more confusing and poorly written chapters of the Bible (sorry Moses). It starts with Adam and Eve bearing two children, Cain and Abel. God, who tends to play favorites, seems to like Abel a lot. So naturally, Cain murders Abel. This leads God to curse Cain, but it’s a strange curse. On the one hand, Cain is punished to restlessly wander the Earth but on the other, if anyone tries to kill him, God threatens that person with vengeance.

From there, the Genesis writers go on one of those genealogical rants that they like to do. The writers tell us about Cain’s descendants (though who exactly he procreated with is unclear…) and specifically they focus on a man named Lamech. The only things we’re told about Lamech is that he has two wives, and that he murdered someone. Some have also noted that he’s the Bible’s first polygamist but it’s not clear whether this is something the writers would have disapproved of. What is clear about Lamech, is that he was a murderer and he seemed to be proud of it. He told his wives “if Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy-seven times,” which presumably means he is a far worse person than Cain and he doesn’t appear to be ashamed of this.

It’s not immediately clear what the purpose of this little anecdote about Lamech is, but there are two commonly cited purposes for these verses. The first is to suggest that Cain’s bloodline was tainted. Lamech, Cain’s descendant, was a murderer just as Cain was. The second cited purpose was to establish that, in the days between the Fall and the Flood, there was a rich culture of sin that stemmed from Cain’s bloodline. To me the verse doesn’t successfully do either of these things, but I could imagine that, had I been living in the time when this text was written, it might have seemed obvious that the sins of Cain were passed down to his children.

When the Bible hints at this inheritability of sin, specifically through the curse on Cain, it is undoubtedly telling us that evil people will produce evil children. That a criminal’s children will be just as awful and evil as the criminal. That Grendel, the descendent of Cain, would be a horrid and grotesque monster. Of course, when put this way, it sounds horrible. How can you hold someone accountable for the shortcomings of their parents? But perhaps there’s something we can learn from this essentialist attitude.

Obviously I’m not saying that people should be held accountable for the actions of their parents, in fact, what I’m saying is quite the opposite. What I’m saying is that the Bible is absolutely right in thinking that who your parents are has an enormous affect on your life. Of course, the Bible went about it entirely the wrong way, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a nugget of truth here. The reality is, who your parents are determines where you will go to school, where you will live, what kind of food you will eat, what kind of teachers and mentors you will have etc. And it is the sum total of these things, in my opinion, that makes up our identity. Ultimately, it’s true that crime is often generational, though not for overly simplistic reasons such as “criminals beget criminals”. As I said earlier, nowadays, people tend to be existentialist, but I think that by ignoring the reality of essentialism we’ve actually limited our potential as humans.

What do I mean by this? I’m talking about socioeconomics of course. In America, where I come from, it has always been our belief that anyone can succeed. But time and time again, it’s been shown that this is not true. That it’s nearly impossible to escape from poverty. Is poverty then, its own kind of Original Sin? What about racism?

But this can be a dangerous belief. By hearkening to these religious metaphors, we run the risk of trying to absolve ourselves of these sins. After all, the point of Original Sin is that you’ve got it whether you like it or not. Descendants of Adam inherit this sin even if they’re flawless human beings. This can lead to a sort of nihilism when applied to the real world. If I refer to racism as “America’s Original Sin” in the way that many have, this removes my role in perpetuating it. Systems like poverty and racism exist partially because of some sort of inherited qualities, but they are also perpetuated by people who benefit from their existence.

They key here is to operate from a middle position between the two. We should be both existentialists and essentialists. We should acknowledge that we have the power to decide what we will do with our lives, while at the same time acknowledging that there are forces beyond our control that influence our lives tremendously. This position opens us up to a radical kind of empathy that we would be incapable of if we remained wholly in either the essentialist or the existentialist camp. The existentialist would look at a grown man working at Walmart for slave wages and say, “he should have applied himself more.” The essentialist would look at the same person and say “he is incapable of anything better because he is inherently inferior to me.” But from this middle position we can look at this person and see extraordinary potential trapped within an unforgiving system. An unforgiving system which we have the power to change.

Genesis 2 and 3: The Misogynist’s Toolkit

As much as it can be enjoyable to read the Bible as a mythological text, removed from all the religious baggage that is typically associated with it, there is a danger here. We can and should strip this text from all it’s religious connotations so that we can understand it better, but we must be careful to not remove the text from its history. And history is almost always a tragedy. As we will see, the history of Christianity is no different.

In Genesis 2:7, God creates Adam, the first man, out of the dust and tasks him with taking care of the garden. But Adam gets lonely so, in Genesis 2:18, God decides to find Adam an assistant. God then brings all of the animals in for interviews with Adam but none of them seems to be the right fit for the position. So, God puts Adam to sleep, takes out his rib, and turns it into a woman. The woman, who is later called Eve, turns out to be the perfect partner for Adam and so they marry.

I’m going to dip into Genesis 3 a little bit here as well, because I think it’s important to this topic. In the beginning of Genesis 3, Eve is chatting with a serpent about this whole forbidden fruit rule. The serpent rightly points out that God is being a total buzzkill and that Eve should just take one bite. The serpent promises Eve that he’s cool, and that he won’t narc on her if she eats one (I’m paraphrasing of course). So, Eve eats one of the fruits and gives one to Adam too. This eating of the forbidden fruit leads to what Christians call “the Fall” and it is cited by many as the reason for any and all suffering on Earth.

If you read those past two paragraphs and you saw nothing problematic about them, it’s probably because you aren’t reading them in the proper historical context. In an excellent piece in the Washington Post, Pamela Milne details the impact the character of Eve has had on women throughout history. She connects Eve to the later verse in 1 Timothy that bars women from teaching or having positions of authority and from there she documents the rich tradition of misogyny in the church starting with Tertullian, carrying on through Aquinas and the Protestant Reformers, all the way up to the modern day with TV fundamentalist preachers. The impact of the archetype of Eve has been immeasurably damaging, pervasive and seemingly never-ending. Where do we begin in untangling this incredibly complex and problematic legacy?

Let’s start with why these verses have become a weapon against women. In 1 Timothy 2:11-12, Paul says “Let a woman learn in silence with all obedience.I do not permit a woman to teach or to usurp authority over a man, but to be silent.” He proceeds to cite two reasons for this conclusion. First, Adam was conceived before Eve. This reasoning might seem ridiculous, but Paul literally says this in 1 Timothy 2:13. In Milne’s article, she cites a theologian named Phyllis Trible who points out that, while many people argue that because Eve was created second, she is therefore inferior, those same people would never argue that because humans were created after animals, that humans are therefore inferior. So, there’s an obvious contradiction here but the inferiority of women would have been so obvious to someone living at the time that it’s honestly surprising that Paul gives any justifications at all.

The second reason Paul cites is that “Adam was not deceived, but the woman, being deceived, fell into sin.” Now, if you’ve read Genesis 3, you’ll know that this is a factually inaccurate reading of the text. I wish someone had been there to remind Paul that actually, Adam ate the fruit as well, even if it was Eve who offered it to him. So how then was Adam not deceived? This dude is an adult, capable of making his own decisions, why are we blaming his sins on Eve? And the image of Eve as some sort of sinful temptress coercing Adam into eating the fruit is not present in the original text. So, none of these justifications for Paul’s misogyny hold up to even the slightest amount of scrutiny.

There are two more reasons that I’d like to talk about which are often cited for the misogynist reading of Genesis 2 and 3. The first is that, as stated in Genesis 2:21-22, Eve was created out of Adam’s rib. Many argue that this makes Eve subordinate to Adam by definition. Rather than being her own, full-fledged human being, Eve is just a piece of Adam. Personally, I think this has been read into the text over the years. If we continue on in Genesis 2, Moses writes the following about Adam’s rib “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.” So from the context, it seems clear that this was a myth designed to explain and justify marriage and it’s entirely possible that this portion of the text was never intended to say anything about the relative inferiority of women. Of course, I can’t say for sure what the intent of the verse was, but it isn’t immediately obvious that the intent of the verse was to assert women’s inferiority.

The second reason is that God created Eve as an assistant to Adam. The key thing to understand here is that in the time Genesis was written, existentialist thought did not exist, everyone was an essentialist. For those of you that don’t nerd out over philosophy, an existentialist is someone who believes that existence precedes essence. Essence is the purpose of something, so an existentialist believes that humans are born without a purpose and that their purpose is somehow created throughout their life. An essentialist, on the other hand, believes that essence precedes existence. In other words, an essentialist is someone who believes that human beings are born with a predefined purpose. In the time Genesis was written, virtually everyone would have believed that essence was predefined by God and that humans were powerless to change their essence.

This might sound like philosophical gibberish but it’s essential (pun intended) when we’re talking about Genesis 2:18 because here God defines Eve’s essence. Eve, prior to even being created, was defined as Adam’s helper. On the other hand, Adam was created with the purpose of ruling over the kingdom of Earth. Aside from this being a highly toxic dichotomy, it’s important to note that readers of this text would probably have interpreted these “purposes” as being intrinsic and unchanging properties of men and women. So, men were, by definition, rulers and women were, by definition, servants.

In an article on Bible.org, Kenneth Boa argues that the word “helper” is misinterpreted in Genesis 2:18. He argues that, based on the context, the word “helper” would not indicate any degree of subordination or inferiority but rather indicates that man would need a companion. And while it does seem that the implication was that woman was created more to satiate man’s loneliness than to help him with yard work, I don’t think this fixes the larger problems in the text. Even if woman was made to be Adam’s companion, as opposed to his slave, she was still made for Adam. In other words, while Adam was created for his own independent interests, Eve was made for Adam’s interests which clearly implies that her role in the world is to serve Adam’s interests.

While many of the misogynist readings of Genesis 2 and 3 are, in my opinion, misreadings of the actual text, the underlying sexism in verse 18 seems to be inseparable from the text. Furthermore, as much as we can try to argue against misogynist readings, we have to remember what the culture of the time was. If misogyny wasn’t written into Genesis, then it would already be a radically feminist text for its time. So, we can pretty safely assume that some of the sexist interpretations were intentional on the part of the writers.

That being said, I’ve noticed that it’s common among atheists to work very hard to confine religion to a lot of its more egregious tendencies. I’ve listened to debates where the atheist argues that the Bible is anti-woman or anti-gay because they want to prove that Christianity is a backwards religion, while a more progressive theologian attempts to debunk misogynist readings of the Bible. And while I certainly don’t think Christianity is forward thinking at this point, I think we need to allow the room for Christianity to evolve, which means supporting progressive theology, not attacking it. If atheists are attacking liberal theologians, then those theologians have enemies on all sides when they should be supported by people that support their overall conclusions (that women deserve equal rights, that gay people should be allowed to marry etc.). Serious humanists should be supporting those liberal theologians that defend the rights of oppressed groups regardless of how we feel about Christianity.

On the other hand, Christianity should not be totally off the hook. Whatever your interpretation of these texts, it’s undeniable that Genesis 2 and 3 have been used to oppress women. If Christianity is going to evolve, the church must acknowledge these wounds and work towards healing them. They need to address the fact of sexism in the church and work harder to empower women. A good starting point would probably be to stop spouting off nonsense about how women can’t be leaders. The Christian leadership needs to be held to account for the grotesque sexism that pervades Christian culture to this day, but we need to recognize that there may be allies within Christianity for this initiative. We shouldn’t alienate these allies by invalidating their perspective. The focus of atheists is all too often centered around shitting on Christianity rather than focusing on the much more important goal of liberating women and correcting the toxic traditions of the past.

In Milne’s article, she cites several feminist theologians who have worked to reform the Church’s views on Eve in an effort to correct the Church’s views on women in general. Many of them address the topics I’ve discussed here (though much more effectively) and they address many more misogynist readings of Genesis 2 and 3. What’s important is not that any of them are necessarily correct, but that they’ve been virtually ignored by the theological world. How many Christians have heard of Phyllis Trible or Elizabeth Cady Stanton? I hadn’t until I was doing research for this post. Why haven’t we heard their names from Rick Warren, Tim Keller or Joel Osteen? The goal right now should be to hold these leaders accountable for the lack of representation of women in the church. Perhaps there will come a day where we can challenge Christians to abandon Biblical inerrancy and maybe even Christianity as a whole. But for now, the best we can do is to challenge the narrative and challenge Christian leaders to start talking about this issue.