Things are getting really weird here.
Cain kills Abel. By the Quinn interpretation, this is story is about how the pastoral Semites believed farming people came to be. Or, if you prefer, it’s exactly literal and about two brothers who didn’t get along. Either way, I think it’s interesting that Gen 4:20 talks about Cain’s descendants as innovators and inventors, the first to live in tents, the inventor of musical instruments and the first to work with metal.
More important than our interpretation of the Cain v Abel fight is Gen 6:2. This is right before the flood when it’s casually mentioned that the sons of God like to mate with human women and the results are giants and heroes. I’m not really sure how to take that, and whatever interpretation you have is, I’m sure, fine, but it kind of bugs me that passages like this get kind of swept under the rug. Methuselah is mentioned in this section. He’s kind of famous as the person who lived the longest in all of human history, but he didn’t actually do anything. He’s only mentioned as part of a line of genealogy. In fact, the way the math works out, it kind of implies he died in the flood, so he may not even have been a great guy. But we know about him, and we can mention him in casual conversation and people will know who we’re talking about. If you talk to most Christians about God’s sons interbreeding with humans though, you’re probably going to get some odd looks.
After Abel died and Cain was banished to the land of Nod in the east, Adam and Eve had another son, Seth. It was in Seth’s son’s time that people started worshipping the Lord. I’m not certain what that means, but later God also mentions to Noah the kinds of animals suitable for sacrifice, so I think this is the transition from the time in the garden of Eden when God and people just kind of hung out together to a more formal relationship where people need priests in special outfits to burn incense and cast spells to get God’s attention and blessings.
There’s a guy named Zecharia Sitchen who got really into ancient Sumerian texts and claims that the Nephilim, the giants and heroes that came from the sons of God breeding with human women, are actually related to aliens who genetically modified humans to develop a nearly-sentient population of laborers to mine gold. That’s about as reasonable as any other explanation I’ve heard for what’s going on there.
God flooded the world because people were such stupid jerks that He regretted ever creating us. The idea of God regretting something or changing his mind seems to be coming up a lot. Got seemed to change his mind about Eden too when things didn’t work out as planned. But that doesn’t really make sense, does it? Things always go to God’s plan, that’s sort of the point. I’ve heard it said that God just sort of played through these elaborate ruses in the ancient times, allowing people to believe he was changing his opinion about things. I’ll buy that I suppose.
I mean it stands to reason that God would have to cut early humanity a little slack when it comes to faith; it’s not like He had things like dogma or church politics to push people into doing His bidding.
And how come we always capitalize pronouns when they refer to God but they’re not capitalized in the Bible?
No comments:
Post a Comment