In The Beginning
If your looking for some interesting reading, check out what David Plotz is doing over at Slate.com. In a continuing series called "Blogging the Bible", Plotz is actually reading the book of Genesis, and as much of the rest of the Bible as he can get through, and writing down his thoughts and impressions as he goes. So far he's gotten to the death of Abraham in Chapter 25. I like the notion of what Plotz is doing very much; whether we think of the Bible as the inspired Word of God, or simply as a fascinating combination of literature, mythology, poetry, history, administrative code and propaganda (Disclosure: my own interpretations tend strongly toward the latter position, but I do my best to respect those who favor the former), it's amazing how few of us actually go back and read the thing. Plotz is no theologian and has no agenda; in fact, he claims no particular expertise of any kind. He is simply a man who is unfamiliar with the details of the Bible who has decided to read it and share his impressions.
Perhaps one of the reasons I find this to be an interesting project is because I myself did something similar a few years ago. Just sort of out of nowhere one day I decided to go back and read the book of Genesis. This wasn't out of any spiritual or religious inspiration, but was actually just the result of realizing that I couldn't remember actually reading the book from beginning to end.
Like Plotz, I was raised with religious instruction--Plotz attended Hebrew school as a child and went to a "rigorous Christian high school", while I attended Catholic schools for every year of education but one (freshman year of high school) from first grade through my graduation from Law School--and I thought that I knew what was in the Book of Genesis. I knew that it started with "In the beginning" and told the story of Adam and Eve getting cast out of the Garden of Eden, covered the strife between Cain and Abel, then probably finished up with Noah's Flood. If I'd ever thought about it (which I didn't), I guess I would have assumed that the stories about Abraham, Issac, Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat and all the rest were found somewhere in those later books of the Old Testament who's names I can never remember.
When I actually sat down and read the Book of Genesis, I was surprised and confounded by many of the same things that are now apparently surprising and confounding Plotz as he covers the same territory. For one thing, there's a lot more to it than I remembered. The story moves across many generations, finishing up at the point where the Israelites are living favorably under Pharaoh in Egypt. The part that I and most other people are most familiar with, the Creation story, actually makes up a relatively short portion of the book.
Second, long stretches of it are extremely boring. Much of the book is taken up with excruciatingly detailed genealogies, lists of place names, descriptions of migrations, breezy recountings of battles and all sorts of other details that probably mattered a great deal at the time they were written, but whose relevance today is hard to fathom.
But much more than the size of the story covered by Genesis, what really surprised me was how sanitized were the Sunday School versions of these stories that I'd been taught as a child, and how much was simply left out because, I think, many of the details are rather disturbing and difficult to reconcile with modern sensibilities.
So many things were completely different from what I had been taught or thought I remembered. First of all, the story is confused and contradictory--for example, there are two separate and conflicting Creation stories in the very first two chapters! But more unsettling, the God who appears in Genesis seemed to me to be a lot more like an old-world god than the more benevolent, omniscient source of all compassion that we tend to think of today. In fact, in Genesis God comes across at times as mistake-prone, paranoid and even needlessly cruel. For example, God goes through the trouble of creating everyone and everything on earth only to destroy almost all of it with a flood, simply because mankind, whom He created just a few chapters ago, is apparently full of an unspecified "wickedness." You would think God would have had more foresight than that. But in any case He decides He must kill pretty much every person on earth, along with every other living except those few that are on the Ark. Then, after the flood waters have receded and Noah has made burnt offerings out of many of the animals he has just worked so hard to save, God decides that even though "the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth" (i.e. the flood hasn't actually changed or accomplished anything besides a great deal of death and destruction), He will never again destroy the world in such a manner. It's as if He's figuring it out as he goes along. But in Genesis, God is always doing things like that.
I found the behavior of many of the human characters featured in the book equally surprising. There are lots of examples, but let's stick with Noah: In Chapter 9, the first thing Noah does after the whole flood episode is to plant a vineyard, then get drunk and pass out naked in his tent. Then the text tells us that his youngest son Ham "saw the nakedness of his father" and went to tell his older brothers. The older brothers cover their father up with cloth by walking in backwards so as to avoid seeing him in that state. Noah wakes up from his stupor and is furious once he finds out "what his younger son had done unto him" (side note: I can't help but get the feeling there's a subtext here I'm not catching on to) so he curses Ham and his descendants by making them slaves to his elder sons and their descendants. This Noah seems nothing like the nice, bearded old man in a bathrobe that I remember from childhood stories.
If you're as unfamiliar with the actual Book of Genesis as I was, you might be tempted to think that this is an isolated episode, somehow taken out of context. But it's not. If anything, it is fairly typical. Many of the heroes and heroines of Genesis actually come across as selfish and conniving, prone to jealousy and cruelty and disturbing episodes of violence. Trickery and deception and even murder are fairly commonplace, as are many other things we generally frown upon like taking slaves and practicing incest. Reading this I was shocked, and not quite sure what to make of it. After all, this is the first book of a collection of the most influential writings in the history of Western Civilization, and yet most of what I thought I knew about it turned out to be wildly different from what was actually written there.
Now I know there are people who have spent years studying these stories and coming up with ways to justify or explain away the parts that I found shocking, inexplicable, or downright bizarre, and I'm sure these people would love to lecture me about how I just don't understand, that it's all about context and the time in which it was written, or that somehow the words don't actually mean what they seem to say. That's all fine; I'm not a theologian or a historian and, unlike a lot of people, I don't insist that my way of reading these stories is the only acceptable one. And without a doubt, portions of the book not only provide excellent instruction, but are also quite beautiful (for example, understanding that to a certain extent you are your brother's keeper is the beginning of morality). But I would urge people to actually read Genesis or some other part of the Bible, and try to decide for themselves what to make of it. If you assume that "authorities" have always given you the whole story or presented the only reasonable interpretation, then like me you might be extremely surprised what you find there. I was utterly blown away, and I haven't really looked at religion in the same way since. And I'm sure I'm not the only one who's had this experience.
Perhaps one of the reasons I find this to be an interesting project is because I myself did something similar a few years ago. Just sort of out of nowhere one day I decided to go back and read the book of Genesis. This wasn't out of any spiritual or religious inspiration, but was actually just the result of realizing that I couldn't remember actually reading the book from beginning to end.
Like Plotz, I was raised with religious instruction--Plotz attended Hebrew school as a child and went to a "rigorous Christian high school", while I attended Catholic schools for every year of education but one (freshman year of high school) from first grade through my graduation from Law School--and I thought that I knew what was in the Book of Genesis. I knew that it started with "In the beginning" and told the story of Adam and Eve getting cast out of the Garden of Eden, covered the strife between Cain and Abel, then probably finished up with Noah's Flood. If I'd ever thought about it (which I didn't), I guess I would have assumed that the stories about Abraham, Issac, Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat and all the rest were found somewhere in those later books of the Old Testament who's names I can never remember.
When I actually sat down and read the Book of Genesis, I was surprised and confounded by many of the same things that are now apparently surprising and confounding Plotz as he covers the same territory. For one thing, there's a lot more to it than I remembered. The story moves across many generations, finishing up at the point where the Israelites are living favorably under Pharaoh in Egypt. The part that I and most other people are most familiar with, the Creation story, actually makes up a relatively short portion of the book.
Second, long stretches of it are extremely boring. Much of the book is taken up with excruciatingly detailed genealogies, lists of place names, descriptions of migrations, breezy recountings of battles and all sorts of other details that probably mattered a great deal at the time they were written, but whose relevance today is hard to fathom.
But much more than the size of the story covered by Genesis, what really surprised me was how sanitized were the Sunday School versions of these stories that I'd been taught as a child, and how much was simply left out because, I think, many of the details are rather disturbing and difficult to reconcile with modern sensibilities.
So many things were completely different from what I had been taught or thought I remembered. First of all, the story is confused and contradictory--for example, there are two separate and conflicting Creation stories in the very first two chapters! But more unsettling, the God who appears in Genesis seemed to me to be a lot more like an old-world god than the more benevolent, omniscient source of all compassion that we tend to think of today. In fact, in Genesis God comes across at times as mistake-prone, paranoid and even needlessly cruel. For example, God goes through the trouble of creating everyone and everything on earth only to destroy almost all of it with a flood, simply because mankind, whom He created just a few chapters ago, is apparently full of an unspecified "wickedness." You would think God would have had more foresight than that. But in any case He decides He must kill pretty much every person on earth, along with every other living except those few that are on the Ark. Then, after the flood waters have receded and Noah has made burnt offerings out of many of the animals he has just worked so hard to save, God decides that even though "the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth" (i.e. the flood hasn't actually changed or accomplished anything besides a great deal of death and destruction), He will never again destroy the world in such a manner. It's as if He's figuring it out as he goes along. But in Genesis, God is always doing things like that.
I found the behavior of many of the human characters featured in the book equally surprising. There are lots of examples, but let's stick with Noah: In Chapter 9, the first thing Noah does after the whole flood episode is to plant a vineyard, then get drunk and pass out naked in his tent. Then the text tells us that his youngest son Ham "saw the nakedness of his father" and went to tell his older brothers. The older brothers cover their father up with cloth by walking in backwards so as to avoid seeing him in that state. Noah wakes up from his stupor and is furious once he finds out "what his younger son had done unto him" (side note: I can't help but get the feeling there's a subtext here I'm not catching on to) so he curses Ham and his descendants by making them slaves to his elder sons and their descendants. This Noah seems nothing like the nice, bearded old man in a bathrobe that I remember from childhood stories.
If you're as unfamiliar with the actual Book of Genesis as I was, you might be tempted to think that this is an isolated episode, somehow taken out of context. But it's not. If anything, it is fairly typical. Many of the heroes and heroines of Genesis actually come across as selfish and conniving, prone to jealousy and cruelty and disturbing episodes of violence. Trickery and deception and even murder are fairly commonplace, as are many other things we generally frown upon like taking slaves and practicing incest. Reading this I was shocked, and not quite sure what to make of it. After all, this is the first book of a collection of the most influential writings in the history of Western Civilization, and yet most of what I thought I knew about it turned out to be wildly different from what was actually written there.
Now I know there are people who have spent years studying these stories and coming up with ways to justify or explain away the parts that I found shocking, inexplicable, or downright bizarre, and I'm sure these people would love to lecture me about how I just don't understand, that it's all about context and the time in which it was written, or that somehow the words don't actually mean what they seem to say. That's all fine; I'm not a theologian or a historian and, unlike a lot of people, I don't insist that my way of reading these stories is the only acceptable one. And without a doubt, portions of the book not only provide excellent instruction, but are also quite beautiful (for example, understanding that to a certain extent you are your brother's keeper is the beginning of morality). But I would urge people to actually read Genesis or some other part of the Bible, and try to decide for themselves what to make of it. If you assume that "authorities" have always given you the whole story or presented the only reasonable interpretation, then like me you might be extremely surprised what you find there. I was utterly blown away, and I haven't really looked at religion in the same way since. And I'm sure I'm not the only one who's had this experience.
posted by Yukon Sully | 3:29 PM
4 Comments:
SO interesting and the reason I have probably spent a great deal of time and energy reading jewish authors on the subject. There is a reason jews love the concept of the law and the idea that god's laws are to be studied in a scholarly way. It always seems like a great tradition to me. Maybe its because the god in their part of the bible is so much more about justice? I too read Genesis, but when I was much younger--for the history of it. There is a great book by CHaim Potok called The Wanderings which is a history of the jews in Genesis. Good stuff.
Did I say he's one of my favorite authors? The Book of Lights, My Name is Asher Lev--stunning books. MOst kids read The CHosen in school but don't ever read any more of his work. Its fabulous.
Or what about this--David didnt kill Goliath. He challenged Goliath, but winds up fighting an unnamed Philistine. Some other guy killed him...think of all the stories from the bible that kids in sunday school digested with the incorrect facts.
The most interesting religion class I took in college (Old Testament) was taught by a priest but our text was by a Protestant. This author basically said that the Old Testament was a collection of folk tales meant to teach lessons (something Jesus did much later). Many of the ancient civilizations had a flood story-- there's not just one "Great Flood Story." That's why I look on the Old Testament as a collection of fairy tales, folk tales, what-have-you, compiled to teach us a lesson, not meant to be taken as literal truth.
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