134 2 Chronicles 32-34

  Even though Hezekiah has been completely faithful to the Lord, an army from Assyria shows up led by their king, Sennacherib.  Sennacherib runs a tight propaganda campaign, yelling in the language of Judah about how the battle's all but won already and how their god isn't going to be able to protect them just like all the other gods of other nations were unable to stop the mighty Assyrian juggernaut and so on and so forth.

  Hezekaih heard about their coming beforehand though so he had time to take a few precautions.  He had the walls of Jerusalem repaired and improved and stopped up all the water sources outside the city.  When Sennacherib tried to demoralize the army, Hezekiah responded that all those other gods were made by the hands of men and that Assyria has certainly never faced a God like the theirs.  He told his own army that, with God really on their side, they wouldn't even have to fight at all.

  Reading through this part, I was interested to see how God would feel towards Hezekiah afterwords.  I sense a kind of tension from the previous stories about relying on God.  It's obviously insulting to God to sit back idly and demand God do everything to make life easy for them, but on the other hand, attempts by ancient kings to fix things themselves seemed to also offend God.  David's census of the men in Israel is an example of that.  I still can't fathom why it was such a terrible thing for him to have done.  There's another king who fell victim to this also, although his name and the specifics of his story escape me.  I believe he set up a trade agreement with Tyre or someone and they built a bunch of ships together, but they didn't consult with God first so God destroyed their plans.  Hezakiah is very devout though, so he probably spoke at length with his prophets off-camera before working on the walls and the water sources to prepare for the siege.

  In the end, Hezekiah yells prayers and God sends an angel to wipe out the Assyrian army.  With the battle over, the Sennacherib can do nothing but go back to Assyria in shame.

  God performed many miracles for Hezekiah.  He eventually got a little prideful because of it and stopped being very thankful.  God reprimanded him though and Hezekiah quickly snapped back in line.  Later on, God left Hezekiah to test him (I'm not sure what exactly this means) but Hezekiah remained faithful.  It sounds like there's a lot of this story that we're not hearing because it's covered in the Book of the Kings of Judah, but it sounds like Hezekiah is just about the most virtuous and faithful king we've heard about to date, and Judah thrives under him.  Babylon even starts sending down messengers to learn about what was making Judah so awesome.

  Hezekiah's son Manasseh however, took the throne at 12 years old and adopted the customs and gods of all the other nations around Judah.  There's an interesting line in 39:9 that says "They did more evil things than the nations the LORD had destroyed to make room for the people of Israel."  So Assyrians show up again and this time take Manasseh captive.  While a prisoner, Manasseh humbles himself and prays to God, and God takes pity on him, returning him home.  After that he straightens up and worships the Lord.  Manasseh ruled for 55 years.

  Amnon ruled next for 22 years.  He was king type 1, the bad kind.  He was eventually killed in a plot by his officials.  Then the people of Judah killed the officials and made Amnon's son Josiah king.  So, that was kind of a mess.

  Josiah became king at 8 and he must have had some really good advisers because he became a type 2 king, the King David type.  He tore down the altars to other gods, cleaned out the temple, etc, etc.  When they were clearing out all the treasure from the temple vault to get some restoration projects going, someone stumbled across the scroll of the law given to Moses, which I guess had been lost for a while.  When Josiah saw it he flipped out.  Even with all the good Josiah had been doing, nobody had really been following these rules.  He consulted with some prophets and God told Josiah that he was doing a good job and had made himself humble before God, so he was going to be okay, but yes, God was super-angry about the neglect of the law over the last several (hundred?) years, so He was going to basically wipe this country off the face of the Earth.  He would wait until after Josiah died though.

130 2 Chronicles 18-20

  Jehosephat allied with Ahab, the king of Israel, through marriage, and started repairing the fracture between the two nations.  Ahab asked to Jehosephat to go to war with him against Ramoth Gilead, some random middle-eastern parcel of desert.  Befoire Jehosephat would agree to such a war though, he asked about what the Lord thought.  Ahab brought all his prophets out and they all said that whatever Ahab wanted to do would be awesome, but Jehosephat pressed him and asked if he had any prophets of the Lord.  Ahab admitted that there was a prophet of the lord in Israel named Micah, but he complained that it was a drag to listen to Micah because all he did was say negative things all the time.  Jehosephat insisted that they hear what Micah had to say though so Ahab dutifully summoned him.

  Micah heard that all the cool prophets were telling Ahab that he would crush Ramoth Gilead and be awesome forever, so he tried to tell the two kings the same thing they had been hearing so far.  Micah was a bad liar though and Ahab ordered him to tell them what the Lord had actually revealed to him.

  Micah told the kings that things would not go well at all in battle, so Ahab had him put in prison and ordered that he have nothing  but bread and water until his own safe return from the front.  So really there's no way for Micah to win here.  The warning must have had some effect though because Ahab wore a disguise to the battle so no one would know who he was.

  When they actually went out to fight Ramoth Gilead, the enemy had orders to ignore all of the Judean and Israelite soldiers and to concentrate only on the king.  Since Jehosephat was dressed as a king and Ahab was disguised as a random charioteer, this did not bode well for Jehosephat.  Enemy soldiers began pursueing him immediately.  He prayed to God though and the Lord protected him.  The enemy soldiers realized that he was not the king of Israel and stopped following him.  Meanwhile, Ahab was struck by a random spear and died by nightfall.

  Jehosephat wasn't completely off the hook though.  He had gone to war on the side of Ahab even though he knew that a prophet of the lord had spoken out against it.  As soon as he got back home, his own prophets of the Lord gave him an earfull.  But, he did tear down all the Ashera poles so he bought himself a little bit of leeway I guess.

  Some people from the east came in later and tried to invade Judah, but Jehosephat went before the Lord and prayed about it.  He asked God if He would allow someone to come in and take the land that God had given to the Isaraelites back in the day, especially since the only reason they were neighbors with these people from the East anyway was because God had forbidden Aaron and the original Israelite armies from wiping these guys out.  Now God is surprisingly susceptible to cogent arguments in the Old Testiment so He agrees that it's not fair for foreigners to come in and swipe the land He gave to them, so if the Judean army goes out and stands their ground in an act of faith, they won't even have to fight.  They do, so they don't.  Judah wins without firing a shot when the other army tears itself apart in the night.  Judah even gets the plunder.

  Jehosephat rules for 35 years which it a huge amount of time compared to most other kings.  The impression I get from him is very devout, but a little naive.  Aside from that misguided alliance with Ahab, he also tries to reconcile with Israel a second time by allying with Ahzakiah, another king of Israel, to build some ships for trading.  God still doesn't like Israel though so all his ships sink.

Day 115 2 Kings 18-19

            Now things are getting interesting again.  The king of Assyria has conquered Israel and he’s got his eye on Judah.  His officers come down to Jerusalem and run a big, loud propaganda campeign about how Assyia has conquered a whole bunch of kingdoms already and their gods never helped any of them.  They say that Judah’s only allies are Egypt and God and Egypt is useless and God won’t do anything.  They say the king of Judah, Hezekiah, is lying to them and misleading them and will get them all killed, but if they surrender, thy ‘ll all get nice new lands in Assyria.

            Hezekiah goes to the temple and prays about what’s happening and eventually God tells him that He won’t let anything happen to Jerusalem, that he’ll take care of the Assyrian situation. He sends a long reply through the prophet Issaiah that basically asserts how ridiculous and insulting He finds the claims of the Assyrians and He’s going to show them a thing or two about how He differs from the gods of the people they are accustomed to fighting.

            God sends and angel to kill hundreds of thousands of Assyrian soldiers in their camp that night and the king chooses to withdraw from the field before ever even starting the battle.  He runs all the way back to Ninivah actually, the capital of Assyria, but there his sons murder him, and that’s the end of his story.

Day 114 2 Kings 15-17

            More of the same.  A long line of kings filed through Israel and Judah.  None of them were really great guys, but most of them weren’t too horrible.  King Ahaz of Judah redecorated the temple with a foreign altar and used it for divinations.  Once upon a time God would have vaporized someone for a move like that, but I guess God is in the process of giving up on the Israelites not so there are no immediate repercussions.

            Eventually God completely turns His back on the Israelites and the king of Assyria conquers them and drives them out of the country, relocating them to Assyria.  At first the colonists he sends down to replace them are eaten by lions because the Assyrians don’t know anything about God or how to worship Him and not provoke Him into sending lions after them.  After the Assyrian king hears about these problems and sends a priest down to teach them about God.  They do a little bit of temple stuff, but they also keep worshiping their local gods.  This seems to appease God just enough to stop killing them with  lions, but still doesn’t really ingratiate them.

Day 111 2 Kings 6-8

            Aram has been stirring up trouble with Israel for some time now, but God is angry with Israel so basically both sides are losing the fight.  Aram’s army will be run off by a miracle, but only after really ruining Israel’s day.  In a siege on the city of Samaria, the food shortages were so bad that people were eating their kids.  This was something that Moses prophesied would happen to Israel when they angered God enough to make Him turn on them back in his last speech at the end of Deutoronomy.  In the end though, God makes the Aramian army run away and leave their camp and all their supplies, so the city isn’t taken or destroyed.

            The king of Aram got sick and sent an officer to inquire of Elisha whether he would get better or die of the sickness.  That seems like an odd move sine Elisha lives in Israel, but maybe it’s public knowledge that he’s not very patriotic.  The officer, a man named Hazael, asks Elisha about the king’s health and Elisha gives him a very strange answer, explaining that the king will die, but that the officer should go tell him that he will recover.  Then he stares the officer down until things get awkward, and starts crying.  When the officer, Hazael, asks him what is going on, Elisha says that he, Hazael, is going to kill tons of Israelites.  He will accomplish this because he’s going to be king of Aram.

            All this borderline gibberish is apparently exactly what Hazael needs to hear though to go back home and kill the king.  This reads different to me than most prophecies in the past.  Before, the prophecies we heard about sort of described things from a distance, either reffering to things happening generations into the future or about other people unaware of the prophecy or something like that.  This prophecy seems to be one of the major causes of the event being prophecied.  The text seems to imply that Hazael would not have killed the king if Elisha had not said that he was going to kill the king.

            I know that God tends to use people to fulfil prophecies anyway, but it’s interesting that this prophecy was the motivation for the fulfillment of itself.  It’s like a trick-shot.

Day 51 Numbers 23-25

            Balaam is brought to several hilltops around Jericho and the Jordan river where he could see the Israelite camp so that he could curse them.  Much to the chagrin of Balak and his people, Balaam kept blessing the Israelites every time he opened his mouth to prophecy.  He kept trying to explain that he doesn’t have any power to bless or curse anybody, but only repeat what God says.  After seven different ceremonies, Balaam has blessed Israel three times and systematically cursed every one of the other nations in the area, saying that Israel is going to destroy them.

            I think that at least some of these leaders he’s talking to must be descendants of Ishmael.  I’d like to see a chart or something that lays that out.

            While the Israelites are camped out near the Moabites, some of the men begin fraternizing with Moabite women.  I’m not sure if that’s allowed under the law or not, since the Moabite women aren’t under the dominion of any Israelite men, I’m not sure that there’s any rules against fornicating with them,

            The foreign women convince Israelite men to worship their Moabite Gods though, which infuriates God.  God sends an awful plague until Moses declares that every man who’s been consorting with the Moabites must be put to death.  While everyone’s praying about this around the entrance to the tent of meeting, someone who didn’t get the memo actually brings a Moabite woman into camp.  Eleazer sees them and grabs a spear.  He follows them all the way to the mans tent and then stabs the spear through the both of them.

            God makes a covenant with Eleazer to make his line a holy line of priests because his zeal was most comparable to the Lord’s zeal when it comes to enforcing the law.

Day 48 Numbers 16-17

            250 Israelites led by Korah, a Levite and a few Reubenites came to Moses saying that he had no right to act as though he were closer to God than any of the rest of them.  After all, God was with the entire assembly, not just Moses.  Long story short: the three main leaders were swallowed up by the Earth and all their followers were burned to death by God the same way that those two sons of Aaron’s were burned to death at the big party towards the end of Exodus.

            To try to develop a little more trust within the camp and hopefully prevent more killings in the near future, God told Moses to collect staves from each of the heads of the tribes, including Aaron’s staff representing the tribe of Levi.  He put them in the tabernacle overnight and the next morning Aaron’s staff had sprouted and started growing almonds.

            God said to put Aaron’s staff in front of the ark of their covenant as a reminder to people to have faith so He wouldn’t have to kill them all.  The people didn’t seem to take it that well though and started wailing and despairing in fear that God would kill anybody who came near the tabernacle.

Day 46 Numbers 11-13

            Once again, the people start to grumble about their hardships.  This whole time they have been eating the mana that falls to the ground with the dew and they’re getting tired of it.  They tried preparing it a few different ways, but it’s getting really old and they remember all the good food they had in Egypt.  They talk about how they were better off back there, so God sets some of them on fire.

            Moses goes to talk to God and begs Him to let some of Moses’s responsibilities rest on some other people.  He feels like a nurse-maid carrying the whole camp while none of them understand anything about what’s going on with God.  The Lord tells him to bring 70 men from all the tribes and He will make them prophets as well.  Since is was the griping about the food that started all this, He will also stuff all the complainers so full of meat that they’ll wish they’d never asked for it to begin with.  These people need to stop saying that they were better off in Egypt.  That really seems to piss God off.

            God says that He’s sending meat because He has heard the wailing of the people.  A huge amount of quail showed up in piles several feet deep all around the camp.  The language seems to imply to me that the quail was already dead when the Israelites went out to gather it, which would make them violate the law about dealing with dead things, but it’s not completely clear.  That would make sense though because in the next scene we hear about a terrible plague wiping out all the people who complained so much about wanting meat.

            Aaron and his wife start questioning Moses’s leadership a little bit.  Now that there are some other prophets around Moses doesn’t seem quite as special.  I’ve been thinking lately that Aaron is really positioned to have a lot of problems with his pride here.  He’s the high-priest of the whole civilization, which is a huge deal since this is supposed to be a nation of priests.  Within the temple hierarchy he is the biggest thing around, yet what are his duties?  Lighting some candles, overseeing the way the tabernacle components are cleaned and transported.  He does a lot of sacrifices for people, but that’s probably actually pretty tedious once the novelty wears off to be honest.  He’s like the head janitor of the camp.  All he does take care of all the day to day operations and whatever else Moses tells him God says to do.

            Anyway, God calls a meeting with all three of them, chews out Aaron and gives his wife leprosy.  Aaron goes to Moses, who then goes to God on her behalf and she is cured seven days later, but in the interim she has to live outside of camp.

            These little administrative matters taken care of, the camp continues on to Canaan, the promised land.  When they start getting close, Moses sends some spies in from all the tribes to scout out the land and the people in it.  They report back that the land is awesome and full of great fruit and stuff, but also populated by giants and assorted badasses living in big fortified cities and who would love nothing more than to eat little Israelite armies for breakfast.

            One of the scouts though, Caleb, insists that it will be fine and they should attack at once.  Caleb is confident that they will be victorious, after all, God told them that land was for them to have, right?

Day 22 Exodus 17-18

            The Israelites continue to complain to Moses.

            “Why did you take us from Egypt just so we could die of thirst?!”  They asked Moses, who kept explaining to them that they were not just complaining about him, but about God.  It’s was God’s plan they were following.  So shut up and do it already.  It sounds very frustrating.  He performed yet another miracle from the Lord, striking a rock which then poured out water for them.

            The Amalekites came out while Moses and his people were at Rephidim and they had to fight.  As long as Moses held up his arms, they had the upper hand, but whenever he dropped them, the Amalekites would start to win.  Moses got tired after a while and needed some guys to help him hold his arms up until the end, but they did and the Israelites fighting under Joshua won the day.  God told Moses that He would be at war with the Amalekites from now on and wipe them from the face of the Earth.

            I saw the latest Narnia movie in the theatre a little while ago and I know that it’s all supposed to be Christian Allegory, but I really don’t like the Character of Aslan and I think this passage has made me finally realize why.  In these stories from the Bible, I’m just starting to get into the parts where there’s a proper Israelite army and they can fight real battles.  As long as they do what God says though, they always win, completely.  Often they win without losing a single man or win even when they’re outnumbered five hundred to one or something ridiculous like that.  God has them completely covered.  On the other hand, when there are idols and deceitfulness and sin in the ranks, they’re on their own.  It’s either one or the other, God’s either on your side or he’s not, and He’ll let you know if you ask.  Aslan meanwhile, likes to play these games where you don’t know if he’s around or not.  If you ask him what you’re supposed to be doing he gives vague, fortune cookie answers.

            My wife says that the Chronicles of Narnia are supposed to be about Jesus, not the God of the Old Testament, but even when Jesus was around, he was sometimes not super-clear, but you could tell if you were on his good side or not at least.  That kind of mystic ineffable quality makes good supporting characters, but it  seems like more the territory of the holy ghost than the father or son.  Also, Jesus, while alive, was decidedly not interested in leading great epic battles.  So Aslan is backing armies and running the world like in the Old Testament, but refusing to give straight answers like the holy ghost.  If Aslan were running the battle with the Amalekites, Moses would have found his staff no longer worked until he walked out into the desert by himself to find God and listened to a monologue about faith first.

            Moses’s father in law, Jethro, comes out and visits him.  He was a Midianite priest, but now he says that the power of the Lord is undeniable and worships the God of the Israelites in stead.  Destroying the Egyptian Army and wiping the Amalikites from the face of the Earth makes for pretty powerful evangelism I guess.  After that conversation, he gives Moses some advice on how to properly lead people.  Moses had been making judgments and mediating for all of the Israelites and it was spreading him pretty thin.  Jethro told him to split the people up into administrative groups to handle their own disputes.  Moses is now the Israelite Supreme Court.  Only the most difficult of problems reach him.

Day 21 Exodus 14-16

God told Moses to go camp in this place by the Red Sea in stead of going aroind the north end of it into Canaan. When Pharaoh’s army shows up to kill them all, they believe the Israelites are lost and wandering the desert. The Israelites believe that too and promptly freak out and start blaming Moses for their eminent deaths at the hands of the Egyptians, because even being oppressed by slavery is better than getting stabbed by charioteers.

God commands Moses to hold his staff over the water and a dry path will appear. It takes all night for an east wind to dry a path through the sea bed, but the pillar of smoke they’d been following moves around to the back of the camp in between the Israelites and the Egyptian army. It lights the Isrealite camp as a pillar of fire, but casts darkness over the Egyptians so they can’t find anything. The rest plays out just like the cartoons and Sunday school stories. The Israelites walk through, then the waters close in and kill the Egyptians to a man.

I feel like there’s this pattern in how God gets people to worship Him. With Adam and Eve He just talked to them and hung out like another corporeal creature. It didn’t seem like they had to do much of anything, but God let them know that He had made everything and was in charge of everything and expected them to pass that along to all their descendants. With Noah, God again spoke directly with Noah but now He wasn’t around all the time, so He worked miracles all around Noah and his family so they would know He was in charge of things. When He started humanity over again with Noah and his family, it’s again assumed that the knowledge of God will continue on through all their descendants. Both times though, the message seems to run out of steam pretty quickly and people have all but forgotten about God within a few generations.

For Abraham then, God connects up with the family in the long term, working directly with Abraham’s line for generations, subtly helping them out and making things work out for them. This works better and, when Moses comes, the descendants of Abraham still hold onto some idea of what the Lord is about, but it sounds like it’s kind of a theoretical knowledge. No one really does anything about it. So now there’s a new chapter, no more subtly telling kings to be nice to the Jews or multiplying flocks to help out Abraham’s line, and no more working with one man and expecting him to pass the knowledge of God along to his family. God actually goes out of His way to prevent Pharaoh from giving in to Moses’s demands to make a big show for everyone to see. In Exodus 14:17-18 God says He hardened the hearts of the Egyptians so they’ll chase after Moses and then He will have the glory for killing Pharaoh’s army. It was a huge, flashy miracle and everyone saw it.

This change of tactics seems to sound again like God changing his mind about things. It reminds me though of the Tralfamadorians in Kurt Vonugut’s book Slaughterhouse 5, and a few other books of his too. The Tralfamadorians see time differently from us. They see all time at once, but they still exist in only one instant at a time. There’s a major revelation for the protagonist of the novel when they tell him about some mistakes they are going to make in the future. Billy Pilgrim can’t understand how they could know something’s a mistake and still go through with it, and they try to explain how it works, but Billy just can’t process it.

I’m not saying that I think God is using different methods because He’s making mistakes, but only that we don’t really know what omniscience entails. We assume that perfect foresight implies unchangingness, but that’s really naive since we can’t even get our heads around what perfect foresight even looks like. I can’t remember if I’ve seen anything so far about God claiming to be unchanging Himself, but it seems to come up a lot in church doctrine. I’ll have to keep an eye out for that claim specifically in the future.

In the end, God’s plan whips the Israelites into shape though. The grand display in front of the entire nation brings everyone into line and no one ever questions God for generations to come.

Just kidding. They actually start complaining and cursing Moses again in the very next chapter when they travel through the Sin Desert and there’s no good source of food or water there.

“We told you you should have left us alone” They gripe at Moses. “We may have been slaves, but at least we were fed in Egypt.”

So Moses explains (again) that God is running this show and that complaining to Moses and Aaron was complaining against God. God heard them though and sent a bunch of Quail to eat every night and every morning He frosted the ground with manna, which were like little bread crumbs that tasted like honey cakes. I think God was still working on making a point about how dependant the Israelites were on Him though because they weren’t allowed to store any extra food ever, but had to wait for God to send each serving.

Day 20 Exodus 11-13

There was only one plague left, the plague of the firstborn, where God declared He would kill every firstborn son, from the sons of the slaves to the prince of Egypt himself. God told Moses that this was the one that was going to change Pharaoh’s mind and they would finally be allowed to leave Egypt.

The bulk of this section of the book is about how the Israelites are supposed to prepare themselves. The last plagues all avoided the Israelites in Goshen automatically. The darkness didn’t touch them and the frogs and gnats and flies all just stayed away, but now Moses was given a very complex set of rules for avoiding the plague. They had to slaughter a lamb and smear a little of the blood on their doorway so God would know Israelites were there and not go in and kill anyone in that house. That’s the Sunday school version, but they also had to cook it a certain way and eat it with bread with no yeast in it, and then they had to be sure to eat it all, if there were any leftovers at all they had to burn them. Also, everyone was supposed to go ask their neighbors for pieces of silver and gold and God made all their Egyptian neighbors feel generous that day, or else made them feel terrified of the Israelites who kept cursing them all the time. Either way, they gave away lots of gold.

The Israelites also had to make a commitment to commemorate this plague every year with the Passover feast and nearly a month of spiritual services and prayer and special meals. A major theme is eating bread with no yeast in it.

The final obligation is that Israel’s first-born sons are now God’s, both man and animal. Not just now, but forever it sounds like. Everyone has to take their first born son and explain how the Passover works and why they do it and all about God. We’ve finally got our first dogma. Until now everyone’s relationship with God was completely personal. God told them to do stuff and did stuff for them and usually only seemed to really be with one person at a time. Now there’s a codified system of worship though, that everyone is supposed to do.

The fact that all the firstborn sons of the Israelites are now set aside for God is interesting given the plague that’s going on around them at the time. It’s like God is saying that the miracle happening here isn’t that He’s killing all these Egyptians, but that he’s saving all the Israelites from it. All those sons would be dead if it wasn’t for God interceding on their behalf so now they’re His, even though He’s the one who is running the plague anyway. That’s the kind of distinction you get to make though when you make the rules I guess.

Actually, now that I think about it it’s a lot like the old Pharaoh’s arrangement once everyone in the nation was his slave to have them return to their lands and farm them for him. It seems benevolent but it wouldn’t be possible unless Pharaoh had annexed all their grain to sell back to them to begin with, but then they’d all have starved to death if he hadn’t. Similarly, God not killing al those first-born Israelites seems benevolent except He’s the one killing all the other first-borns anyway, but if He didn’t do this, then the Israelites would be doomed to stay imprisoned in Egypt.

Maybe that’s kind of a thin comparison.

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 2 Genesis 4-7

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?