My wife and I are going through the Bible together, starting at the beginning.  As we’re doing this, I thought it would be interesting to post any questions or reflections here.  I started doing this a while back, but here I’ll be including both mine and my wife’s reflections. 

We don’t hold back: if we find something striking, beautiful, ugly, senseless, etc.  no matter what, we let ourselves reflect and ask questions.

Sunday we read the first 11 chapters of Genesis together.

Right off the bat, we felt like the tone of the Creation stories vary from the initial 7-day creation to the more specific creation of mankind and the placing of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden.  I do know that most folks maintain today that these are two separate Creation myths, and you can clearly see the distinction. 

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Is the serpent really a talking snake? Did the original authors and tellers of the story of Eden see it completely as metaphor?  I don’t think so, because part of the curse after the eating of the fruit is that the snake will crawl around on its belly.  Now I think we can glean some metaphorical images out of the whole scenario, but I think that, at its original conception, the story treated the snake as a real, live, talking snake.

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We were struck at the imagery of God regretting he had made mankind and deciding to flood the earth and kill every living creature.  First off, we’re so flooded today (no pun intended) with images of God’s temporal omnipotence that we cannot see any sensible way where he would regret something.  Now we can say that this is just a human view imposed on God for our own understanding. But again, like the deal with the snake, I think at the time, God’s omnipotence may have been less of a concept than it is today: I think the people of that time really thought God got mad and regretted creating mankind.

Is this possible? Can God really regret something? I think that if God truly, truly regrets, and feels things like regret and remorse in the way that we do, then it opens up new doors onto the nature of who God is. But, being that we Christians usually hold that God knows and even ordains the future, such a God couldn’t really be taken by surprise in order to experience regret, could He?

I do think there may have been a flood in the geographical area of the Bible at that time.  It’s possible.  It’s even possible that there was an extremely large, perhaps, earth-covering flood.  I really don’t know.

But I what I surmise happened is, there was a disastrous flood, that stamped itself into the minds of the people at that time, and various stories cropped up, the story of Noah being one of them.  And then folks started trying to figure out why the flood happened.  And they came up with: God was angry about something.

Happens often enough.

That’s my take on the Noah Story right now.

The same kind of retro-active story telling (creating stories to talk about events that have happened) is also present, I think, in the story of Noah’s sons and their father’s nakedness.

I don’t think any kind of nakedness today can amount to cursing your child and all of his descendants, no matter what he walked in, and walked out, on.

Instead, I think that at the time of the story, the Canaanites, or Caananites, however you spell it, were viewed by the Hebrews as low-lifes.  So they create this story about how and why these people are so worthless.

Another Retro-Story.

Alright.  I believe I can see the Tower of Babel in the distance.

Until next time.