129 2 Chronicles 13-17

  Abijah succeeded Rehoboam as king of Judah.  The text very conspicuously omits any mention of Abijah being of the anointed line of David, which is interesting given how heavily Abijah leaned on this anointed bloodline thing when he railed against Jeroboam and Israel.  And he must have at least been on good terms with God because he eventually angered Israel into attacking Judah and fended them off handily because, as the book says, God was on his side.
  That's pretty much all Abijah did during his reign though. Next king:

  Abijah's son king Asa ruled over a period of peace.  He was a big fan of the Lord and oversaw the removal of all kinds of shrines and ashera poles which I guess were all there during his father's reign?  After a decade the cushites came and attacked though, leaving a lush, Indian paradise to come take over a whole bunch of desolate Middle-eastern tumbleweeds.  This seems a little bit like Oregon invading Arizona to me, but Judah was a power-house around this time so maybe it was just a matter of principle.
  Anyway, Asa was tight with God so he won easily and the cushites went home defeated.  Then God spoke to the prophet Azariah and told him to tell Asa that He would be found if Asa would seek Him and that Asa could turn Judah back toward God if he tried.  Asa did try and had all the pagan idols in Judah destroyed (again?  more thoroughly?) and restored the temple that Solomon had built.
  Honestly, I didn't realize that Judah had turned away from God since Solomon's time.  This is all happening withing the "18 year reign of Jeroboam" in Israel, so it's not like we're looking at a long, slow decline over several generations here.  Judah must have forgotten about God literally within months of the death of Rehaboam.  I guess there's probably a lesson there about how much damage a lame representative can do to the church.  David did pretty well and the nation flourished.  Solomon did pretty well and the nation flourished.  Rehoboam was kind of a jerk, spending the credibility that his predecessors had earned, and the nation splits, both side descending almost immediately into idolatry.

  Later in king Asa's reign, he stripped his grandmother of her political power because she promoted the worship of foreign gods, and he sent a bunch of treasure to the king of Damascus to restore a treaty from back in Solomon's day.  This latter move proved to be a mistake because, even though it worked out well in the short term and Israel stopped causing trouble with Judah, Asa relied on this treaty in stead of relying on the Lord.  A prophet told Asa as much and Asa was angry with him and put him in prison, then started oppressing the people.  I think the moral there is that once you start turning your back on God, it's a small step to becoming a huge jerk.  So Asa had a good start, but eventually screwed up being in charge.  Next king:

Jehosephat was the son of Asa, but the text also refers to David being his ancestor so now we finally have some evidence that we're still talking about the line of David here.  Jehosephat fortified the border with Israel and removed the high places and Ashera poles.  He's the third king in a row to have removed the high places and Ashera poles, so I guess the people must have been just sort of constantly erecting these things all through these times.  Jehosephat sent teachers and Levites around through Judah teaching people about the Lord.  Smaller groups in the area like the Philisitnes and the Arabs paid tribute to Jehosephat.  It's interesting that a pretty solid indicator of how tight the king is with God seems to be what the neighboring pagan tribes think about him.  Whenever a Jewish leader is really on the up an up, all the key gentiles in the area also think that he's great.  God said in Exodus that He would reveal himself to anyone who honestly sought Him, although he was talking specifically to Moses and the Israelites.  There seems to be a theme though of foreigners outside of the Jewish tradition still knowing that God is God, and supporting whomever God supports.  Balaam and Malchizedek come to mind specifically.

Day 124-8 1 Chronicles 15-29

            David brought the ark of the lord to Jerusalem and celebrated with a lot of music.  He was about to build a temple for the ark too, but God told him not to via a nearby prophet.  God also told David that He would raise up David’s son and establish his rule forever.  This son would build a house for God and God will be his father, never withdrawing His love.  David’s son was Solomon who did build the temple and I don’t think God ever did get really angry with Solomon.  Israel hardly lasted forever though, under the rule of David’s line.  It split into two nations and then a few generations later both were taken prisoner and carted off to Babylon.  I think a lot of people would argue that this promise to David is actually about Jesus.  The word son seems to be pretty much interchangeable with a more general idea of a descendant in a lot of these stories and Jesus was a descendant of David’s.

            With God happy, David won battle after battle with the Israelite army against everyone around them.  Everything was going great until David ordered a census taken of all the fighting men in Israel.  For some reason, this was a horrible, sinful thing for him to have done.  This story is really strange, but it already came up at the end of 2 Samuel so there’s no real need to go over it again.

            David had a son, Solomon, and he wanted to start early cashing in on God’s promises about the son of David.  David made a lot of preperations for the temple Solomon would build, saying that Solomon was young and inexperienced so he was just getting things set up for him, he was just helping.  My mom used to help me write essays the same way when I was young.  It can be a little frustrating.

            At the end of his life, David made Solomon king of Israel and delegated groups of Levites to different tasks around the temple according to their families.  Then chapters 23 through 26 of 1 Chronicles give a breakdown of the Levite family tree and the divisions of the priests.  Levites were assigned by David to be musicians, gatekeepers, treasurers and other things in the new temple.  The word prophecy is used around the musicians a lot, which seems like a new development.  The role of music so far in scripture seems like it’s mostly been to talk about how awesome God is or to record some historical event in verse so people will remember it better.  Music seems to be a big deal to David though and these temple musicians sound like they actually have some connection to God through their music.  This raises further issues though because, if that’s true,  and being a musician is supposed to give these Levites the ear of the Lord, David is way overstepping his authority appointing them.  Kings don’t get to make prophets, prophets make kings.

            The rest of the book is a list of military and government officials under David’s administration up until Solomon is crowned king and David handed over to him the plans for the temple.  David had drawn up plans for every part of the temple in such detail that there were already designated weights for the gold to be used for the forks and sprinkling bowls inside.  David was not taking any chances on this temple not turning out the way he wanted it.  From the story in 1 Kings it sounded like Solomon had no trouble planning and building the temple on his own, but by this account, it seems that all Solomon really needed to do was say go and David’s temple would essentially start building itself.

            David then took up a collection from the whole assembly for the building fund, gave thanks to God, had Solomon acknowledged as the new king of Israel a second time, and then died.

Day 120 1 Chronicles 6

            The sons of Levi.  All Levites had special title within the theocracy of Israel, but only the sons of Aaron could actually approach the altar to offer sacrifices.  Other Levites were assigned to various other tasks related to keeping up the tabernacle, and later the temple.

            It’s tempting to try to think of the Levites, and especially the priests, in kind of the same way people think of the Vatican or the president of the LDS church or something where these guys are in charge of the temple because they have a direct line to God.  They’re listening to Him so we need to listen to them.

            This doesn’t seem to be the case though through the last couple books.  When priests are mentioned, they are usually referred to as so-and-so’s priest, like the king’s priests for example.  Chronicles mentions that King David assigned a bunch of Levites to be in charge of music in the temple, so obviously the king is able to boss the priests around.  Even Aaron back in Moses’s time was aware of (and not very happy about) the fact that he and his sons were kind of like glorified janitors, with no authority beyond doing exactly what the law and Moses told them to.

            The guys with the direct line to God are the prophets, who have the authority to anoint kings themselves.  So it looks like it goes God, prophets, kings, priests, other levites, and then the general public in terms of who gets to tell whom what to do.  The trick is though, the kings are in charge of the day to day affairs of the country and, more importantly, the army, so there’s an enforcement issue when prophets roll in and try to tell kings what to do.

            1 Chronicles 6:55 says that Hebron was made a city of refuge and given to the Levites, but back in the book of Joshua, Hebron was given to Caleb, the scout who had originally gone out with Joshua to reconnoiter Canaan for Moses and came back with a positive attitude about it, so there’s a bit of a conflict there.  It turns out the city itself, and the pasture land around it, were given to the Levites, but the fields and villages in the area were given to Caleb.  That must have been pretty awkward.  Herders and planters didn’t get along under the best of circumstances in the ancient world.  Also, I think I mentioned before how Caleb really seems to get the short end of the stick.  Joshua is basically the unofficial king of Israel, while Caleb, who we’re told did most of the same stuff Joshua did, got Hebron thirty years later.  Now we find out that e didn’t even get all of Hebron, just some of the leftover bits of Hebron.

            I’ll bet that being right next to a city of refuge really brought down local property values too.

Day 86 I Samuel 9-12

            There was a Benjaminite kid named Saul who was a full head taller than everyone else.  He goes out one day looking for ome sheep that have wandered off and eventually finds his way to Samuel, who old him his sheep had already been found and also, he will be made king of Israel soon.

           

            When the time comes to choose a king,  all of Israel meets and Samuel starts drawing lots, which was not a random thing, but a way of telling what God wanted.  I think it would be frowned upon in most Christian churches today, but that was the way they made a lot of decisions back then.  Sure enough, Samuel drew Saul’s lot and he was made king.

            Everybody went home pretty unimpressed that the crown should go to kind of a backwater little clan, but not long after a town was attacked by ammonites and Saul led an army and defeated them though and everyone loved him.  That seems to be about the quickest way to impress the Israelites, raising an army and winning a battle.

            Once Saul is accepted as king, a bunch of his followers want to find those guys from before who made snarky comments about Saul being king and kill them as an example and a tribute to Saul, but he denies them because this is a good day in which the Lord has saved Israel.

            Samuel chews everyone out one last time for having a king, but tells them to just do the best they can to follow the Law still anyway.  I think it’s really interesting that God chose Saul as king, or that he chose anyone as king really.  We’ve seen that God has no trouble killing His people and unleashing terrible plagues among them when they act against Him, but I guess wanting a human king isn’t really a sin per se because God never told them not to do it, it’s just kind of stupid because God is in charge of the entire universe so they’re just adding another level of middle management to their own nation.

Day 85 I Samuel 4-6

            God punishes Eli’s sons and the rest of Israel by letting the Philistines win an important battle against them.  After the first defeat, the ark of the covenant is brought out, but God isn’t with Israel so Eli’s two sons are killed and the ark taken by the Philistines.  When Eli heard about this, he fell over and died too.  Samuel had gained quite a reputation by now though as someone with a direct line to God, so he was in a prime position to move in politically.

            Meanwhile, the Philistines were jazzed about having captured the God of the Israelites and took the ark to live with a giant statue of their god, Dagon.  When they came back the next morning, the statue of Dagon was on its belly on the ground in front of the ark of the covenant.  This happened a couple more times, along with some nasty curses and stuff.  Everyone started getting bad tumors.

            They moved the ark to another city, but then that city started having problems too.  Finally they decided that the ark was more trouble than it was worth and they needed to give it back.

            Once the ark was back in Israel’s hands, Samuel got everyone to worship the Lord properly again without trying to mix in a bunch of foreign gods and idols, and then organized an army to meet the Philistines, who had still been steadily soaking up more and more of Israel’s land.

            When Samuel prayed for God to help them in the battle, there was so much thunder and noise that the Philistines were routed before the battle even started.  Samuel’s army just waded through and killed them all.

            After such a high-profile victory, of course Samuel was the people’s choice for a leader.  For years he did laps around Israel mediating and teaching.  They wanted him to give them a king too, but he balked at that.  God was supposed to be the king, that was what was to set them apart from other people, what made them set apart for God.  The Israelites specifically wanted a king to make them more like the other nations around them though, and finally Samuel gave into their demands for a king.

            God told him first to explain to the people that a king would roll in and take all their best stuff for himself and his court and require taxes and tribute and service and all this material stuff on top of what was to be set aside for God.  Samuel di his best to convince them that they didn’t want a king, but the people had made up their big, loud, communal mind and they would not be swayed.

            Samuel told God about their demands for a king and He said to give them one.

            I have a friend who’s an anarchist as well as a Christian.  Well, he might not identify himself as an anarchist, but he’s sympathetic to their cause.  I don’t agree with him all the time in his interpretations of scripture, but I feel like the last couple books have really promoted an anarchistic political system.  Obviously there are clans and priests and all these official sounding social artifacts, but in practice, the way things work is that a need arises and then God drops in a judge with the skills needed to resolve the situation.  If there’s a battle that needs to be fought, God calls up a good general and tells him to build an army.  If there’s a whole bunch of Philistines that are going to need to be put in their place, God releases a super-human psychopath to terrorize them.  If there had been some great need to build a relationship with the Latin tribes in Italy, God would have called a judge who was really into the shipping industry or something.

            Now contrast that system with America today.  If there’s a battle to be fought, we have a standing military already prepared to keep us safe.  If there’s a famine or a natural disaster, we have federal programs already set up to deal with them, the national guard, FEMA, and so on.  This reminds me of another facet of the arguments made in Steven Levitt’s Ishmael which I mentioned several times back in Genesis.  Levitt opines through the titular character that it’s ridiculous to insist upon such a high degree of personal control over the world as we exercise in our culture.

            On a personal level, Jesus talked about how we shouldn’t spend all of our energy worrying about where our clothes or shelter or even our next meal are going to come from because those things are under God’s control.  When we spend all our energy trying to bring them under our own control, it’s disrespectful and only serves to show our own ignorance, but I’m getting ahead of myself now.

            I’m interested to see how this king thing works out.

Day 80 Judges 10-12

            A couple more judges came and went apparently without doing very much.  Jael’s three-verse story sounds like a nursery rhyme.  It seems like the average reign these days is only around 20-30 years as opposed to some of the older heroes of the faith who were the heads of their clans for a hundred years or more.  I wonder is people are still dying younger or if there’s a lot of political turmoil.

            Israel angered God again by worshipping other gods and the Lord again delivered them into the hands of their neighbors.  They cried and apologized and threw out their idols though, and eventually God said He would fix things for them.  Again.

            Jephthah takes the job leading Israel against the Ammonites, who are trying to reclaim the land the Israelites took from them back when the Israelites were conquering everybody.  Jephthah is told that he will be king after he rids the land of Ammonites.

            He delivers a pretty eloquent rebuttal to the Ammonite king’s claim to the land, explaining that they were given that land by their God, which is different than just taking it form the Ammonites.  Also, that happened like 300 years ago so the statute of limitations is up on this land.  The Ammonite king is not surprisingly resistant to this line of logic so Jephthah goes and kills him.

            He gets a little too excited about it though and promises to sacrifice the first thing he sees of his to the Lord as soon as he gets back home.  That thing turns out to be his young daughter.  She’s surprisingly accepting of her own sacrifice, although she does ask to go into the hills for a couple months to weep with her friends first.

            The Ephraimites were upset that they weren’t included in the fight with the Ammonites, but Jephthah kind of blows them off.  Actually Jephthah conquers the place where Ephraimites cross the Jordan river and starts killing every Ephraimite that tries to cross it.  In the 6 years he rules, 42000 Ephraimites are killed trying to cross.  That’s about 20 a day.

            The rulers stay in power for even less time now.  There’s a series of judges who all stay less than ten years.  The book is not forthcoming on how they really served the Lord, if at all, but they had lots of sons, and owned lots of donkeys.  So that’s something I guess.

Day 64 Deuteronomy 21-23

            The following things are not allowed under the Law:

Denying your first-born son his rightful inheritance because you don’t like his mother

Leaving the body of a criminal on display on a pole overnight

Seeing your neighbor’s animal wandering off and not stopping it

Taking a mother bird from the side of the road with her young

Not building a railing around your roof

Planting two kinds of seed in your field

Plowing with an ox and a donkey together

Wearing cloths of more than one kind of cloth woven together

wearing a cloak without tassels           

Littering in the camp

Handing over a runaway slave to their master

Being a shrine prostitute

Having anything to do with the money made by a shrine prositute

Charging another Israelite interest

Harvesting in your neighbors fields, although you may snack in them as long as you take none home with you.

Marrying your father’s wife

            The following things prevent one from entering the tabernacle to worship:

Having something wrong with your testicles

Being descended from a forbidden marriage

Being an Ammonite or Moabite

            The following things will get you killed with rocks

Disrespecting your parents

Raping a woman in the city or in the country

Being raped in a city

Sleeping with another man’s wife

Sleeping with a virgin pledged to another man

Cheating on your husband

Cheating on your fiancé

            I would feel a lot better about sifting through these piles of strange rules if I understood better what my relationship was as a Christian to the law of Moses.  Jesus says later on that he’s not there to change the law, but He very clearly does, or at least changes the way it affects us.  I’ve never seen a Christian who takes the Law seriously.

            At least not the whole law.  Sometimes people like to latch on to a specific verse or two when there’s politics involved.

            I guess it may be more complicated than this once I get to what Jesus specifically said, but it seems like we either have to follow these rules or we don’t.  I don’t understand this kind of half-obedience, half-unaffected attitude that I see in American Christian culture.

Day 56 Numbers 35-36

            God commands the creation of cities for the Levites to live in.  There are to be forty eight towns all together and six of them will be towns of refuge.  If you kill someone accidently and are afraid of that person’s family taking revenge on you, you can move to a city of refuge and you’re safe from vengeance as long as you stay there.  Once the high priest dies, you’re safe forever and you can leave.  It’s important that this is only true if it’s an accidental death though.  This section differentiates very strongly between accidently killing someone and intentionally murdering them.  This is not the first time in Numbers that the idea of accidental versus intentional sin is discussed.  It seems like a bit of a theme in this book.  God did not hand down the sacrificial laws so that you could buy your way out of punishments; he created this system as a means of recovering from accidental rule-breaking so that God can still stand to be around you.

            God Himself told Moses that He couldn’t travel with the Israelites because they were too wicked, too disobedient for Him to be around, so I wonder how it is that God had such an amicable relationship with Abraham or his sons.  I mean, I know they didn’t have this same covenant so Abraham wasn’t actually breaking commandments back then, but God is saying that He can’t stand to be around someone who doesn’t wash their cloths right or who burns incense to Him the wrong way.  Did God’s preferences change in the intervening couple hundred years?  Is God’s disgust based on the Israelites’ disobedience, so like it’s only abhorrent to God, not because it’s something He doesn’t like per se, but just because He told them not to do it?  This book raises as many questions as it does answers sometimes.

            I mean the Bible, not the book of Numbers.  Numbers is actually pretty straightforward.

            Most of the time.

            The very last chapter outlines some logistical problems that have come up from those sisters from before inheriting their father’s land in chapter 27.  Some guys from the (half)tribe of Manasseh come to Moses and the heads of the Israelite families and point out that if those women, who were from their tribe, went off and married men from other tribes, then their husbands would absorb their holdings.  That means that land that was allocated for the tribe of Manasseh could be acquired by someone from Judah or Dan or whatever.  This transfer of land, under the law, would persist even through a year of Jubilee when all bought land is returned to the original owner.  That’s a real problem because the boundaries of the tribal lands are kind of holy, and this loophole could muddy those borders a lot over a few generations.  Moses and the elders patched it up with a ad hoc little piece of legislation decreeing that any women who inherit land in such a way have to marry within their own tribes.  Bang, done, next.

Day 36 Leviticus 16-18

            God tells Moses to tell Aaron that he’s not allowed to just come into the sanctuary whenever he pleases.  He has to make some special sacrifices first to account for his own sins and the sins of the whole rest of the camp.  All the sins of the people get loaded onto a goat (the scapegoat) which is then released out into the wilderness.  He needs to do this once a year.

            Eating blood is forbidden because of something to do with life being in the blood.  Anything you kill you have to drain before you eat it and cover its blood with Earth.

            Sex with your close relatives is not allowed.  I assume the definition of a close relative must have been something that was obvious to the Israelites.  It must have been very specific because Abraham married his sister, Isaac married his cousin’s daughter and Jacob married two of his cousins and that all seemed to be okay.  Although Simeon slept with Jacob’s wife and Leviticus also expressly forbids bedding your father’s women, and taking two sisters as your wives is also forbidden and Jacob did that, so maybe these rules just weren’t enforced until after Moses got them.  That seems fair.

            A lot of the rules for who you’re not allowed to sleep with involve not dishonoring friends and family members by sleeping with their wives.  I feel like a lot of care is being taken to specifically include “don’t sleep with your uncle’s wife,” don’t sleep with your son’s wife,” “don’t sleep with your neighbor’s wife.”  Was it okay to sleep with other people’s wives?  I know that neighbor in the old testament is ideally supposed to cover all Israelites right?  But even that’s not a very strong rule because there still doesn’t seem to be any rule against sleeping with your slaves or unwed girls or foreigners.

            You can’t have sex with other men or with animals and you cannot sacrifice your children to Moloch.  I know that this passage about sleeping with other guys gets a lot of air time when my fellow Christians are looking for a reason to dislike the gays.  I think that it’s important to keep perspective here though.  I’m not saying that we should ignore Leviticus when we’re deciding how to run our lives, but we are only about two chapters past the part about how menstruating makes you so unclean that you contaminate everything that you touch for two weeks.  Also, no more shellfish or bacon according to Leviticus and we, as a church, don’t seem to have a problem with that, so I’m hesitant to take someone seriously when they get too bent out of shape about one verse while ignoring everything around it.  I want to keep an eye on this issue though.  I think the Bible can be kind of vague about sexual sins sometimes, especially homosexuality.  And it’s so politically charged that it’s hard to get straight answers from anybody sometimes.  I guess that’s one disadvantage to reading secondary sources.

One month check-in

  I've got to start writing shorter posts.  I'm already through most of the advance posts I wrote before I started and I need to stay at least a week a head before I go out of town at the end of February.  I got a gift card for some Google ads in January so I went ahead and made a couple.  They were under review for something like two weeks before anything actually went online, which is really weird.  According to the Google AdWords website it should only take a day or two.  Maybe they're extra careful when they see ads with religious content.
  I certainly would be.
  Since the ads went up though I've seen a huge spike in traffic.  I had basically given up on AdWords, but then a couple days ago I noticed that suddenly as many people had clicked through the blog in one night as had the entire previous lifetime of this project.  I'm certainly not going to keep putting ads up once it ceases to be free, but it looks like I'm getting myself a nice little reader base.  This is good news.  Hopefully I'll continue to see some regular traffic after the ads are gone.  Tell your friends.

  I seem to be getting a surprising amount of traffic from India.  I back-tracked some links to a blog about the aggression of Christian missionaries in India.  It seems to focus on rebroadcasting news items that expose people making a bad name for the Christian Church, of whom there never tends to be a shortage.
  I'm glad there's a connection between our sites though.  Obviously I don't agree with their view that Christianity is a cancer on the face of India, but I think that the best thing for Christians to do when faced with these opinions is not to yell and argue, but to simply do our best to not be assholes.  The mainstream media is great at giving a little slice of air time to every nut job who hates his neighbor and wants to try to legitimize his problems by calling them Christian values.  We can't compete with that.  If we model our lives off of Jesus's ministry then honestly, I don't think we should be trying to compete with it.
  "Love the Lord your God...Love you're neighbor as yourself.  All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments" Mathew 22:37-40 Pardon the paraphrasing.

Day 3 Genesis 8-11

The flood recedes. God tells Noah and his family to leave the ark, release the animals and go repopulate the Earth. God sends a rainbow as a promise that he’ll never flood the Earth again and there will always be summer and winter, heat and cold as long as we have the Earth.

Afterword, Noah gets drunk and his son Ham makes fun of him for falling asleep naked in his tent. Presumably after his brothers tattle on him, Noah curses Ham and says he will be his brothers’ servant and his sons will be his brothers’ sons’ servants. Some translations say for like three generations, some say pretty much forever. Later some Bible scholars decided that Ham’s descendants were black people and Japhath’s descendants became Europeans. This was the justification for slavery for a few hundred years.

Ham did give rise to the Canaanites though, so they’re all going to get killed later anyway. Shem’s sons were the first Semites, who became the Jews.

The tower of Babel gets really weird though. Right in the middle of this story following Noah’s family line to Abraham, smash cut to Babylonia where some guys (Semites?) are building a tower, a monument to their own greatness to keep them all together. God comes by and sees the tower and panics.

“Oh, shit.” God says to himself “If these guys can build that tall, brick building, they can do anything.”

Then God starts speaking to someone just off camera, other Gods it sounds like, and says “We need to ruin this political unity and keep these men fighting each other or they’re going to be big trouble for us.”

Now this, aside from not fitting in with the narrative it’s interrupting, sounds like everyone else’s religion at the time of Moses. The Gods are like us but more powerful, and they’re also kind of dicks a lot of the time. I won’t say that I don’t believe this is a legit part of the Bible, I just think that if you insist on believing that the entire book is completely literal, you’ve got some real issues that need to be addressed here. I feel like taking this passage to heart means I have to make a decision about what kind of God I believe in, because it seems for all the world to completely contradict what I know about God via Jesus.

I understand that there are plenty of intelligent, educated fundamentalists, but I think that insisting on a literal reading of the Bible is, more often than not, a cop-out by people who don’t know that much about the book in order to not have to learn any more. If you allow the context surrounding the writing to affect your reading, then you have to actually know about who wrote what when and what was going on in their part of the world at the time. Not always, but often, and to a great detriment to established church doctrine.

Moses wrote the first few books of the Bible and much of it was already ancient folklore at that time, especially these first few books of Genesis. Did God inspire Moses to only write down certain stories and to modify them so they were perfectly, literally true? Maybe, I haven’t come across anything in the Bible so far claiming that to be the case, but I’m certainly not claiming otherwise. But, neither am I willing to hang my faith on the literal veracity of the story of the Tower of Babel.