The Bible: Commentary and Controversy

So there was only one couple in the world back then – Adam and Eve. And when Adam was 130 years old he begat Seth – in his image. We assume the mother was Eve, but the bible doesn’t specify that. Then Adam (and Eve, we suppose) had a bunch of other sons and daughters, and died when he had reached the ripe old age of nine hundred and thirty. There is a lot of controversy about that number, and the prolonged age of others in this period, one problem being that according to Ellicot, “primaeval man had no power of expressing large numbers.” Whoops. Another suggestion is the Jewish calendar back in those days was based on the cycles of the moon and not of the sun. Which would make Adam about 78.

But who really cares whether Adam lived to be nine hundred or ninety? What real effect does that have on the story?

Anyway, Adam had all these kids. Then Seth had a bunch of kids. Evidently with his sisters (hopefully not with his mother.) Then Enosh, one of his sons, had a bunch of kids, but we really don’t know with whom, but we have to assume it was also with his sisters.

It keeps going. Always the male participant is named, but never the female. At any rate, it’s obvious that all those relationships were incestuous: mother/son, father/daughter, brother/sister.

But wait, there’s more. Cain went into the land of Nod, which lay East of Eden, and had relations with his wife, and she gave birth to Enoch. Wait. His wife? Where did she come from? Ellicot surmises one of his sisters followed Cain into Nod (which some say was Mongolia) “in spite of the solemn decree of banishment passed upon him.”

This is getting a little creepy. Obviously, according to the Bible, we’re all related, and are still practicing a remote form of incest. Maybe the ages of the antediluvians is necessary to the proposition that Adam and Even populated the world; they needed to live that long so they could have enough children.

Of course it all stems from the supposition that God created only two creatures: one male and one female. Frankly, I think that supposition, and all of the begats, is a bunch of twaddle. It’s there because it tells a story and has a moral; that is its function and its purpose.

Do we really see Adam and Eve telling Cain and Abel the paradise story? “Yeah, we had it really good, but we screwed up and doomed mankind forever to turmoil, hardship, and death. Here’s the whole story so you can pass it on to your children.”

Of course as far as I’m concerned, all that is totally irrelevant. There are some highlights. For example, Enoch, who walked with God, was taken by God – meaning, evidently, he was such a reverent person he didn’t have to die, but went straight up into heaven.

Now we come to the weird part.

“And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.” And “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.”

Or according to the King James version, “There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.”

So the sons of God took the daughters of men as wives, and those daughters bore children to the Nephilim (the giants). Problem is, no one seems to know exactly who the sons of God were, and who or what the Nephilim were.

The sons of God, the daughters of men, and the Nephilim.  Jesus taught that we are all sons of God, but there’s an obvious distinction here, differentiating the sons of God from the race descending from Adam and Eve and, obviously, from the Nephilim. Sounds like three different races, and if that’s so, where did those three races come from?

Whoever and whatever they were, these passages set up the basis for the flood. When the Lord saw the wickedness of man was great, he was sorry that he had made man, and determined to blot out his creatures from the earth except for one: Noah, who walked with God and had found favor with Him. Which included man, beast, the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air, “for I regret that I made them.” The explanation is that “every creature had corrupted its way on the earth.”

I get the man part, but it’s kind of hard to see what the birds and beasts had done to anger Him. I do think, however, that getting rid of “the creeping thing” might have been a good idea.

Incidentally, that’s also when some biblical scholars say God shaved about 800 years off of man’s life expectancy, pronouncing (to whom?) that “his days shall be 120 years.”  That provides a lot of food for thought. Folks regularly living for eight or nine hundred years before the flood, and only about 15% that long afterward.

Others have a different opinion – that 120 years was left for man before he would be destroyed by the flood. That interpretation would give Noah 120 years to build the ark. And then there’s that moon cycles vs sun cycles controversy.

Obviously, to believe the story of Noah and the flood, you must believe that some supernatural power made it possible. God, aliens, whatever. How else could Noah have built this huge boat – 500 feet long and 75 feet wide? Imagine first the amount of wood needed, the number of “gopher” or cypress trees that would have to be cut down and made into boards, beams, and planks.

A modern replica, built to scale, was opened for viewing in Kentucky in 2016. It required well over three million board feet of lumber to build. I’m no lumberman, but from what information I can find on the subject, that much wood would require about ten thousand mature cypress trees. No idea on the length of time it takes to cut a cypress tree down, strip it, and cut it into boards, but there’s no doubt it was good they had 120 years to do it.

Then there’s the concept of going out and collecting a male and female version of every living thing, bringing them back to the ark, and fitting them in it. Along with enough food to keep them all alive for a year or so.

According to Young’s literal translation, God told Noah to bring into the Ark “of all the clean beasts seven pairs, a male and its female; and of the beasts which are not clean two, a male and its female; also, of fowl of the heavens seven pairs, a male and a female, to keep alive seed on the face of all the earth.” That is a pretty sizeable group of livestock, to say nothing of the flying and creeping things. God evidently gave Noah a week to do all that.

So the ark is built and stocked, and then it rains for forty nights and forty days, the same length of time, by the way, that Jesus spent in the wilderness, and the number of days He spent on earth after His resurrection.   So the water raises “15 cubits high,” covers the highest mountains, and raises the ark, which floats for almost a year before God causes the waters to subside.

Noah turns all the creatures out to be fruitful and multiply, and immediately begins building an altar. When it’s finished, he takes “one of every clean beast, and one of every clean fowl, and burns them on the altar as a sacrifice to God. That’s quite an offering. Quite an altar, too, come to think of it. It also, evidently, assumes that all the clean beasts and all the clean fowls had reproduced during the year they were on the ark. Of those that didn’t there would be only one left, and the species would become extinct.

And “Jehovah smelleth the sweet fragrance,” and decides not to smite man anymore.

The multitude of holes in that story have been pointed out countless times; no need for me to repeat them. But of course if you believe in God, you can dismiss them, because God is all-powerful.  Maybe He shrank all the animals down to the size of an ant; maybe He just handed Noah a box of self-activating DNA samples from all the creatures. All that’s not important, anyway, because the story of Noah, like all the other stories in the bible, is a parable, which is “a simple story used to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson.” Granted, not all of the stories in the bible are simple. Nor are they, necessarily, all fiction. The point is, they’re all there to teach us something. And most often the lesson is about the necessity for and power of faith. And, of course, sacrifice.

In the Old testament, we are able to interact with a being who appears before us, and speaks to us, and punishes and rewards us, pretty much in person.  In the New Testament, we are given a Being who walks and talks with us for more than three decades, then leaves us for Heaven, and becomes our intercessor.  The difference seems to be obvious, but it’s more complicated than it appears.

The serpent told Eve that if she and Adam ate the fruit they would become as gods. Based on that promise, they ate, and were excommunicated. But as we’ve discussed, their sin was not disobedience, or pride, or any other common “sin.”  Their “sin” was not in raising themselves to God’s level, but in bringing Him down to theirs.

So when Jesus came, what did He do?  He raised us back up to God’s level, as His children, with all the benefits derived from that relationship, thereby “taking away the sin of the world.”

But back to the bible. If everything is a parable, what’s the moral of the Noah story? What is it teaching us? That if we aren’t good little boys and girls God will wipe us out? That’s the obvious lesson. By fire next time. And the way we’re all behaving, that day may not be far off.

As with just about every other story in the bible, the lessons are about faith, obedience, and sacrifice.

“Then God said to Noah…”

Which brings up an interesting point (to me, anyway). The old testament is full of God talking to people, saying things to people. How does He do that? Since He doesn’t always “appear,” He speaks to them in other ways – as a voice in their heads, perhaps, or from the sky. If so, how do they know the voice they “hear” is really God’s? I’m pretty sure he doesn’t shout to them from the sky, as He would in a Monty Python sketch. Wait. There is at least one passage in the bible where He does just that.

I’m really not being flip; I just think this is a rather glaring omission by the authors. I’d like to know how God communicated with all those folks without appearing in human form, or as a burning bush, or whatever. Which brings up still another point: why in the world appear as a burning bush?

To Moses and His people he appears as a dark cloud, and as Moses brings the people to meet Him, “Mount Sinai was all in smoke because the LORD descended upon it in fire; and its smoke ascended like the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mountain quaked violently. When the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder, Moses spoke and God answered him with thunder.” That’s enough to stir the heart of Erich von Daniken, or any other ancient alienist. Also a pretty good description of a volcano erupting.

So at least once God just spoke as a voice from the sky. When that happened, did the ones He was speaking to faint, or have to run change their drawers? Nope. They listened, and pretty much did what the voice told them to do. I don’t know about you, but if I was on the 8^th green about to make a putt and heard God speaking to me from the heavens, I would do what He told me to do, too. Especially if everyone in my foursome also heard Him. If they didn’t, I’d probably wind up in a padded cell.

But I digress.

So along comes Abram, and God tells him to go to a certain place, where He will make him become a great nation. And Abram takes his family and goes. When he reaches the appointed spot, God (Jehovah) appears to him and says “to thy seed I give this land.” Nothing about how He appeared, or what He looked like. Just that He appears. And Abram builds Him an altar.

Incidentally, this is, according to Ellicott, “the first time that any appearance of the Deity is mentioned. Always previously the communications between God and man had been direct, without the intervention of any visible medium,” as in “God commanded Adam,” and “Adam and Eve heard His voice,” and he “called” them, or “spake” to them.

There is a famine, and Abram goes with his wife, Sarai, to Egypt, to “sojourn” there. Well, Sarai is a beautiful woman, and when the Pharaoh sees here, he wants her. And Abram says to her “pretend you are my sister, because seeing how beautiful you are, if the Egyptians think you are my wife they’ll kill me and take you away.”

But the plan has a flaw. Pharaoh, believing she is Abram’s sister, takes her into his house as a wife/concubine, giving Abram all sorts of wonderful presents for her.

Then Jehovah brings plagues – great plagues – on Pharaoh’s house, letting him know it is because he has taken Abram’s wife. We don’t know how He let the Pharaoh know that, but he did. Maybe Sarai owned up. So he chides Abram and tells him to go away, taking all his stuff with him.

Biblical scholars tell us this part of Abram’s story is important because it details the origin of the Jewish nation – when God says to Abram “to thy seed I give this land.”

So Abram, now a wealthy man thanks to the Pharaoh, returns to the land the Lord had directed him to. And the Lord says to him “Lift up thine eyes and look North, and South, and East, and West, for the whole of the land which thou are seeing, to thee I give it, and to thy seed — to the age.”

And Abram builds Him another altar.

Pretty soon we hear about a war (the War of the Kings) in which Lot (Abram’s nephew) is taken prisoner. When Abram hears of this he takes his 318 trained domestics, and smiteth the bad kings, and rescues Lot, and plunders the lands of those he’s conquered. But Abram refuses to take any of this plunder for himself, so that no one can say “I have made Abram rich.”

When he returns home, Abram is troubled. God has given him the land, and promised him many children, and said He would reward him exceedingly, but Abram has seen no real effect of those promises. He has no children, and how does he know the land is really his? Most importantly, all the land and riches mean nothing if Abram has no children to inherit them. So he whines a little to God, who – instead of vaporizing him for his impertinence – reassures him, appearing to him at night while Abram is in a dream state, or trance.

In his trance, Abram sees God lead him from his tent, where He tells him to count the stars, and says “thus is thy seed.” But that’s not enough for Abram. He asks God “How do I know I possess it?” How about some proof, Jehovah? If I’d asked my father a question like that I’d have been sent to my room. But not God.

Instead, God tells Abram to assemble a group of animals and fowl, divide them, and lay them in the field, which Abram does, and spends the rest of the day shooing away birds of prey that came to feast on the carcasses. As the sun was going down, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and in that sleep a great and terrible darkness came upon him. And in that darkness God spoke to him. This was God proving He was God – a profound terror, as Ellicott says, “which the creature cannot but feel when brought near to the manifest presence of the Creator.”

God tells Abram that his children will be “strangers in a strange land,” and will be afflicted by those in the land for 400 years, but it will all end happily, and Abram will go to his fathers in peace. The trance ends with Jehovah leaving – as “a smoking furnace and a burning lamp that passed between those pieces,” meaning the carcasses Abram had put down.

As a reminder – I am not attempting to write a new translation of the bible, just commenting on those passages that interest me, and bringing a new interpretation to those that present themselves.

And here’s one of the interesting parts. Because she can’t conceive, Sarai tells Abram to lie with Hagar, her handmaid, so he can have a child. He does that, and Hagar conceives. This changes her relationship with Sarai; she begins to disrespect her mistress. Sarai complains about it to Abram, who replies “She’s your handmaid; do with her what you will.” So Sarai chastizes Hagar and sends her away.

In her flight, Hagar rests for a time “by the fountain of water in the wilderness.” Where “a messenger of Jehovah” finds her and tells her she will bear a son, and to go back and humble herself to Sarai, which Hagar does. He also tells her to call her son Ishmael, and that he will be “a wild-ass man, his hand against every one, and every one’s hand against him — and before the face of all his brethren he dwelleth.”

The interesting point: this is the first use of the term “messenger of Jehovah.”

Obviously, though, it’s far from the first appearance of God Himself, who is frequently involved on a one on one basis with his creatures — appearing to them, speaking to them, sending his messengers, making promises, commanding them, making threats, and otherwise being a part of their everyday lives. Very reminiscent of the gods of other religions: the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, among others, who were constantly popping in and out of mortals’ lives. The significance of that is a matter for you to contemplate.