The Bible: The Book of Genesis Part One

Most everyone is familiar with the stories from the book of Genesis, it is where many of the traditional Bible stories come from.  I'll go through the important parts and sum it up with some commentary and alternate translations here and there.  Also, this is a big job so I'm breaking it up into parts.

The book starts with the creation of the world.  Creation is said to have taken place in six days, however an interesting translation point is that the word for days can also be meant to mean generations.  Here I think that rather than focusing on the time involved, the important point is that God thought His creation was good.  Evolution is a fact of science, and I don't think that it is necessarily opposite to the teachings of creationism.  It is possible that God created the world to evolve and that man evolved from whatever animal you wish to point to (monkeys, fish, etc).  In the Bible it could say that God created man and woman on the sixth day (or generation) to point out that at the end of creating everything else, man had evolved to be what is thought of as modern man in the species.  Here are the lists of what God made in each day:

1. Day and Night.
2.  Earth's atmosphere.
3.  Land and oceans are separated.  Plants and trees are created.
4.  Sun, moon and stars are created.
5.  Sea creatures and birds.
6.  Land animals and people are created.
7.  Day of rest.

Now, skeptics may say that the Earth is not the oldest thing in the solar system, so it couldn't have happened this way.  I agree that Earth is not the oldest thing in this universe and it must have happened in a different order.  This doesn't disprove God, just that the people who wrote (or rather told, as the Bible was an oral tradition before it was written down) this creation story didn't understand science as we  understand it now and wrote it in a way that they could understand.  The message to take from this story isn't the days or generations, time period, specifics of the story - but the fact that God made the universe and He thought it was good.  After each passage in the Bible describing the creation of each bit of the universe, God looks at what He has made and He says that it is good.

In the creation story, God is Elohim.  When the story of Adam and Eve begins, God gives his more personal name - Yahweh Elohim.  This to me says that God wants to be known personally by mankind where before he was the One High God, creator of all, now he is a personal God because he finally has made a being that is sentient enough to walk with Him.

God names his creations Adam and Eve.  Adam in Hebrew means "mankind" and there are scholars who argue that at this point in the Bible, God creates a species of people not just one man.  In this scenario, the story of the garden of Eden would be a metaphor for how the species fell, not a factually specific story.  In the story, God makes Eve out of Adam's rib.  Eve is described as a "helper" for Adam, which many people have in the past considered to mean Eve was to be inferior to Adam.  I don't believe this is true as God Himself is described as a "helper" to mankind in the rest of the Old Testament.  God is certainly not inferior to man, and Eve is not inferior to Adam. 

God gives Adam and Eve the responsibility of respecting and caring for the Earth and all its inhabitants.  In Hebrew, instead of the word till, the word that God uses is serve and keep.  I think that this is especially important for today's people.  Being that the Judaic people (Jews, Christians and Muslims) are the majority in most of the economically advanced countries, I assume that most people have forgotten that it is our job to preserve the earth instead of destroying it.  Too many people remember the fact that God gave all of this to us, and forget that we're put in the position of servant to it - to keep the earth whole, unpolluted and as close to how it was at creation as possible.  I think a great environmentalist action would be to remind the world's Christians (many of whom are at the highest positions in corporations that do the most polluting) that we have been tasked by God to take care of the earth.

Adam and Eve fall from the grace of God.  God gives them Eden, where everything is always wonderful, no sin happens, lives are forever and all food and shelter is readily available.  He lets them take from any tree or plant they want save one - the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  If they eat from it, they will surely die.  The serpent comes in and tells Eve that she won't die but will in fact be like the gods if she eats from that tree.  Eve sees that the fruit looks good and she and Adam eat from it.  They realize they are naked and sew clothing for their waists with fig leaves.  God comes walking that evening to see Adam and Eve as He normally does daily and He can't find them.  He calls out to them and they respond that they are hiding from Him.  When He asks why they respond that they are hiding because they are naked.  God realizes what they have done and ejects them from the Garden because now that they have knowledge of good and evil, He doesn't want them eating any more from the tree of life and living forever.  In this way they would be like God.  He ejects them and puts guards at the entrance so they can no longer enter Eden. 

Now, if this is a metaphorical story, and Adam really did stand for mankind in that God created a species of people, this could be the point of history where man evolved into a creature sentient enough to know good from evil.  The people creating the story use the tree of life to explain why their lives end.  I don't know which I believe, but am open to both. 

Adam and Eve become farmers and hunters and have two children Cain and Abel.  Everyone knows the story.  Cain was a farmer and Abel was a herder.  They both brought offerings to God.  God accepted Abel's offering of a lamb but rejected Cain's because his attitude towards offering to God was one of bitterness.  It had nothing to do with the offering itself, but that God cannot be bought off with sacrifices and acts - God needs an attitude of faith as well.  God sees what we do, but it is not enough to be a good person.  We have to have faith and love for God in our minds and hearts.  Cain, with his bad attitude, gets angry that God didn't accept his offering but did of Abel's, and kills his brother.  When God asks him where his brother is, Cain says the famous words "I don't know, am I my brother's keeper?"  Because of what Cain did, he is exiled and marked by God so that no one will kill him.  In the next bit, it supports the idea that God created a species of people, because it says that Cain took a wife and his lineage created the first cities and music and the beginnings of civilized life.  He couldn't have taken a wife if there weren't already people around the world for him to run into.

Adam and Eve had more children, and the begots begin in the Bible.  There is a long passage about each first son, who their first son is and how old they were when they first had him, then how long they were alive before each died.  The only exception is Enoch, who didn't die but was taken by God.  This happens several times in the Bible and it usually means that a person was especially holy in their life.

Now we run into the story of Noah.  But before Noah there is an interesting line.  The sons of God saw that the daughters of man were beautiful and they took wives amongst them.  Another name for the sons of God are Nephalim.  They are also referred to as giants.  This act is one of the things that makes God so angry that He wants to destroy the earth.  Wikipedia puts forth that Nephalim's base in Hebrew is fallen and many scholars suggest that the giants refer to Angels.  In my mind, this could be one of two things - that Angels (who are forbidden to marry in heaven) married women on earth and those women birthed half-angels "who were the heroes of old" (Genesis 6:4) or that fallen angels married women on earth and spread evil among man.  I'm leaning toward the second, since the root of the word Nephalim is fallen.

Anyway, God sees that his creation has turned into a species so sinful that He is angry and decides that He wants to destroy it all because He wishes He had never created it.  But there is one good, honest and faithful man on earth - Noah.  So God tells Noah to build an ark, to take two (male and female) of every beast on land and bird in the sky, his sons and their wives and get on the ark when He tells him to.  Something to note here is that it says nothing of Noah's neighbors laughing at him because of this.  When I was in Sunday School we heard this story and it was said that everyone laughed at Noah for creating a boat but his faith was strong enough to get through that.  I read nothing of the sort in my Bible.  Perhaps it's in other Bibles, but its not in the New King James Bible or the version of the Tanakh that I've read.

The measurements in the Bible for the Ark makes it almost as big as a modern liner.  Its bigger than a pilgrim ship and a clipper ship by alot.  I suppose they needed the room for all those animals.  Also there were three stories to this boat, and it was meant to float, not to sail. 

When God told Noah, Noah gathered all the animals and his sons and their wives and boarded the ark.  It rained for 40 days.  The waters overcame the earth and raised the ark far above the mountains.  Finally, God decided to stop the rain and eventually Noah's ark landed on top of a mountain.  Noah does something a little weird now.  He lets the raven out.  There are no details as to why or to what purpose, but it states that he let a raven out of the ark.  He also let out a dove and this was how he found out if it was dry outside.  The dove came back a couple times with nothing, then one day the dove comes back with an olive leaf in it's mouth.  Who knows what the raven did.  Then God tells Noah to let everyone out of the ark and makes a covenant with them that He will never again destroy all of the world.  And the covenant is remembered in the form of a rainbow.

Its interesting to note here that the Babylonian story of Gilgamesh incorporates almost the same story of a flood and a boat as Noah's story.  Except in the Babylonian story, the Gods decide to destroy the world because human beings are being so noisy that they can't sleep.  I feel that way about my dogs sometimes :)

Now there are a lot of begats again, and the descendants of Noah and his sons is traced.  The one thing of note other than the different kingdoms is that Noah's son Cush begat Nimrod, who was a mighty hunter.  He is referred to in some Biblical commentary to be the first king of in a kingdom on earth.

At this time the whole world spoke the same language.  In Shinah, which is ancient Babylonia and in the kingdom of Nimrod the hunter, they decided to rebel against God and build a tower so tall that it reached the heavens.  God saw this as the beginning of bigger rebellion and sin against him, so he divides the people up giving all people a different language so they can't plot against God anymore.  This is where the different races and languages came from.

Abram was a decendant of Noah's son Shem.  He went with Terah his father, Lot his nephew (whose parents had died earlier) and Sarai his wife to the land of Canaan.  God spoke with Abram and told him to get out of his country and from his father's house and that he would be the father of nations and God would bless him and those that blessed him and curse those who cursed him.  So Abram took his wife Sarai and his nephew Lot and went on his way into Canaan. 

When they approached the land of Egypt, Abram was scared that men would kill him to get to his wife, Sarai, because she was so beautiful.  So he had her tell everyone that she was his sister (which, actually, they were half siblings).  The Pharaoh's princes saw that she was beautiful and suggested her to Pharaoh who followed their suggestions and took her into his harem.  Abram was given great wealth in trade for her.  But then God plagued Egypt and the Pharoah found out why and yelled at Abram and asked why he had brought this upon him; that he might have taken Sarai as one of his wives.  He makes Abram and his party take their belongings and leave town.

Now, by this time Abram and Lot had both acquired many herd animals and servants and it came time for them to split because their men weren't getting along well with each other and the land couldn't support both of their herds.  So Lot went down to Sodom and Abram went to Canaan.  There was a war in the area that Lot went, and Lot was taken captive.  When Abram heard that Lot had been taken, he brought up an army of over three hundred among his men and attacked the troops that had invaded and stolen away Lot.  He won, and thusly won the war for the kingdom that Lot had lived in.  Lot and his household was returned.

To be continued....