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 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.

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...