An Atheist Explores The Bible Part Two: In which God kills almost everyone and everything, and is then very sorry about it (Genesis 6-10)
Genesis 6-10
In which God kills almost everyone and everything, and is then very sorry about it.
Genesis 6
In which God kills almost everyone and everything, and is then very sorry about it.
Genesis 6
“And God said
unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with
violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.”
There’s an intriguing little vignette at the start of
this chapter where the “sons of God” make wives of the “daughters of men” to
create “mighty men of renown”. Now, I think
that the intent is that the sons of God just means men, but the passage kind of
sounds like its implying a kind of race of demi-gods. But, of course, if God has
sons at this point in the narrative it kind of undermines the whole thrust of
the New Testament, so I suppose my first supposition is correct. Pity, because
it sounds kind of cool.
There then follows a fairly repetitive section about God
then regretting having created the earth because of all the wickedness and
stuff, apart from Noah. There’s nothing here to suggest why Noah is singled out
as some kind of exemplar of goodness – he Just Is, okay? And so God tells Noah
he’s going to flood the earth, and to build an ark and to take his family, two
of every kind of animal and food for them all. We even get some pretty detailed
building instructions for the ark:
“And this is the
fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the
ark shall be
three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it
thirty cubits. A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou
finish it above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second,
and third stories
shalt thou make it.”
I looked up
cubits, which are a fairly variable kind of measurement but the average seems
to be, let’s say, 50cm for ease. That makes the ark 150m x 25m x 15m, so the
three decks must be approx 5m high each, I would guess. That’s actually pretty
big, especially for a wooden ship. By comparison Nelson’s flagship, HMS
Victory, is 70m x 15m x8m. A typical
bireme was about 80m x 10m. The Titanic was 270m x 28m x 20m. So it’s big, but
not that big. And of course, you’d need to figure out what on earth “gopher
wood” is.
And… that’s
about it for this chapter. It’s preparation for what comes next.
Genesis 7
“And the rain
was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.”
After a bit of
reiteration of Ch. 7 we get the actual flood itself (I was going to say on the
17th Feb, but the actual quote is “seventeenth day of the second
month”, and there you get into the issues of which calendar is being used.
Hebrew? Maybe ancient Assyrian? I’m sure this kind of detail has occupied
biblical scholars for centuries. And so the “fountains of the great deep” and
the “windows of heaven” are opened and the earth is flooded. Noah, his sons and
their un-named wives are the only people saved. One assumes that aquatic
creatures are okay, although salinity could be a factor in their survival.
Now, wait one
minute, though. “Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the
mountains were covered” saith Verse 20. Now, if we go by out Wikipedia-based
definition of a cubit of 50cm, that makes these mountains less than 8m tall.
Either “cubits” is being used in a very loose term or, perhaps more likely,
this follows on from previous verses where the floodwaters creep ever upwards,
and this is the last few meters that takes out even the tops of mountains. In
order to have covered all land, this would have to take into account Mt.
Everest, meaning that the ark was floating at a height of 8855.5m. But again,
this is one of those details that doesn’t really matter – of course it’s not,
it’s a mythological truth and you aren’t supposed to analyse it like that!
Also, as any
fule kno, the flood lasts forty days and forty nights, right? But then Verse 24
gives us “And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days”
which throws us a bit of a loop. So … is it 40 days of rain followed by another
150 days before the waters subside? Again, irrelevent details really, but you
shouldn’t include concrete values if you’re just going to mess about with them.
Genesis 8
“Also he sent forth a dove from him,
to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground”
Okay, I should
have been patient with the last chapter as it seems that, yes, indeed, the
flood water stayed another 150 days after the rain had finished. It isn’t until
the 1st day of the 1st month that anyone leaves the ark,
so they’ve been stuck on board nearly a year (by somebody’s calendar). Here’s the origins of the symbol (s) for
peace, a dove with an olive branch. I do wonder what happens with the raven,
though, and why that’s inserted. Are we meant to interpret this to mean that
the raven doesn’t return because it’s a naughty type of animal? Or did it just
drown somewhere? Seems a little unfair on the raven, really. I presume that the
two ravens had reproduced during the time on the ark, otherwise there’d just be
one left. Ditto the hapless beasts that are sacrificed at the end of the
chapter. Other than that, not a lot happens here other than I can’t help but
think the world would be a horrible sight after nearly a year of flooding, just
a morass of mud and debris and bloated corpses. Lovely.
Genesis 9
“I do set my
bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the
earth”
More aftermath
of The Flood in this chapter. Interesting to note that the words “go forth and
multiply” are not used here – these are the biblical equivalent of “Elementary
my dear Watson”, “Play it again, Sam” and “Beam me up, Scotty”. Everyone knows
them, everyone uses them. Never said. “Be fruitful, and multiply”, actually,
peeps.
The Flood is
one of the OT stories that I really don’t like, for several reasons, even
though it’s probably got some basis in race memory of catastrophic flooding in
the Fertile Crescent. For some reason the infeasibility of it irks me more than
other biblical stories (perhaps because it tries too hard with the numbers
rather than just rolling with the allegory), but it’s the rainbow thing here
that really annoys me, because God is acting like an abusive parent or spouse who, having
lashed out in anger, is now being very sorry and making promises never to do it
again. Yeah great, thanks. We’ll see, I bet there’s more smiting to be done
yet.
And the
patriarchal douchery continues at the end of the chapter where Noah, probably
suffering post-traumatic stress disorder after being stuck on a ship for a year
with every kind of animal and no hope of rescue, makes some homemade wine and
gets drunk on it. Whilst naked. His three sons find him like this and, as far
as I can determine, respectfully cover him up. When he wakes up he, for some
reason, is angry at them for this and, even more bizarrely, decides to take it
out on his grand-son Canaan, who WASN’T EVEN THERE! I mean, dude. This is
supposed to be the best of humanity and he’s acting like a total bell-end.
Besides, as we’ve already determined, nudity is fine with God, it’s being ashamed of it
that’s wrong.
Genesis 10
“Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah,
Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and unto them were sons born after the flood.”
More
begetting. This is the kind of chapter that Reverend Lovejoy from the Simpsons
always uses in his sermons, a dry list of evocatively exotic names and places.
I mean, “And Ophir, and Havilah, and Jobab: all these were the sons of
Joktan. And their dwelling was from
Mesha, as thou goest unto Sephar a mount of the east”. It’s hardly riveting
stuff, but at the same time it carries a certain charm, not least that many of
the names can be linked to fantastically ancient historical people and places.
Nimrod, for example, the only character in this chapter to get any kind of
epithet, likely refers to a Mesopotamian king from around 2000BC, which links
all this geopolitics into an actual period of history, one that’s a
breath-taking distance from our own time and yet has been retained to us,
albeit somewhat skewed and shifted, in the form of this writing.
And of course
it’s a culture that at the time I’m writing this some numb-nuts are trying to
destroy in the name of their religion, despite the fact that it shares a
heritage with this one, but somehow they’ve managed to take all the “behaving
like a pillock” parts without any of the “respect for tradition” parts, so I
have to say even though this chapter is dry as desert-parched brick ruins, it’s
mere existence is an important part of human history and literature. And that
was a hell of a run-on sentence. Sorry about that!
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