Genesis: Reflections

I want to take a momentary pause at this point and reflect on what I've just finished reading.  It was honestly not my intent to nit-pick every problem I saw, or even seek out problems, but to (a) become familiar with the material; and (b) attempt some kind of understanding.  And that understanding part is where I ran into trouble.

Not because I couldn't understand it, but because I could.  For example, when the Bible claims that someone lives over 900 years (before the flood) or over 140 years (after the flood), I know that's a ridiculous notion.  How do I know?  Because people do not live that long.  Over the last hundred years or so life spans have been steadily increasing due to improvements in hygiene and modern medicine (read: science!), and the global average lifespan is now around 70 years.  So to claim that someone could live 140 years in a time that lacked our level of medical knowledge, living a hard-scratch existence such as farmers and shepherds, dealing with famine and disease, it is just not credible.  Plus, we have found no evidence from archaeology that supports the notion that people living in the BCE time period described in Genesis had such long life-spans; to the contrary, life spans were significantly shorter than they are today.

But again, not to pick on this one specific issue; there are many.  I think the main difference between the way I read the Bible and the way a Christian believer reads the Bible is that I read it to understand, whereas they read it to reinforce their faith.  So when I read that Jacob lived 147 years, I recognize that this is not possible and that therefore this is fiction.  When a Christian reads that, they conclude that lifespans were longer closer to the creation and see this is a reaffirmation of their faith, all evidence from the natural world notwithstanding.  This is our difference in perspective: they're reading history; I'm reading fiction.

So with my perspective, what did I learn from Genesis?  Here's a summary, in no particular order.

God doesn't have a clear sense of justice

Over and over again when someone does something wrong, they are either not punished, or God punishes the wrong person.  It starts with the fall: God punishes Adam and Eve (and all their descendents for all time) for disobedience, even though they did not yet know the difference between right and wrong (they learned that after eating from the tree of knowledge); this scenario in every way was a set-up (<Ackbar>It's a trap!</Ackbar>).  Cain is never really punished for the murder of Abel; he is instead put under God's protection and lives a long and fruitful life.  God destroys all life on the planet, even all of the animals, because mankind (that he created) has turned out to be wicked.  When Ham sees his drunken father Noah naked (and why is that a crime, again?), God punishes Ham's son, Canaan.  Abraham and Sarah are never punished for repeatedly lying about their marriage and bringing suffering onto others (Pharaoh and Abimelech); rather, they are rewarded for their deceit like scam artists, and God confusingly punishes Pharaoh and Abimelech with plagues for Abraham's lie.  Sodom and Gamorrah are destroyed (even innocent children); Lot's daughters rape him.  Jacob is not punished for tricking Isaac, on his deathbed, into giving him the blessings of the firstborn instead of Esau, even after he brings God into the lie.  Simeon and Levi are not punished for slaughtering all the men of Shechem and sacking the city; and all the men of Shechem are punished (murdered)  because one man raped Dinah.  Joseph's brothers are not punished for plotting to kill him and eventually selling him into slavery; and on and on. 

On the other hand, people are punished for ridiculous things.  Ham for seeing Noah naked; Lot's wife for looking at the destruction of Sodom; Onan for not impregnating his dead brother's wife, etc.  These are not crimes and not deserving of the punishment.  This is just a confused, seemingly random application of justice; the one thing you can be sure of is that the person committing the crime will not be punished.

God does not understand science

We learn that principles of heredity and genetics are controlled by what you see while you're impregnated and gestating: being made to look at spotted and streaked rods will result in spotted and streaked offspring.  People can live for hundreds of years.  Women can have children far beyond menopause.  People could build a tower to heaven and not suffer hypoxia at around 15-20k feet.  People can live for years on nothing but corn.  The future can be foretold through dream interpretation.  The entirety of taxonomic fauna can fit on a little boat for over a year and survive to repopulate the planet (and there are so many specific problems with this story, I can't even begin to recount them).  The entire planet can be flooded, and then all that water can disappear.  The entire population of the planet can be descended from two people.  Different languages were created all at the same time.  Maybe these kinds of things could be accepted by a people without a solid understanding of science, but they cannot be accepted today.

God hates women

From the beginning women are treated as inferior: they are like property, they must subjugate themselves, they can be married off against their will.  When Adam is confronted by God about eating from the tree, his first impulse is to point the finger at Eve; she is seen as the cause of all human suffering.  When a man and wife cannot have children, it's always because the woman is barren.  When a mob threatened Lot for protecting some strangers, he offers to let the mob rape his virgin daughters (which was itself a lie; they weren't virgins, they were married).  Hagar is forced to sleep with Abram, after which she is beaten by Sarai; when she runs away to protect herself and her child, God tells her she has to go back and take what's coming to her.  Later, when Abram and Sarai have their first child together, Hagar is exiled.  We almost never hear about female children, only males (unless they are to be married off, or mistreated).  And when they are mentioned, we never hear about their point of view.  Did Leah love Jacob?  Did Dinah love Shechem?  Who knows?  To the author of these stories, it didn't matter.

God hates nudity

At the end of Gen 2, the author comments that Adam and Eve are naked but not ashamed, because they were innocent and pure.  But for the rest of us who don't have the pre-Tree innocence of Adam & Eve, the implication is that nudity is something to be ashamed of.  And in fact, this is the crime that Ham commits, seeing his father Noah naked.  But there's nothing inherently wrong or evil about nudity.  The appropriate, polite view of nudity should involve modesty, not shame.  And standards of modesty should be measured in the context of the society in which people live, not based on what I say, or what some 2000+ year old book says.  This is one of the most psychologically harmful loads of crap to come out of this book.

God loves sex

There is so much bom-chicka-wow-wow going on in this book that it could be sold in paperback at the train station with Fabio on the cover.  The author(s) of this book really enjoyed the descriptions of sex; I can imagine their palms getting sweaty every time they wrote "going in unto her" and such.

A good marriage involves polygamy, and should be kept in the family

Nearly every man who has a family in this book has multiple wives, and most of them are from the same family.  Lamach marries Adah and Zillah.  Abraham has Sarah (his half sister), Hagar and Keturah.  Nahor marries his niece Milcah.  Isaac marries his cousin Rebekah.  Esau marries two Hittites, Judith and Bashemath; then his half-cousin Mahalath, then Adah, Aholibamah and Bashemath.  Eliphaz has a second marriage with Timna (his first wife, the mother of most of his children, is unnamed).  Jacob marries Leah and Rachel (sisters, as well as his cousins), as well as Bilhah and Zilpah.  Judah marries Shuah and then has children with his daughter-in-law Tamar.

The next time you hear a Christian talking about the "sanctity of marriage," remember that Abraham, the father of their religion, was a polygamist in a incestuous marriage.  They don't generally mention that in the brochures.

God has no problem with slavery

Not only is slavery not condemned, but it's celebrated as a measure of wealth and success.  Slaves are beaten, even pregnant women.

God is a racist

We learn to hate people based upon where they were born and what race they are; entire groups of people are condemned or slaughtered.

We also find a harmful teaching in the idea that, without God, people are wicked.  For example, in Gen 20 Abraham is justifying his lie to Abimelech, saying that he was afraid that Abimelech would kill him and steal his wife because they did not fear God.  But over and over again we see examples of wicked behavior from God's chosen people (do I need to mention Simeon and Levi again?); the people that they fear and loathe are much better examples of morality than they are.  When I condemn the Bible as a hateful book, it's this kind of thing I'm talking about.

God likes the smell of burning animal flesh

Cain's offering of produce is disliked by God, but Abel's dead animal is better (this is why Cain gets up set and kills Abel).  After the flood waters receded and the ark is on land again, the first thing they do is kill and sacrifice some animals (even though animals are dangerously scarce at this point).  Abraham kills a goat in sacrifice (instead of his child Isaac).  The value of animal sacrifice is never explained.  (My theory: it involves people bringing valuable food to rabbis.) 

God will only love you if you're circumcised

God makes a promise to Abram that he will be the patriarch of a great nation of people, but to keep his promise God requires that every male have the foreskin of their penis removed.  Why?  This is an absolutely bizarre and ghastly practice with no explanation, which amounts to genital mutilation.  It's especially confusing, since the premise is that God created man: if God didn't like foreskins, he could have created man without them.  Plus, what does it mean for women who don't have foreskins to cut off?  This implies that there's nothing they can do to keep the oath that Abram/Abraham signed up for, other than marrying the right sort of man (one without a foreskin) and subjugating herself to him.

God is a viscous and indiscriminate killer

Flooding the planet and destroying nearly all life.  Killing all of the people, including innocent children, in Sodom and Gomorrah.  Bringing a plague to Egypt.  Bringing a seven year long global famine. The problem is that there are natural disasters that destroy peoples and places.  If you introduce as a character an all-powerful and all-knowing creator God, then you have to attribute these events to that God, and he turns into a heartless bastard.  There's no way around it. 

For an atheist, and one who values good history and science, is there anything good in this book?   For me, no.  It's badly written, it has no basis in reality, and it has scant moral value (and even where you could find a reasonable moral lesson, such as Joseph persevering against repeated reversals, there's so much wrong with the story that any possible positives are diminished beyond recovery).

What do you think?