For Bob Dylan

Post Script to the Tower of Babel:

I was thinking more today about the Tower of Babel story. God gets mad at humans for trying to build a tower to the sky. But back then the highest tower they could possibly have made would be a few stories, maybe five or ten. Today we make towers that are almost 2000 feet tall--hundreds of stories. Why isn't God worried about this now? Christians have no good answer for why God is no longer involved in our lives. He constantly involved hands-on in the first several thousand years, now he never shows up. And yet some Christians do believe he answers prayers.

The argument against religion usually goes along the lines of "you have no proof," "if I saw even one shred of actual evidence of God's existence I would believe." But I think there's a much more fundamental problem with believing in God. It is simply impossible that "God" exists in the way the bible describes him. Even if I were open to believing in some god, this notion of God is nonsensical. So the question would be then, is there some other story of God that is more believable?

Christian fundamentalists always use the circular argument that their belief is the right one because it is the only one that promises certain things, such as salvation through grace. But by that logic Hinduism is the real religion because it's the only one with gods with 8 arms. Judaism is the real religion because it's the only one that starts with a "J". Native American beliefs are the true belief, because they are the only one that posit an explanation for the strange shape of Devil's Tower in Wyoming. Why, the bible doesn't even MENTION Devil's Tower! It can't possibly be the real one!

***

"Where are you going; where have you been?" --Gen. 16:8

Old Testament
Book 1: Genesis
Chapter 13: Abram and Lot split; Lot moves to Sodom; God gives the rest to Abram
Chapter 14: A war between kings; Abram wins
Chapter 15: Abram talks to God; God makes promises
Chapter 16: Birth of Ishmael

I just found an interesting webpage. http://agards-bible-timeline.com/q10_bible-facts.html
. It is facts about the bible. That page says the entire bible can be read aloud in 70 hours. Well, I find that impossible to believe. That means it could be read in the same amount of time--one hour a day for two months and you'd be done. I'll think more about it, but I don't think it's possible. Many more strange, interesting, and useless facts are on that page.

In chapter 15 Abram asks God, how do I know I shall possess these lands you say? God says bring me a cow, a goat, a ram, and a pigeon. Abram brought them and split them in two. This is another passage that bears serious, honest thought. What on earth is the purpose of sacrificing an animal for God's sake? And why would he ask for it? I mean if you take this story seriously, that God created the world, now he's watching us and interacting with us. God's behavior makes no sense--what benefit could it possibly do for God to have the sacrificed animals? The note says for an explanation of this strange ritual, see Jeremiah 34:18-19.

***

I like this story of Abram, Sarai, and Hagar the slave-girl. A common theme during Genesis is that those people who oppose God's chosen people are almost always in the right. Here Hagar is completely blameless; Sarai is awful. First, the rules are great: Sarai can't have children, so she tells her husband to have sex with her servant Hagar instead. Abram of course does, and Hagar becomes pregnant. Then Sarai is jealous of Hagar and abuses her until Hagar runs away. The result is a very poetic line in the bible, when God sees Hagar crying he asks, "Where are you going, where have you been?" That's the name of a great story by Joyce Carol Oates, which you can read here. God tells her to go back to Sarai and submit to the abuse. He promises Hagar that her descendants will be too numerous to count, and he tells her to name the son, "Ishmael." "Ishmael" means "God has heard" in Hebrew. (Ishmael, of course, is the narrator of Moby-Dick.)

Well, that's really all there is to say about these pages.


--bibletoenail


Textual Notes:
- Gen. 13:10--Interesting, some biblical foreshadowing.
- Gen. 14:23--An interesting notion. Abram would not take anything from the King of Sodom, because if he had, the king could have said, "I made Abram rich."
- Gen. 15:18--Another covenant. God gives Abram all the land in sight.
- Gen. 15:6 n. 1--The note says that Abram put his faith in God that God would uphold his promise, and that in the New Testament this becomes a model for the faith of Christians (Romans 4:1-25, Gal. 3:6-9).
- Gen. 15:18 n. 5--Interesting. The note says the language here literally means to "cut a covenant"--the expression deriving from the ceremony of cutting the animals in two. Here again, then, the sacrificed animals perhaps serves in some way as a seal to bind the promises.
- Gen. 16:1-6 n. 1--Note that according to rules of the time, Abram having sex with Hagar was not technically adultery. But how can we reconcile that with the status of the ten commandments as something like a biblical bill of rights--the ten commandments supposedly are the origin of all our morality. How could a simple tradition like this be okay when it is so blatantly at cross purposes with one of the commandments? Or is it that the commandments themselves are deficient in some way? Or is it very much like our own bill of rights--these rules are not absolutes, but are subject to interpretation and application from one circumstance to the next. I think that is fine as a practical matter, but when we're talking about God's Law it seems highly troublesome. But in this story God obviously doesn't have a problem with it. How can that be? This is the God that has been so angry at us for being "evil" for all these years.
- Gen. 16:7 n. 2--Interesting. It is God's messenger who happens upon Hagar, not God himself. The note says that this is a manifestation of God in human form. That echoes what Jesus is as well. Then in Gen. 16:13, the messenger is identified as God himself.


Quotables:
"Have intercourse with my maid." --Gen. 16:2
"Where are you going; where have you been?" --Gen. 16:8