Genesis 8 to 12- Arks, Babels, Cuckolds and Dogging

So, the waters recede...

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?

Capitalism as religion- great article by Julian Gough

Julian Gough wrote a highly entertaining take on tragedy and comedy that will be the subject of a later post, on a slow day (when there's a lot of begatting going on).

I had a look at the archive of his pieces on the Prospect website, and stumbled across
"The Sacred Mystery of Capital" from July 2008.

Though there's bits to disagree with, it's full of provoking and intriguing ideas, and is so well written you can just quote chunks. Among the best are these gems-

"But religions evolve, and recent events show that capitalism has begun to evolve less in the manner of the Galapagos finches (whose beaks adjusted over millennia to suit the berries of their individual island), and more in the manner of the Incredible Hulk. Incredible Hulk capitalism can expand the muscle of its credit so swiftly that its clothing of real world assets cannot stretch fast enough to contain it. Expansion, explosion, collapse—Incredible Hulk capitalism sprawls, stunned and shrunken again, in the rags of its assets.

"Or, returning to our religious analogy, if capitalism was a religion, it would now be a delightfully demented pseudo-scientific cult. Incredible Hulk capitalism is to the capitalism of Adam Smith what Scientology is to the Christianity of Christ. Both modern high finance and Scientology use the language and tools of science to ends that are religious, not scientific. Both meet a need, a yearning which the old forms of religion and capitalism no longer meet. The need for a mysterious power greater than us, in which we can believe. It must be powerful—but it must also be mysterious. And mystery has been vanishing from the world ever faster, ever since Galileo."

Genius stuff...

Planetary domination

I'm pleased to say that this blog has only been running for about 48 hours and I already have an excuse to include a cartoon from the magnificent Marc Roberts. Concepts of human mastery over all dominion, anyone?

Genesis 5-6: the prelude to the soggy bit

One of the many hideous memories I have of the long and painful years I spent at Old Palace School for Girls in Croydon is of a production one of the dance classes put on, including the song The Animals Went in Two by Two. It featured pairs of girls playing various types of animals parading up the central aisle of the Banqueting Hall (which served as an assembly room, theatre, gym etc etc). And the fucking bitches who were our PE teachers at this time, who I'd better not name for libel reasons, in case they're not burning in some appropriate hell somewhere, cast as the hippo who "got stuck in the door" a girl who, whilst very popular, pretty and generally lovely, was also rather large.
Of limited relevance, I know. But we all need to have the occasional cathartic PE-teacher rant, and it seemed like a good opportunity.
These two chapters are pretty much all begatting, and some very, very, very old men (bit short on women, shock horror). And a big boat made of gopher wood. Which sounds kinda cool, but no-one actually knows what it was. And being the sentimental type, it seems a bit sad to create all those creatures - including beasts, fowls of the air and creeping things - and then kill them all off. The giant humans I seem to be less concerned about, given that we'd already apparently started killing each other off and generally embarking on the unpleasant activities characteristic of the species. Sigh.

Genesis 5 to 6- Noah business like noah business...

Jesus Christ- or rather, "Yahweh": The Old Testament is notorious for it, but I didn't think there'd be so much begatting already. The eyelids do weigh heavy, gentle reader....

As begats... I mean befits an oral history written down, there is some redundancy- ya get the same information repeated. You get the same information repeated.

Methusaleh does his cameo so early (but sticks around for so long). On grotesque longevity, I am reminded of an anecdote (possibly apocraphyl- how begat... befitting) that gerontology researchers were running all over the Caucasus, esp. Georgia, interviewing people who were apparently 90 years old and yet healthy and working in fields. Was it diet? Genes? The semi-starvation during their youth? Or, er, was it that they had "borrowed" their parents birth certificates to avoid the draft. Though the wikipedia link above has a more interesting take.

Anyway, here comes Noah's ark, all ship shape and bristol fashion. And I'll repeat yesterday's observation- this God chap seems to be a pretty cack-handed SimCity player. He's already ctrl alt deleting and we're only on day two of this book...

The idea that a hard rain is gonna fall and clear the streets of grime/crime has stuck around of course. Thomas Pynchon has written well of violent redeeming and badasses, for example.

So anyway, this is an extinction event. And I'll repeat yesterday's link to the sixth extinction, caused by us, homo sapiens killthemallandletgodsortthemoutiens. A Pending Ecological Debacle indeed.

Did I read somewhere that this whole Big Flood story may have been inspired by the creation of the Black Sea when the Med spilled through?

And aren't there are a few obvious questions- like why didn't smaller vessels, not laden down with two of everything do OK? You'd expect an arc of survival, if you look at it in -gasp- selection pressure terms. And what about the Founder Effect?

I suppose tomorrow I'll get to write about the Sons of Ham and the egregious defences of slavery that the Church put about. But all wicked things in time, eh?

PS One of my favourite (OK, the only one I can think of just now) fictional representations (well, other fictional representations) of the flood is the woodworm narrator in Julian Barnes' “A History of the World in 10 and a half chapters.”

Genesis 1-4: in the beginning

Was... not the Word. This is the first thing that's struck me reading these key first chapters - because there are so many versions and some of the phrasing is so magnificent, bits you've heard quoted elsewhere stick in your head - and then you find that the version you're reading doesn't have that bit. So the opening line here is actually:

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,"

which is much more straightforward, but rather less poetic. But then we get:

"and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,"

which is a beautiful image and puts me in mind of a William Blake painting which I shall have to try and track down.
But it's good to have gotten started. Marc has a fairly humane sized edition to read, but the only two that Waterstones had in stock the other day were full complete-with-apocrypha versions of intimidating, not to say crippling, thickness and weight. Just opening it was a feat of psychological strength (especially on the depressing wasteland that New Year's Day tends to be).
And I have an appropriate bookmark picked out, a Crivelli Virgin and Child, from an altarpiece in the National Gallery.
But back to the book in hand, and we have lots of creating of plants and herbs and fowl and beasts, which all seems like a generally good idea until we get onto the Man bit, which today I can't help feeling is where it all starts to go a bit wrong. But I suppose the authors don't agree and I should go with the flow for the moment.
(On the literary references, though, these chapters are just dripping with them - we have out River Out of Eden and Adam's Rib and East of Eden and probably lots of others I'm not spotting).
The other danger of reading this properly is that it's making me want to go and read lots of other things I don't have time to deal with, unless I devote my entire working life to this project and I'm not hearing anyone volunteering to pay the mortgage while I do that. But there are bits of 15-year-old archaeology lectures about the birth of agrarian societies in the Middle East lurking around in the back of my skull, and all of this stuff about Cain and Abel and the competition for status between animal and grain growing ways of life is all very interesting, and can we talk about allegories for the development of complex settlement in the Fertile Crescent?
On the other hand, I am just very confused about where Cain and Abel's wives are meant to have popped up from, unless they're more spare rib jobs??? But some of these early and often-forgotten characters do have the most wonderful names, like Adah and Mehujael and Zillah and the brothers Jabal and Jubal, and it's a great pity they feature in a set of verses which are all about family blood feuds... I guess this starts off as a book steeped in hierarchical concepts, with all that rule and dominion over various living things being allocated, and one of the knock-on effects of that is that people start having conflicts over who gets to do all that dominion-ing. Men. Tssk.

Tracy Quan

Tracy Quan, in the October/November 2008 Red Pepper magazine's Booktopia section, has this to say of the King James Version:

"Read the King James if you want to be impressed by the dense, poetic language - that 'moth-eaten brocade' as Larkin puts it. Then compare it to the Jerusalem. This Catholic translation manages to be clear, direct and modern enough for reference without subjecting you to the humiliation of being spotted with a copy of the Good News Bible - and, as a bonus celebrity angle, JRR Tolkien is responsible for the translation of Jonah and the Whale. You'll be hooked, if not actively converted."

Genesis 1 to 4- "stop me if you've read this one before"

Well, this is familiar. The story I've had drilled into me at various (sort of religious) prep schools and via paintings and myths and all the rest of it. It is the “Christian” creation mythology. Garden of Eden, serpents, fruit (not specified as apple), wicked women leading men astray etc. From a plotting point of view, it starts at the beginning (with the Word) and rushes you through sex, disobedience, discovery, punishment, exile, birth, murder and begatting with great efficiency. If only the following 880 so pages were so enthralling...

So, while wanting to write intelligently on the Big Questions of- you know, creation, evolution, theodicy, idiocy, all that guff- my eyes were drawn instead to Ch 1 verse 11

And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit trees yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth, and it was so.

Now, if I could get my hands on the vandal who senselessly sawed my wife's plum tree that she planted on t'allotment, there'd be some distinct lack of forgiveness and heavy-duty smiting going on. I am neither Christian nor pacifist, after all.

Anyway, same chapter, verse 28.

and replenish the earth and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

has gotten us into all sorts of stupidity. But I seem to recall there's an alternative call to stewardship rather than dominion, further on in Genesis, so I'll save the ranting for that.

Then God says "it's all yours, but not that tree." And would you Adam and Eve it, along comes the serpent, and says, “ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”

And God is irritated, and clearly not omniscient, since he/He has to cherchez la femme: Adam and Eve manage to hide from him/Him and he even has to ask the reason why.

Ooh, here's a good bit; I'll get a T-shirt made up for the little lady. Chapter 3 verse 16“and thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee.”

Yadder yadder yadder, Chapter 4 is about Cain and Abel.
God turns out to be fonder of animal husbandry than agriculture. (Don't forget who was writing this stuff down, and their self-serving bias).

And Cain is Unhappy about this and there is some smiting. Brothers, eh, what can you do?

(If I were a sci-fi geek (which I sort of was once), I would characterise God at this point as a not particularly competent terra-firming engineer with poor control over the parameters and behaviour of his production schedule. Just saying...)

Cain's wife (who she?) gives birth to Enoch, and then we get our first little bit of begatting. Lots more of that to come of course, which is partly why we're doing this whole King James Version project together- either one of us alone would come unstuck on the begatting.

At the tail end of Ch4 the family tree already begins to look like one of those “demographic bushes” that were spoken of when the police were trying to construct lineages of the Shannon Matthews crew. Everyone married or ex of each others' cousins, step-brothers, aunts younger than their nephews etc. One of my best mates is a quack, and just to toughen up medical students, he has them go and try to get a family history- for genetic purposes- from the punters where he works. It's always good for a laugh. Bit like the Bible really...

What is this blog?

On our honeymoon in October 2008, my husband Marc and I decided to set ourselves the task of reading the whole King James Bible over the course of 2009. We would try and read a few pages each day, needing to average 17 pages per week of Marc's 1950s Oxford University Press version to complete the task by the end of the year. And committing to maintaining a regular blog of what we read, our reactions to it and the observations of others on the subjects raised seemed a good way of trying to maintain the momentum.
I'll leave Marc to explain why he, a devout atheist raised in a vaguely Roman Catholic tradition and with a fairly trenchant dislike of religion, would want to do this. I'm a confused atheist/agnostic with a sentimental attachment to some small elements of my Anglican schooling and considerable hostility to some of the Scots Presbyterian bits of my ancestry, and I have very mixed feelings towards the project.
For me, it's partly a cultural endeavour, aimed at encountering and understanding where many of the literary references of the last several hundred years stem from.
Partly it's about trying to understand more about our major religions through one of the great books of one of them.
Partly it's about working out my own relationship with Christianity; as I mentioned, I have no affiliation to and considerable scepticism of most organised religion, be it institutional European Christianity or the Eastern faiths like Hinduism and Buddhism that so many self-deluded middle-class Westerners seem to have convinced themselves are more 'spiritual' and less patriarchal than the Religions of the Book. I have encountered plenty of smug, bigoted, homophobic, selfish, arch-capitalistic, morally bankrupt Christians who confirm all of the stereotypes and prejudices of anti-clerical socialists and anarchists. But I've also encountered some really amazing Christians, including liberation theologists in Nicaragua and Mexico who identify Jesus as a revolutionary figure whose example can stand for all those fighting oppression. And the likes of the Christian Peacemaker Teams in Hebron, whose willingess to stand in the way of the vicious oppressions of the Israeli army and the vile, murderous, racist settler community there are an inspiration to anyone with any belief in the potential for power and goodness in the human spirit.
(And yes, I know that if I'm going to hang some of my arguments on Catholic examples I should be reading the Jerusalem version, but tough, there's the literary argument mentioned above too.)

In December 2001, I spent some time in the West Bank with the International Solidarity Movement, learning for myself about the oppressions being imposed on the Palestinian people on a daily basis, and beginning a long involvement with the region. On one of the days between Christmas and New Year, we took part in a takeover of the Surda checkpoint, used by the Israeli authorities to prevent students moving between the city of Ramallah and Bir Zeit University. Many students had missed months of classes. That day, we used human chains to block the routes the Israeli army used to bring jeeps and armoured vehicles down from their military base, and held the roads while local students used heavy machinery from nearby building sites to push the concrete roadblocks and a metal military watchtower off the cliff.
We only held the roads for a few hours, after the IDF used tear gas and sound grenades to push us back. But one of my abiding memories was watching a Catholic priest in his 70s, I think called Peter and I think a member of a Michigan Peace Team, lying in the road in a huge cloud of tear gas, the only thing blocking the way of the menacing army jeep whose raucous siren was blaring for him to move. Peter had been a consistently positive and wise figure over the previous two weeks of digging out muddy roadblocks in the pissing rain, having live ammunition shot over our heads outside President Arafat's compound, and trying to balance out the pain, fear, rage, confusion and anger of 60 people who knew they wanted to do something but weren't sure what or how. Peter is a reminder for me in my most anti-clerical moments that people have done some appalling things in the name of Christianity, but there are also some wonderful people who derive strength and inspitation from the teachings of the Christian faith, and that for that maybe some of its teachings are worthy of consideration and respect.