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.

Computer Brains

I was reading a post about thoughtcrime as it relates to Christianity over at A Counter Apologist's blog when it dawned on me that one of my favorite Christian rock bands had engaged in some unintentional irony related to this issue back in the day.

First some background.

It seems obvious that CCM is highly derivative, and the Christian rock band Petra was certainly no exception. In 1984 (the year, not the book) the young people were all tuning in to keyboard-driven techno pop, so there was a natural inclination for a Christian rock band like Petra to veer away from their rock roots and produce a techno pop album. 1985's Beat the System was that album. It was the first ever CCM recording I was introduced to outside of Amy Grant, Keith Green and Truth.

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].

Modern Mythic Messiahs that Out-Christ Jesus: Marty McFly

Christ figures have been around since…well…before Christ. Even as a Christian I acknowledged that there were what theologians often referred to as “types” of Christ in the Old Testament. These included Adam as a son of God, Abraham as an intercessor, Noah as a deliverer, Enoch who walked with God and ascended into heaven, Melchizedek a king and priest, King David the shepherd king, Isaac the willing sacrificial victim, Moses the lawgiver and deliverer with an infant exposure story, Joshua (same name as Jesus) the conqueror who led people into the Promised Land, Joseph the humble servant who became a ruler and deliverer, Jonah the prophet who was in “death” for three days and was “resurrected”, Judah who offers himself in exchange for the life of his brother, Boaz the kinsman-redeemer for Ruth, Daniel who is thrown in a pit of lions and emerges unscathed, Solomon the wise ruler and supposed husband of the female protagonist of the Song of Solomon, Elisha the prophet who miraculously multiplied resources and performed resurrections, Samson the Nazarite deliverer with a miraculous birth who is betrayed and sacrifices himself, and on and on.

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.

Christianity's Culture of Pious Fraud

As I reflect on the time I spent as Christian, I can look back and see things that should have been obvious clues that something was not exactly right. The Bible itself contains many of those clues, but even outside the Bible, Christianity seems to have an ingrained sense that taking liberties with the truth is acceptable and even encouraged as long as it bolsters faith, reassures the doubting and furthers "the cause of Christ and His kingdom." One is left to conclude that for all their talk of having the truth, Christians in general seem to have a careless disregard for it. Most seem to be willing to believe anything as long as it conforms to their expectations.

Mistakes of Moses Expanded Universe: Genesis 9

We now turn to the post-flood world and learn more about God's "promises" and find out that Noah could be a bit testy when he was hungover.

Genesis 9:2
In this verse God says every living creature of the earth and every bird will be terrified of mankind. This is kind of odd because there are quite a few land animals and birds that are not at all terrified of humans, especially in places like the Galapagos where, up until recently, there was no human presence. People can just walk right up to frigate birds on the islands and they won't fly away. Similarly, dodo birds who lived in isolation on the island of Mauritius had no natural fear of humans and were easily hunted into extinction. It's almost like animals that were around humans evolved to fear them because of selective pressure caused by easily being killed by them. Nah, that can't be it. Evolution is just a fairy tale for grown-ups.

Just look at how terror-stricken all these animals are!

Genesis 9:4-5
Prohibition is made against eating bloody meat. It would have been easy for the ancients to conclude that blood was the source of a creature’s life essence as any time they observed major blood loss it would have looked like something’s life was literally draining out of it. We now know what blood actually is and does.