September 5, 2012
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Bible Verses Your Pastor Won’t Bring Up – Genesis
Everybody knows some of the broad themes of Genesis: God creates earth,the Garden of Eden, the story of Noah, etc. Here are some things that may not have been brought to your attention in Sunday School.
~ God creates day and night on the first day, but doesn’t create the sun or the stars until the 4th. (Genesis 1:3-5, 16-19)
~ God repeatedly refers to himself as “us,” though why (and why only in Genesis) is never explained. (Genesis 1:26, 3:22, 11:7)
~ Adam was not kicked out of the Garden of Eden for eating the forbidden fruit. God became nervous that his newly-enlightened creation would also eat fruit from the tree of life and become immortal.(Genesis 3:22-23)
~ Cain killed Abel because God liked Abel more. Why? Because as a farmer, Cain could only sacrifice plants to God. Abel was a herdsman,and so could sacrifice animals. (Genesis 4:2-5)~ God’s sons come down from the heaven to have sex with earth women. (Genesis 6:1-2, 4)
~ “There were giants in the earth in those days” isn’t an accurate translation. The word translated into giants was “Nephilim”, which nobody actually knows how to translate. (Genesis 6:4)
~ Noah gets drunk on wine from his vineyard and passes out with his genitals exposed. Ham, his son, accidentally sees this. When Noah wakes up, he punishes Ham by making his youngest son a slave. (Genesis9:20-27)
~ God makes a covenant with Abraham and demands that he and all his descendents become circumcised. God never explains why cutting off the foreskin is important, but it seems quite contradictory to all the other laws about never exposing one’s genitals. What good is a distinguishing self-mutilation that nobody is allowed to see? (Genesis17:10)
~ Rachel and Leah battle for Jacob’s favor by giving him their maids as sex partners. (Genesis 30:1-11)
~ God has a wrestling match with Jacob and loses. To honor the occasion, God changes Jacob’s name to Israel. (Genesis 32:24-30)
~ The “sin of Onan” is not masturbation. Onan wasn’t punished because he “spilled his semen on the ground” but because he didn’t impregnate his sister-in-law. God kills Onan. (Genesis 38:1-10)
Of course, many of these issues have light shed upon them when the Bible is viewed from a critical, rather than inerrant perspective. For example, God referring to himself as “us” is explained by Wellhausen’s documentary hypothesis. For a great book on how to read the Old Testament in a historical-critical perspective, I highly recommend Brettler’s How to Read the Bible.
Comments (44)
I absolutely HATE it when Christians try to argue that birth control is sinful because of the Onan story, using that as a defense let’s me know straight off that they’ve never read the Bible for themselves (I have, I’m agnostic though at best but I spent many years studying theology and history of the church before realizing it’s complete bullshit.) Great post.
What an amusing set of myths.
@loner_writer - It does have a mythological feel, doesn’t it?
My youth pastor has actually used all of these verses. Interesting though. I like the post. it causes me to think.
The wrestling match with Jacob and the subsequent name change to Israel is talked about frequently. I’m also unsure why this is included in this list. What’s the purpose of it? Same with Rachel/Leah competing for Jacob, though there’s far more to that episode then just that – for instance, Rachel and Leah’s father misleading and tricking Jacob for seven years’ labor (twice).
I can see why some of the others would be included, but that one stood out as an odd one for me.
Also, (at least in all the churches I’ve been in), it’s always been clear why Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden. It wasn’t the act of eating the apple that was at issue, it was the instance of disobeying God’s direct order, though it’s correct to say that it was fear of eating from the Tree of Life that led God to banish Adam and Eve.
My point is that some of these require more context than is given to make a judgement about the philosophy of these verses. It’s also a bold assertion to make that these verses are not used – my experience is that it’s just not true.
It’s quite barbaric, that bible, eh? It just screams out “written by ignorant, primitive men” on every page. The fact that people today, in civilized nations still believe this is the inerrant word of a being possessing an intelligence that’s eons ahead of ours is more than baffling. It’s both sad and laughable.
@cmdr_keen - I agree with you. context is needed in these verses. saying just these verses alone will obviously cause those who do not care to understand to make an instant assumption. I did find it interesting that god does say us and we a lot though only in genesis. never really noticed that one before.
Interesting….
Genesis is a very beautiful book when it is read critically. It’s a very confusing book when read literally.
Nearly every one of these items were talked about in the church I grew up in. Granted, their explanations for them were not always satisfactory, but at least they were honest about what the Bible said.
For the Onan thing, it might be fair to be even more specific: Onan’s sin wasn’t what most people think it is, but failing the obligation to carry on his heirless, deceased brother’s line. Funny you should mention the first part of Genesis 6, it’s the basis for one of my fave sculptures.
@In_Reason_I_Trust - Guessing you’ve never read the Qur’an…
you should read up on the Documentary Hypothesis. basically…
- where it says “God” in the Bible, the original text is “Elohim”- where it says “LORD”, the original text is “Yahweh”
Elohim is, technically, a plural noun.
also, the Israelite religion was not monotheistic but, in fact, monolatric. they acknowledged the existence of other deities (“Thou shalt have no other gods before me”) but determined that Yahweh was the only one worthy to be worshiped.
lmao @ the image
I have to admit, as a child I really did believe all the stories in Bible School I learned about creation and thought it was wonderful. Since then I now have more faith in Tinkerbell and her fairies coming to take me away into THEIR promised land. Φ ≡
Interesting stuff to know!
@flapper_femme_fatale - Read the last paragraph of my post, where I link to a summary of the Documentary Hypothesis (it was a major overarching theme in my Hebrew Bible class).
None of the pastors I’ve ever known have spoken from Genesis. That’s not to do with fear of refuting anything that social convention would believe sacred. Rather, my pastors all spoke on the positive messages found throughout the Bible, specifically the Gospels.
My pastor has brought up the first two.
Your third sets up a false dilemma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma). In the Creation myth, God forbids them to eat the fruit, then expels them in order to prevent them from being immortal, and because they ate the forbidden fruit.
Your fourth is a bare assertion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipse_dixit). The verses don’t indicate why God looked upon one with favor and the other without, but that one was a grain offering and the other wasn’t isn’t a permissible explanation, if only for the fact that grain offerings are standard in the OT.
My pastor has discussed the fifth. (Also, the phrase “sons of God” is difficult to translate into English, and at any rate, has been used to refer to both angels and human beings. I wonder why you don’t use the same level of analysis here as you did with regard to Nephilim There, you say we don’t know what Nephilim means. Here, you assume that “sons of God” means angels. Convenient.)
As to your seventh, yeah, my pastor has not discussed that. Good catch, Krisko!
“about never exposing one’s genitals” Source?
My pastor has discussed the ninth, about Leah and Rebecca. It’s a sad story, indeed.
My pastor has discussed the story of God “losing” to Jacob.
My pastor has discussed the story of Onan, and yes, it’s not an argument against birth-control, but rather an argument for men to take care of their wives that they have been entrusted to them where the wife’s husband passed away, instead of using her for sex.
Thanks for playing, anyway.
Here is another one for you, if there was a tree of eternal life in the garden, that implies that Adam and Eve were mortal, yet death is the penalty for sin……before they sinned.
I would suggest you post this in ReveLife. This will stir the shit there. I should like to see their explanations to deal with your valid points. I absolutely agree with every one of them. It is a sad thing when I agree with a lowly liberal over something so important.
Try more logic in your arguments next time. This is as lame as the quotes used by your opposition.
Cool stuff. Never thought of them that way
This link and the books it summarizes will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the “us” references like in Genesis. There has always been a plurality with God.
Here is a good summary regarding the Angel View of Genesis 6 and the nephilim issue. Nephilim comes from the Hebrew root word naphal which means “to fall” or “to be cast down.” Nephilim literally means “the fallen ones.”
All of these items have been discussed either in a sermon or Bible study led by the pastoral staff at my church. Normally when you find an oddity in Scripture like the ones listed in this post, it is a pointer to a very interesting, deeper concept. Dare to dig.
I’ve heard all of these addressed in sermons………..
But I haven’t usually gone to typical church services.
….usually….
There are some pretty inept churches out there. But there are also some decent ones.
But what is decent, anyway? Who gets to define that?
Mixing science with the Bibles is difficult. For instance the joke, Who is the fastest man in the Bible? This answer can be punned by saying Adam because he is the first in the human race. But basically Scientists are wondering if Neathanthals are human enough.
@brown_buffalo - Maybe sinning causes the soul to die and that the Apple made Adam aware of his soul? The Christians use the death because of sin thing a lot, however how the death of one man can prevent the death due to sin is a tricky subject that would take pages to write and fully explain.
@NightscapeFamiliar - Maybe in a liberal area like California you can find decent Churches? Are you in the Bible belt or in the North?
@an_acute_angle - Not an argument, just a list of passages you normally don’t hear in Sunday School. In no way do I declare this to prove the Bible to be false/evil.
@jordon@revelife - @nyclegodesi24 - @NightscapeFamiliar - You all obviously went to churches that explained more than 90% of churches out there. When I brought up the Nephilim with my youth pastor, he just gave me a blank stare.
@FringeChristian@revelife - That link makes Christianity look like a polytheistic religion.
God frequently explains his use of “us.” Also explains the purpose of requiring Jews to be circumcised (and requiring “circumcision of the heart” by Christians). Most books are like that. You have to read the whole thing to understand the point of it. Even 12-page childrens’ books usually have to be read to the end to understand the story.
@nyclegodesi24 - Do you believe your explanation to the Adam/Eve apple claim makes God’s action any more defensible? The passage clearly indicates that one of the, if not the only, motivating factor in kicking people out of the Garden was to prevent them from becoming immortal. God actively denied humans the choice of being free from death and sickness (or at least terminal illnesses). As someone who worked with cancer patients for several years, that’s just plain abominable.
I am not surprised God would do this, as gods fighting to prevent humans from gaining immortality and other god-like powers was a common theme in the religions Christianity borrowed from. But, what does surprise me is that many Christians read these passages and continue worshiping their God in a completely uncritical manner. Like, nobody every seems to bat an eye at the holocaust God allegedly committed through the worldwide flood, which drove mankind into near extinction. How much pain and suffering can an all-powerful being cause or permit before people demand a bit more in return for their life-long faith and commitment? Why don’t people hold God accountable for his previous actions?
God is not exactly portrayed as being reasonable in the Bible, but he is quite fickle and changeable at times. Maybe Christians could make the world a better place by demanding God live up to the hype a bit more, rather than just being passive supplicants clinging to the bread crumb miracles they believe are thrown their way every once in a while. I just don’t understand the complete and total subjugation to a being that has caused or permitted more pain and suffering than anything else in the history of our world. Arguably even more than the Devil.
@GodlessLiberal - I did find the list interesting though. I never really noticed that god said “us” when he was speaking to himself.
@UTRow1 - Well, mind you, it’s an allegory. It’s an allegory that teaches that when man turned from God, he turned away from the source of life and fullness. Adam was made in the image of God, but when he turned away from God, everything he made was in his “own likeness, according to his own image”, so subsequent generations generate poor and perpetually worsening copies of each other instead of imitating the Original. God’s placing a life-span upon humanity in this creation poem signifies placing a limit on the entropy and havoc that human beings could have created. And Jesus came to restore us to having “eternal life” – one that begins in the here and now, so God certainly does not want to “rob” us of our immortality – he just wants us to realize that he is eternal life, and that rejecting him is rejecting eternal life.
(Of course, none of this makes it true – you’re free to reject that this is the case, but that’s a different question from the one you posed to me.)
I could spend my time going through most of these, telling you facts and theories that I know and have heard, probably would be about 30-50 pages long (though some listed to me have no reason to even be listed). But lets be honest, you dont really want to discuss any of these, you just want to mock then and show how ridiculous you think religion and Christianity is in general. I took a whole class on Genesis 1-11. If you are really interested, I could give you the books we discussed in the class. Otherwise, I guess just ignore this comment.
EDIT – this isnt necessarily to the author of the blog, because he is right, some of these will not be talked about. But when I was going through Genesis, I would bring up some of these, either on my own or if asked by students. I know lots of pastors and minister wont/dont do that. I think that is unwise, harmful, and is trying to deny the brain God made us all with, along with our power to reason and choose how we want to live and how we want to believe.
Yeah, I’mma have to agree with @Doubledb - here.
I could give you a list of things that explain quite a bit of this.
But, that’s only for the “interested”
You must not go to church much because I have heard all of these passages preached.
@TheTheologiansCafe - yeah, I was thinking the same but honestly only read the list until the picture
@godlessliberal, the correct term is monolatristic.
I want what all those various folks were smoking when they wrote the buy-bull. I wonder if Frank Sinatra was singing … Fairy tales can come true … in the background as they smoked and wrote?
@nyclegodesi24 - [Well, mind you, it's an allegory.]
That’s the most convenient interpretation of it to have in the age of modern science, since it’s factually incorrect. But it only became an acceptable interpretation in modern times, and many Christians (if not most Christians, and certainly virtually all YEC Christians) also still don’t view it as pure allegory.
Adopting this view may alleviate some of the problems posed by my questions concerning your faith, but it doesn’t apply for most Christians, past and present. Many of these Christians choose to worship a God they believed actually committed all these barbaric and petty acts, just as described in the Bible.
[(Of course, none of this makes it true - you're free to reject that this is the case, but that's a different question from the one you posed to me.)]
Right, but it also doesn’t really address my question. I still don’t understand why Christians are willing to subject themselves to a being that is affirmatively or negatively responsible for all the evil on Earth without ever demanding more from him. The fact that we are (supposedly) rewarded with heaven when we die doesn’t mean that God has to permit horrifying suffering in this life, no matter how flowery or poetic the supposed justifications are for that “set up”.
Also, are all the examples in the Bible where God murders people, acts like a tyrant, etc. allegorical? Are none of them meant to be literal? Why did God approve and/or permit the Bible to portray him in that light, allegorical or not? Seems like pretty bad PR. When a consistent theme is “don’t displease God, or you die and/or experience eternal damnation” it’s hard to pretend that the intent behind the book was to convey that he is and always has been a sympathetic, rational, loving dude.
I know Christians have been struggling with answers to these questions since the beginning of their faith, as have all religions, it just bothers me that people pretend that there aren’t fundamental issues with the manner in which God has conveyed his message to us through the Bible. Many issues with the Bible’s message itself are also issues a competent writer could have easily avoided.
@UTRow1 - ”But it only became an acceptable interpretation in modern times,”
This is false. Philo (Jesus philosopher who lived during Jesus’ lifetime), Augustine, St. Paul, like half of the church fathers, and Darwin expressly interpreted the creation myth as myth, so you’ve got your reading cut out for you. The view that genesis 1 must be literal is the product of the reformation and popularized in America.
I thought you were asking specifically why God expelled Adam and Eve… not why God killed people, killed the Canaanites, and like everything else he did in the Bible. Geez dude I’m only a man, I put on one pant-leg at a time, and I went to public school, don’t have such high expectations of me. If you really want to chat about all of that we could work through it one passage at a time, which is painful and slow and arduous, but really the only way that has worked for me in my struggles with understanding it
@blonde_apocalypse - [God frequently explains his use of "us."]
Curious: when? And don’t say the New Testament, because that leaves three thousand years of people in the lurch, which is even worse than a confused God.
@GodlessLiberal - Not ignoring you. Will come back when I have time.
@mycontinuity - .@In_Reason_I_Trust - i know for a fact that he thinks they are ALL barbaric, which they are
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