#torrah

I love this one. Is it an anecdote? Is it a metaphor? Who can say. 

So God is pissed because His favourite creation, mankind, is running amok on the very Earth He created for them. It's like if your entire Sim family rebelled against you and started killing each other, but multiply that by a few thousand and make it real. Once again, I have to side with God on this one. But, you know when you're with someone on an argument and you're like "Yeah we're in this together!" but then they go off and take it a little too far and you're like, "Whoa, shit..." This is one of those cases. Instead of giving mankind a simple timeout, God decides to wipe out the entire human race, along with all the plants and animals. This is my "Whoa, shit..." moment with God. As any loving God would do, he plans to set a cataclysmic flood upon the Earth and drown every living thing in its wake. Maybe God got the same feeling you get when you tell your Sim to go swim in the pool and once they get in you remove the ladder and watch them drown. I don't know. 

But God worked really hard on mankind and he doesn't want to have to to start completely from scratch, so he selects one man whom he deems to be righteous: Noah. Now, I wonder why he needed to do this at all. Because of Eve, we already know that all of mankind is intrinsically sinful no matter what, so if God is going through the effort of wiping out the entire human race save for one special man, why not go one step further and get rid of mankind completely, then start fresh? And hey, maybe this time God could hire some pest control and get rid of the damn snake. Or why not just avoid planting the Tree of Knowledge altogether and lock Adam and Eve 2.0 in a playpen? Okay, we'll call that one creative licensing because what would the rest of the 1700 pages in this book possibly be about if it weren't for Adam and Eve's misfortune. I digress.

So God selects Noah as his righteous man and warns him of the impending flood. He gives him instructions to build a giant ark, which is really pretty nice of him. God is like the weatherman. So Noah builds the ark (wouldn't you?), but before he does, God adds an additional clause: Oh yeah, Noah you have to take a male and a female of every single animal and take them with you on your ark so that they can repopulate the Earth once the flood is over. Okay ... This changes the blueprint slightly. Luckily, Noah's ark didn't meet the same fate that other grandiose vessels have in the past (maybe his ark didn't star Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet). Let's just pause here for a second. Noah, the only righteous man in the entire world according to God, is tasked to take not just one but two of every single animal on the entire planet, shove them in an ark built by Noah and Noah alone in a time before welding and house them and feed them for forty days and forty nights and somehow prevent them from eating each other. Alright, I'm going to say it: God is a pretty unrealistically demanding parent. Oh and one more thing: Noah is six hundred years old. Six hundred. That old woman from Titanic was only a hundred and she could barely muster the energy to throw the necklace into the ocean. Come on, Bible. 

Thankfully God let Noah bring his sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Oh, he could also bring his wife, but her name isn't worth mentioning (remember--she is a woman). The sons brought their wives as well, who are also not worth mentioning. Somehow Noah rounded up all the animals, including the "creeping things." Now, tell me how an ancient six hundred year old man without a degree in biology can distinguish a male centipede from a female one. Or an ant for that matter. And how did he catch all the birds? Also--without evolution (it's a lie), how could the two of each animal he brought somehow "become" (don't call it evolution) all the new species we see? Unless he went all over the world, lugging his massive ark with him, collecting all the zebras and flamingos, this seems implausible unless some kind of force (it's not evolution) was acting. 

Anyway, he did it (obviously, we're still here are we not? Thanks, Noah!) and for forty days and nights Noah ignored the drowning people of the Earth. We can only assume that Noah and his family sustained themselves by eating a species that we'll never see thanks to them. So the rain stops, the lands clear and Noah unloads the troop off the ark where they then proceed to have a giant orgy to repopulate the Earth. Then Noah proceeds to offer God burnt sacrifices of the clean animals he "saved." One might wonder, then, what the point of all this was. I have an inclination that I'll be wondering this a lot. God is once again delighted by the smell of burnt animal carcass and he is hit with an epiphany. He realizes it's not so cool to be so destructive and he vows to never smite anyone again (somehow I don't see this sticking). This demonstrates that God is capable of emotional growth, which seems to contradict his eternal wisdom and perfection. But hey, any vow to smite no more is fine by me. Maybe that's why I haven't been smote yet for writing this? God materializes this vow with a rainbow, as the symbol for the loving relationship between man and God. NONE of this gay shit. Just God and Noah and the rainbow.

Like any good prophet, Noah gets drunk and falls asleep naked. His son Ham freaks out and gets his brothers to cover him with a blanket, which gets him cursed, you know, the usual stuff. And the curse is to extend to all of this son's descendants, the Canaanites. Then we get some filler pages with more genealogy stuff. Turns out, a particular group from these descendants gets cocky and decides to build a tower to reach heaven. God gets pissed and scatters them across the nation, changing their languages so they can never work together again. If you've ever struggled to learn Japanese, you can blame God for that.

With Noah long dead, we meet Abraham. Or should I say Abram, because only later does God forcibly change Abram's name to "Abraham," you know, for holy reasons. Abram is a descendant of Noah's son Shem, and they are called Semites. God whispers to Abram that if he follows His command, God will make sure all of his descendants get the divine treatment. Duh! Who wouldn't take God up on that. Abram takes his wife Sarai (finally! A name!) and his son Lot and they hang out in Egypt for a while. Abram gets rich via mysterious methods and peaces out of Egypt. There isn't a ton of interesting stuff going on here (for the fundamental prophet, he's pretty dull so far) until God tells Abram that the sacred covenant between God and his followers shall be represented in the holy act of ... Cutting one's foreskin off. Ah, yes. I seal most of my deals with circumcision, so I am totally with God on this one. God then decides that "Abram" is so outdated, and that "Abraham" is more appropriate. God also decides to rename Abraham's wife to "Sarah." I think I'm seeing a pattern here: God likes to add h's to people's names. If/when God speaks to me, I imagine he'll change my name to "Erich." I await thee. Abraham goes and circumcises all of his followers, which makes me wonder what the men at the time thought of this. I mean, how many men in our time would allow a 99 year-old man with a pair of scissors anywhere near their penises? 

Speaking of penises, we now come to Sodom and Gomorrah. As far as wicked places go, this was pretty much the height of it. Lots of shit went down there, and we can only assume it was something like the biblical equivalent of Las Vegas. So God sends two angels to do some investigating. Think CSI when they enter a crack den and look around critically--can you say angel out of heaven? So they're out patrolling when Lot, Abraham's son, steps out of his house and convinces the angels to come in for dinner. And then a mob of angry townspeople surround the house and demand Lot to hand over the angels. I know what you're thinking: the townspeople are upset by the angel's judgmental attitude and they want to evict them. That would make sense and probably be more proportional to the situation, but no. No, the townspeople demand the angels ... so that they can rape them. Now Lot, not wanting to be the guy who let two angels get raped on his watch, instead offers his own two virgin daughters for the townspeople to rape. Okay, so this place is maybe a little worse than Vegas, but in what world would offering your two daughters to be raped somehow be more moral? I get it, they're angels and everything but given their divine status one would hope they'd be able to fend for themselves. And Lot is supposed to be the good guy in all of this, yet he really isn't the one who is going to be dealing with the emotional trauma of being raped by an angry mob like his daughters would. So that makes me question this guy's problem-solving skills. The angels at this point have seen enough and they confidently report back to God that the place has indeed gone to shit (again, where God was during all of this is undisclosed). So God decides to destroy the city. Fair enough. He allows Lot to take his wife and two daughters with him and haul ass out of there. Once they've left the city, God does his thing and showers the city in brimstone and fire. The angels tell Lot's wife not to look back as the city is destroyed, but of course once she's told she shouldn't do something she just has to go and do it. For the split second it took for her to watch as her home is destroyed by God's wrath, she is turned into a pillar of salt. Yes, a pillar of salt. I get that she wasn't supposed to long for her old home because she's on God's path now or whatever, but the pillar of salt, come on God. She raised her children there, give her a second to grieve before turning her into salt. 

Now, Lot decides to live in a cave for some unknown reason ... Maybe the city of Zoar smelled like New York, I dunno. While he's in the cave with his daughters, they get a funny idea. Because caves are lonely places and there aren't a lot of suitors roaming the mountains, the two daughters decide that the seed of their righteous father, the guy who offered them to the angry mob to rape, must be preserved. Instead of, oh I don't know, finding him a new wife in Zoar, they decide it would be more appropriate to get him drunk and have sex with him themselves. Right. Apparently they just can't get enough of Abraham's seed because it isn't enough that they're already his daughters; no, they must also have his son so their offspring is like doubly more righteous. 

The stink of incest is a great place to leave off, I think.

This section of Genesis has been particularly rape-y for some reason, and I can't say I'm thrilled. God isn't very useful here--he always seems to show up at the last minute to say "Ah yes I knew all along okay let me smite them brb." I'm sure he's a busy guy, but to my knowledge this Abraham is pretty important. Shouldn't God already know that? Why is God always surprised by how loyal Abraham is? And why would God need to send angels to check out Sodom and Gomorrah if He knew the townspeople would try to rape them? 

I'm starting to think a lot of these situations present a strong case of Stockholm syndrome. I mean, if my father offered me to an angry mob of rape-obsessed townspeople, I really wouldn't trust the guy anymore and I especially wouldn't live alone with him in a cave. Severe psychological distress is really the only explanation for the daughters' actions. He's their father! Why would anyone do that. Come on, Bible. 

So the obvious argument is that these stories are all metaphors. Okay, sure. The ark thing has to be a metaphor because no mildly educated person could possibly believe that story really happened--I can't even begin to list all the reasons why this story is implausible. So let's interpret this as a metaphor. What is the message here? It seems to be one of obedience. Noah didn't question the ark request but instead went right to work. He also diligently rounded up all those animals. Noah comes off looking great, I mean he's loyal, he's faithful, and he's righteous in a time of evil. God, on the other, comes off looking like a toddler throwing a tantrum. Why did he have to go and kill every living thing? What did the squirrels do! It's humans that pissed Him off. Up until this point, it seems that humans keep fucking shit up. Adam and Eve, Cain, Noah's sons, Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot's daughters--really not painting a nice picture of humanity. So the only morality that can be driven of this story is ... People are fundamentally bad and only in unquestioning obedience to God can we hope to be redeemed, and in disobedience we can only expect mass death. But what doesn't make sense is how human God is portrayed. God can learn? God can make mistakes? What?

The fundamental problem with all this is that God did not create us in His image; we created Him in our image and he must therefore suffer all of our faults. And if that's true, why bother at all?