1. Why do the characters God favors seem like bad people?
Although a myriad of names and family lines can be found in the first 26 chapters of Genesis, the text focuses on a specific, notable few to whom God seems to give favor and with whom he communicates. These men include Noah, Abraham and Lot. However, the actions of these three characters specifically do not paint them in a favorable light. Noah and his family are the only human beings on Earth allowed to survive the great flood in Genesis 6 and 7, because Noah was "a righteous man, blameless in his generation" (Genesis 6:9). Yet in Genesis 9, Noah gets drunk and proceeds to get naked, and when his son Ham sees him naked, he doesn't just curse Ham, he curses Ham's son Canaan and condemns him to slavery and all his descendants to slavery (9:25), which seems like a shockingly cruel punishment for such a minor infraction. Abraham, the man to whom God says "I will make of you a great nation" (12:2), is a slave owner, which is considered a pretty odious thing to be in contemporary society. Lot, a man singled out by God as being the only man worthy of surviving the destruction of Sodom and Gomor'rah in Genesis 19, offers to allow an angry mob of Sodomites to rape his two daughters in place of two strangers (19:8), which seems like a bizarrely callous thing to do by modern standards. So why does God favor these people with such horrible, ugly character traits? The answer to me seems to be that these characters' actions only seem so hideous to me because of my post enlightenment values and ideals. The idea of slavery being morally acceptable is a hard pill to swallow today, but slavery, based on how casually Abraham's slave ownership is addressed in Genesis, was pretty widely accepted in the time period in which that story was written. Similarly, doing such things to one's family as offering to let strangers rape them and cursing their entire family line because they accidentally saw one naked seems bizarre and unnecessarily cruel, but since Lot and Noah are both treated by the text as if they are righteous in their actions, I believe these actions would have been more culturally acceptible when Genesis was being composed by its various authors. In order to understand why God favors apparently rancid people in Genesis, we must understand that our perspective is inherently tainted by the culture in which we live.
2. What's up with that part about the Nephilim in Genesis 6?
From Genesis 6:1 to 6:4, there is a particularly baffling and cryptic passage about...well, it's not entirely clear when read within the vacuum of Genesis, without any outside context. Genesis 6:4 mentions that "the sons of God came in to the daughters of men" and that "the Nephilim were on the earth in those days" (Nephilim being another word for giants), but these events are never referenced ever again in Genesis and never elaborated upon, so what do they mean and what is the point of their inclusion? The answer lies in an apocryphal text: The Book of Enoch. The Book of Enoch gives an expanded recounting of the events of Genesis 6:1 to 6:4, explaining that some of the sons of God (Angels) became tempted by human women and had sex with them, which produced giant, destructive Nephilim offspring. Without this information, though, the story fragment in Genesis 6 has no real meaning or purpose, which indicates to me either that 6:1 to 6:4 are a reference to the Book of Enoch, or the Book of Enoch was meant as a supplement to an incomplete text. Either way, this supports a theory of the Bible having multiple authors. I happened to be aware of the Book of Enoch and its contents while reading 6:4 to 6:5. Even though the contents of the Book of Enoch might not be common cultural knowledge, it is outside baggage I brought to my reading of Genesis and it would have been very easy for me to assume that 6:4 to 6:9 make sense in this context by assuming the Book of Enoch to be a part of the same text, but what it is important to realize is that even though the Book of Enoch is a related text, it was not chosen as a part of the Biblical continuity, and for all intents and purposes it's events never happened in the exclusive context of Genesis. In leaving my outside suppositions about the Genesis story behind, the reality of the multiple authorship of the Bible was more distinctly defined.
No comments:
Post a Comment