Posts
Genesis 14
War is Hell for Sodom and Gomorrah.
Abram and Sarai's open marriage yields a son.
God decides Abram needs more letters in his name.
God's new club has a rather curious initiation requirement.
Three men head off to Sodom. What could go wrong?
Is Gen 14:20 the earliest mention of holy war in the Abrahamic tradition?
ReplyDeleteDid the other contemporary tribes praise their gods whenever they won a battle, and if so did any writings survive?
And the birth of the religion of Islam is born.... 16:1-16
ReplyDeleteSometimes Free Will can lead to a new...Religion? Maybe?
But the birth of Ishmael from the Mistress, Hagar, is key... The tribes begin to separate soon after.
According to Genesis, God told Abraham that Sarah will bare him a child and to name him Isaac (17 verse 19). Never... is God mentioned with the pregnancy of Hagar until Sarai (soon to be Sarah) says "May the Lord judge between you and me" (16:5). God never approached Sarai to tell Abram to have a party with Hagar.
God is mentioned AFTER Ishy is born (16:7) whereas God started off the conversation regarding the birth of Isaac BEFORE Sarah is pregnant. I wonder what point Moses (the human author, but inspired by the Holy Spirit) was trying to get across? But God does say He will make Ishmael a leader of nations anyway...I wonder if it was a reaction caused by free will or Gods Plan? Both perhaps.
http://www.billpattillo.com/Abraham.asp
Abram is now Abraham:
Its kindof like a re-birth or born again since God gave him new responsibilities.
The topic of Circumcision...Thank God for Jesus Christ:
Galatians 5:6
but to answer your question...It was a law that still holds true today for both Jewish and Muslim. I wonder if perhaps Muslim do it b/c it has something to do with Abraham having the Covenant with God...and the whole Abraham-Hagar-Ishmael thing?
My family does not practice it and some myth is out there that its healthy for the baby. This link is for facts and myths on Circumcision.
http://www.nocircpa.org/4642.html
-Tom
I notice Abraham bargaining with God to save Sodom.
ReplyDeleteBTW the King James Version refers to the plains of Mamre where the word, plains, in the original Hebrew seems to be a tree either oaks as many other versions have it or Pistacia palaestina (terebinth, from which comes turpentine). As to why. The KJV version apparently followed the Vulgate (an early Latin translation) which used plains.
I thought Abram was a bit of an ass for telling his wife (Sarai) to treat his mistress/her maid as she feels because she is jealous. It was her idea for him to sleep with Hagar. Then Sarai treats her so bad she leaves.(GEN 16:6)
ReplyDeleteIn GEN 17:10, we get god demanding circumcision.
In GEN 17:14, god asks that we abandon any uncircumcised child (man-child).
Of course Abram becomes Abraham and Sarai becomes Sarah.
@Damion: This is a very good question. I hope someone here knows the answer. I'm not sure where the source for Gen. 14-20 falls in the chronology of writing, but I just listened to a lecture by Prof. Robert Oden about the oldest examples of Hebrew literature which are all holy war poetry. Examples of these are found in Exodus 15 and throught Judges and the Psalms. The idea of holy war is central to the Tribal League period (before 1000 BCE) which was the first manifestation of Israel. Therefore, Israel itself is founded on holy war.
ReplyDeleteThe ancient perspective in these first books is very different from the image of a god built in the later books. Here's a god who has to go find out if there are good people in a town, meaning that he is not omniscient. And he can be bargained with, which means that there is not a "perfect plan" in place, with the future already known. If we had access to the collected myths of other tribes in the area from the same time-period, I would expect to see much the same kinds of descriptions of their war-gods as we find here. The ancient Hebrew god is coming across as an inflated version of a warrior king, just as emotional, violent and demanding as any human king.
ReplyDelete@Erp: Abraham's bargaining with God is pretty interesting. This is a passage that Christians interpret as foreshadowing Christ. It introduces the idea of the guilty being saved by the innocent.
ReplyDeleteWhat strikes me about it is that God tolerates Abraham's challenging him. This is the type of bargaining that Noah did not attempt, whether or not it would have been fruitful. There is a dialogue now as opposed to "I speak, you obey." Maybe this reflects the importance the early writers placed on the character of Abraham. Adam, Noah et al. may have been ancestors, but not until Abraham is anyone chosen by God and worthy of a back and forth conversation.
War comes to the land. The details are always changing but the results the same. Things, lives, fortunes and people are thrown into slavery and turmoil. Lot is caught up in this. Taken away. Many kings and empires all are wrapped into the events. Abraham came to rescue Lot and bring peace to the land. And when given the chance to accept the rewards of his military victory. He said no. Because of God's/Universe voice which he heard and he believed help his hand. He worked for the peace, in that he re-established the order of what was before. And his selflessness established him as a holy man. For he warred not for gain but for the voice.
ReplyDeleteThe question. What is the voice? How does one negotiate with it? Why serve it? To me the intuition of doing right is the voice. And how do we deal with this voice. We don't negotiate as much as we try to figure it out. Make sense out of feelings that are not based in edicts and statements. Abram gives himself over to the intuition/voices changes the ongoing story of the bible. He lays out another example of god/universe the helper not just god/universe to be feared.But why does he do this... Perhaps giving himself over to the first story. Yearning for it and wanting to join it again.
What strikes me about the Sodom bargaining is that it shows a clear evolution from the perception of God in the Noah story. Abraham doesn't just bargain - he speaks the idea that God must be just. His bargaining comes from a conviction that God *should* want to save the righteous even if it means also saving the wicked. That idea never comes up with the flood. So is this the Hebrews focusing in more on the difference between Yahweh and the gods of old?
ReplyDeleteI also have to say, in Sarah's defense, that she didn't get mad at Hagar until Hagar "despised" her. It seems like Hagar was lording it over Sarah after she got pregnant. I'd be mad too!
And finally, when did the sin of Sodom become sodomy? So far I'm not seeing anything specific about what this grevious sin was.
Dick Gregory, in Dick Gregory's Bible Tales (page 62) offers Isaiah 1:18-20 as a working definition of "sodomy."
ReplyDeleteIsaiah 1? Those passages don't seem to have anything to do with Sodom.
ReplyDelete@hdauria
ReplyDelete"What strikes me about the Sodom bargaining is that it shows a clear evolution from the perception of God in the Noah story. Abraham doesn't just bargain - he speaks the idea that God must be just."
I think you are on to an interesting idea when you suggest the "evolution" of Hebraic thinking concerning God and morality. Reading the Bible sequentially gives the reader an unfolding revelatory look regarding the complexity of moral action in connection to God. As we build towards the Exodus and into the Davidic line, an interesting practice would be to begin reading the Psalms alongside Exodus-Chronicles. The reason is to listen to the voice of the Hebrew writers as they question God, wrestle with the wickedness in the world, but maintain hope in God's goodness and His promise to the Hebrews.
My question to everyone is: is man creating the morality of god, or is God teaching and instructing through experience the morality of man? I am sure this is a question of religious import.
Concerning the text: Ishmael is associated with the Islam, but only by Islamic profession of new revelation (meaning it is Muslims in the 6th c.e. who have decided that Ishmael is associated with them, not the Hebrew bible itself.)
Would anyone suggest that Sodom and Gomorrah did not have what was coming to them? I know this is a bit of a volatile question, but it would make for interesting discussion ;). Sort of a just war theory and state sovereignty question.
Would anyone suggest that Lot's wife did not have what was coming to her? It seems safe to assume that whatever rules S and G allegedly violated were just as arbitrary and capricious. We are clearly dealing with a deity who does things because He can.
ReplyDeleteOn the subject of the evolving deity, I've heard it suggested that another innovation of the Israelite religion is the portable deity. In this view, Yahweh is attached to a people (symbolized in their stories as his promise to Abraham here) rather than a place like other gods of the era. This was presumably important when Israel was starting out as a confederation of tribes of nomadic herdsman fighting against their agricultural, city-dwelling Canaanite neighbors (Who worshiped Baal in stationary temples). Yahweh could move around with his chosen people.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I think the lists of begats actually get pretty important here because the Israelites of the tribal confederacy used various descendants of Abraham as ostensible forefathers of the various tribes they were trying to build solidarity between.
Oh, yeah. About God's curious initiation requirement for his club, Penn & Teller's Bullshit did an episode on that:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.tv-links.eu/tv-shows/Penn--and--Teller--Bullshit-_523/season_3/episode_1/
What it's not: an unbiased and thoughtful treatment of the subject.
What it is: entertaining (and screamy - that's how Penn Jillette rolls)
My question to everyone is: is man creating the morality of god, or is God teaching and instructing through experience the morality of man?
ReplyDeleteFables, fairy tales and folk tales all have a way of showing that good triumphs over bad. That taking the high road will lead to riches and long life. The bible is no different in that the people who wrote it were searching for a way to create a higher moral standard in their god as a demonstration to the populace.
What a great point, Brian! The professor of the Open Course class makes the point that while earlier gods lived in their temples, Yahweh lived in a tent, like his people. Which would make him by definition portable.
ReplyDeleteJustin, as an atheist I of course come from the perspective that the ancient Israelites were creating God, and with him reflecting their own evolving moral identity. This is what makes the Bible so fascinating to me. Growing up as a Christian I simply thought of the Bible as God's rule book, so to speak, and wasn't particularly interested in studying it. Now it seems to me to be a door into the psychology of a very ancient people, a tiny minority who went on to spread their world view to, really, unimaginable geographic and temporal lengths.
@Lorraine
ReplyDeleteIs the moral violations of Sodom and Gomorrah arbitrary and capricious? If so, how does one determine moral judgements between people groups or governments? Perhaps this questions transcends the Genesis text analysis, and is therefore beyond the scope of the blog, but I find it interesting.
@momof atheists
"Fables, fairy tales and folk tales all have a way of showing that good triumphs over bad"
That is true, but can historical accounts also help develop better moral epistemology as well? Could there not exist some historical underpinning to many of the "fables" of Genesis?
I think the crimes of the Sodomites are so ill-defined and Lot's actions so immoral that there is no coherent moral to that episode.
ReplyDeleteWhen discussing the scene at Sodom, you may want to flip ahead and read about a *very* similar incident that takes place in Gibeah in Judges 19. It's pretty much the same story, minus any divine intervention. It's pretty effed up.
That is true, but can historical accounts also help develop better moral epistemology as well? Could there not exist some historical underpinning to many of the "fables" of Genesis?
ReplyDeleteNot really. Everything in the Bible before Kings is ahistorical, and we have no reason to trust the Bible's contradictory, polemical accounts over archaeological evidence and common sense.
The entire Torah and Joshua are invented folk-histories, written down hundreds of years after they supposedly happened. I think Judges has some authentic pre-monarchic content, The Song of Deborah in Judges 5, for instance, may date to almost 1200 BC. Other ancient material is present in the Torah. (I know of several characters purported to be alive both in the time of Numbers and the time of Judges!)
Any historical underpinning to Genesis would be drawn from events sometime in the 1st millenium BCE, well after any part of the Torah is set.
@ Justin
ReplyDelete"Could there not exist some historical underpinning to many of the "fables" of Genesis?"
They certainly come across more as "just so stories". People observe a natural phenomenon, invent a myth to explain it, then weave some moral lesson about obedience or evil or some such into it. In the case of the story of Lot, there are plenty of unusual natural phenomena in the area. The area around the Dead Sea is prone to earthquakes, so the unexpected destruction of towns was an event that probably did happen. Additionally, because of the high salinity of the Dead Sea, salt pillars are commonplace near it. Large blobs of flammable pitch frequently float up out of the Dead Sea as well. Put all this together and you have a legend just waiting to be written. And of course the priests are going to write it this way: "my god is telling you to obey my every word, or else he will smite you!"
@hdauria: "Now it seems to me to be a door into the psychology of a very ancient people, a tiny minority who went on to spread their world view to, really, unimaginable geographic and temporal lengths."
ReplyDeletePerfectly put! Seriously, of all the thousands of people groups from the ancient world, this one (to a great extent through arbitrary circumstances) went on to essentially dictate how Western civilization would unfold. How cool that we have this literature. In a way, it's more fascinating than Homer's epics because this group has cultural continuity with present day culture(s).
@ Justin
ReplyDelete"Could there not exist some historical underpinning to many of the "fables" of Genesis?"
Even if that were the case some 4000 years ago any original history has been lost to time and the inevitable corruption of oral history to exaggeration and embelishment.