Day 8 Genesis 25-26

Abraham dies at the age of 175 surrounded by sons and concubines and a brand new wife. He’s buried by Ishmael and Isaac in the same property as Sarah. Ishmael went on to have a dozen sons who each had their own tribe.

Rebekah had twins with Isaac, Jacob and Esau. Esau means red, because Esau was born covered in red hair. Jacob means heal-grabber because he was born supposedly grabbing the heel of Esau, who was born first. Heal-grabber was also an idiom for someone who sort of sneakily takes power from others. This is foreshadowing.

Esau was a macho man, always out hunting and stuff, while Jacob quietly hung out around the tents. Isaac loved Esau because he loved wild game. Rebekah favored Jacob though. One day Esau came in from the fields very hungry and Jacob was making stew. After some prodding Esau agreed to give up his birthright in exchange for some of Jacob’s soup.

Isaac had almost exactly the same interaction with Abimelech that his father had gone through probably 50 years previous. He claimed his wife was his sister and Abimelech found out the truth and sent them on their way. Later they made an agreement about some wells. It’s been said that this is probably just a case of someone getting their stories mixed up and it only actually happened to one of them, but I don’t think it affects my faith too much either way whether both Abraham and Isaac had similar experiences with Abimelech or not.

Day 7 Genesis 22-24

God had finally given Abraham and Sarah the son He’d been promising for decades. Abraham obviously loved Isaac very much, even more probably since Ishmael was now gone. Now his free ride is over though. Since the beginning God has been heaping blessings upon Abraham and his household and he hasn’t really had to do anything in return. Abraham believes what God says sometimes and it’s considered righteousness when he does, but then when he lies about Sarah not being his wife because he doesn’t have faith that God will protect him, God doesn’t hold it against him either.

Now, God tells Abraham that he has to sacrifice Isaac to Him. Abraham does it, or is about to do it when God stops him anyway. Once he proves his obedience to God, God tells him to kill a ram in stead.

Sarah died and Abraham bought some land to bury her. That made him decide to get a wife for Isaac, so he sent a servant to Padam Aran, which is in Mesopotamia, where Abraham was from, to collect someone from the family for Isaac to marry. The servant finds Rebekah, who is Nahor’s granddaughter. Nahor was Abraham’s brother, which means Rebekah is Isaac’s niece? I think that’s right, his father’s brother is his uncle. His son would be Isaac’s cousin, so his daughter would be his niece. Maybe his niece once removed.

There’s an ancient Sumerian tradition that a true heir to a priestly or royal line can’t just be a son of the father, a mother of the same family is required too. Siblings can’t just start breeding with each other, but half-siblings can, and often had to in order to preserve the family line. I’ve heard it theorized that Abraham actually came from a Sumerian line of priests because he was so familiar with spiritual rituals and performing sacrifices and stuff. That’s why he insists Isaac get a wife from among his own family back in Padam Aran and why Sarah is Abraham’s wife and his half sister, the daughter of the same father but a different mother. That’s why Isaac gets the birthright in stead of Ishmael, because Ishmael only has half the family line; he was born to a woman outside Abraham’s family. According to some Bible Scholars.

To recap, Sarah’s gone, but Isaac’s married so it’s now Abraham, Isaac and Isaac’s wife Rebekah.

Day 6 Genesis 19-21

There were not ten good men in all of Sodom and Gomorrah so it was destroyed. I think it’s possible there wasn’t even one good man in Sodom and Gomorrah because Abraham’s nephew Lot really comes off as kind of an awful guy. When two angels come into town, Lot insists that they stay with him because it’s not safe in the town square. Once they’re there, all the men in the town get together and decide they want some sweet, non-consensual angel-sex and demand Lot hand over the two travelers. Lot refuses, offering in stead his two virgin daughters. The men refuse the offer and start trying to break in so the angels strike them all with blindness and tell Lot to get his family out of the city.

It really seems like Lot could have at least tried giving away like some goats or silver pieces or something before he jumps straight to offering up his two daughters. I guess we don’t know the details of what happened, but that seems unsavory to me.

More importantly, this tends to be the story that comes to mind when we think about the Bible and homosexuality and I think that’s kind of ridiculous. Now there are certainly parts of the Bible that speak directly to sexual issues, but if I were a gay man, I feel like I would have a very important burning question upon hearing this tale connected to my orientation.

“Who do you think I am in this story?”

I guess the men in Sodom and Gomorrah must be into guys because they want to have sex with the angels who come, but that’s not why they’re struck blind. They’re punished because they want to break into Lot’s house to gang-rape the angels. To cite the story of Sodom and Gomorrah as biblical condemnation of homosexuality is incredibly offensive because to do so is to refuse to differentiate between gay sex and rape. It’s like saying the story of God drowning the Egyptian army in the Red Sea is about how it’s a sin to ride chariots.

Anyway, Lot tries to warn the guys engaged to his daughters that the city is about to be destroyed, but they don’t believe him, so in the end it’s just him, his wife and their two very forgiving daughters. His wife looks back at the city as they flee though and is turned to a pillar of salt. Later, they’re living in a cave and the two girls get Lot drunk and sleep with him to keep the family line alive.

Meanwhile, Abraham and Sarah move to the Negev which is desert just north of the sea of Aram. The same thing happens here as happened in Egypt; Abraham tells Sarah to tell everyone they’re siblings, the king takes a shine to her and then God curses the king for carrying on with a married woman. The king, Abimelech, is a nice enough guy and fears the Lord, so God tells him what’s going on in a dream before anything too bad happens to him. He is understandably upset with Abraham, who waves off his protests explaining that Sarah really is his half-sister as well as his wife so he technically didn’t lie at all. Thanks Abraham, I’m sure that made Abimelech feel much better.

Now that Abimelech knows that Abraham is favored by God though, he can’t really do anything but be nice to him, so he sets him up with livestock, cash and property to apologize for taking his wife, and asks him to look favorably on his kingdom. A little while later, Abraham’s having trouble with Abimelech’s servants running him off from the wells in the area so they get together and hammer out a treaty which identifies a new well that Abraham just dug and confirms that it is his, witnessed by Abimelech himself and sealed with seven lambs from Abraham’s flock. The well was called Beersheba.

Beersheba is still a major city in Israel today. It’s been the biggest source of water in southern Israel for thousands of years.

Isaac is also born around this time, just like God promised over and over again. During the celebration of Isaac’s birth though, Sarah says that Ishmael was mocking so, in keeping with her history of being a jerk to Hagar, she insisted that Abraham send them both away.

Abraham was not happy about it, but God told him to go ahead and do it and that He would look after Ishmael. Hagar and Ishmael wandered out in the desert for a long time, but God provided for them and promised to make Ishmael the father of a great nation.

Day 5 Genesis 16-18

Now by this time, even though God keeps promising Abraham and Sarah lots of children, they still haven’t had any and they’re getting worried. Sarah says that, since she can’t seem to have any kids, Abraham should sleep with her servant girl to start a family and he very graciously accepts that directive.

He sleeps with Hagar and she does become pregnant, but then I guess she gets all uppity around Sarah because she’s having a kid and Sarah isn’t. Sarah comes to Abraham blaming him for Hagar’s behavior and Abraham tells her basically, “Hey, she’s your servant, you need to deal with this if you have a problem.” So Sarah starts beating Hagar and generally being a jerk to her until she runs away.

The angel of the Lord comes to her while she’s out and tells her to go back and that she’s having a son and she needs to name him Ishmael, which means God hears, because God heard her plight.

Ishmael gets kind of a left-handed blessing from God, who says that he’ll be the father of many tribes, but he’ll be a wild-donkey, always “living to the east of his brothers.” I guess each of those was an idiom at the time that meant he’d always be fighting his neighbors.

I heard that the history of Islam runs through Ishmael, that Muslims believe that they are descended from the line of Ishmael instead of Isaac. Abraham is revered in Islam just like in Judaism and Christianity, but they say that the true line progresses through Abraham’s first son.

After all this happens God comes to Abraham again and tells him (again) that he’ll have lots of kids. This time Abraham sounds more skeptical, laughing and saying he and Sarah are too old to have kids. Then he asks instead for a blessing on Ishmael, assuming he will be his only son. God does bless Ishmael, but insists that he and Sarah will also have a son. The catch is that everyone in the household has to cut off the tip of their dicks. Every man in the family as well as all the slaves and anyone bought into the family. When new people are born or bought, they have to be circumcised within eight days.

The next time the Lord visited Abraham there were three visitors. It’s a little vague about the exact mechanics, but the text seems to imply that one of the visitors was the angel of the lord and the other two were the two angels who were (spoiler alert) about to go destroy Sodom and Gomorrah.

God, as a change of pace, promises Abraham that he’ll have lots of descendants. Sarah overheard this time though and laughed, which God confronted them about and Sarah denied. In chapter 15 God had credited it to Abraham as righteousness that he believed Him when God told him he’d have many descendants, so I assume Sarah’s laughter irked Him. Abraham just had pretty much the same reaction in the last chapter though so maybe it’s just that God’s patience is starting to wear thin with them.

God says he’s going to scout out Sodom and Gomorrah because he’s been hearing rumors about how awful it is there. Abraham argues with him about it though and convinces him that if there are fifty good men in the city then God shouldn’t destroy it for their sake. Then he haggles all the way down to ten people, so God agrees that he won’t destroy the city if there are ten good people in it.

The tough part of this section is that obviously God knows already exactly how many good men are in Sodom and Gomorrah, and he already knows whether he’s going to destroy them or not. I think the official party line here is that He’s not really arguing with Abraham in good faith, and that he already knows where this conversation is going and that’s what he intended the entire time. C.S. Lewis wrote some about how prayer is more for our own benefit than for God’s. That seems a reasonable interpretation to me. I don’t know why it was necessary to have that conversation at all, but I’m sure it accomplished something.

Day 4 Genesis 12-15

God calls Abraham, now called Abram, to leave his father’s house in Mesopotamia and travel to Israel. He took his wife, Sarah, and his nephew Lot and I guess a bunch of servants and kind of wandered around the Middle East for a while.

A drought sent them to Egypt where Abram was worried he would be murdered because his wife was pretty so he told her to tell everyone that she was his sister. This plan worked great actually. Sarah caught the eye of the pharaoh himself who took her into the palace and treated Abraham very well, presumably because pharaoh was sleeping Sarah, but I guess it doesn’t really come out and say that per se.

Gen 12:17 says that God inflicted pharaoh’s house with nasty stuff because of Sarah and pharaoh doesn’t seem to have any trouble figuring out why. He confronts Abraham and asks why he didn’t say Sarah was his wife, then, recognizing that these Semites are trouble, sends them all off with some supplies and a stern request they leave the country. I think pharaoh got a pretty raw deal in this story, he doesn’t seem like a bad guy at all. He just got caught up in Abraham’s lies, although he very well may have killed Abraham and slept with Sarah anyway if things had gone differently, so who’s to say who’s right and who’s wrong there. I did notice, though, that nowhere does the text imply that God told Abraham to lie to pharaoh, or even to go to Egypt to begin with, so it’s difficult to discern God’s stance on anything in this story, beyond the fact that He did not care for pharaoh’s relationship with Sarah.

After leaving Egypt, Abraham and Lot are so prosperous that they cannot travel together anymore. Their herdsmen are bumping into each other and getting into fights; I guess the drought is over by this time. So they part and Lot promptly gets himself abducted after a battle between two groups of city-states.

Abraham rolls in with 300 men and rescues Lot as well as a lot of treasure from the routed army. He went by Salem, which would later become Jerusalem, and met with King Melchizedek, a priest of the Lord. Now I was taken aback by this title. I figured at this point in history, no one is closer to Got than Abraham, since he seems to be the protagonist in this story. We’ve already spent more chapters hearing about Abraham than we have hearing about Adam and Noah combined, so to have a minor character come in and turn out to be a priest of the Lord is unexpected.

Perhaps even more unexpected is how Abraham seems to kind of snub Malchazedek, refusing to accept any of the king’s hospitality beyond camp for a few days and a nice blessing. The reason he gives is because he doesn’t want Malchezadek spreading word around that he made Abraham rich once God gives Abraham all the land and riches he’s promised.

Finally, Abraham gripes about not having an heir so God tells him to cut some animals in half and then promises to give him some sons.

I’m glad that the narrative is becoming more coherent as we focus in on the adventures of just one man, but sometimes Abraham seems a little disappointing in the role of God’s chosen genetic emissary to mankind. He actually seems like kind of a jerk sometimes.