The Bible: Commentary and Controversy

So let’s talk about prayer, which at least one dictionary describes as “a solemn request for help or expression of thanks addressed to God or an object of worship.” It’s described variously in the bible as seeking God’s favor, pouring out one’s soul to the Lord, crying out to heaven, drawing near to God, and kneeling before the Father.

It is also commonly described as “talking to God,” which is a quite different thing. No pleas, no seeking favors, no crying out. Just talking. I like that definition best, but that’s just me. But all those definitions raise an important question: to whom and/or what god are we praying?

If you read my post on sin, you already know the answer; it depends on your belief system, and on the specific situation in which you find yourself. I remember the old adage: “there are no atheists in foxholes,” and believe there is a great deal more truth than poetry in that quote.

But is that universal? Must we need god in order to believe in him/her/it/they? That’s a really interesting question. Was Voltaire right when he said “If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him?”

Do atheists pray? And if they do, who or what are they praying to? When my favorite atheist, Bill Maher, gets in a dicey situation, does he “pray” to anyone for help? If a child of his was injured, or stricken with a terrible disease, would he simply hope his child survived, or that the doctors would do the right thing? When my son was diagnosed with cancer at age two and a half, I looked up God in a hurry, and begged Him to save Angus. Didn’t work, but I’m not sure it was God’s fault.

It’s my contention that everyone prays in some form or another, to some person or thing – or another. The horseplayer hanging on the rail at the track may pray to jockeys or horses: “Please run faster, Midnight!” Wives making dinner might silenty pray to husbands: “Oh, please mow the lawn tomorrow.” Children shrinking in their seats might pray silently and fervently to the teacher: “Oh, please don’t call on me today.” After the event there are thankful prayers: “Oh, thank you horse,  or husband, or teacher. And if their prayer wasn’t answered, they might pray in another way: “Damn you, why didn’t you… etc.”

Strictly secular. But that can change with the insertion of one little word. “Oh please make Midnight run faster,” “Oh please make him mow the lawn tomorrow,” “Oh please make her not call on me today.”  Which raises the prayer to a higher power (pun intended).

Which answers the question: must prayers acknowledge the presence of, and be directed to, god? Well, yes. At least a god of some sort. Which brings up another question: If we admit the existence of a higher power, and decide to pray to him/her/it/they, how do we define that higher power?

God – or the apostles – brilliantly answered that question with the creation of Jesus, which anthropomorphosed an indistinct, shadowy figure spoken of in the old testament, and gave us a real live person to pray to. Much easier than praying to an all-encompassing being floating somewhere up in the sky, which whom we have no earthly connection. Jesus was the lifeline thrown to us to pull us out of the murk into which we had sunk. Or at least that was the premise. And it worked beautifully. Jesus became a handhold to heaven we could see, and touch, and talk to, and take pictures of – a human being that was also God himself.

So what is sin? And if you sin against someone, who is it that you sin against? One dictionary defines it as “an immoral act considered to be a transgression against divine law,” and adds this strange phrase: “a sin in the eyes of God.”

Another, stating that this is the “true definition of sin” says it is “an offense against religious or moral law; an action that is or is felt to be highly reprehensible, as “it’s a sin to waste food.”

And check out this definition from Christian hamartiology, which describes sin as “an act of offense against God by despising his persons and Christian biblical law, and by injuring others. In Christian views it is an evil human act, which violates the rational nature of man as well as God’s nature and his eternal law.” Wow! We could write a book about that definition. “The rational nature of man?” Whoever accused us of that? But I digress.

According to Augustine of Hippo (354–430) (and the bible) sin is “a word, deed, or desire in opposition to the eternal law of God,” or “a transgression of the law.” Obviously that definition applies only to those who believe in God, which leaves the atheists and agnostics and my Uncle Jack  pure as the driven snow as far as sin’s concerned.

Okay, since we’ve cleared that all up, let’s look at the types of sin, of which there are two… no, three, uh… or four… uh, wait – twelve? Oh, boy. Okay, the first two are:

1.     Original

2.     Personal

Original being, of course, the sin that was passed down to us by Adam and Eve, and is in all of us. As David said: “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.” Hopefully there’s a way to cleanse us of that universal sin; we’ll keep an eye out for it.

Personal sin being, evidently, as simple as “sins of commission and sins of omission.” In other words, we can sin by doing or by not doing something. Which tells us nothing about what sin is; it merely gives us a short handbook on how to sin. But that’s okay; the world and literature are overflowing with definitions of sin.

The next definition offers three types of sin:

1.     Original

2.     Venial

3.     Mortal

Original we know about, okay, but what are the other two? What constitutes a “venial” sin? Catholicism evidently defines it as “a relatively slight sin that that does not entail damnation of the soul.” I love the majestic scope of that definition. It convinces me that I must find out what acts cause so grievous a sin that they mean my soul is damned for all eternity, and be very careful to avoid those acts. Oh. Those, evidently, would be classified as “mortal” sins.

Simplybible says there are four kinds of sin: sins of attitude, action, neglect, and intent. Again we’re told how we might sin, but not what the sin might be. But here tradition comes to rescue us, naming the  seven deadly sins: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust.

Enough already.

You could read for a lifetime about what sin is, and how to commit it, and what to do after you’ve done it, and so on and so on. As someone once said about creating laws against specified behaviors: the more you define the law, the better you define the loopholes. The true definition appears much simpler to me.

The two categories of sin (without all the twaddle)

If you consider it long enough, and with the right attitude, it will become clear to you that there are really only two categories of sin:

1.     Sins that separate us from God (for believers)

Let me again bring up one of the most evil and despised men of all time: Hitler, considered to be practically the definition of sin, particularly mortal sin. But that is the common judgment of him, and has nothing to do with whether Hitler actually was or was not a “sinner.” The true test is whether he sinned according to his own beliefs, not ours. I haven’t studied his life, nor do I care to, but many theories supposedly explaining him abound. They’re all twaddle, of course, because we can’t know unequivocally what was in his (or anyone’s) heart and mind. If he was convinced he was doing the right thing according to his belief system, he obviously wasn’t “sinning.”

The point is: if I believe in a God, whatever that god might be: a spiritual being, money, climate change, a brazen idol, we have formed a belief system according to that belief. Whatever we do that falls outside of that system is therefore a “sin.” In other words, whatever separates us from our “god” constitutes a sin, and the gravity of the act constitutes the gravity of the sin. If climate change is my god, and my preferred method of transportation is a Bombardier BD-700 or a more traditional Boeing 747, I am obviously committing a sin.

2.     Sins that separate us from ourselves (for everyone).

Suppose at the checkout counter I see a twenty dollar bill fall out of a woman’s purse, and I stealthily pick it up, pocket it, and don’t say anything to her. If I know that is wrong according to my own personal belief system, then it is a sin, and that sin separates me in some degree from myself: it will nag at me, perhaps for the rest of my life. Suppose I am totally dedicated to losing weight, and I sneak a Hershey bar. Sin. Why do so many criminals want to be caught, want to be punished? Because they have sinned against their belief system, which has separated them from themselves, and they want to be whole again, which requires atonement and punishment.

Obviously the whole concept of sin is integrally intertwined with our belief system. If I believe I should behead a sinner, or stone an adulteress, or electrocute a murderer, then doing so is a righteous act, and not doing so is a sin. If we all had the same belief system there would be no confusion. But that ship sailed a long time ago.

So. Sin defined. I think we’ll take up prayer next.

I started this project a few years ago to read – really read – the bible, to ask questions that occurred to me, and try to answer them in my own way. Unfortunately, the more I read, the less I began to think of the bible and the god of the old testament. Fortunately, I haven’t reached the new testament yet, though I have shared some passing thoughts about Jesus.

So rather than a reverential reading of a fascinating book, it has become a search for my own faith. I haven’t believed in a white-haired god in flowing white robes since I was a child; I have, however believed in God, because I have seen Him (or Her, or It) work small miracles in my life, but I have no knowledge of  who, what, and where that God is. Are the miracles simply coincidences I’ve attributed to a higher (or at least external) power?

I don’t believe so. But then again, I don’t know exactly what I do believe. So this project has now become a method, a pathway toward discovering what my beliefs actually are. I’m not foolish enough to think that I’ll wind up with some kind of concrete knowledge about god, or the watchmaker, or the creator, or aliens, or who/whatever I wind up believing in.

I know Jesus is that belief to many billions of people, largely because they see him as the personification of god, which gives them that concrete something to pin their faith on. Whoever invented Jesus, whether it was God Himself or just some really, really good storytellers, it was incredibly brilliant, because it gave all of us a specific someone to picture, and pray to, and from who to ask blessings. I am, however, a long way from the New Testament, and will now continue my stroll through “The Greatest Book Ever Written.”

Lastly, in Judges 19, we again encounter the story of the Levite and his concubine, which we referred to in another article. Let’s review. A Levite from Ephraim has a concubine who is unfaithful to him. Wow, what a shock. Anyway, she returns to her home, Bethlehem, and the Levite goes and gets her. (In case you are wondering, as I was, what a concubine actually was in those days, the Oxford dictionary describes it this way: in polygamous societies, a woman who lives with a man but has lower status than his wife or wives. In other words, a second or third or even lower class wife. Wow, no wonder she ran back to her parents.)

The Levite retrieves her, and on the way back to his home they stop for the night in Gibeah with an old man who offers them a place to sleep. While they are eating supper, the “wicked men of the city” start pounding on the door, demanding of the old man: “Bring out the man who came to your house so we can have sex with him.” (Strikingly similar to the Lot and the visiting angels story, but maybe this happened all the time in those days.) The old man cautions them not to do this wicked thing, and offers both his virgin daughter and the Levite’s concubine to satisfy their lust. But they wouldn’t listen. So the Levite grabs his concubine and shoves her out the door, whereupon the wicked men grab her and rape and abuse her all night. In the morning she manages to crawl back to the old man’s house and die on the front porch. When the Levite found her there he picked her up, put her on one of his donkeys, and carried her to his home.

Having arrived there, he did what any normal person would do: cut her into twelve parts and sent the pieces “into all areas of Israel.” I assume there was a message attached. After receiving the gory remains, “all Israel gathered before the Lord in Mizpah,” including 400,000 men armed with swords. The Levite tells the assembly his story, but lies about it, saying the wicked men had come to kill him, and took his concubine instead, raping and abusing her until she died. Nothing about him handing her to the gang to save himself.

Anyway, they decide to teach Gibeah a lesson, and seek the support of the Benjamites, who, however, decide instead to fight against their fellow Israelites, perhaps because of provincialism; they lived in towns in and around Gibeah. An imposing crew they were, too: “twenty-six thousand swordsmen from their towns, in addition to seven hundred able young men from those living in Gibeah. Among all these soldiers there were seven hundred select troops who were left-handed, each of whom could sling a stone at a hair and not miss.”

Well, somehow this small but expert group manages to kill 22,000 Israelites and send the rest running. So the Israelites ask the Lord if they should go again, and the Lord anwers “Go up against them,” which they do, and lose another 18,000 men. So they regroup and ask again if they should go again against the Benjamins, their fellow Israelites, and the Lord says “Go, for tomorrow I will give them into your hands.”

This time the Israelites set a trap and are able to kill 25,100 Benjamites, all armed with swords, at which point the Benjamites knew they were beaten. (An easy conclusion to come to, since they only had 1,900 men left, and the Israelites still had more than 350,000.) Then the Israelites went into the towns and put everyone to the sword, including the animals, and burned all the towns down except for 600 Benjamites who ran away and hid in a cave.

After all that, the Israelites assembled, mourning the loss of one of their tribes (the Benjamins), but vowing that no Israelite would ever give a daughter in marriage to a member of that tribe. Even though that tribe basically didn’t exist anymore. Then, counting those who had fought with them, they realized no one from Jabesh Gilead had joined them in their fight. Which angered them. So they sent 12,000 troops there and killed every man, woman, child, and animal, except for “every woman who has never slept with a man.”

Then the Israelites sent a peace offering to the remaining Benjamites, who came down from their cave and were given the 400 virgins who had been captured at Jabesh Gilead. But the 400 were not enough for the 600, and the Israelites could not supply any more because of their vow. So they came up with a plan. The Benjamites would hide in the vineyards surrounding Shiloh, and when the young women came to the annual festival of the Lord they would jump out, kidnap them, and carry them away. Which they did. Each man caught one while she was dancing and carried her off to be his wife.

Pretty cool story. Unfaithfulness, rape, abuse, murder, dismemberment, millions of men and women slaughtered, towns burned to the ground, and mass kidnappings with, obviously, hundreds more rapes to follow. All condoned, nay, motivated by the Lord. Problem is this is one of those stories in the bible that actually could have happened the way it’s told, since no heavenly miracles were involved. Although 27,000 troops soundly defeating 400,000 not once but twice is stretching my credulity a little.

I am, however, shocked that we encourage everyone to read this kind of thing, even our young children, because I see no redeeming virtue in it.

“Then the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord.” That’s pretty much the story of Judges. Israel misbehaves, comes under the thumb of an enemy, begs the Lord to save them, and the Lord raises someone up to facilitate killing the enemy and setting them  free again. Pretty messy way of doing it, however. Ehud, for instance, sticks a sword into the obese Eglon so deeply he can’t pull it out again, and runs away.

After Ehud “the Israelites do evil in the eyes of the Lord,” come under the thumb of a tyrant, and beg the Lord to save them.  Deborah then becomes at least the moral leader of the Israelites against Jabin’s army, also saying Sisera, the commander of that army, will be delivered into the hands of a woman. Shortly thereafter, Jael drives a stake through Sisera’s head and kills him. Then peace reigns for 40 or so years.

Then “the Israelites do evil in the eyes of the Lord,” come under the thumb of a tyrant, beg the Lord to save them, and along comes Gideon. It takes three miracles to convince him it’s really the Lord who is choosing him, but he finally accedes. The Lord then tells him to reduce the size of his army, because if he beats the Midianites with 10,000 men it won’t properly glorify Him. So Gideon eventually pares his army down to 300 men. Then, “at the beginning of the middle watch” Gideon put trumpets and jars with torches inside into the hands of his 300 men. They attacked, blowing the trumpets and smashing the jars, and the Midianites were afraid. The Lord then caused the Midianites to be confused and turn their swords on each other, killing a great part of their army.

Gideon then sent part of his army out to finish the job and capture the Midianite leaders, Oreb and Zeeb, and bring him their heads, which they do. So Gideon then goes to Sukkoth and Peniel and asks for food for his army, but they rebuff him. By this time the Midianite army has been reduced from 135,000 swordsmen to just 15,000. Still, you would think, a formidable for against Gideon’s 300, but he pursues them and captures their entire army.

Then, for rebuffing him, Gideon punishes the elders of Sukkoth with desert thorns and briers, as he had promised to do. He then pulls down the towers of Peniel and kills the men of the town. Then he kills Zebah and Zalmunna, commanders of the Midianites. Gideon then refuses to accept the throne of Israel, but asks the Israelites to give him all their gold, so he can make an ephod. It’s unclear what an ephod is, but Gideon makes one and places it in Ophrah, “his town.”

This happens with some frequency in the old testament – taking gold jewelry and making a calf, or an ephod, or something similar with it. But if you think about it, that’s quite a task – somehow managing to build a fire that will burn at just under 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, a bucket that will withstand that kind of heat in which to melt the gold, building a form in the shape in which the gold will be cast – a form that will also withstand temperatures of close to 2000 degrees – in fact, it would be impossible without the right materials and tools. Much like in the modern telling of Games of Thrones, when Khal Drogo melts gold in a cookpot and pours it over Visery’s head. Not possible, but makes a good story.

During the past 60 years or so, I’ve read parts of the bible, heard parts of it read in church, on TV, and on the radio.  But I never really read it. Now that I have, I am appalled. Appalled at the god of the old testament, who kills those who don’t believe in him, and those who displease him.

The flood is a great example. God doesn’t like what the beings he created are doing, so he wipes them all out – men, women, children, dogs, whatever.  Because he’s unhappy with them, he drowns millions of his creation, saving only Noah and his family, plus two of every “clean” animal.

Jericho, Sodom and Gomorrah, Gibeon, the plagues, etc. Shechem rapes Dinah, you’ll remember, certainly an atrocious act, but in retribution Jacob and his sons kill all the males and plunder the city, taking all the livestock, all the women and children, and anything else worth carrying off.

It feels like this god is an amalgam of a prototypical father figure painted by the authors: their idea of what a father should be. Stern, uncompromising, demanding obedience and allegiance, relentless, quick with punishment, unable to accept any other “fathers.”

Their idea, not mine. And it seems their intent was not only to prove the existence of, and power of, god, but to set an example for fathers and families everywhere.

The deeper I get into the old testament, the less able I am to accept the god defined therein. Things might have been different if I were a Jew a few thousand years before Christ. But I’m not.

I cannot condone or accept a god who mercilessly kills millions of souls just because they don’t worship him and him alone. That’s narcissism at its worst. It’s happened countless times in real life, with Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tse-Tsung, and others. Don’t like my way of doing business? Off with your head.

This short piece was written, as you might imagine, well after I began submersing myself in the old testament. Raised a Catholic, I always thought of god as an all-powerful father figure – one I would have liked my father to emulate. An intense reading of the old testament turned me completely around.

I no longer think of god as Charlton Heston or H.B. Warner — a white-haired old man standing on a mountaintop in voluminous robes holding the ten commandments. But I do believe in a god of some sort. I can’t picture, describe, or accurately define my “god,” but I have what I consider to be incontrovertible proof that my god exists and is concerned about my welfare. I find that to be so improbable I waver often from “there is a god” to “acknowledging the existence of any god is insane.” Yet still I believe. But not in the god painted by the authors of the old testament; that god is totally unacceptable to me.

This admission may cause you to throw this little book across the room, or into a bonfire, cursing it and me in terms acceptable to the god of the old testament. Okay. I guess it depends on the depth and details of your faith. For some, any inference that the bible is not the divine word of God, or that the god in the old testament is not Godly, is anathema, and I understand that.

I am not trying to debunk the bible, or suggest that your faith is specious, or claim my god, whoever or whatever that god is, superior to yours; I am only describing my thoughts as I work my way through this book from another millennium.

Everyone dances to his or her own tune. And as time goes by, and new information is processed, that tune can change, and so, obviously will the dance. It happened to me. I am in a different place than I was when I started this project. Where will I be when I begin my study of the New Testament? I’m eager to find out.

But first… Let’s start at the beginning.

It’s the Horatio Alger story on steroids: the poor youth cast away by his parents who becomes the ruler of a vast empire, loses favoritism, is persecuted and eventually saves his flock by destroying the enemy. Wow! No wonder it’s such a memorable tale.

According to Wikipedia, “The modern scholarly consensus is that the figure of Moses is legendary, and not historical, although a Moses-like figure may have existed somewhere in the southern Transjordan in the mid-late 13th century B.C. Certainly no Egyptian sources mention Moses or the events of Exodus–Deuteronomy, nor has any archaeological evidence been discovered in Egypt or the Sinai wilderness to support the story in which he is the central figure.”

Moses is, however, mentioned in many non-Judean writings. For example, Diodorus Siculus, a prominent and well-respected historian and author in the 4^th century BC, describes Moses as a wise and courageous leader who left Egypt and colonized Judaea, founded cities, established a temple and religious cult, and issued laws. Of course that reference – the earliest in non-Judean literature – was written many centuries after the events took place – if indeed they did.

Of course, whether Moses was real, or whether he did all that the bible says he did, is not the focus of this book. It’s a wonderful story that drives home the bible’s main goal, which is similar to the commandment stated in Deuteronomy and later restated by Jesus: “The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.”

Similar, yes, but as far as the intent of the old testament is concerned, it might be restated as “The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt trust and obey the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength, or severe consequences are sure to follow.”

Which pretty much sums up the action in the Moses story, which begins with a theme that will be reprised many centuries later, at the time of Jesus’ birth. Joseph has died, and there is a new Pharaoh. Seeing how the Israelite have prospered, and their numbers are growing, the new Pharaoh worries that “the people of the children of Israel may become more and mightier than we, and may join with our enemies to defeat us.” He therefore commands the Hebrew midwives to kill all newborn children during birth if they are male.  But because the midwives feared God, they refused to obey the king’s orders, and let the males live, saying the Hebrew women are too healthy and too quick, not giving us enough time to get there for the birth. So the Israelites continued to multiply, growing more and more powerful.

Seeing this, and fearing them, Pharaoh gives the order to “cast every son that is born into the river.”

During this time, Moses was born, and his mother hid him for three months. “When she could no longer hide him, she made for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch; and she put the child therein, and laid it in the flags by the river’s brink.”

By the way, the story of his being found in the bullrushes and adopted by the Pharaoh’s daughter is very much like the story of Sargon of Akkad’s Akkadian account of his own origins, which evidently preceded the Moses story by several centuries.

My mother, the high priestess, conceived; in secret she bore me
She set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she sealed my lid
She cast me into the river which rose over me.

Hmmm. Well, a good story deserves retelling.

So the Pharaoh’s daughter finds him, adopts him, and names him Moses, or Moshe, a name which means ”I drew him out (meshitihu) of the water.” (This explanation links it to a verb mashah, meaning “to draw out”, which makes the Pharaoh’s daughter’s declaration a play on words. The princess made a grammatical mistake which is prophetic of his future role in legend, as someone who will “draw the people of Israel out of Egypt through the waters of the Red Sea.” Making it a very cool name, indeed.

One day, when he had become a grown man, Moses saw an Egyptian “smiting” a Hebrew, so Moses “smote” the Egyptian and killed him. When Pharaoh heard about it and looked for Moses to slay him, Moses ran away to the land of Midian, where he had a son for whom he chose the name Gershom, for, he said, “I have been a stranger in a strange land.”

Eventually the king of Egypt died, but the Israelites remained in bondage, crying out to the Lord for release. The Lord heard their cries, and remembering his covenant with Abraham, decided to do something about it.

So He sent an angel in a burning bush (evidently God’s preferred method of communicating with Moses), spoke to Moses from “the midst of the bush” and introduced Himself, and told Moses He was going to send him “unto Pharaoh, that thou mayest bring forth my people the children of Israel out of Egypt.”

Moses, of course, asks “Who am I” to do that.

God explains “            I will put forth my hand, and smite Egypt with all my wonders which I will do in the midst thereof: and after that (the Pharaoh) will let you go.”

But wait, there’s more. God then tells Moses “ye shall not go empty,” but will take “jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and raiment… and ye shall despoil the Egyptians.”

Then, so Moses won’t have any trouble convincing the Israelites that he is doing God’s work, God gives him the magic staff, that turns back and forth from a rod to a serpent at Moses’ command. Moses still balks, worried that he is not eloquent enough, and God gives him Aaron to speak for him.

Finally out of excuses, Moses packs up his family, grabs Aaron, and heads for Egypt. Once there, he convinces his people of his mission and authority, and goes to see the Pharaoh, demanding that he let his people go. The Pharaoh, of course, declines. Moses then calls for a strike by the Israelites, who stop working and start praying. This irritates Pharaoh, and he comes down on them, causing Moses to ask God why his people are still being punished.

God kind of skirts the issue, telling Moses to take Aaron back to the Pharaoh, and when the Pharaoh asks him to do a wonder, to tell Aaron to cast down his magic rod. Which he does, and it becomes a snake. Which is evidently not an astonishing event in Egypt, because Pharaoh’s sorcerers and wise men then all cast down their rods and they also all become serpents. Oops. No problem, though, because Aaron’s rod/snake immediately swallows up all the others.

Pharaoh still won’t relent, so God directs Moses to take his rod to the river,  and smite it, upon which the river is turned to blood, as is all the other water in Egypt.

So Jacob settled again in the land of Canaan, where his father had lived as a foreigner. When his son Joseph was 17, he worked for his half brothers, Bilhah and Zilpah, tending flocks, and reported to Jacob some of the bad things his half brothers were doing.

Now, Jacob loved Joseph more than any of his other children because he was born to him in his old age. So one day he made Joseph a beautiful coat and gave it to him, which made his brothers jealous and angry.

Joseph then described a dream he had in which his brothers bundles were bowing to his in obeisance, which angered them even more. Then he described another dream in which the sun, the moon, and the stars were bowing to him. I can imagine the effect this dream had on his brothers, and anyone else he told it to.

So his brothers plotted against him.

One day Jacob tells Joseph to join his brothers in the field, see how they’re doing, and report back to him. His brothers see him coming and decide to kill him. They will throw him in one of the pits in the area and say an evil beast devoured him. Reuben, in order to keep Joseph alive so he might rescue him later, tells the brothers not to harm Joseph, but just to put him in the empty pit without laying a hand on him. Which the brothers do, first stripping him of his splendid coat.

As they then sit down to have lunch, they see a caravan of Ishmaelite traders coming toward them and decide, instead of killing Joseph, to sell him, which they do, for 20 pieces of silver. And the traders took him to Egypt.

The brothers then killed a goat, dipped Joseph’s coat in it, and sent it home to their father. Jacob recognized it immediately and assumed that Joseph had been killed by a wild beast. Dressing himself in sackcloth, he mourned for his lost son, saying “I will go to my grave mourning for him.”

When the traders arrived in Egypt, they sold Joseph to Potiphar, captain of the palace guard under Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, who is so pleased with him he makes Joseph his personal attendant. Everything goes along swimmingly until Potiphar’s wife falsely accuses Joseph of trying to rape her, and Joseph is thrown into prison.

Because God is watching over him, however, Joseph succeeds in all things, and before long the prison warden makes him his favorite, putting him in charge of the other prisoners and everything that happens in the prison. Some time later, two of his prison mates, the chief cup bearer and the chief baker, who have been incarcerated for offending Pharaoh, tell Joseph of dreams they have had. God interprets them through Joseph, giving the two dreamers a vision of their futures: one is to get his position back as cup bearer, the other is to be impaled.

Both dreams eventually come true.

Some time later, Pharaoh has two dreams, which no one can analyze. The cup bearer remembers Joseph from  prison, and Pharaoh brings him in to tell him what the dreams mean.

Joseph says they mean seven years of bounty for Egypt, then seven years of famine. He tells Pharaoh to put the best man available in charge of preparations for the seven years of famine. Pharaoh chooses Joseph, making him second in command over all of Egypt, and gives him Asenath, daughter of Potiphera, for his wife, with whom he has two sons.

So during the seven years of bounty, Joseph takes one-fifth of all the crops produced in Egypt, and stores it in Pharaoh’s warehouse.

During the next seven years, he trades food from the Pharaoh’s warehouses to the Egyptian people for their possessions, their livestock, and their lands, basically giving Pharaoh ownership of the entire country and all its contents.

During that time, Jacob sends the rest of his sons, excepting Benjamin, to Egypt to buy food. They meet with Joseph, who recognizes them, but they don’t recognize him. He makes life tough for them before he reveals himself as their brother, and they all hug and give thanks. Pharaoh tells Joseph to bring them all from Canaan to live in the land of Goshen, “the very best land in Egypt,” and showers them with gifts.

At age one hundred and forty-seven Jacob dies, asking Joseph to bury him with his ancestors. As he lies dying, he tells Joseph God wants him to go to Canaan to take back “the land of your ancestors, plus an extra portion of the land that I took from the Amorites with my sword and bow.”

Then he prophesies for each of his twelve sons, blessing each one with an appropriate message, and dies. And thus the twelve tribes of Israel are born and named. Years later, at the age of one hundred and ten, Joseph died, was embalmed by the Egyptians, and placed in a coffin in Egypt.

I have come to the point where I wonder why great parts of the bible are included. It seems much the same story is told over and over, in a different way, and with a different cast of characters. True, the story of Jacob’s early life seems unique – the deceiving of his father to steal the blessing from his brother.  But viewed in the light of the 21^st century, it’s hard to swallow if, of course, you are not an orthodox Jew (and probably even then.)

Jacob disguises himself as his brother and gets his father’s blessing. When his father learns he has been deceived, he bows to convention, saying he can only give the blessing once. I don’t see the reason for that explained anywhere, but assume it’s part of the Jewish tradition.

God help me, I’m not out of Genesis yet, and my mind is cramping with what I’m reading. For example: Judah, Joseph’s brother, “took a wife for Er his first-born, and her name was Tamar.  And Er, Judah’s first-born, was wicked in the sight of Jehovah. And Jehovah slew him.  And Judah said unto Onan, Go in unto thy brother’s wife, and perform the duty of a husband’s brother unto her, and raise up seed to thy brother.  And Onan knew that the seed would not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother’s wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest he should give seed to his brother. And the thing which he did was evil in the sight of Jehovah: and he slew him also.”

We have no clue about how Jehovah slew the brothers, or even proof that was what really happened, but obviously God could “slew” them any way He wanted to. However, from what the bible says, it would appear that He made it plain that it was He doing the slaying.

So then Judah’s wife dies, and he goes to Timnah to shear his sheep. And hearing of this Tamar disguises herself as a prostitute and gets Judah to have sex with her, receiving a goat as payment, and requiring as collateral “thy signet and thy cord and thy staff that is in thy hand.” And of course she becomes pregnant. Judah tries to find her to pay here the goat, and cannot.

Three months later Tamar appears, hands Judah the signet, cord, and staff, and Judah “acknowledged them, and said, ‘She is more righteous than I; forasmuch as I gave her not to Shelah my son.’ And he knew her again no more.” What? Of course Judah wasn’t exterminated by God for “his wickedness.”

I’m losing my way, here.

So Isaac then tells Jacob to go to Paddan-aram to find a wife, because “You must not marry a Canaanite woman.” Jacob travels toward Haran, lies down for a nap at sundown, and dreams of a stairway that reaches from the earth up to heaven, and the angels of God (Young translates it “the messengers of God) going up and down it.”

At the top of the stairway stands the Lord, who says (again according to Young’s translation) “I am Jehovah, God of Abraham thy father, and God of Isaac.” He then gives the land on which Jacob is lying to him and to his seed, and blesses Jacob and all his progeny to be. And in the morning Jacob names the spot Bethel, which means House of God.

So Jacob hurries on toward Haran, meets a group of shepherds, and they tell him his cousin Rachel is coming. Jacob kisses her and instantly falls in love. He asks his uncle if he can marry her. His uncle agrees, and says “Stay and work with me.” So Jacob stayed and worked for seven years to “pay” for Rachel.

On the night of their wedding, his uncle substitutes his older daughter, Leah, for Rachel. For some inexplicable reason, Jacob doesn’t notice, and has intercourse with her. In the morning, realizing he has been deceived, he goes to his uncle, who says it’s the custom for the older daughter to be married first, and asks Jacob to “spend the wedding week” with her, which Jacob does. Then the uncle tells Jacob to spend seven more years working for him and he will give Rachel to him as his second wife. To which Jacob agrees. So a week after Jacob had married Leah, his uncle gives him Rachel, and Jacob stays and works another ten years.

Evidently Rachel was incapable of conceiving, so the Lord enabled Leah to have children, of which she had four: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah, and then stopped having them.

Well, Rachel becomes jealous of all these children her sister is having, and confronts Jacob about it, saying “Give me children or I’ll die.” Jacob replies it is not he, but God who has stopped her from having children. Then, in the biblical way, Rachel tells Jacob to have sex with her maid, Bilhah, so that through her she can have a family, which Jacob agrees to do.

So Bilhah gets pregnant, twice, and gives birth to Dan and Napthall. Seeing this, Leah gets mad because she can’t have any more children, and Rachel is gaining on her in that department, so she gives her servant to Jacob for another wife. And Zilpah, the aforementioned servant, has two children, Gad and Asher.

Then Leah has sex with Jacob again, and eventually has two more sons and a daughter, which puts her way ahead of Rachel in the child department. So Rachel prays to the Lord, and he hears her prayers, and makes her fertile again, and she bears Joseph, which is probably where this whole story was pointing.

Then there’s that whole thing about the spotted and speckled sheep, with Laban and Jacob scheming to cheat each other. Jacob wins in the end, due to God’s intervention, and becomes very wealthy. Then God tells him to go back to the land of his birth. Jacob gathers all his livestock, and belongings, and family, and servants, leaves secretly so Laban won’t see them, and heads for Gilead. I don’t know how you would manage to get that kind of caravan past a blind man, much less Laban, but he doesn’t find out for three days that Jacob has left, whereupon he gathers his people and heads after him, murder in his heart. Fortunately, God appears to him in a dream and warns him to leave Jacob alone.

He still pursues Jacob, and chastises him for stealing Labon’s family’s possessions, but when they search Jacob’s camp they find none of them, mainly because Rachel has tucked the important things – Laban’s family’s idols – into her saddlebags and is sitting on them, apologizing for not getting up because she is “in the way of women.”

Jacob and Laban then make a covenant, establishing a boundary which neither will cross.  Laban kisses his daughters and granddaughters and goes back home.

So Jacob goes to reunite with Esau, first sending his wives, servant wives, children, livestock, and possessions on their way, leaving him alone. During the night God comes and wrestles with him, and is losing the match until He touches Jacob’s hip and wrenches it out of its socket. Then God said “Let Me go, for dawn is breaking.” But Jacob won’t let Him go until He blesses him, which He does, and renames him Israel, “because you have fought with God and with men and have won.”

Okay. Completely believable. Man wrestles God; man wins.

At any rate, Jacob and Esau are eventually reunited, and tearfully hug each other.

Later Jacob’s daughter Dinah slips away, as you or my daughter (or son) might, to a festival to see what’s happening. She is there raped by Shechem, the son of a prince, who falls in love with Dinah as a result. He begs his father to get Dinah for his wife.

So the sons of Jacob tell Prince Hamor that can’t happen because Shechem is uncircumcised, and that would defile Dinah. However, they tell him, that can happen if every man in your tribe is circumcised. Hamor agrees to make that happen. Which it does.

And while all the men are still “sore” from the circumcision, two of Dinah’s brothers took their swords and slew all the males, including Shechem and Hamor, and brought Dinah back home. Then Jacob’s sons, seeing all the men were slain, “plundered the city because they had defiled their sister,” taking all the livestock, all the women and children, and anything else worth carrying off.

Jacob, fearing retribution, rebukes his sons. But God saves the day again, appearing to Jacob and telling him to move to Beth-el. Which Jacob does, and God clears the way for him by terrifying all the cities in the area so they are afraid to pursue him.

Jacob and his people flee to Bethel, even though that place had not been named Bethel yet, and God appears to him again, blessing him, and apparently forgetting he had already named him Israel, he names him that again. Then God says “I am El-Shaddai—‘God Almighty.’ Be fruitful and multiply. You will become a great nation, even many nations. Kings will be among your descendants!  And I will give you the land I once gave to Abraham and Isaac. Yes, I will give it to you and your descendants after you.” Then God leaves and Jacob set up a pillar of stone and poured oil on it, and named the place Bethel.

They continue their journey, toward Ephratha (which is Bethlehem) and Rachel gives birth to Benjamin, but dies doing so.

Don’t go away, though. Now comes the story of Joseph, and it is some kind of story.

Okay. Let’s take a short break and talk evolution, DNA, LUCA, survival of the fittest, and all that stuff.

LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, is what we all sprang from, according to common scientific belief. It was a small, single-celled organism with a ring-shaped coil of DNA floating freely within the cell, like modern bacteria, and a set of 355 genes. It was the final evolution of the building blocks that had developed in the chaos existing more than 4 billion years ago.

That’s been duplicated. Almost.

In 1953 scientists imitated the earth’s early atmosphere by mixing hydrogen, carbon monoxide, ammonia, methane and water vapor in a glass flask and then subjecting it to ultraviolet light and electrical discharges. Within a few weeks (not even the blink of an eye on a cosmic scale) complex molecules formed in the mixture, including several amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, which are in every cell of every living organism. So the necessary ingredients (the building blocks) were falling into place.

But, of course, it was not alive, because for life to occur in this inert result of several chemical reactions, a further step is required – a vital piece needs to be added. Out of millions of compounds, formed over millions of years, only one in particular provides that missing ingredient – the crucial piece necessary for the emergence of life.

That missing ingredient is DNA, our genetic code, quite accurately called “the building blocks of life.”

Technically speaking, DNA (or deoxyribonucleic acid) is the hereditary material in humans and almost all other organisms. Nearly every cell in a person’s body has the same DNA, located in the cell nucleus. The information in DNA is stored as a code made up of four chemical bases: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T). The order, or sequence, of these bases determines the information available for building and maintaining an organism, similar to the way in which letters of the alphabet appear in a certain order to form words and sentences. Human DNA consists of about 3 billion bases, and more than 99 percent of those bases are the same in all people.

For simplicity’s sake, think of it as code, the kind used to write computer programs. Binary code has only two building blocks, or bases: one and zero. The way they are arranged tells the computer what to do. Human DNA is a very long and intricate “code,” containing more than 3 billion bases.

So how did this microscopic single-celled animal come to have a complex set of instructions telling it what to become and how to reproduce? Well, no one really knows. Some say it could have started with RNA, which is very similar to DNA, but less stable. Of course the question then  becomes “where did RNA come from?” There are some very astute and complicated explanations, but the simple answer is we don’t know and may never know where DNA and RNA came from, or why they came, or how animals began using them.

Bummer.

Believe me, the science world is feverishly dedicated to proving that life happened by accident. Otherwise they might have to accept the possibility of intelligent design, and that is totally unacceptable to them.

Well, that’s enough about DNA for the moment. We’ll get back to it.

Now let’s talk about evolution.

Of course Darwin knew nothing about genetics, and DNA, and so on. I believe he kind of got it right, anyway, but also got it very wrong. His whale story is a perfect example. According to Live Science, “In the first edition of The Origin of Species in 1859, Darwin speculated about how natural selection could cause a land mammal to turn into a whale. As a hypothetical example, Darwin used North American black bears, which were known to catch insects by swimming in the water with their mouths open:

‘I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale,’ he speculated.”

The idea didn’t go over very well with the public. Darwin was so embarrassed by the ridicule he received that the swimming-bear passage was removed from later editions of the book.”

Darwin, without realizing it at the time, basically says DNA changes as a result of the environment, such as changes in beak shape in Galapagos finches in response to available food sources.

History World provides this explanation.

“Chance, on which the theory of evolution depends, is exceptionally hard to believe in. But there is strong evidence, from the fossil record and from DNA, that chance has indeed brought us the amazing diversity of life.

Accidental changes in the message carried by the DNA have again and again led to altered or mutated versions of living things. If, as occasionally happens, the mutation brings an advantage of some kind, then the mutant creature is better equipped to pass on its new version of the DNA code to future generations.

Its descendants will seem, at the first few removes, a variant of the same species. Later, after many more mutations, they may have evolved into an evidently different animal. “

In other words, changes happen chaotically, rather than in response to the environment, and when a change is beneficial, it sticks. Which fits with Darwin’s survival of the fittest dogma.

Because I am who I am, I cannot believe that a bear became a whale in order to get more to eat. I also cannot believe a mouse turned into a bat for the same reason. But that’s just me.

However, I also have trouble believing in a set of wings suddenly sprouting on a mutant mouse, and proving to be beneficial. Obviously if the “wings” in the mutant mouse were not developed enough for it to fly, they would not prove to be beneficial. The “wings” would have to develop, generation by generation, into paraphernalia that would permit the mouse to fly. And because with the development of the wings apparently came blindness, a powerful sonar system would have to be added, so the bat could catch its food and not run into things. That’s a lot of mutation for a simple rodent.

However, there is at least one species of mouse that is blind and uses a sonar system. So it seems only reasonable that this is the mouse (or its equivalent five hundred million years ago) that managed to sprout wings. Otherwise, the whole evolution from mouse to bat is not just improbable, but impossible.

Let’s say you have a living, seeing mouse, and that creature somehow develops “wings,” meaning the third, fourth, and fifth digits grow abnormally long, with webbing between them. Okay, so what? It all of a sudden discovers it can fly? That’s a remote possibility, but a possibility. Maybe it falls off a cliff and finds out it can glide. From there it’s a short step to purposeful flight.  So everything’s good, right? It flies around all over the place and grabs bugs en volante. Why in the world would it then need to develop a sonar system?

Now suppose you have a living, blind mouse, the result of generations and generations of its ancestors living in dark caves, or only going out at night, or being born blind, or whatever. Over time it develops wings, and spends its life bumping into walls and trees because it can’t see. The development of wings in a blind mouse would be the first step to extermination.

But imagine the blind mouse, sitting in its cave, or somewhere in the black of night, listening carefully for the sound of something it can eat, and developing the ability to tell that sound from the sound of something that will eat it. Its hearing becomes more and more acute, and eventually it develops a method of sending a signal and analyzing what comes back. Bingo. The rudiments of a sonar system. From there, the development of wings would not be suicidal, but could actually become useful over time. As I understand the theory of evolution/survival of the fittest, I still don’t understand how the wings could be anything but a handicap until they’re fully developed, but maybe that’s just a problem of my small brain.

So let’s talk simians and homo sapiens. You’re a gorilla, or an ape, 500 million years or so ago. You have plenty to eat, you have little to fear from predators, you’re strong and quick, and life is pretty good. Why then would you develop into a weaker, slower being, surrounded by predators, with not enough easily accessible food? Now, if you knew you were going to develop into full-blown Man, with enough brain to solve problems, develop tools, plant crops, etc., etc., it would make more sense. But where is the granular advancement from ape to man? I don’t see it.

Thomas Henry Huxley, a colleague of Darwin, was perhaps the first to try to identify humanity’s roots using well-reasoned evolutionary thinking. In his 1863 book Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, Huxley said it was “quite certain”, anatomically speaking, that humans are most similar to gorillas and chimpanzees. One of these two must be humanity’s sister species, although Huxley was not sure which.

Wait. They are anatomically similar, so they must be sister species? What a lot of twaddle. The fact that two beings are “anatomically similar” in no way guarantees that one evolved from the other.

But right or wrong, that’s simply not important. The important question is “Why would simians evolve into a lesser creature?” To me this is not “evolution,” or “survival of the fittest.” It is a random mutation that worked.

We only have two choices, as I see it. Either evolution progressed through survival of the fittest – that is, a change occurred that was in retrospect foreseeable – and it benefited the mutant, or change happened chaotically, with no regard to positive progression, and the change benefited the mutant.

Now let’s look at another possible aspect of DNA, which I’m sure will be excoriated by scientists, religionists, and pretty much everyone else.

First of all, let’s go back to the comparison between DNA and computer code, and take it a step further. Probably the biggest advance in computers today is the study of artificial intelligence. Basically this means the computer inputs data, analyzes it, and makes choices based on probabilities. The key, of course, is the parameters set at the start. Asimov’s laws, for example.

So suppose the parameter set for DNA is to improve the species’ lifestyle. Wow! Everything fits, now. More food in the sea than on land? Start developing a sea creature. Blind mouse? Start developing a sonar system. Beak too big to get enough food? Make it smaller and more pointed.

No, DNA can’t look at the future and make changes based on it, but it might be able to assemble data and make changes based on empirical evidence. Question: did RNA develop into DNA because it wasn’t stable enough to make changes that might improve the species? And did it change to incorporate a more durable type of artificial intelligence? And was it designed and placed there in the first place by “an intelligent creator?”

What do you think?