Mistakes of Moses Expanded Universe: Genesis 33 & 34

Time to knock the rust off and restart this party.

In this installment Jacob scraps an old plan for a new one; the aging twins make nice until Jacob tricks Esau for old times' sake; a patriarch again buys some property in a land he's already been promised; filled-with-the-Holy-Spirit Stephen flubs the details once more; someone does a bit more with Dinah than strum on the ol' banjo; the men of an entire city get talked into some unnecessary genital surgery; Levi and Simeon show their father how dirty deeds are really done; and one of our sources continues to try to make the folks in the Northern Kingdom look bad.

Mistakes of Moses Expanded Universe: Genesis 32

In this installment Jacob meets some heavenly messengers on a camping trip to earth. He comes up with a plan to handle his approaching brother only to later abandon it. Finally, he has a nocturnal romp with a divine being resulting in a limp, a name change, and a whole lot of interpretive difficulty. Did you think the story in the last installment was a little difficult for conservative Bible expositors to wrestle with? Well, LET'S GET READY TO RUM....hold on a sec....I don't want to have to send a fat check to Michael Buffer. Let's just get started.

Mistakes of Moses Expanded Universe: Genesis 30:25 - 31:55

This time around we find some rather odd labor negotiations, we see Jacob up to his old tricks again using sympathetic magic to make himself rich (or maybe not), we have some fun at the expense of two thousand years worth of Bible commentators, and finally we witness a treaty that stood meaningless for a millennium.

Mistakes of Moses Expanded Universe: Genesis 29:1-30:24

In this installment Jacob goes about acquiring a family while in the service of his uncle Laban. Herein we find an incredible feat of strength, more baffling gullibility, another warning about those tricky neighbors to the north, a curiously silent yet quite active deity, a sibling rivalry involving a uterine arms race with a couple of slave girls caught in the crossfire, the silliest excuses for names you ever did see, and we read between the lines a bit to see how good biblical writers copy, but great biblical writers steal.

Mistakes of Moses Expanded Universe: Genesis 28:10-22

In this installment Jacob uses a magic rock to have an encounter with the deity, he has a curious response to Yahweh's promises while setting up a worship center in the wrong place, and we attempt to peel back the curtain a bit and show what source-critical scholars have been aware of for a while now.

Mistakes of Moses Expanded Universe: Genesis 27:1-28:9

In this installment, which we could begin calling "The Old and the Restless", Jacob continues his trickery with the help of his shifty Aramean mother; Isaac makes a careless blunder when casting a spell; Esau gets a really raw deal again because, well, Yahweh just hates him; and then all four main characters act like none of it ever happened. 

Mistakes of Moses Expanded Universe: Genesis 26

Just picking up a Bible and reading chapters like this one might make a reader come away yawning. Isaac goes to the territory of the Philistines to escape a famine, lies about his wife being his sister, gets rich in the process, develops a rivalry with the locals, gets into a dispute over some wells and settles things with a treaty. When taking other passages into account, however, there are a lot of interesting discrepancies. 

Mistakes of Moses Expanded Universe: Genesis 25

In this installment Abraham dies (or does he?) but not before knocking up a concubine to the tune of six more sons, Rebekah needs divine intervention to get pregnant and immediately regrets that decision, and Yahweh hates a guy before he's even born.

Mistakes of Moses Expanded Universe: Genesis 24

In this chapter we see a bit of Love Ancient Hebrew Style, featuring all the typical trappings of an Ancient Near Eastern romantic comedy. And what shall we call this comedy? Romancing the Stoning? The 40-Year Old Virgin? Failure to Launch? One Funeral and a Wedding? When Isaac Met Rebekah? Sleepless in Beer Lahai Roi? Sweet Home Aramea? Purchase Actually? How to Buy a Bride in One Day? I'll let the reader decide.

Genesis 24:1-9

Isaac is 40 and still unmarried and living in his dead mother’s tent (v. 67). Abraham, who is now 140, decides it's time to find a bride so the young lad...er...I mean middle-aged man can settle down. Note that even though Isaac is 40, he's being treated like a youth. Abraham calls his chief servant and tells him not to let Isaac leave the land, as though a servant would have that kind of say over Isaac, a grown-ass 40-year-old man man who will one day own him once old Abe kicks the bucket. In normal cases a servant would only be able to exercise this kind of authority over an heir that was not yet of age.

Is it possible that the writer of this portion (typically identified as part of the Yahwist or "J source" by those who adhere to the Documentary Hypothesis) had in mind a much younger Isaac who was only then approaching marrying age? After all, the only way we know Isaac's age is by using material found in chapter 23 along with 25:20, both of which are typically passages attributed to the Priestly or "P source".  Incidentally, the P source also puts Esau at 40 when he gets married. Recall that we ran into a similar age-inappropriate problem in chapter 21 with a teenaged Ishmael being treated like a toddler.

Mistakes of Moses Expanded Universe: Genesis 23

In this installment an entire chapter is devoted to negotiating the purchase of a burial cave, we meet some Hittites that aren't really Hittites, we discover more problems with a place-name and we see once again how Moses really enjoys repeating himself.

Genesis 23:1-20

Most likely not looking like she was a day over forty, Sarah dies at 127 years old in Hebron and an entire chapter of the Bible is devoted to Abraham’s purchase of a cave where all the Patriarchs and their first wives will be buried (sorry Keturah and Rachel, but you're not in the first wives club). Cue all the expositors offering guesses and trying to explain why the details of this transaction and burial cave are so significant. If the purpose was to show that Abraham had a rightful claim to some land in Palestine, it seems kind of silly given that it’s supposed to be Yahweh’s land anyway. If he wants to give it to Abraham and exterminate the sons of Heth/Hittites, that’s his prerogative, right? Why the need for all the described pomp and circumstance? Like I said, I'm sure someone has offered a guess that goes beyond the obvious political and cultural reasons.

Mistakes of Moses Expanded Universe: Genesis 22

In this installment we look at the sacrifice of Isaac. I've been fairly reserved thus far in this series, making light of a few things here and there, pointing out anachronisms and discrepancies and joking at the silliness generated by conservative views of Genesis as an inerrant, divinely inspired book. Fair warning for this passage: the gloves are coming off and I won't be pulling punches or tempering things. I think this chapter strikes at the very core of exactly how the traditional expressions of the Abrahamic faiths are able to make otherwise good people do terrible things in the names of their gods.

Mistakes of Moses Expanded Universe: Genesis 20 & 21

In this installment we get to experience a bit of déjà vu when Abraham once again becomes worried about his super-hot nineteen-year-old ninety-year-old wife, we find another big fat anachronism, we see once again how possession (of a woman) is nine-tenths of the law unless Elohim threatens to smite you, and we get to see just how much of a physically underdeveloped little man-child Ishmael must've been at seventeen.

Genesis 20:1-17

Abraham lives as a temporary resident in Gerar, a Philistine city that current archeology tells us wouldn’t be inhabited until 1200 BC at the earliest and not as anything more than a small village until about 800 BC, putting it hundreds of years after the time when the Patriarchs lived or when Moses supposedly wrote this account (Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, pp. 37-38). While there, not-so-honest Abe has his ninety-year-old sister/wife once again trick the locals into thinking that they aren’t married. Exactly as happened in chapter 12 during the first of the three "Dude, she's just my sister" patriarchal narratives, the ruler sees the nubile nonagenarian and takes her as a wife. In chapter 12 it’s Yahweh that threatens Egypt. Here in Gerar it’s Elohim. Later in 26:6-11 when Isaac pulls the same thing one more time on Abimelech, no specific deity will be named directly.

Mistakes of Moses Expanded Universe: Genesis 19

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Mistakes of Moses Expanded Universe: Genesis 17 & 18

In this installment: Abe is asked to put some skin in the game, everyone gets a laugh about having kids when you're old, Yahweh has to talk himself into telling the patriarch about his plans for Sodom and Abe teaches the deity about fairness, justice and mercy and schools him in negotiation.

Genesis 17:1
In this verse God appears to Abram and identifies himself as El Shaddai. Early translations from the Hebrew like the Greek Septuagint rendered this something like “God Almighty” because a similar word shadad means to overpower or destroy and this seems to fit when the name is employed in Numbers, Job and Ezekiel without the El element.

However, when it’s used in Genesis with El it’s almost always in the context of reproductive fertility (see 28:3, 35:11 & 49:25). Interestingly the Hebrew word shad means “breast” and the ending ai means “my own.” It’s very possible that Shaddai started out as a large-breasted Semitic fertility goddess whose “fruitfulness” attributes were eventually subsumed into Yahweh’s attributes, minus the accentuated breasts, of course.

Mistakes of Moses Expanded Universe: Genesis 15 & 16

In this installment: Yahweh makes some promises to Abram over bisected animal bodies, an ambiguous antecedent becomes the basis for an entire doctrine, more Chaldeans are mentioned before they exist, Yahweh rounds to the nearest hundred, old age is relative and slave girls learn their place.

Genesis 15:1
Yahweh is about to once again promise stuff to Abram, but this time he appears to him in a vision rather than as some sort of manifestation at an altar under a tree.

Genesis 15:2-5
There are a couple of elements in this passage that are highly suggestive of literary construction or oral folkloric tradition as opposed to a historical account. The first is that Abram’s servant and heir, Eliezer of Damascus who is nowhere else mentioned by name, has a name that means “El gives help,” which happens to be exactly what this passage is about.

Mistakes of Moses Expanded Universe: Genesis 14

In this installment: the armies of the greatest empire history has ever never known are no match for an old man and his slaves, the ultra-hipster Amalekites get conquered before they exist, there's some vital clarification regarding Abram's ethnicity, we find more evidence that Moses had a TARDIS, and the Hebrew patriarch pays off a Canaanite high priest and Yahweh is totally cool with it.

Genesis 14:1-12

There are nine kings mentioned in this passage. This is the best and only time in the Abraham narratives where we even get an opportunity to try to line up the account with the historical and archeological records of the Ancient Near East. It should be relatively easy since nine kings and a pivotal battle are mentioned in this passage. Indeed for about 200 years archaeologists tried to find matches for these kings. Most have given up. Why? Because the geopolitical situation described in this passage has no correspondence to the records of anything that took place in the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE when Abraham was supposed to have lived.

Mistakes of Moses Expanded Universe: Genesis 13

In this installment: Abram continues his Promised Land Sacred Shrine Confusion Tour™; Moses reminds his audience that Canaanites live in Canaan; Yahweh makes a promise to Abram...again; and the city of agreement fails to live up to its name.

Genesis 13:1-4
Abram goes back to Bethel where the altar was and again calls on Yahweh there, further cementing a practice that will be difficult to overcome later when worship is supposed to become centralized in Jerusalem.

Genesis 13:7

Again we have another odd remark from our supposed author Moses telling us that the Canaanites and Perizzites were in the land at that time. If this is really being written prior to entering the land, why would Moses need to insert this bit of clarification? Wouldn’t the Children of Israel wandering in the wilderness awaiting entry into the Promised Land assume as much? Doesn’t this remark make more sense if it’s from a time when there were no longer Canaanites and Perizzites in the land? Cue the "scribal insertion" excuse again for yet another anachronism.

Mistakes of Moses Expanded Universe: Genesis 12

In this installment we find a mistaken martyr, some superfluous Canaanite clarification, a confusing setting for worship, Episode I of the Patriarchal Pimping Trilogy, Sarai putting the "sexy" in "sexagenarian", a bit of justice Yahweh-style, and some time-travelling Egyptian camels.

Genesis 12:1-4
11:26 says Terah had Abram at 70. 11:32 says Terah lived to be 205, making Abram 135 at the time of Terah's death. This verse, however, says Abram was 75 years old when he left Haran, presumably after his father's death. This might not be that big of a problem as the text doesn’t explicitly state that Abram received the call from Yahweh and left Haran until after Terah died. It's possible to read this as though Terah could have still been living when Abram got the call and left, given the way it’s worded. We certainly get the impression that Abram didn't leave Haran until after his dad was dead, though. The bigger problem is that the supposedly inspired writer of Luke claims that Stephen understood this to be exactly the case.

In Acts 7:2-4 Stephen reportedly says, “The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran and said to him, ‘Go out from your land and from your kindred and go into the land that I will show you.’ Then he went out from the land of the Chaldeans and lived in Haran. And after his father died, God removed him from there into this land in which you are now living” [emphasis mine].

Mistakes of Moses Expanded Universe: Genesis 11

This chapter brings us confusion about a tower, more genealogies with oft-overlooked implications, a few interesting anachronisms and some fun with Hebrew names.

Genesis 11:1

The Tower of Babel narrative begins by informing the reader that the whole earth had one language. This is odd considering what was stated in 10:5, 20 & 31. People typically try to get around the problem by assuming that the chronology of chapter 10 overlaps with the events of chapter 11, ignoring how forced that solution appears. The truth is that neither chapter 10 nor chapter 11 paint a realistic picture of how and why human migration actually occurs. Chapter 10 wants us to believe that people cleanly and uniformly spread out by families and settled according to their languages and cultures, thereby putting the cultural cart before the geographical horse. Chapter 11 wants us to believe that it would take divine intervention to get people to migrate instead of obvious factors like constraints on available resources, rivalries, instability, etc. Both ideas come from the imaginations of ancient people who had little understanding of things like cultural geography.

Interestingly enough, it seems that Native American mythology like that of the Iroquois comes closer to reality by suggesting that groups of people were first spread out and isolated from one another by the creator deity, the Holder of the Heavens, and then because of that cultural and geographic isolation their languages changed to be different from one another. This etiological myth for the origin of the differentiation of language has the added bonus of including some things we can actually observe when we look at how and why languages evolve over the centuries, unlike the Babel myth which relies solely on divine intervention.

Mistakes of Moses Expanded Universe: Genesis 10

Genesis 10:1-32
Here we find the so-called Table of Nations. These folks will go on to populate the whole world. There are some problems here, however. Most of the nations that can be identified in this passage are, not surprisingly, surrounding Israel. Many of these “nations” supposedly founded by these guys are not known to history or archaeology until well into the first millennium BCE, i.e. long after Moses was dead even though Moses is supposedly writing about them as though his audience is already aware of their existence.