other_life

bioconfused
Like OK its allegorical + reflects the culture (tough, warlike, insular desert/hill people) that produced it

But still

Its not the harshness, but the pettiness + insecurity OT Hod is depicted with. Like shouldn't this all powerful deity be above most of this, aloof?

hehe. Hod.
platonic god =! jewish god
platonic god =~ christian god (via interpretive traditions)
jewish god:
JAH IS the vicissitudes of Nature. the buckling plates underground and the torrents from on high. the leveling blast of the volcano. judaism most likely emerges from the bronze age collapse.
the other bit here is that things can be elliptical on purpose for breathing room/room to meditate. or accounts can be contradictory or the sequence of things can feel incongruous to call your attention to a third point.
kamal salibi has an interesting idea ab israel being in the asir of the arabian peninsula and palestine only being colonised later. but ofc it's something of a provocation
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Immediately I'm struck by something that should have been more obvious to me - that when God creates the earth, the earth is all there is. It isn't the pendant orb, as in Milton. It is water, in the dark, and nothing else. He creates the sky afterwards. So it's an even stranger vision than I had thought it was.

Also god naming things. This is a sort of recounting of or imaging of the birth of the world in human consciousness. "And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas...". In a sense we "made" the earth, and the sea, and the stars, by naming them. Edit: but then Adam is given the chance to name all the animals, and names Eve "Woman", because she comes of Adam - and so naming is not an expression of consciousness so much as dominion.
 
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poetix

we murder to dissect
A reading I like is that the OT narrates a tribe's changing conception of God, and of itself. Their image of Him is initially of a super-powerful tribal warlord, petty and capricious, who sometimes doles out exorbitant rewards and sometimes wreaks exorbitant retribution. They, in relation to Him, are sometimes rebellious and sometimes awed and grateful children. That's the starting point; somehow from there the entire Jewish system of morality develops, along with an increasingly subtle, intimate and sublimely abstract conception of God.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I need this translated (the bit in bold):

(God to Cain)

Why art thou wroth? And why is thy countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
It's immediately obvious that this isn't a single narrative written by a single author, or even pretending to be. I think by chapter 5 there's already been at least three, slightly contradictory accounts of God's creation of Adam and Eve.

The generations of Adam does read a bit like an absurdist joke

"And X lived Y years and begat Z. And X lived Y years after he begat Z. And all the days of X were Y years. And he died."

Repeat x 8
 
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Corpsey

bandz ahoy
There were giants in the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bore children to them; the same became the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown.

I understand these giants are the subject of some debate, but probably some sort of fallen angel, but isn't the rest of it difficult to understand? "And they bore children to them" - the "they" here is presumably the giants/Nephilim, not "the sons of God" - unless that's the same thing? But this confused me because God then repents for creating men, not giants/Nephilim.
 

luka

Well-known member
I understand these giants are the subject of some debate, but probably some sort of fallen angel, but isn't the rest of it difficult to understand? "And they bore children to them" - the "they" here is presumably the giants/Nephilim, not "the sons of God" - unless that's the same thing? But this confused me because God then repents for creating men, not giants/Nephilim.

This is where killa priest comes in.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
As much as I don't want to be Mr literalist, I am confused at every turn by things such as God's covenant. He drowns all life because flesh is corrupt and man's imagination is evil, but then he lets Noah and the rest live, and decides he won't do it again, and promises not to. And I'm not sure under what proviso. :confused: It seems like the rules don't change after the flood - don't kill any other man and be fruitful and multiply. This isn't so much unjust as inexplicable to me.

From wiki

The Noahic covenant[Gen 9:8–17] applies to all of humanity and all other living creatures.[9] In this covenant with all living creatures, God promises never again to destroy all life on Earth by flood[9:11] and creates the rainbow as the sign of this "everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth".[9:12–17] Noah and the generations of his posterity were required in their turn never to shed blood, nor to consume it (as the Watchers and giants of Enoch's day had done).

A. I don't know who the "watchers" are. B. So the rule before was you could kill anyone, just not Caine?
 
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droid

Well-known member
Luka will hate this but the new Neal Stephenson makes an OK stab at plausible simulation theory via biblical creationism and uploaded minds. Made me think about genesis slightly differently.
 
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luka

Well-known member
I need this translated (the bit in bold):

(God to Cain)

Why art thou wroth? And why is thy countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.

Seconded.
 

luka

Well-known member
Luka will hate this but the new Neal Stephenson makes an OK stab a plausible simulation theory via biblical creationism and uploaded minds. Made me think about genesis slightly differently.

Not necessarily. Tell us more.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
The story of Noah cursing Ham's son (Canaan) for happening upon him in a drunken naked stupor: is Ham's sin not covering Noah himself, or having seen his father naked (while the other two sons walk backwards so they don't see him)? How strange. Kafka becomes clearer already.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Apparently people have been confused by this for the last 2000 years

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_Ham

The majority of commentators, both ancient and modern, have felt that Ham's seeing his father naked was not a sufficiently serious crime to explain the punishment that follows.[14] Nevertheless, Genesis 9:23, in which Shem and Japheth cover Noah with a cloak while averting their eyes, suggests that the words are to be taken literally,[15] and it has recently been pointed out that, in first millennium Babylonia, looking at another person's genitals was indeed regarded as a serious matter.[14]

Other ancient commentators suggested that Ham was guilty of more than what the Bible says. The Targum Onqelos has Ham gossiping about his father's drunken disgrace "in the street" (a reading which has a basis in the original Hebrew), so that being held up to public mockery was what had angered Noah; as the Cave of Treasures (fourth century) puts it, "Ham laughed at his father's shame and did not cover it, but laughed about it and mocked."[16]

Ancient commentaries have also debated whether "seeing" someone's nakedness meant to have sex with that person (e.g., Leviticus 20:17).[15] The same idea was raised by third-century rabbis, in the Babylonian Talmud (c. 500 AD), who argue that Ham either castrated his father, or sodomised him.[17] The same explanations are found in three Greek translations of the Bible, which replace the word "see" in verse 22 with another word denoting homosexual relations.[16] The castration theory has its modern counterpart in suggested parallels found in the castration of Uranus by Cronus[18] in Greek mythology and a Hittite myth of the supreme god Anu whose genitals were "bitten off by his rebel son and cup-bearer Kumarbi, who afterwards rejoiced and laughed ... until Anu cursed him".[19]

PLEASE: No jokes about honey roast/wafer thin, we're better than that
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I was thinking, reading about the Tower of Babel, that God keeps getting scared or horrified by man's ambition, like Dr Frankenstein - there's no sense of him being omniscient at all at this stage, he's God in man's image, muddling along, throwing shit fits. Anyway, what's interesting about this for me is that it's a model of fatherhood - you create a child (probably a son in this example) in your own image, you want them to be as powerful and creative as you, but at the same time you're threatened, you want to clip the little shit's wings.
 

droid

Well-known member
Not necessarily. Tell us more.

It's a melange as all his stuff is, but the core of it is rich dudes having their connectomes mapped after death and then turned on in a quantum computer. The first mind finds itself in a sea of chaos with no conscious memory of its past of conception of time and eventually recreates reality, builds a world through force of will and a pantheon of gods emerges as others join him. There's some neat stuff about processing power and its effect on the world and the minds that inhabit it. There's a tower of babel, garden of eden, adam and eve, reincarnation... Its all quite contrived but if your a simulation person it seems like a feasible model.
 

luka

Well-known member
JAH IS the vicissitudes of Nature. the buckling plates underground and the torrents from on high. the leveling blast of the volcano. judaism most likely emerges from the bronze age collapse.

Is disease, war, murder, heartbreak, loss. Is the God that is. You can conceive of a Kind, Kuddly, Karing God, but then you have to explain away his powerlessness.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
I remember being quite stunned when reading about the Great Flood in the library of Apollodorus and how it so closely mirrored the later Bible story. There is also a book about the origins of the Flood story written by Norman Cohn which I would really like to read.

It seems to me there's a switch in gears once you get to Abram - suddenly the lineage story becomes clearer, the narrative tightens.
 
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