Genesis 10, 11

I'm back! And I've got a program that'll help keep me on path. I hope.

Genesis 10 is mostly another genealogy explaining were all the peoples of the world came from out of the bottleneck that is the flood.

At the beginning of Genesis 11 there's the story of the Tower of Babel almost forgotten sandwiched between genealogies. People spoke the same language and decided to build a tower. Why? We don't know. This pissed off God who then went down and "confounded" their languages. Why? We don't know.

After this is the genealogy of Shem's kids, leading down to Abra(ha)m. By the time he's born, the earth is 2196 years old. Whee!

Okay, regarding the Tower of Babel. There's a particular subsection of mythology that's explanatory. There's a specific word for these myths but both Google and Wikipedia are failing me and I can't remember it, so I'll just go on from here, 'kay? Anyhow, you remember these myths from school. "Why Ravens Are Black" and "How Coyote Placed The Stars" and anything from the Just So Stories are these types of myths. And this is pretty clearly one of those. Why are there all these different languages when we all came from one people? Well, God got pissed off because some of 'em made a tower.

I'll admit, I'm not coming to this seeing everything written as something that actually happened but I will admit, I've never gotten why it pissed off God to build a tower and pissed him off enough that he'd make communication impossible, you know?

Anyhow, posts should be getting more daily now that I've got this thing to remind me. We'll see if I actually keep up with it. Also, Firefox has been doing something strange with the spellchecker, so forgive me if my spelling is worse than usual. My inability to see mistakes as I'm writing usually extends to several read throughs and I was never the best speller to begin with, so if there is a marked drop in readability, it's Firefox's fault.

Been a while because my life and school sort of exploded. Plan on updating more frequently now that I'm on winter break, however.

Also seem to have fixed whatever problem there was with leaving comments by changing the method of commenting. Since it seems only Keely is reading this, I hope you don't mind much. :-)

Genesis 9

So, it wasn't until chapter 9 that wild animals were afraid of man. "Dread fear of you shall come upon all the animals of the earth and all the birds of the air, upon all the creatures that move about on the ground and all the fishes of the sea; into your power they are delivered." (verse 2) I guess this also says that it was at this point that people started eating meat. That makes this carnivore sad. Over a thousand and a half years without meat? Blech.

There it is. "Every creature that is alive shall be yours to eat; I give them all to you as I did the green plants." (verse 3) According to the footnotes, all creatures were vegetarians before the flood. Again I say, yuck.

And God sets his bow in the sky as a promise to never flood the world again.

Towards the end of the chapter, there's the one bit of the flood that never makes it's way into the kids' books. Noah gets out of the ark and plants a vineyard. He then makes wine and gets roaring drunk and passes out nude in his tent. Ham, one of Noah's sons, "saw his father's nakedness" (verse 22) and goes out and tells his brothers about it. Shem and Japheth (his other sons) take a robe and walk backwards to cover their dad without seeing him. Noah wakes up and then curses Canaan, Ham's son. (?!)

Noah lived 350 years after the flood. (So the earth is now 1906 years old.)

Question I've never had answered: Why curse Canaan?

For some reason, I can't comment on my own posts. I'm assuming there's a glitch somewhere in blogger.

Keely, could you email that doc to me? Sounds interesting.

Genisis 7 & 8

The first five verses in chapter seven point to another author than the last chapter. Instead of two-by-two, God tells Noah to gather up seven of every clean animal and two of every unclean. (From what I understand, the clean/unclean thing wasn't stated until Moses came down off the mountain, so this seems kind of anachronistic.)

We also find out that Noah is six hundred when the flood happens.

It rained for forty days and forty nights and the earth stayed flooded for a while after. Everything that didn't live in water died. "The Lord wiped out every living thing on earth; man and cattle, the creeping things and the birds of the air; all were wiped out from the earth. Only Noah and those with him in the ark were left." (verse 23)

Chapter eight starts by saying that the world was flooded for a hundred and fifty days (!) "And then God remembered Noah..." and started the drain. (I've always wondered where the water came from and where it went during this.) Seven months later, the ark gets caught on the mountains of Ararat, but it takes another three months for the tops of the mountains to show up above the water.

The next six verses are how Noah figured out land was coming back. First he sends a raven, which doesn't do much, then a dove several times. Eventually, the dove comes back with an olive leaf. (It's been almost a year since the land has seen sunlight. How the hell was there an olive tree? It should be dead.) He sends out the dove again and when the dove doesn't come back he figures that things are returning back to normal.

In the second month of the 601st year of Noah's life, the earth was dry. God tells Noah to let everything off the ark and that they should all start multiplying to refill the earth. Noah sets up an altar of thanks and sacrifices one of every clean animal and bird and God seeing this decided never to do something like this again.

Have not been updating as homework has been roundly kicking my butt.

Expect a real update by the end of the month, though.

Genesis 5 and 6

Genesis 5 is a genealogy complete with ages. It's from this that Young Earth Creationists get their age of the Earth.

Adam was 130 when Seth was born who was 105 when Enosh was born who was 90 when Kenan was born who was... You get the idea. This leads down to Noah who was 500 when his three sons were born. (Does this mean that Shem, Ham, and Japheth were triplets?)

I sat down and worked out how old the earth was when they were born. It was 1,556 years old.

Chapter 6 starts with an explanation of the Nephilim. If you're following along with a KJV, it starts with the "There were giants in those days." thing. We're not quite sure what the Nephilim are and they don't show up in Canon again. If you've managed to track down the Book of Enoch (who showed up last chapter as "The whole lifetime of Enoch was three hundred and sixty-five years. Then Enoch walked with God, and he was no longer here, for God took him." No, this isn't Cain's son.) the Nephilim show up as what caused Lucifer's Fall from Grace. The "sons of God", whatever that means, came down to Earth, boffed a bunch of women and, the result of this is the Nephilim. Enoch says that they were thrown out of Heaven for this, but it's not Canon so it doesn't count, I guess.

Anyway, there's a whole bunch of wickedness on the Earth and God doesn't like it. In fact, he doesn't like it so darn much he decides to drown the planet and try again. I guess God runs Windows. ERROR! Reboot!

God looks down, sees Noah and decides to let him live. So he tells Noah to make "an ark of gopherwood" (What's gopherwood? We don't know. This is the only time it shows up.) and gives him the dimensions. The ark, by the way, looks like a rectangular box. It does not look like a ship. Noah's allowed to take himself, his wife, his sons, and their wives onto the ark and he's told that a male and female of all animals is to come aboard and he's also to get all the food he needs.

Thus does Chapter 6 end.

Young Earth Creationists have done whole feasibility studies on the ark. Unfortunately, I don't happen to own any of them so I'm not going to get into the evolutionary debate here.