A Biblical Exegesis

Damn, remind me to contact Oomma.

I'll be honest: the talk of God referring to himself in the plural makes me think of the Royal We, although I don't know if Hebrew had that construction.

SHIKI is dead.

The Royal We could be amusingly recursive in this instance. That use of the pronoun started out as a reference to the divine right of kings and all, "we" referring to both the ruler and the deity behind them, so...

edited 27th Dec '09 4:46:54 AM by AFGNCAAP

Some writing.

Given that this is in the Old Testament, and the Hebrews didn't have a doctrine of the Trinity, this doesn't really work, unless you think the doctrine was waiting in the text to be discovered all along. Given the number of ways in which it's outdated, I don't think it makes much sense to assign it that sort of prescience.

...eventually, we will reach a maximum entropy state where nobody has their own socks or underwear, or knows who to ask to get them back.

Apparently God speaks in plural in the Qur'an as well.

[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.

Quick note regarding the whole "die" thing from earlier- I've been told that the Hebrew connotation of the word is more along the lines of "separation" than "ceasing to live/exist".

Do you highlight everything looking for secret messages?

I might be misremembering, but I believe that not only God, but some angels also refer to themselves in the plural as Elohim. It could be interpreted as their speaking on behalf of all heavenly beings. God speaks for the angels, and the angels speak for God.

...eventually, we will reach a maximum entropy state where nobody has their own socks or underwear, or knows who to ask to get them back.

As an evangelical Christian myself, I would like it known that I wholeheartedly approve of this effort, even if I disagree with some of the conclusions and speculations. Keep it up! :)

edited 29th Dec '09 8:38:07 AM by Specialist290

Thanks! Feel free to give your views on the subjects speculated upon if you like.

Ack. I've been neglecting this, already, and now it's late. I'll do a bit of liveblogging.

Chapter 4

Adam has sex with Eve and she gets pregnant (this entire process is described in one sentence, if you were wondering). She has a son, which she says she has acquired by the Lord's help. She names him Cain, a pun on the Hebrew for "acquired". Later, she has another son, whom she names Abel.

Timeskip. Abel becomes a shepherd and Cain a farmer. Cain brings some harvest to the Lord as an offering. Abel kills the first lamb born to one of his ewes and gives the best parts as an offering.

The Lord likes Abel's offering, but rejects Cain's. I remember learning that this was because Cain's was less generous or wasn't given in the right spirit, but the text here doesn't offer a reason.

Cain is outraged. The Lord sees him scowling and says that if he had done good instead of evil, he would be smiling, but instead he has done evil and sin is crouching at his door. He tells Cain that he must overcome the sin before it rules him.

I think it interesting that "doing evil" is apparently not synonymous with "sinning" here - it merely means Cain is on the verge of sinning.

Cain invites Abel out into the fields, except maybe he doesn't because a footnote says that this line was found in some ancient translations but not the Hebrew.

When they are out in the fields, Cain kills Abel. The Lord asks Cain where his brother is. Of course, He already knows, so perhaps He's giving Cain a chance to confess his sins.

Cain says that he doesn't know, and asks if it's his responsibility to look after Abel. The Lord responds by asking why he has done "this terrible thing" and says that Abel's blood is crying out to Him from the ground like a voice calling for revenge. Cain is placed under a curse (by God? It's not totally clear, but presumably) and can no longer farm the soil. It has soaked up Abel's blood as though drinking it, and the soil will no longer grow any crops that Cain plants. The Lord informs Cain that he will become a homeless wanderer.

Cain sats that the punishment is too hard to bear, and that he is being driven away from both the soil and God - so Cain doesn't believe that God is omnipresent, evidently. He worries that anybody who finds him will kill him.

The Lord replies that if anyone kills Cain, seven lives will be taken in revenge. I guess "an eye for an eye" wasn't official policy.

The Lord puts a mark on Cain to warn those he meets not to kill him, and sends him away from the Lord's presence to the land of Wandering, East of Eden. End chapter.

There it is again, away from God's presence. This far into the Book, my impression of God is of a humanlike entity, but with immense powers. He doesn't appear to be omnipresent.

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Right, because they weren't monotheistic at the time.

Apocryphally, the Mark of Cain is black skin. You might have already known that. That was used to justify all sorts of horrible racism, as you might expect.

Alternately, Cain's immortality makes him the first vampire. This shows up in sources as diverse as Vampire The Masquerade and the SCP Foundation.

[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.

I'd heard both of those. I prefer the latter.

Incidentally, I'm going to be away for a couple of days, so this exegesis is going to be on a brief hiatus.

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Maybe God fought and killed all the other gods, giving him full dominance over the world? Well, okay, not all the other gods. Most of them.

No, I've totally not used that in stories before.

Wasn't Abel the cooler one in SCP? I can't recall at the moment. Might reread those articles momentarily.

edited 29th Dec '09 8:14:42 PM by LuckyRevenant

"I can't imagine what Hell will have in store, but I know when I'm there, I won't wander anymore."

Really? Huh, I've never heard that theory before. I've never given much thought at all as to just what his mark might have been, actually.

[1]

Of course it has little/no basis in the actual book. Apparently it dates back to the Syriac Church, though.

[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.

It's the reason why the Mormons refused to baptize black Africans for decades, only giving it up when they pretty much had to — in 1978.

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Hm. I was under the impression (from some extremely vitriolic anti-Mormon videos, but whatever) that blacks were supposedly the third of humanity that sided with Guess Who (or stayed neutral, I forget) in the pre-existence. Was I misinformed?

[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.

I'm not quite sure myself...lemme look it up.

Okay, this helps. It was that blacks couldn't receive the priesthood or have certain rites performed, not that they couldn't join or be baptized.

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As much as it's just a dramatization of the the first few chapters of Genesis, if we need to wonder where black people came from, I'm kind of partial to just going with what Children Of Eden went with - the third of Noah's son/daughter-in-law pair that decided to head south to Africa.

In a strange way, it makes sense, too. If they're the only people left after the flood, all races would have to be descended from Noah.

Unless, perchance, there were other people elsewhere in the world who had moved further off that God ALSO gave boats to, they just didn't get mentioned for one reason or another. But A) I'm really stretching things here; B) I'm getting way ahead of things and getting off topic.

I appreciate the invitation. I'll try not to start any major, heated arguments, but I'll also try to be honest about what I believe as well.

@Space Jawa: That's what I was taught. If Noah and his family were the only survivors, then it stands to reason that all of the different racial and ethnic groups are descended from him, i.e. that no one ethnic group is any better or worse off than the rest of them.

edited 31st Dec '09 8:51:34 PM by Specialist290

I'm fairly sure that this concept was not introduced before the advent of African slavery. In other words, it was made up to justify black slavery.

As far as the differences between Gen. 1 and 2 go, they have different sources. The E (Elohim) text was from Israel (the northern kingdom), and the J (JHVH) text was from Judea (the southern kingdom). They were both incorporated not to supplement each other, but to provide the accounts indiscriminately, without privileging either.

edited 1st Jan '10 12:12:32 PM by IceQueen

If an offense come out of the truth, better it is that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.

Personally, I don't believe in the Wellhausen hypothesis of Genesis authorship. (I'd give reasons as to why, but I seem to have misplaced my Old Testament textbook from last year.)

The perspective that more conservative scholars are advocating is that the second account is simply a retelling of the events of the sixth day as they specifically relate to the creation of man. In other words, the first account is a summary that describes the creation of the whole universe, while the second account backtracks and zooms in on humanity in particular.

Which is to say, exactly what Katrika said.

[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.

Notes from someone who actually (sort of) knows Hebrew:

The "day" in Genesis 1 does not mean anything besides "day"; it's the same word for "day" they use everywhere else("yom"); there's no reason from the word itself to suspect it means anything but "a 24 hour interval of time".

That said, Biblical Hebrew very often uses words similar to the concept it was going for when it doesn't have a word for something ("Father" is used for "grandfather" and stuff like that.) So, it is possible the author meant "a period of time longer than we have a word for"; but I'd like to point out here that if that was true, the author probably would have used something like "year" instead.

(Also, this already came up, that "we" from Genesis is the plural word "elohim"; probably it means that the author of Genesis was still henotheist.)

And I'd like to point out it never says Cain was immortal; all it says is that nobody was allowed to kill him. (Also it never said whatever the mark was passed on to his descendants anyway; it probably didn't, you'll get to that with the weird anecdote about Tubel-Cain. Sorry, remembered it wrong, weird anecdote about Lamech.)

But I'd like to point out if black skin was the mark of Cain, everyone who has ever lynched a black guy would be in DEEP doo-doo. Not exactly a solid pillar for racism, that.

EDIT: Oh yeah, useful note: in Hebrew, seven can be used to mean infinity.

edited 2nd Jan '10 1:52:47 AM by BlackHumor

I'm convinced that our modern day analogues to ancient scholars are comedians. -0dd1

Far be it from me to denigrate centuries of scholarship, but I am more convinced by the theory of separate origins than the explanation which has two contradicting myths coalesced despite their blatant differences in tone, style, depiction of God, and the order of creation. Not only do the two use different names for God, and apply to him distinctly different attributes (Elohim is remote and creates by speaking, whereas JHVH is actually hands-on and can be seen by his creation), but the accounts actually contradict each other in their telling of the creation.

If an offense come out of the truth, better it is that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.

I think the base problem is that you see them as two separate myths with separate origins; I see them as a single account with a single author.  ^*

The "separate names" argument is not proof of separate origins in and of itself; God is often referred to by different names throughout the entire Bible when serving in different capacities. As for the "creation by speaking" vs. "hands-on creation," I believe that the Bible is deliberately making a point about man's place in the Creation and the mind of God. While he could have spoken man into existence just like every other part of the world (He certainly had the power to, if you choose to believe in an omnipotent God), He instead chose to invest some greater symbolic significance into this particular instance. (Furthermore, I don't believe that the fact that He spoke the rest of the world into existence necessarily belies His distance from Creation, but I'll not expound on that for times' sake unless you're curious.)

As regarding the contradictions: Can you list a few specific ones? I can't promise that I'll be able to answer all of them, but I'll try as best I'm able.

edited 2nd Jan '10 9:00:57 PM by Specialist290