Genesis Blog #2

Kelly Gilbert

HUMN 220

Professor B. Akmen 

1/29/13

Genesis

I actually found this reading to be quite interesting. Although I’ve only read the bible when I was a small child, by my mother, and small excerpts from attending church, I learned a lot and found many things very intriguing. The part I enjoyed reading the most was the very beginning of Genesis when it explained how God created the heaven and earth and all living things, how he created light and dark first and how he created man from his own image. I was a little unsure of that, however. Did God really create the first man to look just like him? What did this first human being look like? Over time, different depictions have been made of what God looked like but over several years, these depictions might have muddled what the original God looked like. I also wonder how much of this information is valid because it’s all been written by so many people and so many different times over the years, as we discussed in class. I’ve never really thought this in depth about the bible, which is probably because I’ve never read it with an open mind. I’ve never tried to make sense of it.

Something that was quite interesting to me was how the first woman was created. It’s crazy to think a person can be created from the rib of a male. Reading this made me a bit skeptical, but I’m open to the possibilities and if so many of these bibles were written by all these different people, it’s got to be true, unless all the people writing bibles have no idea and are just guessing what they think might’ve happened. It all seems so weird when you think about it though. The notion that a serpent told Adam and Eve not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge just baffles me. I do find it interesting reading, however, almost like a novel with genres of drama and action and science fiction. I do consider the bible a kind of literature because in my opinion, it is a bunch of stories, those stories may or may not be true but there’s love and death and drama just like in an actual novel so I do think of it as a piece of literature.

I was quite intrigued reading until I got to around the 5^th chapter of Genesis explaining Adam’s line. It became pretty boring and too complicated, almost like a bunch of names were just being listed and I didn’t know who they were or how they related to Adam and Eve and that time period.

I realize that some people find the bible interesting and would prefer to read that over going to a sermon with an actual preacher, but for me, I personally feel that watching a preacher speak in a big open room is more interesting and I can much easily stay focused. When I’m reading from the book, it’s sometimes hard to focus and understand what I’m reading because it’s much less detailed and I have to read it myself rather than have a preacher yelling it to me.