I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Genesis 19-20.

    When the angels came Sodom to see if the city was indeed as wicked as reported, Lot insisted that they spend the night in his house. They told him that they had intended to spend the night in the city square, something it was apparently common for travelers to do at the time, but Lot insisted. I noticed something interesting today when I was reading this passage. When the men of the city came to Lot’s door and demanded that Lot turn his guests out so that they could rape them, Lot asked them not to do such a wicked thing. There is reason to believe that, in Lot’s eyes, the wickedness these men wished to perpetrate was the violation of hospitality. They wished to inflict violence upon men who had been offered hospitality in their city. The response to Lot from the men of the city is interesting, to paraphrase, they said, “Who are you to judge us?” Notice that it was not enough for them that Lot look the other way when they violated hospitality by attacking men who stayed the night in the city square. He did not impose his sense of right and wrong on them there, but now they were declaring that his wish to defend men to whom he had extended hospitality was an offense against them. It was not enough that Lot did not interfere with their disregard for what he considered common decency in the public square, they wished him to allow them to turn out his own guests for them to abuse. I suspect that this may represent the sin which led to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. It was not enough that Lot did not come out and condemn their violation of the code of hospitality which he believed in. They demanded that he not uphold that standard in his own home.

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Genesis 16-18.

    When Sarai was 75 years old she gave up on having a child, yet she wanted Abram to have a son. So, she gave Abram her slave, Hagar, to be his wife. As one could expect, this went badly. When Hagar became pregnant she started to treat Sarai with contempt. Sarai blamed Abram, who told her that Hagar was her slave so she could do as she pleased to her. Sarai then mistreated Hagar such that Hagar ran away. God appeared to Hagar and told her to return to Sarai, where Hagar’s and Abram’s son Ishmael was born. Despite the mistakes they made, mistakes which stemmed from their inability to trust God, both Abram and Sarai are held up to us as exemplars of faith.

    Thirteen years later, when Abram was 99 and Sarai was 89, God came to Abram once more. At this time, God told Abram that his name would be Abraham and Sarai’s name would be Sarah. Furthermore, Gold told Abraham that Sarah would bear him a son, who would be the father of kings. Abraham laughed to himself at the thought of having a son when he was 100 and Sarah was 90 (the ages they would be would be by the time a child conceived then would be born) and asked God to honor His promise through Ishmael. God rejected the idea that Sarah was too old to bear children, but promised to make Ishmael the father of twelve rulers (just as Jacob/Israel was the father of the twelve tribal patriarchs). If Sarah could bear a son at age 90, none of us should consider ourselves too old for whatever task God calls us.

    I usually refrain from writing the same point about a passage which I know I have written previously. However, I think the point about the negotiations between Abraham and God over the number of righteous people necessary to save Sodom and Gomorrah is worth going over again. Whenever I read this I am reminded of when Jesus compared the Kingdom of Heaven to yeast. It only takes a small number of righteous people to transform a society of wicked people into something acceptable to God.

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Genesis 12-15.

    Today’s passage continues with God calling Abram to continue the journey which he had begun with his father. At God’s calling Abram once more set out for Canaan. Abram traveled to the Negev, which is largely suitable only for nomadic herders even today. It is worth noting that while Abram was in the Negev a famine came on the region similar to the one which would later send Jacob and his sons to Egypt…and this famine sends Abram there. I will not write much about Abram’s stay in Egypt except to note that he was afraid that the Egyptians would kill him in order to take his over 65 year old wife. Something those of you who think an older woman cannot be beautiful should keep in mind.

    I am always struck by the story of Abram rescuing Lot. First the backstory. Kedorlaomer, king of Elam, had been collecting tribute from Sodom and Gomorrah and several other cities for 12 years when they decided to stop paying. After a year of what I assume to be negotiations, but was perhaps just Kedorlaomer gathering his allies, Kedorlaomer loots the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, enslaving some of the people. Among those enslaved is Lot. When Abram receives word that his nephew has been taken as a spoil of war, he gathers his men and his allies and sets out after him. Now, Kedorlaomer and his allies each had the might of a city-state to draw upon. Abram and his allies did not. Nevertheless Abraham is able to defeat Kedorlaomer and retrieve the people and goods which had been looted from Sodom and Gomorrah. Or to put it another way, Abram was a “power” in the regional geopolitical circumstances of his day. This is something we need to keep in mind as we read the rest of the Book of Genesis.

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Genesis 8-11.

    As I was reading today’s passage I was struck with what God told Noah after Noah offered a sacrifice for surviving the flood; “I will never again curse the ground because of the human race,…” I remember seeing this before and I remember thinking about its meaning. However, what struck me today was the thought, “How does this apply to pollution?” Or perhaps, “Does this apply to pollution?” I do not have an answer to that question, but I will note that it seems like every time when it has seemed like pollution has turned some place into a wasteland, it takes less time to undo it than anyone postulated. Even if that statement does apply to pollution that does NOT make it OK to pollute, because the end of that sentence is, “…even though everything they think or imagine is bent toward evil from childhood.” I would look at that and interpret it to mean that anything we do which results in something which can reasonably be interpreted as “cursing the ground” qualifies as evil.

    Generally, we think of the story of the People of Israel as starting with Abraham, but that is not correct. The story of the People of Israel starts with Terah, Abraham’s father. We are never told why Terah left the city of Ur. We know that he left Ur after the death of his son Haran and that he set out for the land of Canaan. But Terah never got to Canaan. He stopped in the city of Haran. I have long thought that if the Book of Genesis is to any degree factual, the stories about what happened before this point in the book needed to be passed down to Abraham from his father (and from Abraham to his sons). Is it possible that Terah left Ur because his son Haran was killed for telling the story of the Flood which conflicted with the official version as presented in the Epic of Gilgamesh? It has long been postulated that, because of the similarities between the story of The Flood and the Epic of Gilgamesh, the story of The Flood derives from the Epic of Gilgamesh. I have always wondered why we assume that the biblical account derives from the non-biblical rather than the other way around. I understand that the earliest records we have of the Epic of Gilgamesh are older than the earliest records we have of Genesis. However, those early records of Gilgamesh were on stone tablets, which survive the ravages of time better than any scroll. On the other hand, Abraham and his sons, grandsons, and great grandsons, were nomads. Which means that, if they had written their account down, they would likely have done so on something lighter, and more transportable, than stone. Even if they had written it on stone, they would have been unlikely to have left broken fragments of it where archeologists are likely to find it.

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Genesis 4-7.

    There are two key stories in today’s passage: the story of Cain and Abel, and the story of Noah. For the longest time I felt bad for Cain because God did not find his offering acceptable. From the way it was taught to me I thought the problem was that Cain offered crops while Abel offered lambs. However, as I read the passage now I see that Cain just offered “some” of his crops while Abel offered the “best portions of the firstborn lambs”. Rather than change his actions going forward and making better offerings in the future Cain became resentful of Abel and killed him. Another interesting thing about the story of Cain and Abel is that there are numerous other people in the world. We do not know where these other people came from. They may be other descendants of Adam and Eve, or perhaps God had created other people as well. A straightforward reading of the passage makes the first unlikely (the wording suggests that Seth was Adam’s and Eve’s third child, although it does not spell that out and therefore that may not be the case). I personally do not have an opinion on the answer to where the other people came from, but it is a question I am looking forward to having answered when I get to Heaven.

    As an introduction to the story of the flood, and as a means of explaining how corrupt the world had become, we are told that the “sons of God” took any of the beautiful women they saw as wives and had children by them. The heroes of ancient renown were the offspring of such marriages, but we have no real understanding of who the “sons of God” referred to here were. Another answer I am looking forward to receiving in Heaven. The passage tells us that the people were totally and consistently evil so that God chose to wipe the earth clean of them. However, there was one man who walked in close fellowship with God. that man was Noah. God gave Noah instructions to build a boat and take aboard his family and “a pair of every kind of animal”. I have wondered for many years whether “every kind of animal” was story tellers short hand, since only those animals which Noah brought on the boat would have been around after the flood.

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Genesis 1-3.

    As I read the account of creation I struggle with reconciling it with scientific knowledge. There are two reasons for this. First, the language used here is much more figurative than a modern writer would use to describe the same events. Second, a lot of “scientific knowledge” is built on things which were “learned” when the assumptions made by those who discovered the “knowledge” were things which we now know to be completely false (Darwin lived at a time when most atheists believed that the universe had no beginning but had always existed). Ultimately for me, my understanding of creation relies on two things. The scientific interpretation of how the world began rests on the assumption that there is no God, so there must be some other explanation for how the universe came to be. In other passages the Bible clearly teaches that death entered the world when Adam sinned. As a result, I find that this account is more useful in living my life than that which is put forth by “Science”.

    I find the account of the first sin to be the most instructive part of today’s passage, and a great way to start the year. My focus today is on something I do not recall anyone teaching on this passage mentioning. The serpent started his attempt to seduce Eve into sin with a straw man argument. As a result he set the stage for Eve (and Adam, who we are told a few verses later was right beside her) to think that God’s commands were unreasonable. The serpent’s opening statement was, “Did God really say you must not eat the fruit from any of the trees in the garden?” Well, we know full well that God said no such thing. Indeed, God had said that they could freely eat the fruit of every tree in the Garden, except for one. And Eve did indeed tell the serpent that. But by making his opening argument the serpent had planted the idea that God’s command might not be in the best interest of Adam and Eve. Which is the basis for his very next argument.

    The serpent made the argument that God forbade Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in order to keep them from becoming as powerful as He was. The serpent claimed that God gave that commandment in order to oppress them. Eve saw that the forbidden fruit looked good and accepted the serpent’s argument. It is worth noting that Adam was standing right next to her and did not come to God’s defense. Further, it never occurred to Adam or Eve to take the serpent’s argument to God and ask Him for a response. Adam and Eve accepted the serpent’s argument that eating the fruit would make them like God and never considered that that might not be a good thing, nor did they consider whether it was true. They never considered that having knowledge of evil served no useful purpose. Until they ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they did not need to know how to tell right from wrong because they did not know how to do wrong.