Realizations

Today as I was skimming through the bible I suddenly realized a few things.

1. Chapter 3 - Why do we only hear about the serpent once? What was his deal anyway? i mean, he seemed like an envious little creature, so he tempted Eve, who tempted Adam, and then they all got punished for it, and we never hear about the serpent again. I would have like to seen him again later on in the Bible. He could be the annoying little villain that never leaves people alone.

2. Chapter 4 - Cain was a hateful child who was EXTREMELY jealous of his brother

3. Chapter 7 - God must have hated a lot of people in order to drown them all. Sure he tells Noah to save everybody, but he could've also warned a few other people. Also, if Noah only took 2 of each animal, male and female, how did all these wild mixed races of animals become? Was there some sort of freaky polygamist animal thing going on for forty days and forty nights?

4. Chapter 17 - The whole circumcision thing was a little disturbing, partly because I was eating when I read that chapter.

5. Abraham's son, Ishmael, reminds me of a certain gorilla that I read about.

5. Random Thought #1 - I cannot spell the word "circumcision" and "circumcised" without using spell check to help me out.

7. Chapter 20 - "And yet indeed she is my sister; she is the daughter of my father, but not the daughter of my mother; and she became my wife." (20:12)

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN!? were there not enough women that Abraham had to go get married with his sister? I understand that she is his half sister, but that doesn't make marrying her any less wrong.

8. Chapter 23 - Sarah lived to be one hundred and seven and twenty years old. Does that mean she lived to be 1720 years old?

9. Random Thought # 2 - I read the word betwixt again in chapter 23. I like that word

10. Why does God keep changing peoples names? Is it like a right of passage?

Example: (35:10) "And God said unto him, Thy name is Jacob: thy name shall not be called any more Jacob, but Israel shall be thy name: and he called his name Israel."

Massive Family Trees, Wicked Lifespans, and Circumcision

Everybody is so fruitful and they always multiply! I consider myself to be a god student: I do my work correctly and I turn it in on time, but I honestly only read about 7 words in chapter 10 of Genesis. Don't go thinking that I am lazy, because I'm not (sometimes), but I didnt read this chapter because it just talks about the many generations that came after Noah. I'm not even going to list all the names, but I will say this: one of the children is named Nimrod. I'm sure that back then, Nimrod was a lovely name, but if that kid went to my school today, he would deffinitely have his arse handed to him.

I'm very jealous of the life span back in that time, as seen in chapter 11, everybody seemed to live to about a thousand years old:

"And Salah lived after he begat Eber four hundred and three years, and begat sons and daughters.

And Eber lived four and thirty years, and begat Peleg..."

A new discovery: God created circumcision! Yeah you read that correctly. It all happens in chapter 17, when Lord God changes Abram's name to Abraham, and He changes his wife's name from Sarai to Sarah (at least the Lord knew about simplicity). Lord God decides that he and Abraham should have a covenant, "And ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a token of the covenant betwixt me an you." Theres something in this chapter that didn't settle right for me: God DID NOT get circumcised! My motto is, if I go down, Im taking you down with me, hence: If I'm getting circumcised, you better be right there next to me waiting for your turn. Anyways, Abraham and all the sons after him needs to be circumcised. Whoever is not circumcised will be damned to the fiery depths of hell forever! but not in those words exactly:

"And the uncircumcised man child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcised, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken my covenant."

Both my mom and I found this to be very interesting.

Isn't Christianity Monotheistic?

We are now interpreting the Bible(King James version) in class. Today, we noticed that in chapter 1 of Genesis, there is God, and in chapter 2, there is Lord God. Why the two God's? I thought Christianity was monotheistic. When Lord God first appears, it is when he is making Adam and Eve, and in the third chapter we hear him speak. Lord God speaks in a way that reminds me of Shakespeare: think words like thou, shalt, thee. Chapter 3 is all about the grden of eden and how Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. In chapter 4 the Lord comes out. Is the Lord the same as Lord God, or does the bible have Lord God, God, and the Lord? Maybe I'm just over analyzing.

Our class has noticed that Adam is a big oaf and Lord God is confusing. We made our discovery of Adam in the book Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible!, a funny retelling of bible stories. In the book by Jonathan Goldstein, the Garden of Eden is seen as a village and Adam is seen as the village idiot. In the bible we receive evidence of this after Adam tell Lord God "The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat." So if the woman gave you a gun to put to your head, would you shoot yourself?

Something else that I never thought about is how confusing Lord God is. First, why would he plant the tree if nobody was supposed to eat from it? And if God knows everything, wouldn't he know that Adam and Eve were going to give in to temptation? Was it all a test? I bet they failed...poor suckers.

Adam and Eve have two children, Cain and Abel. Basically, nobody likes Cain because they are too busy worshipping Abel and when each brother presents a gift to the Lord, He neglects Cain's gift and accpts Abel's with open arms. Something clicked in Cain's mind and he got sick of everybody loving Abel, so he performs a sinful act and kills his brother. Talk about sibling rivalry. Later, Cain meets his wife and they have a child, Enoch. And Enoch has his son, Irad, and this cycle goes on for a few sentences. Meanwhile Adam and Eve have another son, Seth to replace Abel, and the whole reproduction system continues.