Ch 8 verse 21: And the Lord smelled a sweet savour; and the Lord said in his heart I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of a man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every living thing, as I have done.
Er, doesn't that therefore invalidate the whole Revelation schtick? And hasn't he/He put constraints on what he/He can do (e.g. Make a rock so heavy he/He can't lift it), which I, er, didn't think he/He could do. Just sayin'...
And here's the kicker, Noah gets a little reward for his obedience-
Ch 9 verse 2 And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered.
Now, at the time God's stenographers were taking this down at 100 thunderbolts a minute, humasn would still have had some sort of folk memory of being prey rather than predator, so this is kind of a comforting bit of news. Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a fantastic book called "Blood Rites" about what it meant to be eatee rather than eater. And she followed it up with "Dancing in the Streets", which has great stuff on Dionysus/Jesus, which we will come to when the time is right (about September, I reckon).
Hamming it up- Ham, Noah's youngest son, sees his dad naked, tries to get his brothers in on the joke. They do a goody-two shoes thing of covering Noah up and Noah is not a happy patriarch...
Ch 9 verse 25 And he said “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.
And this is the textual figleaf the Church applied to the slave trade!! Really. How morally bankrupt can you be?
Chapter 10 is another "begatter" chapter. Nimrod, the mighty hunter gets a look in. Aren't there clapped out RAF planes named for him?
Chapter 11 deals with the whole Tower of Babel myth
God, although a lousy terra-engineer, at least gets the basics of counter-insurgency and imperial control, i.e. “divide and conquer"
Ch 11 verse 6 Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do' and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
And as your eyes slide down the begatting, you get (gat?) used to folks living 200 or so years. I suppose any lie told often enough becomes familiar, which is a step on the way to plausible.
Chapter 12 introduces Abraham and all that. I seem to recall some Social Services involvement, with Baby I. But not yet...
verse 11 and he said unto Sarai his wife, Behold now, I know that thou art a fair woman to look upon
And so say I, too..
But then Abraham goes to Egypt and- to save his skin- plays at being his wife's sister. The Pharaoh innocently takes Sarah as another "wife" finds out and exiles Abraham. I don't get this. Was Abraham into the whole cuckolding thing? Shouldn't Sarai be stoned to death now?
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment