Inspiration and Incarnation: Other Ancient Near East Literature

By User:Daderot - File:Tablet in Akkadian language recording court proceedings with seal impressed envelope, Yorgan Tepe, Kingdom of Mittani, 1450-1350 BC, clay - Oriental Institute Museum, University of Chicago - DSC07088.JPG, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=115709323 / Image source.

I've been reading Peter Enns's book, "Inspiration and Incarnation," which is about how the bible was written in the context of ancient Near East culture, and truly fits into that world, and Christians should not view this as a problem, as if it means the bible is not the word of God. Instead, we should view it as God speaking to people in their own culture, in ways they could understand.

In this post, I'll talk about chapter 2, "The Old Testament and Ancient Near Eastern Literature." 

This chapter goes through a bunch of examples of archeological discoveries from ancient Near Eastern cultures similar to ancient Israel. We see that these texts that were discovered are very similar to passages from the bible- so, what does that mean? How should we view those similarities? 

This chapter brings up a lot of really fascinating ancient Near East texts that I had never heard of. I can't fit them all in this blog post, so if you're interested in this topic, you should just go buy the book.

Remember when I said that I don't necessarily care what the bible originally meant in its ancient context? Okay I was wrong, I do care. All the examples from this chapter were incredibly fascinating.

The texts are grouped into 3 categories:

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"Group 1-- Creation and the Flood: Is Genesis Myth or History?"

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. George Washington praying for the return of his slaves (May 28) "She boarded a ship to New Hampshire and never looked back. George Washington sent slavecatchers and government officials after her to recapture his “stolen property,” but her neighbors in the free state of New Hampshire helped her elude those kidnappers. Bounties and rewards were offered for her capture and re-enslavement for years afterwards."

Also from the Slacktivist: A first person, extremely possessive pronoun (June 1) "The subject of this song is, rather, a smallish neighborhood God. This is a puny God who is not the God of Haitian refugees, not the God of second-generation immigrants — not the God of LGBT people, not the God of women, not the God of widows and orphans and the poor, not the God of the sick and the immunocompromised, not the God of any of the billions of people living in any of the other 194 countries of this world, let alone the God of any of the billions of other stars in our universe."

And: Flattening and collapsing, egad! (June 2) "'Love your neighbor' is both necessary and sufficient." Preach!

2. What will it take to get a vaccine for the Ebola strain driving the current outbreak? (June 4) The good news is there's already a lot of scientific research and some vaccines that are likely to be effective. It's just a matter of actually having the money and resources to make it happen.

3. Interesting Pitch: ICR Says NO to Plain Reading of Noah's Ark (June 1, 16-minute video) Young-earth creationism says that the whole fossil record was formed during the year of Noah's flood, when all the animals and plants were buried, rather than being formed by millions of years of slow normal processes. And, therefore, all of the world's oil deposits come from the organic material buried during the flood. 

But, here's a problem: In Genesis 6:14, when God instructs Noah to build an ark, he says to coat it with pitch. !!!! Pitch! Oh no! Pitch comes from oil! There was oil before the flood? How can this be?

Please note that the bible does *not* say that all of the world's oil was formed by the flood. That's a young-earth creationist fan theory. And some young-earth creationists have realized that their fan theory contradicts the bible verse that says Noah used pitch to waterproof the ark, so now they have to come up with another fan theory about how it didn't really mean pitch, it meant pine sap or something.

Anyway, this is a video from Joel Duff which takes these young-earth creationist fan theories very seriously and explains why they don't make sense.

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Todd Blanche says DOJ ‘not moving forward’ with ‘anti-weaponization’ fund (June 3) Hooray! But also, I don't think this is the end of it- they're probably going to do a lot of other shockingly-corrupt things.

2. Musk Attacks Nyong’o For The Same Reason Hitler Attacked Jewish Art (May 26) "Musk is not just some asshole complaining about Hollywood casting choices. He is one of the most horrific mass murderers in history."

Also from Everything is Horrible: Fascists Lie (Even When They Seem To Be Confessing) (June 3) This quote from Vivian Wilson: "Him going further on the right, and I’m going to use the word ‘further’ — make sure you put ‘further’ in there — is not because of me. That’s insane."

3. Republicans' sweeping election overhaul fails in the Senate (June 4) "The SAVE America Act, a far-reaching Republican election overhaul that President Trump said should be his congressional allies' top priority, has officially failed in the Senate." This is good news for overseas voters like me.

4. House passes war powers resolution directing Trump to end hostilities with Iran (June 4) This is good, but it would still need to pass the Senate and also the antichrist would have to sign it, in order to become a real law, so that is unlikely.

5. You Can’t Raise Children to Obey and Expect Them to Defend Democracy (June 4, via) "It begins when a child learns that the person with power does not have to be truthful. Or when a child learns that obedience matters more than conscience. Or when a child learns that being hurt by someone who claims to love you is normal."

6. Screwworm In Texas Cattle Could Drive Up Beef Prices—After DOGE Axed Prevention Efforts (June 4)

7. The Side That Won the Civil War is Now Banning Books About Why the Civil War Was Fought (June 3, via) "Censorship often works like this—indirectly, requiring no specified demands but rather a vague climate of intimidation that encourages “an abundance of caution” when making decisions about what voices should be heard."

8. When U.S. foreign aid changed, AIDS workers in Africa felt it (June 7) "The program is often cited as the most effective public health campaign ever, and is estimated by the State Department to have saved roughly 26 million lives since its inception."

9. Pete Hegseth shrinks military's recognized religions list, erasing atheists and Humanists (June 5) "The Department of Defense/War, under Secretary Pete Hegseth, has just pared down the list of recognized religious labels in the military to a mere 31, making it harder for service members to use the proper identification. A decade ago, as part of a larger mission to be more welcoming to people outside traditional faiths, the list of labels had expanded to well over 200."

10. After D.C.'s Reflecting Pool gets repainted, visitors ask: What changed? (June 5)

11. Deported Filipino sailors say they were falsely linked to child sexual abuse material (June 6) "Soriano Versoza's organization, which helps Filipino sailors with paperwork and other support, documented hundreds of deportations of Filipino seafarers and all follow the same playbook: CBP agents board the ships in the morning at the dock, they round up a handful of Filipino mariners, take them off the cruise ship, and interrogate them."

Inspiration and Incarnation: Introduction

Book cover for "Inspiration and Incarnation"

I started reading Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament by Peter Enns, and it's so good, I decided to write a blog series on it. This post will cover the preface and chapter 1.

Enns is a biblical scholar. I've read and reviewed 2 of his books before: The Bible Tells Me So (published 2014) and Genesis for Normal People (published 2019). I really enjoyed those and I want to read all of his books. This one, "Inspiration and Incarnation," was originally published in 2005, but I have the 10th-anniversary edition, published in 2015. The writing style of "Inspiration and Incarnation" is more formal and academic than "The Bible Tells Me So" and "Genesis for Normal People"- those two had a lot of [in my opinion] unnecessary pop culture references- I know some readers like that, so, that's fine, but I definitely like the style of "Inspiration and Incarnation" better.

Here's the overall idea of this book: In the past 150 or so years, there has been new evidence uncovered about the civilizations and cultures of the ancient Near East. Archaeologists have found writings from people groups who lived near the ancient Israelites- and these writings have many similarities to what we see in the bible. This is something of a problem for evangelical Christian ideology, because evangelicals believe the bible is inerrant and inspired by God, and so they don't want to believe that it's similar to other ancient writings, that it was influenced by them and it borrowed ideas from them, that it has mistakes and anachronisms, that it follows the genre conventions of ancient Near East writing rather than being absolute truth as we would view it from a modern scientific perspective.

The conservative bible scholars respond to this problem by downplaying the similarities between the bible and other ancient writing. The liberal bible scholars respond to this problem by saying the bible is the same as other ancient writing, and therefore it isn't special or inspired by God. Enns claims that both sides are making an incorrect assumption: that if the bible is similar to other ancient writing, that means it's not really from God. He says that, on the contrary, God gave us a bible which is fully human and also fully divine- just like Jesus was fully human and fully God. God speaks to humans within their own cultures.

Marriage

 

"Mawwiage." (From "The Princess Bride.") Image source.

[content note: it's about how, historically, sexual violence has always been a big part of marriage]

Thinking a lot about marriage lately, and what marriage is overall, in a general sense. As in, if you look at all marriages throughout history. The overall picture of it is very bleak for women, and I don't know what to think about that. My own marriage and my own culture- where you get married to someone because you genuinely love them and want to marry them, and you are equals- this is very much an anomaly if you take an outside, objective view of what marriage has always been.

On Rebekah, Virginity, and how to Read the Bible

Rebekah gives water to Abraham's servant. Image source.

So I recently shared this link: Thrift-Store Bibles and the Execution of Renee Good. And I have another thing to say about it. 

One of the bibles mentioned in that article is the "True Images Teen Bible For Girls":

Take a gloss on Genesis 24:15-18, for example, a passage introducing Rebekah, wife of Isaac, one of the most fascinating and complex women in Hebrew Scripture (image below). The verses read “Rebekah came out with her jar on her shoulder… The woman was very beautiful, a virgin; no man had ever slept with her. She went down to the spring, filled her jar and came up again. The servant hurried to meet her and said “Please give me a little water from your jar.” “Drink, my lord, she said.”

The marginal note (pictured above) in a Bible explicitly designed for teen girls explains that Rebekah’s virginity is a key element of the passage:

“Okay, so we know that Rebekah was ‘very beautiful.’ But that’s not all we learn about her. The next two words tell us she was a virgin. Obviously this was important, or we wouldn’t have been told that little fact.”

Virginity and purity are where Rebekah’s elusive “stunning inner beauty” comes from, because: “after all, good-looking girls are everywhere.” God, like the perfect boyfriend, is looking for something more.

I've been thinking a lot about how marriage and sex are modelled in the bible, and the way misogyny is baked into it, and how completely different it is from how we view those things now, so... 

Just now, when I read those verses from Genesis 24, which mention Rebekah being a "virgin", my thoughts were along these lines: Ah, yeah this is coming from a culture which made a big deal about whether or not a woman was a "virgin." It's rooted in the idea that every woman is either a "virgin" or a "whore"- which was really more about whether a woman was viewed by society as properly staying in her place and following gender roles, rather than her choice to have penetrative sex. (For example, it was seen as okay to rape slaves, because they're not part of the class of women who are "good" "pure" "virgins" deserving of men's protection.) This obsession with virginity says more about men's jealousy and possessiveness, the way they viewed women as objects to be owned, than about women's virtues. I don't agree with this view, but I don't really want to get sidetracked into it when reading this bible story about Rebekah. The overall plot of the story is about Abraham's servant going to choose a wife for Abraham's son Isaac, and the role God played in that, and I'm also interested in how Rebekah felt about leaving her home to marry a man she had never met. 

(Also, virginity is not even a real thing- by which I mean, the idea that you are a completely different type of person if you've ever had a penis in your vagina, vs if you haven't. Very much not true!)

And then reading the little note that "True Images Teen Bible For Girls" included about this passage, that just takes it at face value- this bible passage portrays Rebekah's "virginity" as a positive thing, therefore it is a positive thing, and *you*, modern teenage girl reading this, also need to be a virgin.

It feels extremely jarring to me, reading this take on this bible verse. It's like... it's like it's coming from a perspective where we believe the bible is just a trustworthy, true source, written to us. That it's just uncomplicatedly True. That it's "God's love letter to you."

I'm reading this bible verse about Rebekah, thinking about the layers of misogyny and how cultural views on sex have changed throughout history and how that is intertwined with the advances in women's rights, and apparently the editors of this teen bible just... aren't. 

But this is how the bible is viewed in evangelical culture, isn't it? The bible is good and true, and reading the bible is good, and memorizing the bible is good. And Christians are supposed to read the bible every day. The primary emphasis is on how Christians all need to read the bible, and God speaks to us through the bible. 

When I was a teenager, I had an "NIV Study Bible." This means a bible with little boxes of text added here and there, to give some background information about some aspects of the bible which might be hard for modern readers to understand because of cultural differences. And yes, we need that- it's better to have a study bible than to just read the bible without any awareness that it came from an ancient culture completely different than ours. But what strikes me as so bizarre now is the idea that that's enough- that I'm gonna read this ancient document, translated from Hebrew and Greek, but don't worry, occasionally there's a little sidebar next to the text to explain something that might be confusing. 

As if overall we can just read it straightforwardly, and the strange things which merit additional explanation are exceptions. No, oh my goodness. The whole thing is weird, the whole bible is weird, you guys. 

Okay, maybe I'm oversimplifying it- there are plenty of bible stories which come across as good stories, emotionally gripping stories, even if we don't know anything about the background. There are abstract moral principles which continue to inspire people to do good, like "love your neighbor as yourself," without requiring an understanding of the whole cultural context where those bible verses came from. Still, those passages are deeper and richer when we have a better idea of that context.

My point is, evangelical ideology really downplays the weirdness, and views the bible as something nice and spiritually uplifting, that we are able to understand.

It feels really shallow to me, actually. That there is 0 distance between us and the bible because it's just plain true, inerrant, unlike any other text you might read. I don't even know how to interface with a source that's just objectively true, free of any context, because I'm a specific person with my own cultural background and expectations for how to view the world- if someone is trying to communicate with me, and I don't know any of that background where they are coming from, how can we even understand each other? It doesn't make sense to me- now that I'm not evangelical- to read the bible without thinking about "who wrote this, and why?" Evangelicals aren't allowed to ask those questions because if we believe the bible came from somewhere concrete, historical, a product of human decision-making, then how can it be the word of God?

And now I'm interested in reading more about the bible from an academic perspective. Recently I started reading "Inspiration and Incarnation" by Peter Enns, and there will be blog posts on that. What's striking to me is how this kind of "academic" take on the bible will often take just 1 verse and write a whole essay on it, explaining the cultural background of something that's just an offhand mention in the bible verse. It's like, the overall aim is to understand the big picture, the cultural context, the ancient Near East, and then to situate a bible verse into that context. This is such a different approach than what Christians usually do, which is to primarily read the bible, and pause for a second to read a little explanation of some cultural aspect, and then keep going. (Similarly, in the book "Womanist Midrash", author Wilda Gafney does her own translations of the bible passages she discusses, and each word is carefully translated, carefully considering the nuances of the language and cultural setting.)

Or I could describe it as, the difference between "we're going to read the bible" and "we're going to understand the big picture of where the bible comes from." 

But also... if you read the bible, there's no obvious way to know which parts can just be taken at face value, and which ones are "weird" artifacts of the ancient culture they came from. If you're a teenager immersed in purity culture, everyone has always told you that "God's plan for marriage and sex" all along was that everyone must be a virgin until marriage, which ensures that your married sex life will be amazing and you'll be totally emotionally connected to your spouse, and that this is the timeless ideal which is just obviously how it's supposed to be. (My post The Bible and "Purity" points out that the bible doesn't even teach this.) So if you read the bible verse that says Rebekah was a virgin, and that that's important, why wouldn't you just take it at face value?

I guess my view now is... I don't really take anything from the bible "at face value", like it's speaking directly to me, and it just means whatever my first impression is upon reading it. Even the verses that I do think are timeless moral truths, I view as a line running through thousands of years of history, connecting people across different cultures and time periods... Being human, being made in the image of God, means having a conscience, and there have always been people who envisioned a better world, based on principles like love and justice and liberation, even though they and their society didn't live up to that. 

Holding the ideas "this was written thousands of years ago" and "this speaks to me." Which feels even more profound than believing that the bible was written directly to us, like it just fell out of heaven onto a shelf at a Christian bookstore, with neatly-typed English words and a pretty pastel cover. Maybe what I'm saying is, I want to be connected to people, to history, to a culture, rather than just connected to an objective, context-free God.

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Related:

The Bible and "Purity" 

The Bible and Polygamy 

"Genesis for Normal People": Separating "what the writer meant" from "what is true" and "what it means for us"

My Ex-Evangelical Take on "The Year of Living Biblically"

"The Kingdom of Children" (a book about child liberation theology)

Book cover for "The Kingdom of Children"

I've been reading The Kingdom of Children: A Liberation Theology by R. L. Stollar. This book is great; I'm so excited about it. 

I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I want to write down some of my thoughts about what I've read so far. And there will be more blog posts about this book, so stay tuned for that.

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Scott Adams, 'Dilbert' creator and conservative commentator, dies at 68 (January 13) 

2. China’s Viral New App Is a Safety Tool Called ‘Are You Dead?’ (January 13) "The app, known as Demumu abroad, functions as a daily check-in. Users input emergency contacts, then press the check-in button on the interface’s home screen each day. If a user misses two consecutive check-ins, the app alerts their contacts via email."

3. Planetary Alignment (January 9) From xkcd.

4. The lumpers, the splitters, and me (January 13) "So when somebody like Matthew Avery Sutton comes along and says 'evangelicalism is best defined as a white, patriarchal, nationalist religious movement made up of Christians who seek power to transform American culture through conservative-leaning politics' it can feel for them exactly the way it has felt for them over the past several decades when the gatekeeping goons said to them — repeatedly and regularly — 'You are a fake Christian and your story of being born again and transformed by your religious experience must be a lie and you must hate Jesus and the Bible because what it really means to be an evangelical is to be like us — to be part of a white, patriarchal, nationalist religious movement seeking power to transform American culture through conservative politics.'"

5. The Rape of Dinah and The Shame of Adults (January 10) [content note: rape and victim-blaming] "Dinah’s rape and her brothers’ reactivity show us the shame of adults: that adults will, time after time, do nothing but negotiate and cover up the rape of their children by powerful people."

6. This country taxes menstrual pads as luxury goods. She's aiming to end the tax (January 15) "The link to child marriage contributes to the secrecy around periods and makes it an extremely isolating experience."

7.  Sesame Street: ABC-DEF-GHI Song Love this classic Sesame Street song.

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Image source

Image source

Links related to the antichrist:

1. In Defense of Pretexts (January 9) "What I came to is this: For my entire adult life, I've watched American leaders justify war and atrocity with lies about democracy and freedom and self-defense."

2. Chaos continues (January 12) "Businesses are locking their doors even while open to keep employees and customers safe. As I type this, I’m standing guard at the locked door of our neighborhood burrito joint while I wait formy takeout order, so the employees can focus on their jobs. The place is packed with neighbors supporting this small business."

Also about Minnesota: Minnesota federal prosecutors resign after DOJ push to investigate Renee Good's widow (January 13) "The investigation allegedly centers around any possible ties to activist groups [Becca Good] may have. That, of course, is protected First Amendment activity."

A Common Occurrence (January 14) "I’m sharing this so you’re aware that the ICE abuses we’re seeing since Renee Good’s killing is – aren’t new."

The Fascists are Lying about ICE Murdering an Innocent Woman (January 14) "Fuck Michael Shermer and the rest of his rightwing pro-murder pro-fascism sniveling grifters, who spread this lie even as we see ICE now enabled to literally go door to door, breaking into people’s homes, and dragging them away with zero accountability."

3. US aircraft that attacked suspected drug boat reportedly disguised as civilian plane (January 13) "'Fundamentally, the debate about ‘war crimes’ is a distraction – the whole operation is illegal, and the conduct of an extrajudicial execution by means of a plane with civilian markings is in fact reminiscent of a death squad operation,' Bhuta said."

4. Hundreds of nonconsensual AI images being created by Grok on X, data shows (January 8) [content note: contains descriptions of sexually explicit images (does not contain the images themselves)] 

Elon Musk's X faces bans and investigations over nonconsensual bikini images (January 12)

5. For Immigrants, Citizenship Now (January 13) "We have effectively created a class of criminalized residents who do not have full rights and protection under law. Immigration enforcement is a small fascist state within our polity."

I can't really agree with this without seeing an actual policy with more details- automatic citizenship? for who exactly? wouldn't there have to be some kind of criteria, like how long they've lived in the US? What about people from countries that don't allow dual citizenship, so they would have to renounce their other citizenship in order to get US citizenship, and they might not want to do that- there should be a way to have them legally protected anyway. It sounds too big and pie-in-the-sky to actually be a real policy- but, what if we think about it this way instead: What if the path to get US citizenship was a lot easier? What if it was less about bureaucracy and proving that you're "good enough," and more about a principle that people who live in the US and want to be US citizens should have a reasonable pathway to do so. Yeah, I support that.

6. Hillary Clinton May Finally Get Lock-Her-Upped For Refusing Stupid Subpoena From Dipsh*t James Comer (January 15) "You should definitely give the full Clinton letter a read, because it lays out not just why the Clintons won’t go along with Comer’s attempt to shift attention away from Trump and the DOJ’s foot-dragging, but also why this government’s corruption must be resisted wherever possible, from the streets to closed-door hearing rooms."

7. A federal judge dismisses the DOJ's effort to get voter data from California (January 15) "In 2017, one Republican secretary of state famously said the Trump administration could 'go jump in the Gulf of Mexico.'"

8. Behind the front lines of the legal battle against Trump's National Guard deployments (January 15) "Earlier this month, President Trump pulled hundreds of National Guard troops from California, Oregon and Illinois after the Supreme Court ruled against the administration in the Illinois case."

9. UPenn faculty condemn Trump administration’s demand for ‘lists of Jews’ (January 13, via) WTF

Adding Incest to the Story of Cain

A chart showing the descendants of Adam, in the bible. Image source.

I recently read "Genesis for Normal People," and I want to talk about the story of Cain.

This story is from Genesis 4. Adam and Eve (the first humans) have 2 sons: Cain and Abel. Cain murders Abel. And then the part I want to talk about is what happens after that. 

As punishment for murdering Abel, God says that Cain will have to wander the earth. Cain is really not happy about this- he is afraid that "whoever finds me will kill me." So God puts a mark of some kind on him to tell people not to kill him. Then Cain moves away, and he and his wife have a child, and he builds a city.

"Genesis for Normal People" says this (page 33):

If you have ever read this story to inquisitive children, you know what's coming next-- the dreaded question that terrified Sunday School teachers pray is never asked: "Where did Cain get his wife from?" (I don't know, Susie. Ask your parents.) Along with that question, we can also add, "Where did this posse come from that Cain is so afraid of, and why exactly would one man in exile build a city?"

Even children recognize that if Adam and Eve were the first humans, and if Cain and Abel were their children, and if Abel is dead-- that leaves three people on earth. So Genesis 4 just drops a bunch of other people in our laps without bothering to explain where they came from.

Some, who still want to read Genesis 2-4 as another account of creation, find an answer in Genesis 5:4, where we learn that Adam had "other sons and daughters." So are we supposed to believe that Cain married his sister? Besides the fact that that's gross and a little creepy, let's also remember the story doesn't say that or even suggest it. That is a made-up explanation. And besides, Genesis 5:4 seems to say that these other children were born after Seth, Adam and Eve's replacement child for Abel-- all of that happened after the banishment of Cain and his marriage to his mysterious wife. And finally, think about this: for Cain to find a wife among his sisters while wandering around as a fugitive would mean that at least one sister (actually, a lot of brothers and sisters since Cain builds a city) would have been banished too. But again, the story doesn't say any of that.

Here's a simpler explanation: there were other people living outside of the Garden of Eden all along, even if the story doesn't explain it. Which leads to this: maybe the story of Adam and Eve isn't about the first human beings. Maybe it's about something else. And that something else is this:

The Adam story is a story of Israel in miniature, a preview of coming attractions.

!!!!!! Oh, yes, I read all the apologetics books back in the day, and yes they certainly do talk about the question "where did Cain get his wife?" The answer that's given in the apologetics books is: Cain must have married his sister or niece. And this was okay back then because Adam and Eve had completely perfect genes. But later, many many generations after Adam and Eve, the effects of sin in the world had caused more and more mutations in people's genes- so incest is a bad idea now, but back then at the creation of the world, it was fine.

Yes, really, if you believe that Adam and Eve were the first 2 people, and everyone is descended from them, then you have to get into these fan theories about how sin causes genetic mutations. You have to make arguments that incest was okay back then but not okay now.

"Genesis for Normal People" points out that NONE OF THAT IS IN THE BIBLE! The bible does NOT say "Cain married his sister." People just made that up because it follows logically from Adam and Eve being the only people on earth originally. But don't take it that seriously! It's not a true story!

It's just FASCINATING how Christians go from "I believe the bible" to "incest was okay during the time of Adam and Eve and I will die on this hill" when the bible doesn't say that at all! It doesn't!

(I mean, if you want actual bible stories about incest: Abraham and Sarah were half-brother/half-sister. Jacob married his cousins Rachel and Leah. The bible has incest. But the story of Cain doesn't, unless you need it as part of your fan theories.)

When you believe in inerrancy, and you read the bible, you see things in the stories that actually aren't there. Like the incest in the story of Cain. 

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Posts about "Genesis for Normal People":

"Genesis for Normal People": Separating "what the writer meant" from "what is true" and "what it means for us"
God Made the Firmament
When the Bible is Racist
To what extent do I care what the biblical writers meant?
Adding Incest to the Story of Cain

Related

Children's Bibles and "turning ambiguity into clear articulations" 

Cain and Family (A Logic Problem) 

The Bible and the Pixar Theory

To what extent do I care what the biblical writers meant?

A person's hands writing on a scroll. Image source.

I recently read "Genesis for Normal People", which discusses the biblical book of Genesis in terms of what the ancient writer meant to say. Reading it "with ancient eyes," not bringing our modern ideas into it. And, in particular, this means reading the bible without the assumption that it's true, and without the assumption that it has meaningful moral lessons to teach us. ("Genesis for Normal People" doesn't state this so explicitly; this is *my* summary of it.)

It's *just* about what the writer meant, and how the ancient readers would have understood it. (I'm sure the authors of "Genesis for Normal People," Enns and Byas, have opinions on the connection between the bible and truth/morality, but this book didn't get into that.)

Which leads me to ask the question: To what extent do *I* care what the biblical writers meant?

Evangelicals are SO INTO figuring out what the bible originally meant, to its original audience. Because, in their ideology, the bible is inerrant- meaning, whatever the writer originally intended it to mean is inerrant. (I discussed this at length in my 2017 post, "The Author of Leviticus Would Have Been Cool With It" - how can you separate the literal words of the text from the author's meaning? And how can you separate the author's meaning from the author's underlying beliefs and assumptions? And how can you separate the author's beliefs and assumptions concerning what they wrote in the bible, from their beliefs and assumptions about EVERYTHING, many of which must be completely wrong, because all of us have some beliefs which are completely wrong? And how can you claim that the literal words of the text, and/or the author's intended meaning, are inerrant, without also claiming all of the author's biases about everything are inerrant? I think about these things because I can speak Chinese- language is a rolling ocean, not an absolute solid ground. It's the words themselves but it's also an entire society's experiences with those words. Communication is not just about the words, but about having shared background assumptions. How do you say "cookie" in Chinese? Well, a dictionary will tell you it's 饼干 [or maybe 甜饼 or 曲奇, honestly 甜饼 probably gets my point across the best, in terms of what I imagine when I think of a cookie, and what I want to communicate to people about it; and 曲奇 I think sounds a little silly because it's a transliteration, not something native to Chinese], but you need more than a dictionary- you need to know that most Chinese people don't really eat cookies. Also 饼干 usually means a cracker, which is completely different from a cookie, but Chinese people have a hard time grasping what the difference is. There are plenty of examples in the other direction too- I've met Chinese people who find it just UNBELIEVABLE that the English word for 米粉 is "rice noodles." Doesn't "noodles" mean 面条? [Well, no, not exactly. 面条 in Chinese does not mean the exact same thing as "noodles" in English; 面条 is *only* the noodles that are made from flour, not other kinds of starch like rice or potatoes.] 米粉 and 面条 are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS! But in my opinion, they're not really that different? This must be how Chinese people feel when I insist that cookies and crackers are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS. The layers: the words, and what the writer meant by those words, and what people normally think is meant by those words- how can you draw a line and say where the "inerrant" layer ends and the "just regular fallible human thoughts" layer begins?)

Where was I? Ah, yes, evangelicals are SO INTO figuring out what the biblical writers originally meant. Evangelicals are all about looking up Greek and Hebrew words, debating the merits of different English translations, looking up anecdotes about whatever was going on in their society back then, which the bible makes reference to, etc. We need to know what the biblical text originally meant, because that's what it means for us too. 

In evangelical ideology: Our English translations are not necessarily inerrant. Whatever you initially understand a particular bible verse to mean is not necessarily inerrant. But what it originally meant, that's what's inerrant. 

(Or rather, the average churchgoer might understand inerrancy to mean an English translation is inerrant, or that whatever mental image they had while reading is inerrant- but if you ask extremely pointed questions about what inerrancy means exactly, the official answer is this "only what the author originally meant was inerrant" idea.)

And "Genesis for Normal People" is all about what the biblical writers originally meant, but in a way that's obviously off-limits for evangelicals. "Genesis for Normal People" gives examples where "what the biblical writers meant" was simply incorrect- for example, about the existence of the firmament. Like, yes, they really were writing about the firmament. And no, the firmament does not really exist. So they were wrong. But if you're a good evangelical, you can't even imagine the idea that the biblical writers would have been talking about something that clearly (we know thanks to modern science) doesn't exist. The belief in inerrancy blocks you from actually understanding what the text originally meant.

As for me, I'm not evangelical any more, and- okay I'll be blunt about this- wow it's so freeing to not have to obsess over the meanings of ancient Greek words in order to figure out if I'm allowed to treat gay people with basic decency. The bible is not in charge of me; I do *not* view it as an authority which teaches us morals. I care about "what the biblical writers meant" as a matter of intellectual curiosity, rather than an anxiety-fueled quest to determine the commands by which I should live my life. (See: It Doesn’t Actually Matter What Jesus Said About Divorce)

But reading "Genesis for Normal People," I'm wondering, wait, do I *actually* care what the bible originally meant, from an ancient near east perspective?

For example, the book discusses the Genesis flood story, in comparison with other flood stories from other ancient cultures. I'm interested to read that, but it's... it's just the way I'm interested to read cool facts about history. It's a different feeling from how driven I am in my love for the bible and for Jesus.

So I've come to this conclusion: As an ex-evangelical, I'm not *primarily* interested in the original meaning of the bible. What I'm actually interested in is the [white American] evangelical construct of what the bible is and what it means- and how I react to that and critique it.

You grow up in the evangelical church, you read the bible every day, you believe it's inerrant, you devote your life to the God you find in its pages- all of this will result in you having some kind of imagined concept of what the bible is. And even though that concept is more about evangelical culture than about what they were actually writing about thousands of years ago- even though it's very far from what the actual text of the bible originally meant- it's real, in a certain sense. It's a powerful cultural construct.

And when I talk about the bible, I want to talk about it in terms of a reaction to that cultural construct. Which has had a much greater effect on me than "what the writer meant."

For example- I wrote a bunch of blog posts about the book "Womanist Midrash", because that book is about examining the characters in the bible from a womanist/feminist perspective. The reason I was so interested in it was that I know all these characters. I know them, I know them very well, I've been reading these stories my whole life, but always through an evangelical lens, with a bunch of assumptions about what the bible is. I am so into the contrast between evangelical readings of these bible characters, and feminist readings.

And yes, "Womanist Midrash" is based on a lot of good research about language and culture and history- it *is* about "what the bible really meant back then." But what interests me specifically isn't "what the bible really meant" but the contrast between that view and the evangelical view.

And, as another example, when I write fanfiction about the bible, it's because I am Making A Point about evangelicalism. Sure, sometimes I might write it in a way that's like "here's what it was really like for these characters" but my point isn't simply "here's what it was really like" but "evangelicalism gets this completely wrong." And my Noah fanfic is full of modern American evangelical talking points about hell and salvation and what the gospel is- this is an intentional anachronism; my point was not that Noah really believed those things (because of course he didn't) but to use the Noah story to make a point about modern evangelical beliefs.

So I don't necessarily care what the bible really is/ really was to its writers. I care about what evangelicals say it is, and I react against that. And yes, learning about its history from an academic perspective, as we see in "Genesis for Normal People" is an aspect of that, but for me it's not the main thing.

Okay, so, next question: Is it a problem that I'm interested in the white American evangelical construct of the bible, rather than the actual bible?

Well... the white American evangelical construct of the bible is real, though. This imagined version of what the bible is- it's *not* actually what the bible is, but it's *real* in the sense that there's a whole culture and ideology surrounding it, and that culture and ideology has had a big effect on my life. 

It's like... "The Lion King" is based on "Hamlet", but "The Lion King" is worth analyzing and enjoying in and of itself, even if you don't care about its connection to "Hamlet." Plus "Hamlet" didn't have all those great songs. Can you imagine if people were walking around saying "it doesn't matter what you think about 'The Lion King,' it doesn't matter if you like the songs or whatever, it's just an imperfect retelling of 'Hamlet', that's all." No, it's more than that.

And this evangelical ideology, with its biblical inerrancy and all the beliefs that come with that- this is where I first loved the bible, and where I first loved Jesus. This is what the bible meant to me, for many years- so of course I have things to say about that, more so than I have things to say about the fact that there are similarities between Noah's flood and the epic of Gilgamesh, or any other point that biblical scholars present about what the bible really is.

So I do want to read more about actual academic scholarship on the bible, but that's not necessarily the main point for me.

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Posts about "Genesis for Normal People":

"Genesis for Normal People": Separating "what the writer meant" from "what is true" and "what it means for us"
God Made the Firmament
When the Bible is Racist
To what extent do I care what the biblical writers meant?
Adding Incest to the Story of Cain

Related:

The Bible and the Pixar Theory

Figuring Out What I Believe About "The Prince of Egypt" 

"Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles" (I LOVE THIS BOOK SO MUCH)

When the Bible is Racist

Map of the nations in the middle east during bible times. Image source.

I recently read "Genesis for Normal People". I want to talk about what this book says about the curse of Ham.

What is the "curse of Ham," you ask? Well, you know the story of Noah's ark? Well, after Noah and his family survived the flood, after the water all receded and they were able to get out of the ark and start a new life, Noah got drunk and lay in his tent naked, and his son Ham saw him and went to tell his brothers about it. Kind of in a disrespectful, mocking way, I guess. (The other brothers, Shem and Japheth, got a sheet to cover Noah.) When Noah wakes up, he curses Ham's son Canaan- "Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers." He says Canaan's descendants will be slaves to Shem's and Japheth's descendants.

That's the story of the "curse of Ham." Yeah it doesn't exactly make sense that Noah cursed Ham's son Canaan, when he was mad at Ham, but that's what the bible says.

Later in the bible, the land of Canaan is the "promised land" that God leads the Israelites into, and God commands them to kill all of the Canaanites and take their land.

Page 59 of "Genesis for Normal People" says:

The flood story is Israel's vehicle for talking about how their God is different from the gods of the other nations. It is also a vehicle for the later Israelite writer to explain why the hated Canaanites deserved everything they got, including being violently driven from their homeland so it could be given to the Israelites: they have been an accursed race since the beginning-- because Ham saw Noah's nakedness.

In other words, the book says that the story of the curse of Ham was invented for political reasons- the Canaanites were the Israelites' enemies, and so the Israelites told this story to justify the claim that the Canaanites are all bad and deserve to die. See, their ancestor Ham was weird/disrespectful/creepy that one time when he saw his father naked, and so Noah cursed Canaan, and yeah all the Canaanites are trouble.

This is racist.

Like, I hope this is obvious to everyone. You tell a story about how some group's ancestors were bad, and therefore the whole group is bad and deserves to be punished- that's racist. That's just what it is.

But hold that thought, because first I want to talk about how I viewed this story (and similar bible stories- there are many of them!) when I was evangelical and believed the bible was inerrant.

I wasn't really aware that the "logic" of stories like this was "Ham was bad, therefore all of Ham's descendants are bad and deserve to be driven from their homes and/or killed." Because, uh, that doesn't make sense. I had no idea that when we read this story, we're supposed to make a connection between the bad behavior of the ancestor and the bad behavior of the demographic group that came from that ancestor. I didn't think that way at all- that would be racist, obviously. Everyone is their own person and can make their own choices- you can't just say an entire ethnic group all has the same bad character traits. That doesn't make any sense at all.

Also, it doesn't really make sense to talk about "the descendants of Ham" as a separate thing from the descendants of Shem or Japheth. The bible says the only humans who survived the flood were Noah, Noah's wife, Shem, Ham, Japheth, and their three wives. You would have to have some incest going on after that. In the universe of this bible story, all of us are descendants of Shem and Ham and Japheth.

So these origin stories for the "bad" nations in the bible were kinda lost on me. Sure, I knew that the bible said their ancestor did this or that shady thing, but I didn't think that really had any bearing on what their descendants would be like. Sure, I knew that God said the Israelites should kill all the Canaanites- and I agreed with that because I was a good evangelical and I was required to agree with it- but that was because of the Canaanites' own bad behavior, and didn't have any connection to what Ham did.

But reading "Genesis for Normal People," I'm realizing how racist these bible stories were intended to be. "Genesis for Normal People" says we should read the bible with "ancient eyes"- don't bring in our modern ideas about how it's illogical to say that a group of people is bad because their ancestor was bad, or how racism is wrong, or how the flood was a genetic bottleneck. Just read it for what the writer was trying to say to the original audience. 

Importantly, this means we shouldn't expect the bible to be true, and we shouldn't expect the bible to teach us meaningful moral lessons. If we expect those things from the bible, then we read the story of the curse of Ham with the assumptions "this story couldn't possibly be saying all the Canaanites are bad because Ham did something shady- that makes no sense" and "the bible couldn't possibly be making a racist argument here." And so we miss what the biblical writer was actually saying.

How bad is it to miss what the biblical writer was saying about the curse of Ham?

Well. Unfortunately, the curse of Ham is a big thing in the history of anti-Black racism in the US. There's a fan theory that says Black people are the descendants of Ham- and so Black people are under the curse of Ham, and they're supposed to be slaves. Really. This is a real thing that white American Christians have preached.

I never heard about that, until I was in college and started attending a racially-diverse church, and I heard a sermon that said "no, the curse of Ham does NOT mean Black people are inferior" and I had such a hard time figuring out what the pastor was even talking about. Sure, I knew the bible story, but this bible story doesn't say anything about race or skin color or Africa or anything along those lines. I didn't know that in modern times, white people used this story to claim that Black people were inferior and cursed.

It's important for white American Christians to know this history, though. To know what our ancestors did, the way they used the bible as a justification to mistreat other people. I don't mean "our ancestors did something bad, so now we should be punished"- I just said I don't believe in that- but we need to learn from this. We need to learn from what they did, to make sure we are not doing the same things.

So I didn't believe that entire populations in the bible deserved to die because their ancestor did something bad- that would be racist, of course I didn't believe in that. Instead I believed that entire populations in the bible deserved to die because they were worshiping the wrong gods, or some other such sin.

Uh, that's also kinda racist.

Ah, see this is the problem. When we read the bible, believing that it is our authority that teaches us morality- then we are unable to see the racism it promotes, even when it's right there staring us in the face. We aren't able to see that and call it out and say "hey, let's NOT treat people like this." And then we end up at the same place- the belief that sometimes an entire ethnic group deserves to die- but it doesn't register as racism because we just got there from following what the bible says, and of course the bible wouldn't be racist. Right?

Yes, we need to call it out. This story, about the curse of Ham, was written to justify Israel's hatred and violence toward the Canaanites. The message the reader is supposed to get is "the Canaanites are bad, just like their ancestor Ham was bad." Let's recognize this as racism, and say "This is wrong." The writer of the bible was wrong. And we need to learn from that, so we don't do the same thing.

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Posts about "Genesis for Normal People":

"Genesis for Normal People": Separating "what the writer meant" from "what is true" and "what it means for us"
God Made the Firmament
When the Bible is Racist
To what extent do I care what the biblical writers meant?
Adding Incest to the Story of Cain

Related:

For the Sunday School Kids Who Never Heard About "the Curse of Ham" Or "Black Simon" 

The Bible Lied About Lot's Daughters 

This "Do Not Intermarry With Them" Stuff Hits Different Now

The Slavery We Ignore in the Book of Exodus

God Made the Firmament

Image showing an ancient understanding of the earth- there is a firmament above the sky, holding back the waters above the sky. Image source: By Tom-L - Own work Based on File:Early Hebrew Conception of the Universe.png and several other depictions, including Understanding the Bible, Stephen L. Harris, 2003., CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=99817773

I recently read "Genesis for Normal People," and so I want to talk about the firmament.

What is "the firmament," you ask? Well, in ancient times, people believed that there was a whole reservoir of water above the sky. The firmament is the big dome-shaped thing that holds back the water, so it doesn't all fall on us.

Okay...

Genesis 1 tells us what God made on each of the 6 days of creation. Verses 6-8 say that God separated the water above from the water below, and called the big space between them "sky." Different bible translations describe this using different words- vault, space, expanse, firmament. 

So yes, on Day 2, God made the firmament. You know how there's water above the sky, and there's a firmament holding it back so it doesn't fall on us? Ever wonder where that came from? Well, God made it on Day 2.

Okay...

"Genesis for Normal People" explains what the firmament is, and tells us to read the bible "with ancient eyes", ie, don't bring our modern understanding of science into it. As I said in my previous post about this book, it was so surprising to me that this book is ONLY about what the biblical writers meant, and it does NOT say anything about finding truth in the bible, or finding moral lessons to apply to our lives. It talks about what the bible meant to its ancient readers, and then leaves it at that.

I had heard about the "firmament" before, but reading this book, this was the first time I really understood this: The biblical writers believed that there was a firmament holding up the water. Really. They believed the earth was flat, and it had a dome on top, containing the sky, and then more water on top of that, and the firmament is the barrier between the sky and the water. Really. They believed that, and they mentioned it when writing the bible. That's what this part of the bible is talking about.

In the past, when I read the creation story from Genesis 1, I always had in mind what the earth really looks like. So I read that God made an expanse to separate the waters above from the waters below, and I assumed "waters above" maybe meant clouds, or something. I thought Day 2 was when God made the sky. I took the words in the bible and mapped them onto things that we know exist.

So Genesis 1 tells us that God made the firmament, but I wasn't able to understand that, because I believed the bible was true. Obviously there's no such thing as a firmament- so if I'm confused about what this bible verse is saying, I would never in a million years consider the interpretation "maybe it's talking about the firmament." When we read the bible with the assumption that it's true, we miss what the writer was actually saying.

Or, perhaps if you believe in inerrancy, you might explain it like this: "Firmament" is just an old-timey word for "sky." See, the point is that God made the sky- that's the part that's inerrant. Ancient people had an incorrect understanding of what the sky is, but that's not the inerrant part, so no problem. I feel like this explanation still misses the point- it fails to appreciate how foreign and alien the bible is. It just quickly glides past the concept of the firmament, claiming that this bible passage is actually about the sky. In this understanding of inerrancy, the bible passage is "actually about" something that would have been confusing and incomprehensible to the original writer. 

Is that how inerrancy works? God directs them to write something, and the part that's inerrant is the deeper meaning, which the writer themself doesn't even know? Yes, I have seen Christians talking about the bible with these kinds of assumptions- but normally I've seen inerrancy defined as "what it originally meant is inerrant."

I have heard young-earth creationists talking about the firmament, actually. I remember reading a young-earth creationist article which said that when God created the world, there was a layer of water above the sky, just kind of suspended up there I guess, and that's what Genesis 1 is talking about, when it mentions the firmament. Later, during Noah's flood, the water in the firmament rained down onto the earth- see, that's why the firmament doesn't exist any more. Also, before the flood, the air pressure in earth's atmosphere was much higher than it is now, because of the firmament on top of the atmosphere- and this high air pressure is good for people's health, and that's why you have people with 900-year lifespans before the flood. I'm honestly impressed with how much work the young-earth creationists have put into this fan theory.

But even this young-earth creationist fan theory is NOT what the bible is saying, when it talks about the firmament. The bible is NOT saying "there used to be a firmament, but all the water rained down during Noah's flood." It's saying "You know how you look up in the sky and it's blue because there's water up there?" It was written by people who believed the firmament still existed, because they saw it with their own eyes. (Or rather, they saw the sky was blue and assumed they were seeing the big sea of water that's up there. And yeah, that's a reasonable thing to think if you live in ancient times and don't have access to information about space.) The young-earth creationist approach of believing the creation story is literally true and then doing a lot of work to make it fit with what we know about the world thanks to modern science completely misses the point.

(And apparently there are some young-earth creationists who believe the earth is flat, and believe in the firmament and everything. I never encountered that when I was a young-earth creationist though.)

Believing that the bible is true interferes with our ability to understand what it was actually trying to say. It talks about the firmament because the writers really believed that was a real thing. We now know it's not a real thing- but if you bring that knowledge into your understanding of the bible, if you believe the bible is true and therefore can't possibly be talking about something that's not real- well, then you'll miss the point.

Anyway, let's all go outside and look up at the firmament today and thank God for making it on Day 2~

---

Posts about "Genesis for Normal People":

"Genesis for Normal People": Separating "what the writer meant" from "what is true" and "what it means for us"
God Made the Firmament
When the Bible is Racist
To what extent do I care what the biblical writers meant?
Adding Incest to the Story of Cain

Related:

I used to be a young-earth creationist 

If God Metaphorically Made the World in 6 Days, What Does That Even Mean?

Kangaroos and Creationist Fan Theories

"Genesis for Normal People": Separating "what the writer meant" from "what is true" and "what it means for us"

Book cover for "Genesis for Normal People"

I recently read Genesis for Normal People: A Guide to the Most Controversial, Misunderstood, and Abused Book of the Bible, by Peter Enns and Jared Byas. I really enjoyed this book. Here's my review of it.

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"Normal people"?

What does this mean, "Genesis for normal people"? The authors of this book, Enns and Byas, are biblical scholars, and the purpose of this book is to present a biblical-scholar view of Genesis to a "normal people" audience. 

So, everything in this book is informed by what actual academic scholars know about where the bible came from. For example- Moses didn't write the Pentateuch- it was written much later, after the Israelites were in exile in Babylon. For example- comparing other creation stories, from the other nations nearby, with the creation story in Genesis. Same thing for the flood story- looking at the story of Noah's ark with an awareness that many ancient societies had flood stories.

There's something really fascinating to me about how the title "Genesis for Normal People" exposes the divide between academic research on the bible and what the average Christian believes about the bible. Typically, if you're a "normal person," and you go to buy a book about the bible, the selection available to you will be books written from an evangelical "biblical inerrancy" perspective. You don't really have access to actual grounded academic work about the bible. 

And, actually, if you're a good evangelical and you do happen to come across academic scholarship on the bible which says things that good evangelicals are certainly not allowed to believe (Moses didn't write the Pentateuch, etc), you know that you're not supposed to read it. Evangelical leaders warn people that those arrogant scholars are going against God, that they refuse to believe the bible is true, they refuse to believe in miracles, and they're spreading their deceptive ideas in the academic articles they write. Don't listen to them! You'll be led astray!

So we don't have access to writing from actual knowledgeable biblical scholars- and if we did happen to stumble upon such information, we've been trained by the anti-intellectualism in evangelical culture that we must not listen to them and be "led astray."

Very interesting that some of these ideas about the actual reality of the bible are starting to escape from academic circles and become accessible to "normal people."

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The biblical writer's reasons for writing Genesis

"Genesis for Normal People" says that the Pentateuch (the first 5 books of the bible, starting with Genesis) was put together some time around 539 BCE, when the Israelites were returning to their land after being in exile in Babylon. It wasn't *written* at that time- the stories had been passed around for a while- but this is when it got assembled into the Scriptures we know today.

As they were returning to their own land after being conquered by Babylon, the Israelites were thinking about their identity as a nation- who are we, where did we come from, how do we relate to God, is there hope that God is still with us and things will get better, etc. The Pentateuch was written to provide a narrative that addressed those questions.

"Genesis for Normal People" says over and over that we need to read Genesis "with ancient eyes." We have to think about it from the perspective of its original audience. We have to read it with an awareness of the reasons it was written, and what the writer was trying to say to the people back then.

So, in particular, don't go looking for arguments about evolution or the big bang. That's not what Genesis is about. It's not about how the world was actually made, or where people actually came from- it's about the mindset that the ancient Israelites had as they were trying to figure out their identity as a nation.

Read it with ancient eyes.

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This book is ONLY about what the writer of Genesis meant

The thing that's really surprising to me about this book is it's ONLY about what the writer of Genesis meant to say to the original audience. That's it. 

Reading with "ancient eyes" means we don't get tripped up by things the bible says which we now know (thanks to science) are not true. Just put aside questions about what's true and what's not- we're not talking about that right now- we're only talking about what the writer wanted to say.

And indeed, "Genesis for Normal People" points out a few places where the bible says something that is contradictory or anachronistic. For example, Genesis 10 lists the nations which were descended from Noah's sons, and says these different nations had their own languages. But then Genesis 11 starts out with, "Now the whole world had one language and a common speech," and tells the story of the Tower of Babel and how God made the people speak different languages, to sabotage their work.

So, wait a minute, the various nations which were listed in Genesis 10 had their own languages, but suddenly in Genesis 11 there's only 1 language? What's going on?

Back when I was evangelical and believed the bible was inerrant, I would have immediately responded like this: Genesis 10 lists the different nations that would *eventually* come from the descendants of Noah's 3 sons. It lists them there because it's wrapping up the story of Noah's ark- but actually at this point in the story of Genesis, they didn't have different languages. Genesis 11 is not set *after* Genesis 10, it's sort of happening some time in the middle of Genesis 10. The different nations had different languages, as Genesis 10 says, because of what happened in Genesis 11.

As I've said in other blog posts, this evangelical habit of being extremely quick to explain away biblical contradictions means we're not actually reading the story that's right there in front of us. We're reading an imaginary version of the story where everything happens in the same universe, and little details from different parts of the bible are harmonized together to make it make sense.

This is like if you watched one of the Tom Holland Spiderman movies, and all through the movie you were understanding it as being in the same universe as the Toby Maguire Spiderman movies- that everything that happened in those movies is also true in this movie... and you end up with a really bizarre understanding of what happened. Because, you weren't really watching the movie that was right there in front of you.

Anyway, "Genesis for Normal People" says (p 64):

Chapters 10 and 11 give us two different explanations for why people are spread out around the world and speak different languages. ...

These two explanations of the disbursement of humans with their different languages were clearly not a problem for the writers and editors of the Old Testament. And we should not make it one-- insisting that they both need to say the same thing.

Reading the bible to see what the writers meant- not looking for something that makes sense as one connected and true story.

Another example- Genesis 26 refers to Philistines living in Gerar. But at the time when the story is set, the Philistines did NOT live there. Page 83 says,

The writer simply took for granted that the Philistines had always been there, which makes perfect sense for a culture that could not consult a library or do a Google search.

!!!!! So there's a mistake in the bible. There's a little minor detail that's just not true.

If you believe in biblical inerrancy, you have 2 options here:

1. Claim that actually there were Philistines living in that place at that time, and the biblical scholars who say otherwise are godless heathens. Claim that you, a person who has spent 0 time studying ancient history, know this fact, it must be true because the bible says it is, while the scholars who spend their entire careers studying actual artifacts from the ancient world are wrong.
2. Tweak the definition of "Philistine" or "inerrant" a tiny bit. Maybe when this verse says "Philistines" it didn't mean the group of people that we understand to be the Philistines, but meant some confusing different thing- and therefore in some sense it *is* correct to say the Philistines were living there at that time. Or maybe this is just 1 little word in the bible that was copied wrong, and that's okay, that doesn't really *count* as an error- the bible is still inerrant.

But anyway, "Genesis for Normal People" doesn't get into that. It's not about whether the stories are true or not. We're just looking at what the original writer meant.

Also, "Genesis for Normal People" doesn't get into the question "What lessons is this bible story teaching us, that we as modern Christians should apply to our lives?" 

This is really interesting to me- because yes, evangelicals who believe in biblical inerrancy often *do* talk about the question "what did this mean to its original audience" and about reading the bible in the context of the ancient culture where it came from- but this is done as a way to better understand how the commands of the bible apply to our lives now. 

I don't think I've ever seen anyone talking about what the biblical writers meant and then just leaving it at that. But that's what "Genesis for Normal People" does, and I think it's great.

For example, "Genesis for Normal People" compares the creation story from Genesis 1 with creation stories from other cultures at that time. What they have in common is they portray the world before creation as a dark and chaotic ocean, and the act of creation is about bringing order to the chaos. But a key difference is: Other cultures' creation stories had various gods fighting, but in the bible, it's just one God, who simply speaks and the world comes into being. So, the point that the writer of Genesis was making is, our God has power over the whole world. Our God created the world on purpose, the way he wanted it to be, unlike those other gods in the other stories who created the world accidentally through their fighting.

And I've heard this interpretation before- Rachel Held Evans talks about it in her book "Inspired"- but the point was always "the writer of Genesis was saying that God is powerful and organized, and so the lesson we should learn from this story is that God is powerful and organized." It was about learning what the bible meant to its original readers, because what the bible meant to them is what it really means, and that's what it means to us.

Really fascinating to just look at the bible in terms of "what did it mean to them back then" and just leave it at that. To not try to connect it to scientific facts we know about the world, to not treat it like it has to be a true story, to not look for moral lessons we can apply to our lives. And yes, I think Enns and Byas probably do have ideas about how the bible lends itself to those discussions, but they didn't talk about that at all in this book. The point of "Genesis for Normal People" is that the first step is understanding what the writer meant to say- and the book is only about that.

This is great. I love this. 

I think even if you're trying to focus on "what the biblical writer meant", if you're coming at it from the mindset that everything in the bible is true and has something meaningful to say to us now, it affects your ability to see "what the biblical writer meant." Reading "with ancient eyes," as I understand it, means to completely put aside the idea that we read the bible to find truth and to find something meaningful to apply to our lives.

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Characters "telling Israel's story in miniature"

For many of the bible characters discussed in this book, Enns and Byas point out the ways that they "tell Israel's story in miniature." For example, Abraham went to Egypt, and his wife was taken as Pharaoh's "property", but then God brought them out of Egypt- kinda similar to how the Israelites were slaves in Egypt and then God brought them out, huh?

Genesis portrays the Israelites' ancestors as having a lot of problems and drama and often doing a bad job of following God. Actually, the name "Israel" means "wrestles with God." This shows the original audience that even though their nation has disobeyed God, even though they were conquered by Babylon as punishment for their sin, God hasn't abandoned them. 

I don't really like this- at least, I don't like the way that Christians typically frame it, which is: These bible heroes weren't perfect, but God loved them anyway, isn't that great news for all of us because we're not perfect. I hate this because... if you actually read the bible... the "bible heroes" raped and murdered people. If you read that and the message you get from it is "isn't it great that God loves us anyway even though we're not perfect"... my god. Where's the compassion for the victims? And this is a serious thing- here in the real world, Christians really do respond to sexual abuse by supporting the abuser and telling the victims that they need to forgive and "no one is perfect." Really.

So reading this part of "Genesis for Normal People," I tried to keep in mind that this is just what the biblical writer was saying- it doesn't mean it's the message that we should take from Genesis. Because I want to read the bible in a way that cares about the victims, rather than only looking at how everything turned out fine for the main character of the story because they trusted God.

But another thought I had about this is: So, the Pentateuch (including Genesis) was written as a way to present the Israelites' identity as a nation. And maybe this "there have been a lot of problems, but we still have hope that things can get better" is kind of similar to the way I feel about my country. I'm American (I've lived in China since 2013 so it's complicated, but still) ... I really believe in the ideas about freedom and equality, and the United States has always talked a big game about that but has never ever lived up to it. Like Langston Hughes said, "America never was America to me." So, hmm, maybe I can kind of understand the idea of wanting to frame your nation's identity as "have hope, we can be better."

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I want to read all these books

Back in 2015, I wrote a blog series reviewing Peter Enns's book "The Bible Tells Me So." One of my posts was called Peter Enns Makes Me Want to Actually Read the Bible Again, and yeah, I stand by that sentiment.

After reading "Genesis for Normal People," I feel like I want to read all of Enns's books (there are a lot of them) and also all the books in the "Bible for Normal People" series.

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Don't read the bible to find moral heroes

I like this quote from page 87:

It doesn't take a lot of effort to see that Jacob will be the focus of the story [in Genesis 25-35]. As it turns out, Jacob is also a liar, and so is his mom, Rebekah. There is nothing to be gained from trying to make excuses for either of them. And it's not like Jacob's father and grandfather were models of virtue, either, as they passed off their wives as sisters in order to save their own necks. Reading these stories for the moral virtues of the main characters, like one might read a fable, is a misreading.

!!!!!! This is so real and honest- and it's so rare to see people talking about bible "heroes" in this way. Love it.

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Conclusion

This book presents biblical scholars' view of what the writer of Genesis was intending to say. That's unique because there are a lot of things that biblical scholars know about the bible, that good evangelicals who believe in "biblical inerrancy" aren't allowed to know about, and because this book only talks about what the writer meant, and does NOT say anything about reading the bible to find truth or to find lessons that are meaningful to our lives as modern Christians. It has made me realize how much those assumptions- that the bible is true and meaningful to our lives now- distort our understanding of the bible, causing us to read things into the story which totally aren't there, and to ignore what the writers were actually saying.

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Posts about "Genesis for Normal People":

"Genesis for Normal People": Separating "what the writer meant" from "what is true" and "what it means for us"
God Made the Firmament 
When the Bible is Racist
To what extent do I care what the biblical writers meant?
Adding Incest to the Story of Cain

Related:

No One Can Take The Bible From Me 

The Worst Bible Story 

"The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" (book review) 

Children's Bibles and the 2 Creation Stories

Womanist Midrash 

"Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles" (I LOVE THIS BOOK SO MUCH)