As I slowly creep through the first books of The Hebrew Scriptures, the beginning books of the Torah, the law, I am constantly surprised, intrigued, and curious. And I’ll be honest it’s not easy going. I find it absolutely incredible how much information and the amount of stories that are crammed into two tiny columns, only a few pages. The Bible, full of it’s little books, astonishes me now. Rather than a religious text, it seems to me more of an encyclopedia of short stories and lists that pertain to the history of humans. I guess I’ll never get over the whole absurdity of attributing the initial creation to one powerful, angelic man; and the fact that millions of people live their lives strictly by how the bible tells them too; however, as a text, a book of words, I have gained a little respect for the Bible with the little bit of reading I’ve done thus far – it is after all a BIG book.
This entry will be somewhat random on purpose. As I read I marked or underlined certain passages, ones I found interesting, weird, entertaining, and such. So sit back, relax if you can, and enjoy some rather rambling reflections with Genesis.
Gen. 18:27 – “And Abraham answered and said, Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes:” Hmm, dust and ashes. This seems to be mentioned only in passing at this point in the bible, when the Lord tells Abraham he will spare the city if so many righteous people live there. But dust and ashes; this of course reminds me of Phillip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials.” In this trilogy the dust represents more or less the knowledge of good and evil. Kids retain their pure, innocent dust until they reach adulthood and become sexually experienced. There’s much more to the dust in Pullman’s work, but for now I’m satisfied to have an idea of where it came from in the bible.
Gen. 19 – For starters, I must say that it was in this chapter in Genesis that I discovered the name for my Inland Bearded Dragon (a pet reptile I have), and he will be now known as Zoar. This is also the chapter that I realized that the women in the bible are unique, much more so than the man. I’m looking forward to Thursday’s class when more will be discussed about biblical women. In chapter 19, The Lot Girls are quite intriguing. After God destroys the cities of the plain and sends ‘Lot out of the midst of the overthrow, when he overthrew the cities in the which lot dwelt.’ Lot runs to the mountains above Zoar with his two daughters. And what happens next? Yup, sex. The Bible loves sex. But interestingly enough, it’s not the man who initiates anything but the women, and in Lot’s case his daughters!!
Now, I guess there isn’t much else to do when you’re hiding out in the mountains, but this is a family, a father and his two daughters! Yet the girls decide to get their father drunk and take advantage of him!! Both of them!! Earlier in the chapter Lot also acknowledges that his daughters are virgins; not only do they have their father’s children, but their father is their first sexual partner! Whoa, I guess incest is a bit of an understatement, maybe this was some sort of fetish the women of Lot’s family had, I don’t know but it’s rather odd – though I’m sure Lot didn’t mind, his cities just got destroyed, he fled up onto a mountain, and now his two gorgeous virgin daughters want to have his babies. But why? “The firstborn said unto the younger, Our father is old, and there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us after the manner of all the earth: 32 Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that he we may preserves seed of our father.” It makes sense that the family wants their heritage to continue, but for the women to sleep with their father? Perhaps this is where the phrase ‘daddy’s girl’ really originated. Because it is certainly Lot’s daughters who take things into their own hands, literally, and who make a major decision that should probably be consulted with God. Yet God doesn’t intervene, interesting.
I’ll have to come back to this later. The next passage I think I’ll examine is the story of Isaac, Jacob, and Esau, which takes up chapters 27 – 35 where there are many other women who display similar traits as that of The Lot Girls.
