1: Everyone speaks the same language, despite being divided according to their tongue.
2-4:Man begins building a tower to reach Heaven, which is only like 5 miles up as everyone knows.
5-9: God came down to earth, which used to happen a lot, and confounded Men's language and scattered them, as they were getting way too close to building a functioning and progressive society of technological advancement for the Judeo-Christian God's liking.
10-26: More fucking genealogies. People are still living well past the 900 year mark.
27-28: Terah sires Abram, Nahor, and Haran. Haran begats Lot.
29: Abram marries Sarai, Nahor marries Milcah.
30: Sarai is barren.
31-32: Terah takes his son Abram, Sarai, and Lot and went into Canaan. The place, not the person. There they came unto Haran the Place, not Haran the Person.
Chapter 12.
1-3: God tells Abram to leave Haran the Place for somewhere else where God will build a great nation with Abram as its leader. God will bless those that bless Abram and curse those that curse Abram, so, yknow, be nice to that guy.
4-6: Abram, Lot and Sarai and all their people (slaves,) go forth to Canaan the Place.
7: God grants the land to Abram, because that's how property rights work, and Abram built an altar to God who appeared to Abram.
Again, God had no problem with just showing up.
8-9: More traveling and altar building.
10-13: They come to Egypt, where there is a famine. Abram, brave leader that he is, tells his wife Sarai to tell the Egyptians that she is his sister so that they don't kill Abram to take her as a sex slave.
Of course, they may take Sarai anyway, but at least the fella gets to go free, since he's just her brother. Right? "Hey, you're probably gonna get raped to death, so instead of dying trying to defend you, I'll just lie and save my own ass. We cool?"
14-16: Sarai was taken by no less than the Pharaoh, giving Abram sheep, oxen, asses, servants, and camels for her.
So yeah, if you're ever destitute in a foreign land, sell your hot wife to the local king.
17-20: God plagues Pharaoh and his house with plagues because of Sarai. Pharaoh asks Abram 'What the fuck? Why didn't you tell me she was your wife? Get the fuck out of here!' Abram, Sarai and their stuff gets the fuck out.
Chapter 13.
1-4: Abram, having grown quite wealthy in cattle, silver and gold, presumably from whoring out his wife, went back to his alter and called on God.
5-7: Lot, also wealthy in flocks, herds and tents, and Abram had too much stuff to stay on the same land without fighting, since God's prophets are all about worldly accumulation of wealth.
8-9: Abram proposes they split the land down the middle.
10-13: Abram stayed in Canaan, while Lot went down to the cities of the plains. The cities being Sodom and Gomorrah.
14-18: After Lot left to enjoy the sites of Sodom and Gomorrah, God promised Abram all the land that he could see in every direction until the end of time, and that his descendants would outnumber the grains of sand on the earth.
Anyone else think this is kind of a dick move? Hey, guy who sold his wife, You're gonna get everything you could ever possibly desire. Hey, tag-along nephew, you get to go live in a shithole so shitty their hobbies include Angel Rape.
Chapter 14.
1-12: There was a big war between a bunch of places that probably never existed. Or at least never existed as described, the end of which led to Lot and his good being taken by deserters from Sodom and Gomorrah.
13-16: Abram, learning of his nephews capture, armed his slaves and attacked them under cover of darkness and rescued Lot, his goods, the women and the regular people (men).
17-20: The king of Sodom and the king/high-priest of Salem met with Abram to sing praises. Abram offers the first tithe.
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| The King of Sodom. |
21-24: King Sodom offers to let Abram keep the goods in exchange for the prisoners. Abram says no dice, I'm not taking a bribe from you so you can say you made me rich. Abram accepted only the food that his men and confederates had eaten.
Which is the kind of noble and self-sacrificing and humble gesture one can make if one is already so rich that half a country can't hold all your stuff.
Chapter 15.
1: God appears to Abram in a vision claiming to be his shield and reward.
2-6: Abram asks why he doesn't have a proper heir. God promises Abrams descendants will outnumber the stars in the sky.
7-11: God asks for a creepily specific blood sacrifice.
Seriously, if you ever want to know how to properly butcher animals for the purposes of appeasing your mad desert god, this is the goods.
12-21: In a nightmare, God explains how, even though Abram will die peacefully of old age, his people will be enslaved for hundreds of years, but after that it'll be awesome.
Which would be an awesome prophecy if there was any possible way of proving it hadn't been retro-fitted into the narrative.
Chapter 16.
1-4: Sarai, who is barren and baby-crazy, tells Abram to knock up their handmaiden, the Egyptian Hagar. Hagar then gets uppity with Sarai.
Sarai gets mad butthurt about things happening exactly as she wanted them to, proving we really are made in God's image as he's constantly doing that.
5-6: Sarai 'dealt hardly' with Hagar, who flees.
7-10: An angel, upon finding Hagar, orders Hagar to return to Sarai and accept her punishment, and that Hagar's offspring will not be innumerable.
11-16: The angel informs Hagar that her child will be a 'wild man' with 'every man's hand against him' before she returns and gives birth to Ishmael.
Chapter 17.
1-5: Years later, God appears to Abram seeking to make covenant. Abram becomes Abraham, as he will be the father of many nations.
6-11: God explains the covenant, which is more 'innumerable descendants,' 'great kingdoms,' 'more powerful than kings' schtick. The sign of the covenant? Genital mutilation of infants. What else.
12-14: God explains the ettiquite for cutting part of a baby's dick off, even if that child is bought as a slave.
Weird how we consider this barbaric ritual 'normal.'
Also, if God doesn't want people to have foreskin then WHY DID HE DESIGN US WITH IT?
15-17: Sarai becomes Sarah, and God promises she will bear a child. Abraham has trouble believing this, as he is 90 years old. Although that's only like 8 in Genesis years.
18-22: God promises that, while Ishmael will be fruitful, the covenant will pass to the unborn Isaac.
Because let's not get crazy with handing out blessings and covenants, it's not like he's all-powerful and totally capable of passing the covenant to both with no real effort on his part.
23-27: Abraham takes Ishmael, all of his slaves, bought and born, and circumcises them, as well as himself.
Which sounds like it would have been the best Youtube video and worst day at work ever.
Chapter 18.
1: God appears to Abraham on the plains of Mamre one day.
2-8: It seems God took the form of three travelers, for some reason. Luckily Abraham is almost comically eager to please any wandering travelers who happen upon his tent. Abraham and Sarah personally prepare a feast for the guests.
I'm genuinely curious whether or not Abraham knew the trinity were really God, or if this is just how he acts around strangers. I mean he has lots of servants with freshly mutilated cocks, couldn't they prepare the feast?
9-11: The travelers tell Abraham (and Sarah, who was eavesdropping,) that they will have a son, despite being really old.
Now, just as a reminder, while Abraham and Sarah are freaking out about being too old to have children, Abraham's father was 70 when he sired children and lived to be 205 (11:26,32). So as far as I'm concerned, people breeding decades past the expiration of their historical life expectancy (around 30 it they were lucky,) is totally normal for this fiction.
12-15: Sarah laughs at the absurdity of the news. God asks why she was laughing, because he can totally do it, you'll see, God's really powerful.
16-20: God, turning his attention to Sodom and debates whether or not to tell Abraham what he is about to do. God decides to take Abraham with him. Only him is still them at this point.
21-33: God and the trinity travel towards Sodom, which God intends to destroy. Abraham, for once not behaving like a greedy, venal coward with a dick mutilation fetish, bargains God down to sparing the city if ten righteous men can be found.
If God is the source of morality, then why is the human the one trying to prevent needless slaughter at the hand of God here? I refuse to believe that Sodom was irredeemable, as the amount of irredeemable people in the world is a tiny fraction, and those belong to tragic cases of untreatable mental illness or severe psychological/emotional damage. For the rest, surely the 'right' thing to do would be to, I don't know, establish law and schools and to implement preventative education and better parenting techniques.This is God we're talking about, so money and time would not be an issue.
Chapter 19.
1-3: Two angels appear to Lot in Sodom. Lot begs them to stay at his house to eat and wash up, which angels need to do, apparently, and despite the angels desire to sleep in the streets, eventually enter Lot's home and feast.
4-8: A mob surrounds Lot's house demanding that the angels be released for raping purposes. Lot goes out and OFFERS HIS VIRGIN DAUGHTERS TO THE RAPE MOB IN THEIR PLACE.
I'll admit I'm not a parent, but I can say, as a person, I would never, ever, ever, ever offer a defenseless young woman to an angry mob in place of a grown man (which is how the angels are described). To any religious parents out there, I sincerely hope that if push comes to shove you will choose your child's well-being over the dictates of your insane god.
9-11: The mob surges, and the angels pull Lot into the house and strike the mob blind.
And no one was raped. Although Lot certainly deserved it after throwing his daughters to the mob like that.
12-14: The angels warn Lot that they are about to destroy the city, so that Lot can gather his family. His sons-in-law-to-be thought he was joking.
I wonder how hilarious they'd find Lot knowing he offered their fiancees up for gang rape.
15-17: The angels order Lot to take his wife and daughters and flee the city. When he doesn't, the angels forcibly remove him for his own safety. They then order him to flee to the hills to avoid the coming destruction.
18-22: Lot bargains the angels down to fleeing to the much closer village of Zoar.
23-26: With the dawn, God rained fire. All of the men, all of the children, all of the women, infants, elderly and unborn, all of the pets and animals of Sodom and Gomorrah burned. And Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt for the crime of watching the atrocity of God's handiwork.
27-30: The next morning Lot went out to see the smoking crater that used to be the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Lot, fearing to dwell in Zoar, went into the mountains to live with his daughters.
31-38: The daughters (of course it's the daughters' idea, this is the Bible,) decide to get their father drunk and have sex with him to get pregnant. They then give birth to Moab of the Moabites and Benammi of the Ammonites. The daughters don't get names.
Assuming the situation happened as written (which is questionable, given what we know of Lot's parenting skills,) that Lot's daughters got him black-out drunk and took advantage of him, as so often happens, surely when they became noticeably pregnant he would work out what had happened, right? Of course, maybe Lot was totally okay with it.
Chapter 20.
1-3: While sojourning in Gerar, Abraham again tells the king that Sarah is his sister when they come to take her. God, ever one to defend the worthless pile of shit Abraham, appears to the king in a dream to tell him that Sarah is married and that the king is a dead man.
4-7: The king, who had not slept with Sarah, claims innocence as both Abraham and Sarah stated that they were siblings. God claims to have know this and to have been the reason the king hadn't touched Sarah, and orders the king to return Sarah or fucking else.
Which is interesting, in that God clearly has and is willing to forcibly prevent people from partaking in actions he considers wicked. Yet, instead of exercising this faculty on the people of pre-Flood earth or at Sodom and Gomorrah, he found it preferable to drown and burn men, women, and children.
8-10: Upon awakening, the king informs his servants of what has transpired, then calls Abraham and gives him a similar 'what the fuck, dude?!' speech that Pharaoh gave Abraham the last time he pulled this stunt.
11-13: Abraham informs the king that, despite being an abject coward unwilling to defend his wife, she was his half-sister: therefore he wasn't technically lying. He also tells the king that he ordered Sarah to corroborate the story.
14-16: to set matters right, the king gives Abraham sheep, oxen, slaves and a thousand silver pieces and offers to let Abraham stay anywhere in his kingdom.
Because again, if you're a man of God, the best way to make a living is by whoring your wife out while claiming she's your sister.
17-18: Abraham prays, and God heals the king, the kings wife and their female slaves so that they could bear children. Because God had stricken all the wombs of the kings house barren because of Sarah...
First, Abraham has been begging God to fix Sarah's baby-maker for decades, but God decides female slaves that have nothing to do with Abraham in any way are a higher priority. Second, magically healing people of afflictions you magically gave them sort of cancels the use of magic out.
Chapter 21.
1-8: God finally makes good on his promise to give Abraham and Sarah a son, much to the rejoicing of all.
9-13: During a feast in honor of Isaac, Sarah notices Hagar, Abraham's other baby-mama playing with Isaac, and orders Abraham to cast Hagar and Ishmael out, much to the displeasure of Abraham. God tells Abraham to cast his other son's mother and his other son out, as Isaac is the only son that really counts.
14-16: Abraham casts out Hagar and Ishmael to wander in the wilderness. After running out of water, Hagar placed Ishmael under a bush, wandered a ways of, and wept at the prospect of having to watch her child die.
Just so we're clear: Sarah ordered this, God confirmed it, and Abraham did this. A woman is watching her child die of thirst in the wilderness because the child, son of a wealthy landowner, wasn't the legitimate heir.
17-21: God, again taking his sweet-ass time fulfilling his contracts, intervenes and the boy grows up in the wilderness and became a great archer and married a nice Egyptian girl.
22-24: The king of Gerar and the commander of his men told Abraham that God was with Abraham in all that he did, and asked him to swear by God that he would not deal falsely with the king or his descendants, as the king had always dealt honestly with Abraham. Abraham agreed.
25-32: Abraham complains to the king that the king's men had seized a well which was on Abraham's land. The king claimed ignorance of this. The two then took sheep and oxen and struck a deal in which the land of the Philistines was returned.
33-34: Abraham planted a tamarisk tree where the deal was struck, called on God and sojourned in the land of the Philistines.
It's weird how randomly specific some things are, such as their being seven ewes, or the tree being a tamarisk, whatever that is, yet Lot's daughters don't even receive names and time frames are marked only by births and deaths.
Chapter 22.
Fuck, I really hope we're done with the torture and murder of women and children for a while. The last few chapters were nauseating.
1-2: God commands Abraham to offer Isaac as a burnt offering.
Fuck.
3-5: Abraham takes Isaac and two men, along with wood and asses, and set forth for the place where he will kill his son for the glory of God. Drawing close, Abraham tells his servants to wait with the ass while he and his son go off to worship where there aren't any witnesses.
6-10: This is one of the most monstrous things I have ever read, in a book chock full of monstrous things.
11-14: At the last second God calls the execution off, as it was only a test. Abraham finds a ram to sacrifice instead.
As tests go, as far as I'm concerned, Abraham failed miserably. Abraham has, so far, repeatedly lied about his relationship with his wife to save his own hide, repeatedly whored out his wife in a foreign land, impregnated his slave girl, cast the slave girl and his first-born son into the wilderness, mutilated the genitals of both of his children and all of his slaves, and almost murdered his other son. This is the man viewed as the founder of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
15-19: God again promises Abraham the innumerable seed, all nations being blessed thing for his obedience. Abraham and his party return and dwell in Beer-sheba.
And that's the price, isn't it? Unquestioning obedience. Land, wealth, power, prosperity: what is that worth? Murdering a child? No. Hell is preferable to that.
20-24: After this Abraham is informed that his brother Nahor and his wife Milcah also bore children: Huz, Buz, and Kemuel father of Aram, Chesed, Hazo, Pildash, Jidlaph, and Bethuel. Bethuel begat Rebekah. His concubine Reumah bore him Tebah, Gaham, Thahash, and Maachah.
And hopefully none of those children had any dealings with the mad desert god of Abraham.
Chapter 23.
This entire chapter concerns itself solely with the death of Sarah, Abraham's grief, and the purchase of a burial place.
Chapter 24.
1-9: Abraham, now an old man, makes his servant swear to find Isaac a wife from the country of Abraham's kindred and not a Canaanite woman. And also to bring the woman to Canaan and under no circumstances take Isaac to the land of his fathers.
10-14: After loading up on swag and traveling to Nahor the Place, the servant posts up at a well to creep on the women drawing water. He offered up a really specific prayer to find a suitable wife.
15-20: At this point Rebekah, granddaughter of Nahor the Person shows up and fulfills the servants prayer request.
Now, I'm not an expert on the culture here, but the servant prayed that the right maiden would offer to water his camels as well if the servant asked her for water for himself, which Rebekah did. But that probably could have been any unmarried woman that responded in that way to an apparently wealthy traveler in a patriarchal society. Seems a bit like only praying for rain when it's already thundering.
21-28: The servant procures lodging at Rebekah's place and praises God. Because a normal person wouldn't rent out a room to a man offering gold jewelry in exchange for it.
29-48: Rebekah's brother returns to fetch the servant, who refuses to eat or wash up until he has told his story. He then repeats almost verbatim the first 28 verses of this chapter.
49-61: After agreeing to the marriage and showering everyone with gifts the servant and Rebekah depart immediately.
62-67: Isaac, meditating in a field, saw the camels and walked toward them, the servant told Rebekah that it was Isaac approaching, so she veiled herself. The servant then told Isaac what had happened, and Isaac took Rebekah into his tent, married her, loved her, was comforted after the loss of his mother.
I'm starting to worry, as nothing notably insane has happened in a couple of chapters.
Chapter 25.
1-6: Abraham remarried and had several more children, but gave all he had, minus gifts, to Isaac because fuck the other kids.
7-10: Abraham died aged 175 and was buried with his first wife by Isaac and Ishmael.
11: After Abraham's death God blesses Isaac, who dwelt by the well Lahai-roi.
12-18: Genealogy and dwellings of Ishmael.
19-26: Rebekah, who was also barren, eventually conceived after Isaac intreated God on her behalf, which always works out well. She gave birth to twins: Esau, born covered in fur, and Jacob, who came out grabbing Esau's heel.
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| Esau and Jacob |
27-28: Esau, whom Isaac preferred, was a hunter of the field. Jacob, whom Rebekah preferred, was a tent dweller.
29-34: Esau, returning from the field half-starved, begs Jacob for some food (pottage, whatever the fuck that is,) and Jacob convinces Esau to sell Jacob his birthright in exchange for a meal.
First, if Esau was short-sighted enough to sell his half of the kingdom for a meal, then he probably wouldn't have made a very good leader. Second, if Jacob is conniving enough to trick his dimwitted brother into selling his birthright for a meal and ruthless enough to let him starve if he doesn't, then he probably won't make a very good leader either. So I imagine things will soon get extremely cruel, bloody, and inhumane again very shortly.
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