The Bible begins with Genesis but often people who are translating it into other languages start with the Gospel of John, as we have. Genesis begins the Pentateuch, that is, the five books of "Law" of the "Law and Prophets". They are ascribed to Moses. Much of the history of man and many of the stories from the Bible that come to mind (Noah, Abraham, Israel, Joseph, Moses) are from Genesis.
We'll get into this sort of detail at some length later, but let's make some statements about the historicity of the creation stories and so forth. In my mind I hold an indecisive tension between the existence of a literal Adam and Eve or their story being but a parable. One's faith in God, Jesus, Moses, Abraham, Adam, and others does not depend on a literal, historical Adam. When someone claims it does, beware of a litmus test for certain modern sects. My view is that to enter into this debate or others drives a wedge in the wrong place, between the logic of the intellect and the sensitivity of the spirit when the intent here is to drive no such wedges. Other stories, such as the so-called "young earth" belief system in which a Biblical calendar is created proving that nothing existed before some creation event about 6000 years ago, versus old creation versus science versus evolution or whatever are the same trap. No one living today was there. The arguments are only over who gets to say what is true and who gets to claim authority and loyalty based on these truths. The tele-physicists are equally guilty with the tele-evangelists.
As for me, I wasn't there. I can't say firsthand what happened. No doubt I would be surprised if I knew the literal facts of the past, as would everyone else. My point here is that to enter into these debates is to miss the point. The point is that the universe was created by God, in some way at some "time". It, like we, has a finite existence in four dimensions, at least that we can see and measure. The point is that it doesn't matter who Adam and Eve were. Truth is, any human beings at any time would have done and in fact they actually do now what they did then. I don't believe in "original sin" some indelible mark put on an otherwise perfect creation by some one mistake made by one person. I believe in "inevitable sin", an inescapable property of the creation. We are all Adam, we were all Eve. Everybody was framed. Get past it.
So, as we launch into Genesis, we are not holding the origins stories in the Bible up to some fantasy of "pure science" nor are we holding science and rational thought up to some "perfectly true" scripture. We will not miss the point in that sort of way; we will see what these characters have to say about humanity, the humanity of which we are an inextricable part, and the creation in which they live.
The creative activities of God: First, the heavens and the earth, then content by days.
Day 1: Light and Dark.
Day 2: Water below, water above, and Sky.
Day 3: Sea, land and vegetation that reproduces using seeds.
Day 4: Stars, Sun, and Moon, to mark days, seasons and years.
Day 5: Fish ("teaming waters") and birds; all that multiply fruitfully.
Day 6: Living creatures on land that multiply.
Also on day six, man, male and female, in the image and likeness of God, to "subdue" the earth and everything in it. All green plants are assigned to people and the animals of the earth for food. Everything was good.
Day 7: A holy and blessed day of rest.
Scientists like to nitpick the details of this account. For instance, the creations of day three could not exist without the sun, from day four, unless from the Light of day one, perhaps greater than the sun. To a scientist the earth is insignificant to the heavens (i.e., the rest of the universe), at least if you think about it measured on the scale of distance. Clearly, there is significant point of view brought into the story by Moses and his oral forebears which is much more human centered than modern science.
As discussed yesterday, however, I think this sort of "holding the Bible up to the yardstick of 'science'" misses the point. The point is that God initiated everything in the four dimensions: matter, energy, and life in a variety of forms. Science cannot address these matters of origin from nothing since, from within the creation, there is nothing to observe, test, or attempt to reproduce. Pressed, a scientist will claim that these are 'metaphysical' issues. Indeed. Science observes matter and energy as fundamental quantities (in their fundamental forms). Beyond this, there is no additional understanding of essence. In addition, science does not really define 'life' beyond some superficial working definitions.
By faith, people simply decide what they think of origins. To we finite beings within a finite universe, anything 'outside' is simply unobservable and untestable and thus beyond the scientific method. In fact, much of what is inside that universe is unobservable, at least so far. Being beyond our tools of 'objective' observation, these territories are rife with disagreement and debate. Matters of life and spirit, however, are not beyond our tools of experience, reasoned thought and inference; they are just not available to the five senses, except second hand (i.e., by discourse on the topic with other beings).
Myself, I accept that God created everything as stated, in some order and by some means. I do not even rule out parts of evolutionary theory as a partial means, though evolutionists these days are so strident in their insistence on their absolute truth and anti-God accuracy that they often use ridiculous means in their own defense.
Be that as it may, science does not disagree with this text that people are ascendant above the rest of creation. (Beliefs of more homogenous creation are from different religions, different systems of faith, not from reasoned, observed science.) Whether dictated by God or not, this ascendancy is how we find ourselves. It is the way we have always behaved, for better or worse.
It is interesting that the text distinguishes male and female, both equally in the image of God but distinct and different.
A calendar is established with six days for work and a seventh for rest.
Creation is reiterated, now with an emphasis on man himself. Man was created from the dirt and became alive at the breath (… spirit) of God. He was placed in a garden where, ostensibly, all his important needs would be met. The geography of the rivers flowing through this garden is described in detail. Included among the headstreams are the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that flow through Iraq today.
God told man he could do anything he wanted except deal with issues of good and evil. These are represented as the fruit of one of the trees in the garden. Adam named all of the animals; this being a distinction of man that he can name things and by so doing is superior. God also did surgery on the man, took out parts, and made woman. When he woke up, man also named woman and declared her an equal, nearly. Men leave their parents and become one with their wives.
Man and wife had no shame at this point, despite their exposure.
Genesis 3
2004
October 3 for 12th
Here we meet God's antithesis, the serpent, who talks Eve into exploring the knowledge of good and evil. She had to admit that she knew God had said not to do this in the process. Adam was there and participated. Now they understood their exposure. Next time God was around there was a confrontation and everybody was demoted. The serpent had to crawl around on his belly under the heel of the man, the woman gained great pain in childbearing and the man would have to toil for his food, raising it out of ground that would be uncooperative.
They were kicked out of the garden under these curses although God provided skin clothes for them to wear. The buck was passed all around and came back on everybody involved.
Tremendous thought has been put into the meaning and implications of these passages. At this point I'm unwilling and unprepared to debate any of it except to make two points.
Part of the curse on the woman was that her husband would "rule over" her. This usage has been abused throughout all faiths and all ages of recorded history. The clear ideal from Chapter 2 was that the people of different sexes would be equal partners in this life. It is my view that our faith, our religion, calls us to a higher and ultimately better and ultimately easier standard of living than solely following natural or instinctive desires and animal forces. In that standard, there is no need for this "rule over" hierarchy; it is only due to the fact that things aren't right in the creation that it is sometimes necessary. The man is given the leadership role, on average, possibly because, on average, he is taller, stronger, and more able to wrestle with the thistles in his agricultural pursuit of survival.
My second and larger point is that I'm quite familiar with an attitude that everything wrong in the universe is Adam's (and/or Eve's) fault for making this mistake to begin with. "If only Adam hadn't…" is the sad refrain. It is my view that this crises was inevitable. As soon as there was a being in the four dimensional creation who was capable of being a companion to God but less than God, and as soon as this companion was coming and going from God's presence on a routine basis, as clearly happened here, a manifestation of imperfection was inevitable. I would have done it, you would have done it, anybody, anywhere, at any time and under any circumstances would have done it (except Jesus, who we'll discuss at tremendous length elsewhere). Indeed, we live in an imperfect creation in the sense that we know how things ought to be and we know that they're not like that, a very Aristotelian idea, actually. As fully involved members of that creation, each of us is imperfect too.
In any case, it doesn't help much to bemoan all this. The situation we find ourselves in is the situation we find ourselves in. It was here long before we were here (individually) and, unless and until God intervenes, will continue to be here long after. In the same sense that holding the creation order from Genesis 1 up to close scientific scrutiny (by today's science which, admittedly, will change…) misses the point, it also misses the point to blame Adam or Eve for the fact that corruption permeates our four dimensional universe. Their actions at the beginning of recorded human history were just another expression of that corruption. Unacceptable to a perfect God, possibly, but inevitable, certainly.
Genesis 4-5
2004
October 4 for 13th
Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel. Cain grew crops and brought an offering to God. Abel grew flocks and brought an offering to God. God accepted Abel's offering, not Cain's. Cain was angry; God spoke to him, 'do right and you will be accepted.' Cain invited Abel out to the field where Cain killed Abel. God spoke again, asking Cain what had happened. When Cain said he didn't know, God told him what had happened. God put a punishment on Cain then, on appeal, marked him for vengeance "the mark of Cain" if anyone should kill him. Cain left God, went off to Nod, and started having descendants: Enoch, Irad, Mehujael, Methushael, and Lamech, who married two women and, by his own poetry, was more of a hell-bent murderer than his ancestor Cain.
Does this have something to do with why some think that God's ideal family starts with the marriage of one man and one woman. Perhaps the ideals have changed.
Challengers to faith will often ask where Cain's wife came from. Practitioners of faith sometimes take this bait and go to some length to rationally explain what is going on without sacrificing an inappropriate level of literalism in interpretation of this Hebrew poetry. (Cain is the only one who is a problem, a wife for Seth, who we'll get to next, could have come from the daughters of Adam without breaking the model that only Adam can be a human patriarch.) As you might guess by now, I'm going to say that this misses the point. Cain left the presence of God after their 'curse and appeal' interview. He went to Nod where there were other people hanging around, married, and participated in that god-forsaken culture made up of strong men and tough living, producing descendants down to Lamech who would just as soon kill you as look at you. The story of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, is just the story of God's presence and an awareness of God breaking in on humanity, when the time was right, but humanity was still corrupt, with or without God. Even the ones with God killed over little more than human success and failure, at pleasing God.
The first genealogy:
Adam 130 930 0 - 930
Seth 105 912 130 - 1042
Enosh 90 905 235 - 1140
Kenan 70 910 325 - 1235
Mahalalel 65 895 395 - 1290
Jared 162 962 460 - 1422
Enoch 65 365 (God took him!) 622 - 987
Methuselah 187 969 (the flood) 687 - 1656
Lamech 182 777 874 - 1651
Noah 500 1056 -
Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
The flood was in 1656 Adam when Noah was 600. Now, isn't a tabular presentation of this information an improvement?
Genesis 6-7
2004
October 5 for 14th
Things on earth were a mess by 1500 years after the creation of Adam. The "Sons of God" by which some understand heavenly (spiritual?) beings, were marrying human women. Their offspring were "heroes of old" some of whom had racial names like "Nephilim." Everything was wicked and bad everywhere. God was tired of being a parent. He decided to wipe out everything, excepting Noah, a righteous, blameless man. He gave Noah specific instructions on the building of a boat and who would ride in it.
When Noah was 600, God told him to get his family and his God-directed animal collection and get into this boat, which was called an ark. The account is specific about the day. Noah was 600 years, two months and seventeen days old when he and his wife and sons and their wives and two of every animal entered the ark. God then shut the door and the flood started the following week.
This whole experience must have been bizarre, particularly the week between door-shut and rain-start. The flood lasted for 150 days.
The following is only my opinion. A huge amount of ornamentation has been added to this story. It is one of the classics of faith and one of the first learned in many traditions, including Christianity. My opinion is but a different elaboration.
Most people who have been to college have learned that all of the early cultures of this region (at a time and place where culture and religion were the same) have a flood story such as this with a hero such as Noah. Some say that this proves it's all fantasy. To me this does indeed prove that something happened. There's a lake in that part of the world, maybe it's the Black Sea, I don't remember, where submarine archaeology has found ancient campsites along a prehistoric shoreline under five hundred feet of modern water. Looks like what may have happened in recent prehistory is that the narrow straights to the Mediterranean broke through and filled the lake up to a new sea level. This is not unlike the creation of the Salton Sea in California about a hundred years ago and for prehistoric hunter-gatherers, such an event would have been devastating economically, and deadly in many cases. It would have seemed like a world-wide cataclysm.
Those on the other side of the debate are already up in arms, "This is the Word of God, perfect in every detail. The flood was worldwide; the hero was Noah because he was righteous. The remains of the ark are on Mt. Ararat in Turkey." Please be calm.
I believe that a great flood of some sort happened in what was to this writer the whole world in recent prehistory. I believe that God was involved in saving some people. I believe that the story, in oral retellings through many generations may have become a bit elaborated and that when Moses finally wrote it down, he did his best with what he had. The main points are the righteousness of Noah and the initiative of God. There is no doubt that most of the people in the pre-flood world were corrupt or that a few were righteous. Nothing has changed in that respect. I really have no issues with the story of Noah and the ark, aside from the elaborations, ancient and modern. As yet another story of God's Spirit striving with some men and working with others, it is indeed flawless, and as relevant today as ever.
The wind blew and the water receded and the ark came to rest "on the mountains of Ararat." Noah opened his window (does this means they were closed in without daylight for six months?) and sent various birds out at various times to test for land. One day the test bird didn't return. The day Noah turned 601, he took the "covering" off the ark and saw that the ground was dry. Two months later, the earth was completely dry and God told Noah to get everybody out of the ark.
(I see the claim that, had this been only a regional flood, there would have been no need to save animals or even to use a boat to save people. I wonder if by now we have enough technology to extract enough clarity in the geological and fossil records to see perturbations such as these?)
Noah built an altar and offered some of the animals on it. Making an offering like this from what little was left would take great faith. For his part, God said he would never do this again, even though "every inclination of [man's] heart is evil from childhood."
Perhaps because I'm an optimist, this is one of my favorites:
"As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest,
cold and heat,
summer and winter,
day and night
will never cease."
God's new covenant with Noah and his sons continues with the following provisions:
They may now eat all living things, not just the plants.
Murder is defined as wrong because man is in God's image. The punishment is capital.
The people and animals are to increase in number on the earth.
There will be no more worldwide floods.
The rainbow is the sign. When clouds come, the rainbow will remind God not to destroy everything. This is a covenant with everything living on the earth. Did something change at this point that made rainbows possible, or was this just the first time anybody had noticed them, or is God using a pre-existing phenomena as the sign for his new agreement?
Appended 2004 December 13 from a source referenced by Space Update 2004 November 29 at http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/myths_hoaxes_030325.html
A comet
toppled ancient civilizations
Myths are often
rooted in real events, and the dictionary says a myth
may or
may not be based on fact. That's the case with this one. Nobody
knows when the last major comet or asteroid struck
Earth, or
whether it happened recently enough to have altered
human
history in a big way. But Biblical stories,
apocalyptic visions,
ancient art, and some recent scientific data all point to the
possibility that a series of calamitous events
occurred
around 2350 BC, wiping out several advanced societies
in
Europe, Asia and Africa. Could it have all been
caused by a
disintegrating comet that struck in stages? Ah, that's the stuff of
myth, at least for now.
Noah grew a vineyard and got drunk and lay naked in his tent. Ham came in a saw him. Shem and Japheth took care of this by walking into the tent backwards and throwing a rug over their passed-out dad. This was the man who God had saved from among all the inhabitants of the earth because he was righteous. Having been brought up in a very Temperance (anti-alcohol) culture, I'm led to think here that we have an inaccurate grasp of what "righteous" means up against examples like this and those we will see later. I don't think this word means what we think it means.
On learning of this after becoming sober, Noah pronounced his blessings on his sons. In all three, he curses Canaan, the son of Ham, making him the slave to everyone else. Shem gets the blessing of God, Japheth gets to live in Shem's tents, and Canaan gets to be everybody's slave. Some have claimed that all Negroes descended from Ham and that this text justifies or even mandates racially based slavery. This reading had some widespread acceptance up into the 1960s in America and a few still believe it today. Of course, nothing could be sillier. There is nothing in the Bible attributing race to Ham.
In fact, there is nothing in the Bible that clearly says where races came from, certainly not here. It is only necessary to make specious derivations like this if one is trying to prove some such fallacy point as God's mandate of racially based slavery. My own admittedly extra-Biblical belief is that this is not the case. My own belief is then that Negroes are independent from this story. If this passage has a point, it is the seriousness to which these people took nakedness, not slavery.
At any rate, at last now we have
Noah 500 950 1056 - 2006
(Noah's story was a bit longer than the others, such as his father Lamech.)
Now the descendants of Noah are listed in three groups, the Japhethites, the Hamites, and the Semites. The descent is divided up further by clans, languages, territories, and nations. This is the first time we see names like Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord (a descendant of Ham, a slave?) and Sheba (the place, not the Queen, who will come later) and the Philistines and Babylon. Even some professions are listed, for example the sons of Javan, son of Japheth, were "maritime peoples [who] spread out into their territories by their clans within their nations, each with its own language." Of course, the Semites are the descendents of Shem, who has the blessing of God. So, we have the pecking order, Semites have the blessing of God, Japhethites are sailors (some of them) in the middle, and the Hamites are cursed slaves. "From these the nations spread out over the earth after the flood."
Even though 10:4, 10:20, and 10:31 mention that everybody had their own territory and their own language and were spread out all over the place, 11:1 starts with "Now the whole world had one language and a common speech." It then goes on to say that these people built a big city in one place and were going to build a tower reaching to the heavens so they would "make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth."
I think they use the term "whole earth" here pretty loosely. Maybe each speaker is parochial. It is not clear who "they" are from place to place in the text, and it is not clear what "whole" really means.
Anyway, God sees this going on, worries that "nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them", comes down and "confuse[s] their language" and "scatter[s] them over the face of the whole earth." So there.
I have two comments on this. First, what they were trying to do at Babel is essentially what we have done today. Pretty much nothing we plan to do is impossible for us, consider the Scaled Composites consortium winning the $10,000,000 Ansari X-Prize just this month by flying a privately built craft to 100 km altitude twice. And this is just a tiny example of the things we do, some claiming that we do them in God's image and to his glory, others claiming that we do them in spite of God, and yet others not caring one way or the other about any God with respect to what they accomplish. We have great ships that routinely cross the land, seas, skies, and space; we operate on brains, hearts, and bowels; we communicate instantly over the "whole world"; and we do countless other magical things, yet, God doesn't come down and stop us anymore, at least not lately. At least not yet. Not that all of these achievements work perfectly or reach the ends we envision, but we certainly have no problem building towers that reach to the sky and making names for ourselves.
Second, this whole engineering catastrophe looks like a typical failure in project management to me. Countless projects large and small are concocted, undertaken, and fail due to what boils down to failures of communication somewhere. Does God even need to come in and interject confusion? Not usually. Like I said, things don't always work out as we want but we don't often credit God with the failures anymore either. Rather, somebody gets scourged before a Congressional committee and the buck is well passed around to who knows where.
The ancestry now resumes. Let's borrow from Noah above to anchor to Adam:
Noah 500 950 1056 - 2006
Shem 100 500 1556 - 2056
Arphaxad 35 403 1656 - 2059
Shelah 30 403 1691 - 2094
Eber 34 430 1721 - 2151
Peleg 30 209 1755 - 1964
Reu 32 207 1785 - 1992
Serug 30 200 1817 - 2017
Nahor 29 119 1847 - 1966
Terah 70 205 1876 - 2081
Abram, Nahor, and Haran 1946 -
Abram 86, 100 175 1946 - 2121
We note that people after the flood did indeed procreate more quickly and live shorter lives. We note that Arphaxad, son of Shem (the first Semite) was born in the year of the flood. We note that the time from Adam to Abram is about the same as the time from Christ to our current era and that every one of his ancestors all the way back to Noah was still living at the time of Abram's birth. Finally, we note that although God limited the length of man's life to 120 years before calling Noah and sending the flood*, Nahor was the first person in the whole list to actually live that short of a time.
Indeed, if I had to swear on a Bible (as it were) as to the literal historical existence of any of these people, I would be able to do so beginning at Nahor. I've already discussed above, at length, why this is. It is only a commentary on my own place in faith, not on any claim I might have on true reality.
* "My Spirit will not content with man forever, for he is mortal; his days will be a hundred and twenty years." 6:3. Also note that this wasn't at the time of the original curse when Adam was kicked out of the garden nor was it after the flood was over, the places where I was sure I'd find it on review.
Genesis 12-13
2004
October 11 for 20th
I am impressed at the extent to which these short stories, just two or three paragraphs some of them (Babel, the calls of Abram and Noah) are expanded into great philosophies in our own religious heritage. Although I have a certain brand of training in all this from my own youth, I see little of the expansions I remember from then in the Bible itself. For example, we like to make a big deal of how much trouble Noah would have had with his neighbors, building a boat for a hundred years during a drought, but there is no indication in the text that Noah even had neighbors or interacted with anyone outside his family. Maybe he did and maybe he didn't, but all the conclusions we reach about people jeering and getting what they deserved for not listening to God are at least two degrees removed from the text of Genesis itself. Similarly the story of Babel is quite short but the inferences in our religion are quite long. Babel appears to be just a story of God struggling with technological man. We might find a general modern warning in it, but as an explanation of ancient diasporas, particularly after the worldwide spreading in chapter 10, it is hard to buy this as even chronological history, much less read into it some intent of God that he had for other people at a different place and time. I think I was taught that they were punished for attempting to put themselves higher than God.
Now we begin with Abram.
Abram's uncle Haran had died in Ur of the Chaldeans. Lot was Haran's son. Terah took Abram, Abram's wife Sarai and Lot and headed for Canaan, but when they got to the town of Haran, they settled there instead.
God told Abram to leave this country and his people and go on to some land he would show them. Did Abram hear God and obey where his father Terah had not? Had Terah just gotten too old to keep moving? Was there just not enough room for all these wealthy sheepherders around Haran? Whatever the case, they headed toward Canaan when Abram was 75. Abram, Sarai, Lot, and everything they all owned went with them. (Terah would have been 145.) Abram stopped at several places, the "tree of Moreh at Shechem", the hills east of Bethel, near Ai, then towards the Negev. He would stop and build alters and talk to God along the way. God promised him this whole land ultimately.
When there was a famine, they all went to Egypt. Since Sarai was beautiful, Abram had her promise to say she was his sister rather than his wife so that he would be rewarded for her rather than killed. Due to this, Pharaoh in Egypt took her into his harem and gave Abram people and livestock and all sorts of wealth. I don't know about you but this would have made me nervous.
God intervened and sent "serious diseases" on Pharaoh and his household, at which point Pharaoh called Abram in, yelled at him, and sent he and Sarai off with everything he had given them, to leave the country. He's lucky he got out with his head, much less everything he'd come in with and everything he'd been given, and Sarai.
They all went back to the place between Bethel and Ai and Abram called on God again. The land wasn't big enough for his business and Lot's plus all the other people who lived there (Canaanites and Perizzites) so Abram called Lot in and told him to pick where he wanted to settle in the land and Abram would take what was left. Lot picked the well-watered plain of the Jordan to the east and settled near Sodom -- city life. Abram went east into the hills. God told him that everything he could see in all directions would be his. "Go, walk through [it]." He moved his tents and built an alter near the "great trees of Mamre at Hebron."
The text doesn't directly draw the standard Protestant inference from this, "The easy choice is usually wrong," but it does say that "the men of Sodom were wicked and were greatly sinning against the Lord." It doesn't discuss how this is possible when the men of Sodom had no relationship with the Lord. Perhaps it was Lot and Abram in the area that brings God's attention.
The kings in the valley fought each other. One named Kedorlaomer had ruled them all for thirteen years; then they rebelled. The following year, Kedorlaomer made an alliance with several other kings and went out and defeated everyone far and wide, including the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. In the route, some fell into tar pits and the rest fled to the hills. Kedorlaomer also carried off Lot and everything he owned since he was a resident of Sodom.
One of the defeated people escaped and went and told Abram, who put together his 318 fighting men and went and won Lot and all his people and possessions and everybody from Sodom back from Kedorlaomer. After this, everyone wanted an alliance with Abram. The king of Salem, priest Melchizedek came out and blessed Abram, and received Abram's tithe of the spoils. The king of Sodom, for his turn, wanted only his people back, but Abram gave him everything, including the possessions, excepting what the men had used in the process and the share due his allies, Aner, Eshcol, and Mamre.
God speaks to Abram in a vision saying that he is Abram's shield and great reward. Abram asked what could God do that would make any difference since Abram had no heir. God promised that a biological heir, not a servant, would inherit from Abram. "Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness."
Perhaps this is what "righteousness" means.
The conversation continues. God says he will give Abram all this land, but Abram says "how can I know?"
Perhaps this is not doubt or unbelief (presumably unrighteousness) but incredulousness or confusion.
God instructed the sacrifice of a cow, a goat, a ram, a dove and a pigeon. Abram brought these, cut them up, laid them out, ran off the vultures, and fell into a deep sleep at sunset.
God spoke to him in a dream predicting that his descendants would spend 400 years in slavery but eventually come back to possess this place, a place defined as the present land of ten extant peoples.
After some time, maybe ten years, Sarai came to Abram and said maybe it was her fault they had no children. She had a servant from Egypt, Hagar, who she gave to Abram as a concubine. Shortly Hagar was pregnant and quickly "despised" her mistress Sarai who complained to Abram saying that this was all his fault. Abram told Sarai to do whatever she wanted so she mistreated Hagar who fled. Fleeing from an established family in this part of the world at this time was no small risk; in fact it was near certain death. The "angel of the Lord" found her at a spring beside the road in the desert and asked what she was doing there. Hagar told the story.
God told Hagar to return to Sarai and submit to her. He said that she would have a son and to name him Ishmael. The poetry says of Ishmael:
He will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone's hand against him;
And he will live in hostility toward all his brothers."
Abram was 86 when Ishmael was born.
It is possible to read out of this account that women's ideas cause all the trouble and it comes about because men complacently allow it. Abram, for instance, agreed to the plan to marry Hagar in addition to Sarah. (Even though God's ideal marriage plan is between one man and one woman. Sorry, just being sarcastic.) It is also possible to see the prophesy about 400 years of slavery as coming from an author (Moses) who knew what was going to happen. It is also possible to see the description of Ishmael through the lens of an author who knows the history that is future to Abram. It is also possible to look past the author in all these cases and see people doing what they always do, bumbling along, making mistakes, and being ornery. Abram experienced God then went something like ten years without the promised offspring. That's a long time to tend herds and wonder if there's not something else you ought to have been doing. Not a long time for God, but a long time for a mortal.
Abram is now 99 and God speaks to him again to re-establish the covenant. These are the terms:
Abram's name is changed to Abraham.
Sarai's name is changed to Sarah.
Abraham's descendants will be many nations, including kings.
He will inherit this land where he now lives as an alien.
Sarah will bear him a son by this time next year.
At this, Abraham laughed to himself and said to God, "If only Ishmael might live under your blessing!"
God then reiterated that Sarah, at 90 would bear Abraham, at 99, a son. This son, Isaac, would be father of 12 nations and God would later establish the covenant with him.
For Abraham's part, every male in the community would be circumcised. Abraham was circumcised at 99, Ishmael at 13, and everyone else. Males born later would be circumcised at 8 days old.
It is hard for me to speculate what circumcision was all about. I heard a Jewish man say once that the idea was that you would remember God whenever you used "it" for anything. It is a painful process, hard to forget, hard to ignore, permanent, and with (debatably) less physiological impact than losing a tooth. I once had an agnostic friend who had been raised in parochial school who said, "That old man, for some reason, was fixated on everybody's penis." Whatever the case, the Jews have had circumcision all the way back to Abraham.
The Lord appeared to Abraham in the form of three men. He immediately extended hospitality by having Sarah make bread then slaughtering a "choice, tender calf" and having a servant prepare it. While the men ate, he stood nearby, as a waiting servant would.
They asked about his wife Sarah; he said she was in the tent nearby. They said that they would return this time next year and she would have a son. She overheard and laughed, being nearly 90. They said, "Why did Sarah laugh….? Is anything too hard for the Lord?" Sarah and the Lord then engaged in "no I didn't, yes you did."
They got up to leave and Abraham walked with them to see them on their way. The Lord debated with himself (apparently, or perhaps among the three of them), "Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?" As he had chosen Abraham to become a great nation, an example of righteousness and justice, and a blessing to all nations, he's thinking that Abraham is esteemed enough to share in the news:
"The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know."
Interesting, our concept of God is that he is omnipresent, but so far in Genesis, including this episode, we don't see that. Beginning with Adam in the Garden, God came and went, his absence often leading to trouble. Here we have a case where somehow a report has reached him about a couple of cities down in the plains and now he has come 'in person' as it were, to check it out. It's not mentioned here, but it has to be in Abraham's mind, that Lot lives in Sodom.
Another curious thing happens, "The men turned away and went toward Sodom, but Abraham remained standing before the Lord." Does this mean that the three men parted with Abraham but the Lord stayed in spirit, or that two of the men went downhill and one stayed near Abraham? Whatever the case, "Abraham approached him" to plead on behalf of the cities. It has not been mentioned yet what God intends to do in Sodom but Abraham somehow suspects or knows that God intends to destroy them, should his investigation prove the reports of grievous sin correct.
Speaking as an inferior "… though I am nothing but dust and ashes" he lobbies the Lord not to destroy the cities if he can find "fifty righteous people in the city". God says he will not. Abraham then pleads, what if it's just 45, then 40, then 30, then 20, then (and God is being patient at this sixth pleading!) only ten. God promises in each case not to destroy the cities and finally if even ten righteous people are there he will not destroy it. Abraham, perhaps thinking that with Lot and his people and any influence he's had down there, there must be at least ten, goes home.
Or maybe the phrase, "When the Lord had finished speaking with [him]" means that he was dismissed. In any case, it seems clear that we see tremendous mercy on the part of God who will, on the request of a mere mortal, spare an entire city for just ten good people.
The two angels came to Sodom (this partly answers the question from yesterday). Lot was sitting at the gate and welcomed them into his house. They wanted to just sleep in the square but Lot insisted, so they came under his roof and protection. After dark the men of the town gathered outside and called for Lot to turn his guests over to them to be raped (thus the term "Sodomy"). Lot tried to bargain his two virgin daughters off to protect his guests, but this just enraged the townsmen. They called lot an "alien" and derided him for trying to "play judge" over them. When they turned their threats and worse directly on Lot the angels pulled him back in the house and made the men blind so they couldn't even find the door to pound on.
This, apparently, was enough evidence. They asked Lot if he had anybody in town who should be saved with him. He went out to the men to whom his daughters were betrothed and pleaded with them to come, but they just thought he was joking. At dawn, the angels told Lot and his wife and daughters to get out of town, head for the mountains, and don't look back. When Lot hesitated, they pulled him out by the hands and set him on the road outside the gate. When he complained that he was an old man and wouldn't make it to the mountains, but could he just go to the small town Zoar on the way, they said, 'Yes, we won't destroy Zoar, but hurry!'
They all fled to Zoar, but Lot's wife looked back and became a pillar of salt.
God rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah and razed them to the ground. The next morning, Abraham walked out to the place where he had bargained with God and saw the "dense smoke rising from the land." God had spared reluctant Lot for the sake of Abraham.
Lot and his daughters left Zoar after all and moved into the mountains by themselves. The daughters were concerned that they would never get married and have children, so on two days, they got their father drunk and got pregnant by him. In both cases, he was so wiped out that he didn't know when they came in or when they went out. The older daughter had a son, Moab (means "from father") and the younger had a son Ben-Ammi (means "son of my people"). These are the patriarchs of the Moabites and the Ammonites respectively.
Reading these stories from the sensibilities of my Protestant - Victorian training, I am embarrassed to think about these things and to share them here. But, here they are in the perfect Word of God that is suitable for all instruction and edification. (I'm only being about ten percent sarcastic when paraphrasing Paul there.) When we learn about this as third graders in Sunday School (or when we make sympathetic Bible movies for that matter) we don't focus on rape and incest (which are, by the way, the main pro-abortion case arguments today), we focus on Lot's wife turning into a pillar of salt. This whole story is turned into a morality piece about one person who sinfully pined for her life back in the old country that was incidentally wicked, and is frozen in place as a result.
I'm offended by all of this apparent mis-prioritization that majors in making a villain out of Lot's unnamed wife, more or less ignoring the rest. Let's see what the text plainly says.
The two angels came to Sodom and found it as wicked as reported. Worse, they and their host were threatened. The intent to destroy the city was confirmed. The sins of Sodom were primarily inhospitality, violence, and abuse although nearly all of modern culture sees it as primarily homosexuality (thus the term "Sodomy"). It's not even obvious from this text if homosexuality itself is an issue. It might be a second or third tier wickedness, it might not, it just doesn't say.
Lot was saved only because of Abraham's righteousness and pretty much against his own will and certainly that of his wife. He was hospitable, unlike his neighbors.
Lot's "involuntary" drunkenness may excuse his sin of incest with his daughters (though not theirs). Their relationship is hard to grasp. First he tries to throw them to the wolves, then they do this. It is interesting though that the text makes no value judgment on this at all, not on the drunkenness, not on the incest, not on the father or the daughters or the sons, not even on offering to give them away to protect a guest. All that it says is that the sons were made into nations. The blessing the daughters had sought was achieved.
Abraham moved to a different place where he was a neighbor with Abimelech, king of Gerar. Abimelech took Sarah as his wife due to the same "she is my sister" partial deception that had gotten them all in trouble with Pharaoh.
This time, God dealt with Abimelech in a dream saying he was as good as dead for taking a married woman. Abimelech protested, claiming innocence and God agreed saying, "… I have kept you from sinning against me. That is why I did not let you touch her." God's terms were: return her and Abraham will pray for you and you will live. Don't return her and everyone here will die. In addition, no one from the king's wife (the king's main wife, I suppose) down to the slave girls could have children of their own during this incident.
Abimelech called Abraham in to full court and demanded an explanation, as Pharaoh had. Abraham's explanation is worth quoting verbatim:
I said to myself, "There is surely no fear of God in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife." Besides, she really is my sister, the daughter of my father though not of my mother; and she became my wife. And when God had me wander from my father's household, I said to her, "This is how you can show your love to me: Everywhere we go, say of me, 'He is my brother.'"
So Abimelech made Abraham much richer, as Pharaoh had, and returned Sarah and Abraham prayed and the whole mess was over, again.
I'm not sure what to make of this. Abraham was afraid of people who had no fear of God. Possibly there was good reason for this. It could be that murders of husbands over beautiful wives were not uncommon. Did Abraham underestimate God? This would not be uncommon either, for anyone. I do know that Abraham's explanation is the sort of stuttering rationalizing that is heard often from teenagers right before they get grounded for a month. "And besides, I wasn't totally lying…" and "If you really love me you'll lie too."
Oh boy.
So, soon after this Sarah became pregnant with Abraham and had a son Isaac who was circumcised on the eighth day, when Abraham was 100. Sarah said everyone would laugh with her (Isaac means "laughter").
When Isaac was weaned they had a big party at which Sarah caught Ishmael mocking. Sarah told Abraham, "Get rid of that slave woman and her son." She wanted them out of the inheritance. Abraham was distressed; Ishmael was his boy too, after all. God told Abraham to do what Sarah wanted, that he would make both boys into nations since they were both his sons, so Abraham provisioned Hagar and Ishmael and sent them off down the road to nowhere.
When the provisions ran out, Hagar was sure they would die in the desert and left Ishmael nearby in the bushes so she wouldn't have to watch. God heard him crying and spoke to Hagar from heaven, pointing out a well near the road that they had missed, so they were saved. "God was with the boy as he grew up." He became an archer and married a wife from Egypt.
Looking over this additional sorry mess, I'm tempted to conclude that this was all "before God was a Christian," as the saying goes. These people took their (apparently) God given places in culture and birthrights with the utmost seriousness. The women get catty and mean and got away with this because they had rank. And, God goes along. I don't know what to make of that either.
Sarah's conception of what the inheritance was all about may have been much smaller than God's, limited to Abraham's tents and caravan themselves.
Because God was with him, Abraham was in a good negotiating position. He negotiated lands and wells with Abimelech and Phicol. They made sacrifices and planted a tree together.
God spoke to Abraham and told him to go make a burnt offering of Isaac and he told him how and where to do it. Abraham set out early the next morning. As they got close Isaac was carrying the wood and Abraham was carrying the knife and the fire. Isaac asked where the lamb would come from. He already knew how this worshipping business worked. His father answer, "God himself will provide…"
When they got to the appointed place, Abraham tied Isaac up, put him on the wood, and had the knife in the air at which instant God spoke urgently and told him to stop.
A ram was caught in a thicket nearby and was used as the sacrifice instead. God knew that Isaac was the most important thing in Abraham's world and now that God knew he was even more important to Abraham than Isaac, he re-swore the promises to Abraham that we've already seen several times. His descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore, they would possess the cities of their enemies, and all nations would be blessed through them, all due to Abraham's obedience.
The party (including servants) then returned to Beersheba. Later Abraham learned that his brother Nahor and wife Milcah had several sons including Bethel, father of Rebekah.
Child sacrifice has never been unusual in human cultures. In some places and times it has involved ritual appeasement of various gods. Something like this would have been common in the cultures surrounding Abraham throughout his life. Today in western culture it is called abortion and extends from concepts of self ownership and self determination. Some suspect that in many cases an underlying driver is resource control. Children are, after all, a huge and expensive task for parents of all times and places. (As the digestion of food takes much energy from the body so the raising of children takes much energy from society.) Though Isaac would not have been a significant resource burden to Abraham, still it seems that it would have been no surprise to him that his God made a demand like this. He obeyed, essentially immediately, and may have been more surprised when God stopped him at the last instant than at the beginning.
There may be a lesson in this in how God deals with people who he knows and trusts. It appears, for instance, that he can ask for one thing that is totally out of character just as a test, only to reverse himself later. It has to be a misunderstanding to see this as a form of dishonesty. It has to be. Our religious training today says to question voices that are telling us things that are out of character with God, whatever it is we think God's character is.
True enough, however, this episode is always taught as an endorsement of blind obedience. Religious establishment, as institutions of crowd control, have always been interested in blind, quick obedience.
I just don't get this, though. I always need big clarification for big unexpected and seemingly nonsensical instructions. Abraham must have been in excellent touch with God not to have hesitated at either of these encounters.
Sarah died at Kiriath Arba at age 127. Abraham mourned. He then went and spoke to the Hittites who lived there. As an alien in the land he had no cemetery property. They replied that he was a mighty prince among them, just pick anyone's tomb and they would be glad to have him bury his dead there. He insisted that he wanted to own the place and he named the cave of Machpelah that was owned by one Ephron as his choice of a place to buy. Ephron offered to give it to Abraham but Abraham paid the asking price without haggling. This bought the field and the cave and the trees on its border and he buried Sarah there.
This was the first property Abraham had owned since leaving his father at age 75, 62 years ago.
Genesis 24:1 - 33
2004
October 20 for November 2nd
Abraham was old and did not want Isaac to marry a Caananite woman. He wanted a wife for Isaac from his own relatives but he was even more adamant that Isaac not go to Haran himself. Doubtless he feared that Isaac would not return, at least not quickly, if he went on such a journey.
He brought in his chief steward and had him swear an oath that he would go to Abraham's relatives, find a wife for Isaac, and return with her. It was a serious oath, made by putting his hand under Abraham's thigh, a euphemism for the testicles where future generations were thought to be stored.
It was also a difficult assignment. Go hundreds of miles, find relatives who haven't seen or heard from us in decades, find a wife for Isaac and persuade her to return, sight unseen, to be the wife of Abraham's heir. The servant was justifiably worried; the only thing going for him was Abraham himself. Abraham said that if he found a girl and she would not come, he was released from the oath.
This unnamed servant took ten camels loaded with riches and went to Haran. When he arrived, he stopped at the well outside of town and prayed that his mission would succeed quickly. He was very specific. The girl that God had picked would come out, offer him a drink from the well, and offer to water the camels until they were satisfied, considerable work considering that camels are known for an ability to go without water for considerable time.
While he was still praying, this exact sequence of events began to occur! He gave the girl gifts and asked if he could come, with his ten camels, to spend the night at her master's house. The girl was Rebekah, daughter of Bethuel, son of Milcah, wife of Nahor, Abraham's brother. This makes her a first cousin, once removed, to Isaac who would, in any case, be much younger than his first cousin Bethuel.
When Rebekah's brother Laban (a first class schemer as we will see later) saw the gifts, he was very impressed and prepared the house. He went out and invited the servant and his camels in and put on a feast for him. Before the man would eat, however, he insisted on telling his business.
Genesis 24:34- 67
2004
October 21 for November 3rd
The story that Abraham's servant told was just the account of what we had seen him doing yesterday and it was prefaced with a glowing report of Abraham's life and wealth. At the end of the story, Laban and Bethuel (brother and father) answered that this was from God and they, therefore, could say nothing about it. They gave Rebekah over, and threw a big party in which the servant gave expensive gifts and clothing to Rebekah and her brother and mother.
Next morning, the servant, never idle for a moment, was ready to go. The family asked for ten more days, but he insisted, politely, on leaving immediately. Apparently he was used to doing and serving, not waiting and celebrating. They asked Rebekah. She was ready. She was ready to leave home and probably never come back. This was an unparalleled opportunity. They blessed her and sent her off with her nurse and maids with the man on Abraham's camels.
Isaac was living out in the Negev and was meditating in the fields one evening when he saw the camels approaching. Rebekah, on inquiry, learned that this was Isaac and covered herself. They were married and Rebekah moved into Sarah's tent. This was a comfort to Isaac after his mother's death.
Genesis 25
2004
October 23 for November 4th
After Sarah was gone, Abraham had another wife, Keturah, and they had six sons and these had children and became tribes, including Sheba, son of Jokshan, second son of Keturah. (Much later, we will meet the Queen of Sheba.) He gave gifts to all these sons and sent them away to the east. Isaac was then the sole heir.
When Abraham died at age 175, his sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave at Machpelah where Sarah was buried.
Abram 86, 100 175 1946 - 2121
Ishmael had twelve sons who became the leaders of twelve tribes. They all lived down on the way to Egypt, in hostility.
Ishmael not stated 137 2032 - 2169
Isaac married Rebekah when he was 40 and she was barren at first. He prayed for her and she became pregnant with twins who "jostled each other within her." There is a prophesy from God that these would be two nations and the older would serve the younger.
When they were born the first was red and hairy. They named him Esau (hairy). The second was holding on to Esau's heel. They named him Jacob ("grasps heels," or "deceiver"). As they grew up, Esau became a hunter and spent his time in the fields while Jacob stayed around the tents (… the house). One day Esau came in famished while Jacob was cooking and gave away his birthright to Jacob for some stew.
"So Esau despised his birthright."
Again, I'm caught wondering how much more this story makes sense in retrospect. Soon we will have seen the whole history of Jacob and Esau which puts the stew incident in context. This concern doesn't bear on the meaning. We do see that birthrights were very important to these people.
The adventures of Isaac:
Although there was a famine (another one from the one during Abraham's time) God appeared to Isaac and told him not to leave the area, particularly not to go down to Egypt. He reconfirmed the promise to Abraham to make nations of his descendants who would take over this land. Isaac stayed in Gerar.
Following in the footsteps of his father, he had Rebekah say that she was his sister so the locals wouldn't kill him for her. King Abimelech caught him caressing her one day and hauled him in for an explanation, afraid that somebody might have violated her and brought guilt on all. Then, as now, it appears that adultery was taken as a bigger sin than fornication, perhaps because it is nominally much harder to … repair or because it involves additional violations (i.e., of a marriage covenant). Abimelech gave orders that no one should harm Isaac.
Isaac grew crops, was blessed a hundredfold and became very wealthy. So much so in fact, that Abimelech told him to move away. When he had done so, his men reopened some wells from the time of Abraham, and there were disputes with the local herdsmen about them.
Abimelech then came to Isaac and Isaac asked what was up, since Abimelech had been hostile and sent him away. Abimelech had seen that God was with Isaac and wanted a sworn agreement in addition to geographic separation. Next morning they swore such a deal and parted ways in peace. Same day, the servants found water while digging a new well. Two blessings in the same day!
Esau married two Hittite women, Judith and Basemath. This caused his parents grief. Nothing changes.
Genesis 27:1 - 40 2004 October 25 for November 8th
These people
took their
generational blessings seriously.
Isaac was old
and asked
for Esau to go hunt game and bring him food like he liked it so he
could give
his blessing. Rebekah overheard and
prepared a goat from the flock for Jacob who would go in instead,
dressing him
in Esau's clothes and tying goatskins on his neck and hands. Even with all this, there was great risk in
the deception. Rebekah called any
curses on herself.
When the food
was ready,
Jacob went in pretending to be Esau.
Isaac recognized the voice as Jacob, but the food, the smell,
and the
hairy goatskins fooled him, so Jacob did in fact receive the blessing
of the
firstborn, in particular that his brothers and whole nations would
serve him.
He was barely
gone when
Esau returned and went in for his blessing.
The deception was instantly uncovered. Esau
despaired and Isaac shook with rage. He
claimed he had no blessing left. Blessings
are a scarce resource, it would
seem. Esau pleaded. Isaac's
blessing on Esau was that he would
live by the sword, away from richness and pleasantness and would serve
his
brother but would eventually grow restless and break away.
Once again we
see people
in the very line of God's blessing acting in decidedly unethical ways. It is unfair to call this deception
un-Christian, or even un-Mosaic; after all, this was before even the
Ten
Commandments, but lying in the name of God (Jacob said, "The Lord gave
me
success" to explain why he was so early returning from the hunt.)
cannot
have seemed right or righteous to even these people.
Or to their God, utterly patient though he is.
Genesis 27:41 - 28:22 2004 October 27 for November 9th
The
adventures of Jacob:
Esau consoled
himself on
the loss of the birthright by figuring that he would kill Jacob as soon
as his
father Isaac was dead, which wouldn't be long.
Rebekah got wind of this and told Jacob to go live with her
brother
Laban for a while. She arranged this by
complaining to Isaac about the Canaanite women that Jacob was likely to
marry
(as Esau already had).
Isaac called
Jacob in,
gave him the formal instruction and blessing and sent him on his way. Esau heard of this and, apparently for the
first time, realized that Canaanite women were abhorrent to his
parents, so he
went to Ishmael and married one of the women from that family (thus a
second or
third cousin). I used to think this was
an additional act of defiance but, Ishmael being Isaac's half brother,
it seems
to me now that this may have been an attempt at reconciliation.
The Stairway
to Heaven
Jacob was on
the road
alone and stopped for the night near Luz, putting a rock under his head
for a
pillow. He had a dream in which there
was a stairway from earth nearby to heaven with angels going up and
down on it. God spoke to him making the
same covenant
with Jacob as he had with Abraham and Isaac.
He would have descendants "like the dust of the earth" who
would spread out in all directions and he would come back and own this
land. God then says an interesting
thing. "I will not leave you until
I have done what I have promised you."
Jacob woke
up, surprised
that God was even in that particular place.
He set up his pillow as a pillar, poured oil on it, and renamed
the
place "Bethel" ("House of God"). Jacob
then says an interesting thing, essentially adding to the
compact with God, "If God will be with me and will watch over me on
this
journey I am taking and will give me food to eat and clothes to wear so
that I
return safely to my father's house, then (my emphasis) the Lord
will be
my God." He also pledged to give
God a tenth of everything God gave him and to make the pillar God's
house.
We see here
that Jacob
knew what he needed to survive the adventure.
He knew that being alone on the desert road back to Padam Aram
(where
Laban lived) was a dangerous matter and that there were no guarantees. He was surprised to find God present on the
way, this was probably his first direct encounter with God, though he
would
have known all about him from the stories of Isaac and Abraham (and
Noah and
Adam…). Once he encountered God, he
lost no time in making a deal to his own advantage.
Probably God's promise never to "leave you" was
sufficient for this, but Jacob wanted some fine print.
It's hard to tell without reading extra into
this, but it doesn't look like we're talking about the "I am but dust
and
ashes" approach that Abraham had used.
Genesis 29 2004 October 27 for November 10th
Jacob's
Adventures
Continue: Life With Uncle Laban
Jacob arrived
in Paddam Aram
and first encountered a well where sheep were watered daily. There was a problem with the usual
procedure. A stone on the well was so
large that the shepherds wouldn't move it until everyone's flocks were
gathered
so they could do it all at once. Jacob
suggested that this wasn't the time of day for bringing in flocks and
so all
this was explained to him while they waited.
He also inquired about Laban and learned that he was alive and
well
there.
Laban's
daughter, Rachel
was a shepherdess and shortly arrived with her own flock.
Jacob moved the stone from the well just for
her. This is symmetric with the meeting
of Abraham's servant and Rebekah at the well a generation ago. Jacob wept on seeing Rachel and kissed her
and she ran home to tell her father.
Laban came right out and welcomed him as family.
Jacob moved
in with Laban
and soon, when he asked what wages Jacob should receive for working
there,
Jacob asked for Rachel, the younger daughter.
A deal was struck where he would work for seven years for her. (This contrasts starkly with Abraham's
servant who arrived with ten camel loads of riches on his trip and left
with
Rebekah the next day!) The years flew
by, however, and finally it was time for the wedding.
There was a feast but Laban snuck Leah, the older sister, into
Jacob's bed that night. Next morning,
everybody in town except Leah, Laban, and presumably Rachel awoke to a
big
surprise.
Jacob was not
happy. He confronted his uncle, now the
new
father-in-law.
Laban, who
knew exactly
what he was doing, countered that the local tradition was to marry off
the
older daughter first. Another deal was
struck. Jacob and Leah would finish out
their wedding week then he could also marry Rachel for another seven
years
service. This seven years borrowed
would seem to indicate that Laban trusted Jacob to be good to the
bargain. We can't tell from the text if
Jacob had
earned this trust somehow or if he was outnumbered by Laban or if he
was so
established in Laban, Inc. that it would be unthinkable to duck out or
if he
was just a shrewd haggler himself in the face of this obvious injustice.
Leah was
given a servant
Zilpah and Rachel was given a servant Billah.
This becomes important shortly.
Leah was
unloved but
produced several sons: Reuben, Simeon,
Levi, and Judah, all named to show various phases of her distress and
hope that
her husband will love her ("see, a son", "one who hears",
"attached", and "praise").
Rachel produced no children.
Genesis 30 2004 October 29 for November 11th
A
childbearing battle
begins between Rachel and Leah. Rachel
is mad she hasn't had sons and blames Jacob who says, 'What me? Am I God?'
So Rachel gave her servant Billah to Jacob as a third wife. Billah had sons Dan ("[God] has
vindicated"), and Naphtali ("my struggle"). ("Mein
Kampf")
Leah, not
having any more
children and falling out of the race, then handed her servant Zilpah
over to
Jacob as a fourth wife. She had sons
Gad ("good fortune") and Asher ("happy").
All these
wives, not
satisfied with eight sons, turned up the heat.
When Reuben brought some mandrakes home to his mother Leah one
day,
Rachel asked for some. Leah's response,
"Wasn't it enough that you took away my husband? Will
you take my son's mandrakes too?" So a
deal was made that, for the mandrakes,
Jacob would sleep with Leah that night.
After a hard day in the fields, Jacob arrived home to this news,
"You must sleep with me," [Leah] said, "I have hired you with my
son's mandrakes."
This night
resulted in a
new pregnancy, Issachar ("reward").
Later there was a sixth son (from Leah, ten in all) Zebulun
("honor"). Even later Leah
had a daughter, Dinah.
Then Rachel
became
pregnant and had Joseph ("may he add", as Rachel wanted another son).
At this
point, with
eleven sons and a daughter (at least one, daughters don't seem to be
mentioned
much except when they play a role elsewhere, as Dinah will), Jacob
approached
Laban to move out of the area and go back to his home.
Laban, however, had "learned by
divination" that God was blessing him because of Jacob so asks him to
stay.
They worked a
deal where
Jacob's wages would be that he gets all the spotted and speckled sheep
and
goats while Laban gets the ones that are not.
They went through the flocks that day and separate them all out. If a non-spotted animal was found in Jacob's
flocks, it would be "considered stolen." Jacob,
who tended both his flocks and Laban's, kept the two
flocks separate, but also engaged in a program of selective breeding in
which
he set up some stripped branches (thought to be an aphrodesiac) near
the
watering hole when his animals were there so they would go into heat
and mate
but he didn't do this for Laban's animals.
I think it
goes without
saying that any cross-flock offspring would probably be spotted or
speckled,
these traits being dominant.
Modern
ranchers use more
scientific techniques than stripped branches at the water hole but,
whether it
did anything or not, Jacob still became very wealthy and ended up with
not only
large flocks but also many servants, "camels and donkeys."
Genesis 31 2004 October 30 for November 12th
After several
years,
Laban's sons started grousing about the wealth Jacob was accumulating
and Jacob
noticed that Laban's attitude had changed too.
At this point God spoke to Jacob and told him to go home.
Yes, that's
what it
says. Jacob noticed trouble brewing
then God spoke. Note that God did not
speak last time when Jacob wanted to leave, when there was less trouble.
Jacob met
with Leah and
Rachel in the field (that is, in private), telling them of the trouble
and that
God had appeared to him and told him that he was the one whom Jacob had
set up
a pillar for on his trip out and had brought about all this wealth and
that he
should leave and return to his origins.
His wive's responses were interesting, 'Our father treats us
like a
foreigner and has sold us for wages. Do
whatever God says.'
So, during
shearing
season, they packed up and left without telling anybody, driving the
livestock
ahead. Rachel stole her father's
household gods on the way out of town.
Three days
later, Laban
found out and got his men together and pursued them.
After seven more days he caught up with them.
God appeared to Laban in a dream and told
him not to say anything to Jacob one way or the other.
Laban honored this but chewed Jacob out
anyway, telling him it had been foolish to leave the area without
Laban's
knowledge or blessing, and stealing his gods.
Jacob retorted that he feared Laban would take his daughters by
force,
but that if anyone was found with the gods, they would die.
He didn't
know it was
Rachel who had them.
Laban and his
men
searched everyone's tents and found nothing.
Rachel had hidden them in her camel packs and was sitting on
them. When they came to her she begged off
saying
that she couldn't get down because she was having her period. So, they found nothing. This
is a humorous foreshadowing of Mosaic
Law. Having a period was
defilement. Other gods were an
abomination.
Then, Jacob
let Laban
have it, but only verbally. In essence,
it was "I've been with you twenty years, seven for each of your
daughters
and six for the flocks and you've changed my wages ten times. If God hadn't been with me (the God of
Abraham and the Fear of Isaac…) you would have sent me away with
nothing. God rebuked you last night.
Laban
conceded and
offered a covenant. They set up a
pillar and made a covenant. Laban said
that God would witness if Jacob mistreated his daughters or took other
wives. Jacob said that neither party would
pass the
pillar on the way to harm the other.
They agreed
to this early
the next morning, said their goodbyes all around, and went their
separate ways.
Genesis 32 2004 November 1 for November 15th
From the
frying pan into
the fire:
Having barely
pacified
his father-in-law behind him, Jacob and his massive holdings now faced
the
return to Esau who was in front of him.
He sent scouts ahead who returned with the message that Esau was
coming
with 400 men. Jacob was terrified,
divided the company into two groups in the hope that one would escape
the
expected attack, and prayed for salvation, a humble prayer that began
with,
"Oh Lord, who said to me, 'Go back to your country and your relatives
and
I will make you prosper,' I am unworthy of all the kindness and
faithfulness
you have shown your servant. I had only
my staff when I crossed this Jordan, but now I have become two groups."
He then made
up some
hefty gifts of livestock and sent them ahead, spaced out giving the
leaders
instructions to tell Esau that Jacob was coming behind.
Perhaps, he thought, the gifts would help.
Everything he
owned went
on ahead and crossed the river while Jacob and his immediate family
stayed
behind in a camp. They got up in the
middle of the night and he had them cross the ford of the Jabbok. This was his two wives, the two
maidservants, and the eleven sons followed by all of the personal
effects. After everything was across, he
was alone.
"A man"
wrestled with him through the night and when dawn started to break and
he saw
that he could not beat Jacob, he kicked his hip loose, a foul. Jacob still wouldn't let him go without
receiving a blessing. The man asked his
name. "Jacob," was the
reply. The man changed his name to
Israel "because you have struggled with God and with men and have
overcome." (Hebrews don't eat this
tendon of an animal because of this incident with Jacob.)
Jacob called
the place
Peniel ("Face of God") realizing that he had seen God and yet been
spared. He limped across the river into
the new day. Having met God, he would
now meet his brother whom he had cheated and from whom he had fled two
decades
ago.
Genesis 33 2004 November 2 for 16th
Jacob saw
Esau coming and
divided his family, maidservants and children first, Leah and children
next, and
finally Rachel and Joseph. Then, and
this is a change of stance, he went ahead and bowed down seven times to
his
brother.
What would
happen? Were these his last moments on
earth?
No! In fact, Esau, without explanation, ran up
and embraced him and asked who all these people were.
After introductions, he asked what was all the livestock he had
encountered on approach. Jacob replied
that they were gifts but Esau said he didn't need anything; just keep
it
all. Jacob insisted, saying that seeing
Esau was like seeing God, so Esau accepted the gifts.
Then Esau offered to accompany them, but Jacob said that the
women and children and nursing livestock were slow, and he'd just
putter along
with them. Esau offered to leave some
of his men, but Jacob only wanted Esau's favor. He
was breathing easier now, having seen his life pass before his
eyes three or four times on this trip.
Jacob settled
near
Shechem and bought the patch of land where he pitched his tents,
calling it
"El Elohe Israel" (mighty is the God of Israel).
Indeed.
Genesis 34 2004 November 3 for 17th
The sign of
the covenant
is used as a weapon of mass destruction.
Dinah, Leah's
daughter
went into town to visit the women.
Shechem, the son of the ruler Hamor, had sex with her and wanted
to
marry her. At Shechem's request, his
father approached Jacob about it.
The brothers
of Dinah
were furious.
Hamor
approached with an
offer. Agree to this marriage and we
will all intermarry and live together as one people, trading and
interacting freely. This seemed like a
good deal to them since
Jacob was quite wealthy. Hamor said,
'Name any price.'
Jacob's sons
agreed to
this on the sole condition that all the men get circumcised, the sign
of the
covenant. Shechem was so eager and
delighted with Dinah that he went and talked the men into this and they
…
operated right away.
Two days
later when they
were still … sore, Simeon and Levi came in with swords and killed all
the men
of the city, taking all the women and children as prisoners, looting
all of
their wealth and recovering Dinah from Shechem's house.
Jacob rebuked
them. Now he would be onerous in the land
and the
residents might join together and attack him, wiping out his
people. The sons' reply was,
"Should he have treated our sister like a prostitute?"
Many sermons
have been
preached on this text. What is the
point? The consequences of unchecked
lust? Marrying out of the faith? The slippery moral slope?
Don't visit the neighbors?
Genesis 35 2004 November 4 for 18th
So, now that
Jacob was
onerous in the land, due to the incident with Dinah and Shechem, God
spoke to
him and told him to move to Bethel, that first place where he had met
God on
his youthful flight after cheating his brother Esau.
First thing
Jacob did was
to tell everyone to get rid of their foreign gods.
This apparently also involved some jewelry.
They buried everything under an oak at
Shechem and set out. To me, this
foreshadows the Ten Commandments. Could
there have been some religious intermixing with Shechem and his people
in
addition to the other trouble?
As they
proceeded, the
fear of God was in every place they passed.
Was this because they had cleansed themselves of competing gods
(blocks
of wood, earrings) or because Jacob's prophesy was true, "You have
brought
trouble on me by making me a stench to the [locals]."?
Or, perhaps, God was in fact in front,
behind, and around them.
Rachel's
nurse died and
was buried on the way. We learn her
name: Deborah.
God appears
to Jacob and
reiterates the blessing that we've now seen with Abraham and Isaac, and
he
changes his name to Israel. I'm not
sure why this appears here in the text, since we've seen all this
information
before but I do notice that the prophesy contains the phrase "kings
will
come from your body." This truth
is in the author's (Moses') future too so he could not have known
otherwise,
like he could have known about the 400 years of slavery prophesied
earlier.
While still
on the way,
Rachel began to give birth to another son.
She had great difficulty with the delivery and died. With her last breath she named the son
Ben-Oni ("son of my trouble") but Jacob changed his name to Benjamin
("son of my right hand").
Rachel is buried on the way to Bethlehem and there is still a
pillar
that Jacob set up marking the place ("to this day", ostensibly Moses'
day).
They kept
moving and, one
day, eldest son Reuben went in and slept with Billah (Rachel's servant,
mother
of Dan and Naphtali). It says that
Israel heard of this but says nothing more.
No action, no curse, no pregnancy.
Now we've all heard of it.
Jacob
returned to his
father Isaac near Hebron. Isaac lived
to be 180 then died and was buried by Jacob and Esau.
Isaac not stated 180 2046 - 2226
Note that, in
the context
of God and his descendants, Jacob is called Israel.
When speaking of his father, he is Jacob.
Genesis 36 2004 November 6 for 19th
This chapter
is about the
descendants of Esau. He had to move
away from Jacob since they both had such great holdings in livestock
and the
land wouldn't support them both. Esau
moved off towards Sier.
Esau had
three wives and
five sons:
By Adah,
daughter of
Elon: Eliphaz, firstborn.
By Basemath,
daughter of
Ishmael, sister of Nebaioth: Reuel.
By
Oholibamah, daughter
of Anah: Jeush, Jalamn, and Korah.
Not to
nitpick here, but
back in 26:34 it says Esau married Judith daughter of Beeri and
Basemath
daughter of Elon. After Jacob left he
married Mahalath, daugher of Ishmael, sister of Nebaioth (28:8). There are many possibilities here. Maybe there are six wives, some of them
unfortunate enough to have the same name.
Maybe some of these women were called by multiple names. Maybe there is confusion in the record. Maybe the Bible "contradicts
itself" in this unimportant detail.
I have always wanted to find one of those cases, but can't claim
to know
enough to say which possibility is correct.
I talked to
Bob Bascom
about this after church one Sunday. He
works in Old Testament Translation and said that it was probably just
confusion. One writer at one point
remembered it one way and he or another writer later remembered it
another
way. John Wipf joined the discussion
and offered that the "inerrant" Bible was not available to us anyway,
by definition inasmuch
as
the definition says, "original manuscripts" none of which are
available or probably ever will be.
Bascom went on to point out several other cases where apparent
inaccuracies are just artifacts of writing down an oral tradition in
which
different "spins" were applied.
So for now,
we'll just
say "confusion in the record", reasoning that the Bible was entirely
written by people and the fact that they were under God's influence
(as, we
suppose were the committee members who decided what got into the Bible
and what
didn’t) does not make them or their writing "perfect" in any
calculable sense.
Following
this, the
grandsons of Esau are listed, then the chiefs among the descendants,
then the
rulers of Edom, "who reigned in Edom before any Israelite king
reigned" and their cities. This
list consists of one or two hundred people and a dozen or so places,
few of
which have any meaning to me. The kings
are Bela, Jobab, Husham, Hadad, Samlah, Shaul, and Baal-Hanan. These kings served for life but the
succession was not by family. Each king
is listed with the name of his father, who was not his predecessor.
I think this
is the last
we'll hear of Esau and his nations of descendants since the main
narrative will
continue with Joseph, son of Jacob.
I'm out of my
discipline
but I wonder about the reference to "Israelite kings".
I've noted earlier that Moses was before any
such rulers though prophesies to the patriarchs recorded by Moses
mention them. We will see somewhat later
(maybe a year
from now) that Saul and David were the first kings of Israel. Either this refers to something else for
"king" or somebody added something to the text after Moses, or that
term is prophetic even at the time of Moses.
Genesis 37 2004 November 8 for 22nd
The
adventures of Joseph.
Joseph tended
his
father's flocks which, by now, were so vast that the sons were all over
the
countryside with them, days journeys apart.
When he was seventeen, first he turned in a bad report about his
brothers,
then was given a special coat (of many colors) by his father, who
favored him
above all the others, then he had two dreams.
In one the sons were harvesting sheaves of grain and everyone's
sheaf
bowed down to Joseph's. In another, the
sun and moon and eleven stars all bowed down to him.
Youth that he
was, Joseph
had no more sense than to tell these dreams to his family.
His brothers hated him quadruply (for the
report, the coat, and the two dreams) and his father, who knew about
symbolism
in dreams, rebuked him, "Will your mother and I and your brothers
actually
come and bow down to the ground before you?" But,
his father "kept the matter in mind."
Jacob sent
Joseph to his
brothers to see how they were doing.
When they had him alone, they conspired to kill him but Reuben
talked
them into just throwing him into an empty cistern (underground water
storage
tank) thinking he would come back to rescue him later.
While Reuben was away, an Ishmaelite caravan
with some Midianite traders passed by.
Judah talked the brother into selling Joseph into slavery rather
than
killing him. Still, Reuben was
distraught when he returned to the cistern to find him missing.
They killed
an animal,
made a mess of the colorful coat, and took it back to Jacob with the
report
that Joseph must have been killed by a wild animal.
Jacob then entered into inconsolable mourning.
Meanwhile, the Midianites sold Joseph to
Potiphar in Egypt. Potiphar was Pharaoh's Captain of the Guard.
Genesis 38 2004 November 9 for 23rd
The
adventures of Judah.
Judah moved
to Adulah to
live with his friend Hirah. He met a
Canaanite woman, daughter of Shua and married her.
She had three sons, Er, Onan, and Shelah.
Judah
arranged for Er to
marry a woman named Tamar but Er was "wicked in the Lord's sight; so
the
Lord put him to death." It doesn't
say what was wicked about him. Judah
then had Onan take Tamar so as to keep up Er's inheritance line, but
Onan
didn't want to sire and raise his brother's children so he "spilled his
seed on the ground" when mating.
This too was "wicked in the Lord's sight; so he put him to death
also." Judah then sent Tamar back
to her father until Shelah was old enough to marry, fearing that he too
might
die.
I think this
may be among
the texts on which the Catholics base the "every sperm is sacred"
dogma, which argues against any sort of birth control.
Just from the text, however, it appears that
what was wicked was for Onan not to continue Er's line.
That's more like laziness than some sexual
offense.
A long time
later,
Judah's wife died. After mourning there
was a sheep shearing season near Timnah where Tamar still lived. She heard of this and, realizing that she
hadn't been married to Shelah, though he was now well old enough, she
changed
out of her widow outfit into prostitute clothes and positioned herself
so as to
get propositioned by Judah himself! She
took his seal, cord, and staff as pledge for payment of a young goat
from his
flock to be delivered later.
Next day when
Judah sent
a servant out with the goat, she was nowhere to be found and nobody in
town had
heard of any prostitute in the area, so he just ate the loss of the
seal, cord,
and staff, and moved along. He had
tried to pay, after all.
Three months
later, it
was announced that Tamar was pregnant.
Judah ordered her brought out and burned to death.
As this was being carried out, she said,
'Whose stuff is this? The owner of this
seal, cord, and staff is the father.'
Judah saw
that the jig
was up and admitted he had been unrighteous, not because of fornication
or
prostitution but because of his son Shelah whom he had withheld. Nonetheless, he didn't sleep with Tamar
anymore either, nor did he marry her to Shelah. Anyway,
nobody died this time.
Tamar had
twins. One of them stuck his hand out
first and the
midwife put a red thread around it, but he pulled it back in and the
other was
born first. Firstborn was Perez and
scarlet-thread-guy was Zerah.
Genesis 39 2004 November 10 for 24th
Joseph's
continuing
adventure (not suitable for children).
Recall that
Potiphar,
Pharaoh's Captain of the Guard, in Egypt, had bought Joseph from the
Ishmaelites.
God was with
Joseph and
made him so successful and trustworthy that, before long, Potiphar put
him in
charge of everything in his entire estate.
The only thing Potiphar concerned himself with around the house
was what
he was going to eat. Joseph was also
good looking and it didn't take much longer for Potiphar's wife to
notice. She wanted Joseph to have sex with
her and
pestered him about it every day, but Joseph thought this would be
wicked and
told her that it was unthinkable to betray his master who trusted him
with
everything else in this way. Not only
would he not have sex with her, he wouldn't even be in the same part of
the house
with her.
We are sure
seeing the
work "wicked" used a lot.
Eventually
(inevitably)
she caught him alone one day and grabbed off his cloak.
He ran away but she still had the cloak and
when Potiphar came home, she said that Joseph had put a move on her but
she had
screamed and had the cloak as evidence.
Potiphar, in a fury, put Joseph in the prison of the king's
prisoners.
God was with
Joseph and
made him so successful and trustworthy that, before long, the jail
warden put
him in charge of everything in the jail.
He didn't worry in the slightest about anything delegated to
Joseph.
Thanksgiving off (2004 November 24, 25)
Genesis 40 2004 November 15 for 29th
Joseph, the
teller of
dreams:
Two of
Pharaoh's
officials, the Chief Cupbearer and the Chief Baker, offended him and
were put
in prison with Joseph. (A cupbearer's
job was to prevent the ruler from being poisoned, so it was a highly
trusted
position. The baker's job was similarly
sensitive since he was cooking for the royalty.)
One night
they each had a
dream. The cupbearer dreamed of trees
and fruits. The baker dreamed of loaves
and birds eating them. The next day,
Joseph
noticed that they were dejected and asked them what was up. They mentioned their dreams.
Joseph claimed that God owned all
interpretations of dreams.
The cupbearer
told Joseph
his dream. Joseph said that within
three days he would be restored to his position. The
baker told his dream.
Joseph said that within three days he would be executed and the
birds
would eat his flesh. Joseph begged the
men to remember him when they came to Pharaoh as he had suffered great
injustices, including this imprisonment.
In three
days, Pharaoh
had a birthday party and both dream interpretations came true. Afterwards, the cupbearer forgot about
Joseph and the baker was dead, as predicted.
Genesis 41 2004 November 17 for 30th
Joseph spent
two more
years in jail before Pharaoh himself had dreams. There
were two. In one,
seven scrawny cows ate seven fat cows on the Nile.
In the other, seven "thin and scorched" heads of grain
swallowed up seven fat ones on the same stalk.
These disturbed Pharaoh and he awoke each time.
Next morning he called in everybody in Egypt
who was wise or a magician, but none could tell him what this all meant.
Then the
cupbearer spoke
up, telling the story of what had happened two years ago in jail with
his dream
and that of the baker. He distanced
himself from that "other man" in the telling and apologized for his
negligence with respect to Joseph.
Joseph was immediately summoned, shaved, and bathed and appeared
before
Pharaoh. When asked if he could
interpret dreams, he said he could not, but that God would tell Pharaoh
what he
wanted to know.
The dreams
were told;
Joseph interpreted them. He said it had
occurred in two forms because God was "firmly decided" on the
matter. The interpretation was that
seven years of unprecedented prosperity would be followed by seven
years of
dire famine. The follow-up advice was
that Pharaoh should find a wise man in Egypt and put him in charge of
taxing
everybody's crops at 20% for the seven years so there would be any food
at all
in the lean years. And, they should
start immediately.
In Pharaoh's
view, there
was no one available wiser than Joseph.
Pharaoh put
Joseph in
charge of everything in Egypt excepting the throne itself.
He put him in fancy clothes, gave him the
signet ring showing his authority and set him up to ride in "Chariot
Two" where runners went in front to clear the way.
Pharaoh gave Joseph a wife, Asenath, priest
of On, with whom he had two sons, Manassah ("forget" as in
"forget troubles") and Ephraim ("twice fruitful", "God
has made me fruitful in the land of my suffering").
Interesting that this marriage "outside
the faith" doesn't seem to concern God.
Perhaps it is irrelevant in the case of Joseph, whose faith is
now
demonstrated to be beyond question.
Joseph
traveled all over
the country and started collecting the tax and storing the food.
The seven
years of famine
started. The people of Egypt cried to
Pharaoh for relief and Joseph sold them food.
The famine was all over the region, not just in Egypt. Foreigners traveled to Egypt, having heard
that food was there. Joseph sold the
foreigners food too.
Seven years
times twenty
percent is 140%. This divided by 80%,
the amount that the people were living on during the good years, is
1-3/4,
nearly two. That means that the amount
of saved food should have been enough for nearly two years at the old
consumption rates. For the food to last
through the seven years of famine, the consumption rate would need to
be 25% or
what it had been during the years of plenty.
Is it realistic to expect that consumption could be cut by a
factor of
four? I can see a factor of two with
some belt tightening, pain, and misery and some reduction in
inefficiency, but
a factor of four?
Maybe we are
speaking
here in round numbers. Clearly, to save
for a period of famine equal to the period of plenty at the same consumption
rate, one would have to set aside half.
Maybe a factor of four is not unrealistic. What
would I know about hunger?
Genesis 42 2004 November 18 for December 1st
Among the
internationals
traveling to Egypt to buy food in this famine were ten of Joseph's
brothers. Their father Jacob said,
"Why do you just keeping looking at each other? I
have heard that there is grain in Egypt. Go
down there and buy some for us, so that
we may live and not die."
Joseph was
personally in
charge of all the sales and when his brothers came to the front of the
line he
recognized them, but they did not recognize him. He
got rough and accused them of being spies. They
pleaded that they were all sons of one
father. There were two others, the
youngest was back at home and one was no more.
He called
them liars and
spies and swore an oath that they would not leave until one of them
went home
and brought their young brother. Now
they were terrified.
Three days
later, Joseph
relented a little and said that they could go and take food to their
father,
but that Simeon would stay behind in prison and they should not return
again
without their youngest brother. They
were in despair and talked among each other.
Reuben said this is what they got for disposing of Joseph way
back when,
"We saw how distressed he was when he pleaded with us for his life, but
we
would not listen; that's why this distress has come upon us…. Now we are accounting for his
blood." Joseph understood them and
had to go out and weep. They did not
know whom he was or that he understood their language.
Joseph took
their money,
filled their sacks with grain, and sent them on their way.
First night on the way back, one of them
opened his sack for dinner and found his money in it!
When they got
home, all
of their money was in all of their sacks.
They told the whole story to Jacob who said they had now lost two
of his sons and, no, he would not permit Benjamin to ever go anywhere
with
them. Reuben offered his own two sons
in exchange, but Jacob was firm.
Genesis 43 2004 November 29 for December 2nd
The Man….
After a time,
the family
of Jacob ran out of the food they had bought in Egypt.
Jacob suggested they go buy more, but the
sons reminded him of what The Man had said.
'Don't come back without your youngest brother.'
'Why did you
tell him
about Benjamin?' he asked, angry.
'Look,' was their reply, 'The Man asked detailed
questions; we
merely answered. How were we to know it
would lead to all this trouble?'
Judah then
stepped up to
take responsibility for Benjamin. If
anything should happen, it would be his blame for the rest of his life. Jacob allowed them to go and sent them with
double money (to replace the money that had been refunded before) and
other
regional treasures like pistachio nuts.
When they got
to Egypt
with all this, Joseph greeted them, asked about their aged father, and
invited
them over to dinner. He blessed his
brother Benjamin and was overcome with emotion such that he had to run
to his
room and weep. The meal invite scared
them so they confessed about the money from last time to the steward. The steward said everything was cool.
Joseph had a
feast
prepared, returned Simeon, and seated everyone in order of age, but
gave
Benjamin a quintuple portion. Though
Joseph ate separately (Hebrews being detestable to "Egyptians"), the
feast was light and merry.
Genesis 44 2004 November 29 for December 3rd
Unknown to
them, Joseph
had his brothers' sacks filled with as much grain as they would hold,
and
returned their money again, and had his own valuable silver cup put in
Benjamin's sack. Early in the morning,
they were on their way.
Later in the
day, Joseph
sent his steward after them instructing him to accuse them of doing a
"wicked" thing by stealing the cup.
The steward did this and, when they were confronted, they
claimed they
had done no such thievery and that if one of them had, that one would
die and
all the rest would become Joseph's slaves.
The steward agreed to this with the reduced penalty that only
the guilty
one would become a slave and the rest could go without guilt.
The search
began with the
sack of the oldest.
Last was
Benjamin and
when they got to his sack, there was the cup.
They tore their clothes, wailed, then loaded up and went back to
town,
all of them.
They pleaded
with Joseph
to keep them all as slaves, but Joseph wanted only the 'guilty'
Benjamin. At this, Judah stepped up and
told the whole
story of Benjamin, how he was one of two sons of the beloved wife and
how the
other son was gone; how Benjamin came to be on this trip in the first
place;
how Jacob's life was caught up in that of his youngest son, born to him
in his
old age; and how he, Judah, had guaranteed Benjamin's safety. He pleaded to stay as Joseph's slave in
place of Benjamin.
Genesis 45 2004 November 30 for December 6th
Joseph
couldn't stand it
any more. He sent away all of his
servants so that he was alone with his brothers and then told them who
he
was. They were terrified at this
development, but he called them together closer and told them that God
had used
their selling him into Egypt for good, to save many lives, including
their own.
He wept so
loudly that
neighbors and, eventually, Pharaoh heard about it.
And, his
brothers did
indeed bow down to him.
But this was
only the
second year of the famine, five more were to come.
Joseph told his brothers to take riches from Egypt and go home
to
their father Jacob and bring him and his family down to live in Goshen
where
they would be near him and where they would live well during the
remainder of
the crises.
Pharaoh made
additional
orders, the most entertaining of which was 'Don't worry about your
things, just
leave everything behind and come down yourself and benefit from the
best of
Egypt!' He sent carts for the women and
children.
Joseph loaded
them up with
gifts and animals and changes of clothes and sent them off. 'Don't argue along the way!' were his
parting words. He gave Benjamin
considerable additional gifts and money.
Back home,
Jacob didn't
believe them at first but when they told him the whole story and
everything
that Joseph had said, he revived and declared that he would go see his
son
before he died.
Genesis 46 2004 November 30 for December 7th
A happy party
goes to
Egypt.
Jacob, now
called Israel,
picked up everything and everybody he owned and headed for Egypt. On the way he made sacrifices to God who
spoke to him in a dream calling him "Jacob!" God
would go to Egypt with him and bring him
back again. His son Joseph would
"close his eyes," that is, would be there when he died.
All the
grandsons of
Jacob are listed, including many we've heard about before such as the
sons of
Judah: Er, Onan, Shelah, Perez, and
Zerah.
Sixty-six
people made the
trip in carts and they brought everything including all their tents and
livestock. Counting Joseph and his
family, Jacob's household amounted to seventy people.
Judah went
ahead to get
directions to Goshen and when they all arrived there, Joseph heard of
it and
had Chariot Two fired up for a visit.
When Jacob and Joseph met, they wept for a long time. Israel said, "Now I am ready to die,
since I have seen for myself that you are still alive."
A long and
tortured life
Jacob had.
Joseph began
preparing
his father for an interview with Pharaoh in which he would be formally
granted
permission to reside in peace in Goshen.
Genesis 47 2004 December 1 for 8th
Joseph
brought in five of
his brothers for an audience with Pharaoh.
When Pharaoh learned that they were in livestock, a family
trade, he
directed that they should settle in the best part of Egypt, the land of
Goshen,
district of Rameses, and that if any were exceptionally good at tending
herds,
they should care for Pharaoh's livestock as well.
Jacob himself
was brought
in to meet Pharaoh who asked his age.
"The years of my pilgrimage are a hundred and thirty. My years have been few and difficult, and
they do not equal the years of the pilgrimage of my fathers." Jacob blessed Pharaoh and left.
It is
interesting that
Jacob knew how long his father and ancestors had lived, and that his
life had
been shorter. This lends some
additional credence to that ancestor table we constructed, at least the
more
recent end of it.
The famine
progressed,
both in Egypt and Canaan. When
everyone's money had run out, Joseph asked for their livestock in
payment for
food. When their livestock ran out, the
people sold their land and themselves into slavery in order to survive. At the end, everything and everyone in Egypt
belonged to Pharaoh except for the property of the priests who, having
an allotment
of food from Pharaoh, did not need to sell.
Joseph then gave out seed grain for the people to plant with the
instruction that one fifth of everything that came up would be a tax
for
Pharaoh. This law was still in effect
when Genesis was written.
Today, we
don't consider
such a consolidation of power and property to be a good thing. In our future here, (Exodus), the situation
with the Egyptians and the Hebrews will deteriorate seriously leading
to a
crises that only God could salvage.
Interesting that God would choose this mechanism, this form of
blessing
of and through Joseph, to save Egypt and its neighbors.
Was this God's only choice? Interesting
that God allows either happiness
or despair to go on for decades or centuries.
Is there something more we should be picking up here?
While the
nation of
Israel grew quickly in Goshen, Israel himself grew old and neared death
seventeen years later at age 147. He
called in Joseph and had him swear ("under the thigh") that he would
not bury him in Egypt but would take him back to Canaan for burial when
he
died. Joseph so swore and Jacob
worshipped, standing there leaning on his staff.
Genesis 48 2004 December 1 for 9th
The final
blessings of
Jacob.
Jacob lay
dying. Joseph heard of this and brought
his sons
Manasseh and Ephraim to him. When they
arrived, Jacob revived and sat up in bed.
He recounted
the story of
his life as seen through encounters with God, and of Rachel who had
died on the
way to Canaan. Jacob claimed Manasseh
and Ephraim as his own sons legally, allowing that if Joseph had more
children
after this, they would be his.
Joseph
brought the sons
in to meet Jacob who rejoiced at seeing them.
He had not expected to see even Joseph again, much less his
children. Joseph bowed down to his
father, showing respect despite his teenage dream from so many years
ago, then
placed the sons, oldest Manasseh on Israel's right and Ephraim on his
left. Jacob, nearly blind, crossed his
arms and gave the greater blessing to Ephraim, putting him before
Manasseh. Joseph tried to correct this
but Jacob knew what he was doing. This
scene mirrors the blessing of Jacob and Esau by Isaac but without the
acrimony.
Both would
become great
nations and
In
your name will Israel pronounce this blessing:
May
God make you like Ephraim and Manasseh.
Jacob also
gave Joseph a
greater share of his inheritance, namely, land he had taken from the
Amorites
by force.
Genesis 49:1-28 2004 December 2 for 10th
Jacob calls
in his twelve
sons and pronounces blessings and prophesies on them.
Reuben is
chastised for
defiling his father's bed, Simeon and Levi for killing men in anger and
hamstringing oxen.
Judah will be
the leader,
he will command the nations and be strong and attractive.
Zebulun will
live by the
sea; Issachar, lazy, will be forced into labor. Dan
will dispense justice but will be a snake along the road, a
hazard to travelers. Asher will have
rich food of delicacies and "Naphtali is a doe set free that bears
beautiful fawns."
The best
blessing and
prophesy are reserved for Joseph. He is
strength and prosperity though he was attacked with hostility. Thanks to the God of Jacob he is blessed
from the depths to the heavens, from the ages past to the ages future. He is the prince.
And,
"Benjamin is a
ravenous wolf; in the morning he devours the prey, in the evening he
divides
the plunder." This was probably
not meant as a negative.
Each of the
sons, the
tribes of Israel, received an appropriate blessing.
Jacob's status at the end of his life was remarkable …
miraculous.
Genesis 49:29 - 50:26 2004 December 2 for 13th
After the
blessings on
his sons, Jacob ordered that he be buried in the cave with Abraham and
Sarah,
Isaac and Rebekah. He had previously
buried Leah there as well. He then died
and was "gathered to his people."
Joseph did, in fact, "close his eyes."
Joseph
mourned for his
father and had him embalmed, Egyptian style.
He then requested leave of Pharaoh to go bury his father in
Canaan as he
had sworn. Jacob's whole family and much
of the court of Pharaoh made the long trip with Joseph along with
chariots and
horsemen. Only the children and flocks
were left behind. Jacob was buried in
the cave that Abraham bought for Sarah and himself, as requested. Inhabitants of the cities along the way took
note of the huge Egyptian mourning party.
Everyone then returned to Egypt.
Joseph's
brothers now
worried that he would take revenge and they made up a ruse that Israel
had told
Joseph to forgive them. Once again,
Joseph reiterated that their actions, which they had intended for evil,
had
been turned by God to good and that he would not set himself in the
place of
God to do anything bad to them.
Joseph and
all the
company of Israel lived in Egypt where he saw the third generation of
Ephraim's
children and the second generation of Manasseh's. At
age 110, he was about to die.
He called his brothers in (presumably the ones who were left)
and told
them that when God came to their aid and took them out of Egypt, they
must
carry his bones out with them.
Joseph died,
was
embalmed, and was laid in a coffin in Egypt.
Concluding thoughts on Genesis 2004 December 13 for 14th
And so we
come to the end
of the beginning, the story of the birth of the creation through the
death of
Joseph, the dawn of man's consciousness of God. It
has been a long story covering thousands of years.
We have seen that God chooses when, where
and with whom to do good, sometimes but not always in concert with
their own
actions. We have seen much good, much
evil, and much humanity. We have seen
people who had no reference to written rules of conduct acting as we do
now, we
who do have extensive rules of all sorts.
As I've said
before, I
believe the story, at least from Terah forward, to be more or less
factual and
the story back through Noah to Adam to be at least spiritually correct. As we've said, "scientific"
nitpickers on all fronts are missing the point. Isaac
Asimov wrote a lengthy commentary on the Bible in which he
presumed that nothing in the Bible was true unless it was corroborated
extra-Biblically, through, for example, archaeology or science. This, of course, is unfair.
Discoveries since Asimov's death,
extra-Biblical evidence for a provincial governor named Pontius Pilate,
for
example, will continue as long as mankind survives though Azimov would
have
called this procurator fictional based on his own limited knowledge of
fact. At the other extreme are claim
that the Bible is the only ground truth in existence, that nothing can
be
believed unless it is corroborated directly by the Bible.
This, of course, is silly. I
believe in my own existence, and yours,
for example, even though neither you nor I are explicitly mentioned in
the
Bible.
The Bible,
and Genesis,
its "beginning," are the story of humans awakening to the reality of
God. Of course the initial impressions
and images are fuzzy, even mythical.
You remember the dawn of your own consciousness differently and
less accurately
than your parents do, after all. With
Abraham, though, we see a man who is very aware of and conversant with
God, and
whose life is radically different as a result.
The promises from God that start with Abraham go down through
his
descendants and reach us even today.
© Courtney B.
Duncan,
2004