Wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. (Gen 9:5-29)

Does God approve of capital punishment? That's actually a very good question, and one that many of us wish had a simpler answer. The fact is, God's view of capital punishment in the Bible is a question that would require the study of far more verses than the two quoted here. You'd have to look at passages like the one in which a man is killed for gathering firewood on a Saturday, or where Jesus forgives a woman caught in adultery (but never denies that adultery is a capital crime!), and many others. The short simple answer is, yes, God does approve of capital punishment; the long answer would be an extensive study on what sorts of things God considers worthy of death, and why, and when and why God prefers mercy. I don't believe I'm qualified to give an adequate response of the long sort, but I'd be willing to discuss my views on it in the comments section if anyone really is curious.

Verses 8-17 talk about the covenant that God makes that He will never destroy the world again through a flood, and He offers the rainbow as a sign of that covenant. The main beef that the SAB seems to have with this concept is a scientific one, that being that rainbows are a natural phenomenon. Personally, I don't see why this should be a problem. Just because rainbows may have existed before this covenant was made doesn't mean that God can't use them as a symbolic gesture. Take the early Christians as an example. They were of the habit of using a simple drawing of a fish as a symbol of their faith. Fishes existed before Christianity did, but they decided to use the symbol for their own purposes.

However, my own personal theory that I admittedly have little scientific basis for goes back to the water canopy theory. It seems to me that if the entire earth was covered with a layer of water acting a shield of some sort, then sunlight may not have refracted in precisely the way it does today. Furthermore, regarding this theory, you might remember that I had briefly speculated that it may never have rained before the flood. If it never rained, then there would never have been a rainbow. All of this is in the area of wilder speculation, of course, and the more important aspect of this part of the story is the symbolic aspect. The rainbow, as we now know, is not an actual bow, but is instead a circle that we only see part of from our vantage point standing on the earth. God uses the rainbow as a symbol, knowing that when we look at it, it will look like a bow, but without an arrow on the string. The symbolism is that God has fired this weapon He has, and He intends to now set it down, never to pick it up again.

The rest of the chapter is pretty much all about the drunkenness of Noah and the curse of Canaan. This is obviously a very strange story, and a lot of it that nobody really fully understands. The SAB gives a link to an excellent article on The Straight Dope, a site that I have a great deal of admiration for in many of these matters. (Even when I disagree with their conclusions, I respect the scholarship that went into them and consider them about as unbiased as it gets on the Internet.) It does seem a little odd to me that they link to an article that gives some straightforward answers to many of the questions they raise right before the link.

First of all, being drunk doesn't necessarily mean that you're not righteous, and I think it's perhaps quite understandable that after seeing the entire world destroyed, Noah might feel the need for a good drink, whether out of shock or guilt or depression. Secondly, being naked is also not a sin, especially if it's in the privacy of your own home (or tent as the case may be).

"What did [Ham] do besides look at him?" the SAB asks. First of all, looking at him alone is not entirely inoffensive; I think Noah has a right to some privacy, and Ham's violating that. On top of personally violating his father's privacy, Ham goes and tells his brothers that this is going on, as if it's their business! Granted, on the face of it, there seems to be very little reason to go so far as to put a curse on someone, and even if Noah was justified, it's not too clear why he curses Canaan rather than Ham. The Straight Dope gives the only possibility that even begins to make sense to me, that being that since Ham shamed his father, Noah shamed Ham's son. I don't know, though really, although there are a number of interesting speculations given in the article there. Actually, something that occurs to me now is that since at this time Canaan is the only offspring of Ham mentioned, he may in fact be the only one at this time, and Noah may be using Canaan's name as a generic label for all the descendants of Ham. Not that it fully justifies the curse, but it might make more sense.

Does God approve of slavery? That's a tough question that has been struggled with for a long, long time. You may have heard this sort of response before, but I do think it's the correct one. Yes, God does approve, but it depends on the definition of slavery. In Exodus 21, it's made clear that among the Israelites that slavery is never to be a permanent thing, and furthermore, slavery is essentially a voluntary position. There are some exceptions that get complicated, but the idea is that if a person sank into poverty and could no longer afford food, one could sell oneself to another person (but you couldn't sell someone else), and then they were bound to serve that person for six years, or until their price could be paid back, whichever came first. Maybe it's not ideal, but it's not the same as we think of slavery from the early 1800s, not by a long shot. (For more observations on the nature of Biblical slavery, see this post.)

But the SAB asks the excellent question "Are we punished for the sins of others?" Yes and no. Sometimes, we end up having to take responsibility for the sins of our parents and grandparents just because it's the natural result of what they did. For instance, when a pregnant woman abuses drugs, her child is often born with health problems, and that's not a curse or a punishment, it's just the way things are. Some things are more subtle, like parents dying and leaving you with their debts to settle, parents doing bad things to you that leave you emotionally scarred, and so forth. In general, it's just a fact that people tend to follow in their parents' footsteps, and if you do something that you really ought not do, your children may be cursed for it not because God's angry at you, but because they decided to follow in your footsteps. This may not account for every instance on the page linked, but I think it accounts for a lot of them, and I'll discuss other ones when I get to them. In this case, it may be the fact that Ham's immoral act performed for Canaan to witness it may have led Canaan into a sinful life which in turn led his descendants into sinful ways of their own. So think about the example you set for your children, all you parents out there.

The flood decayeth and drieth up (Gen 8)

I added one more paragraph to the previous post, as I started some commentary here that I realized belonged with that material.

Now, I already talked about the overall length of the flood in the previous post, so I won't go over that again, but there are a few notes in the SAB about time frames specifically for this chapter that ought to be addressed. (This chapter is much more coherent in general than the previous.) The first new thing noted is that there seems to be an inconsistency between verses four and five, which is strange, since I've never heard anyone elsewhere having a problem with these verses. The fact is that I think the answer is so simple I'd never thought there was a problem. Boats run aground onto things that are submerged under the waters all the time. While the tops of the mountains were not visible until the tenth month, that doesn't mean that the ark was not sitting low enough in the water to rest on them earlier. One might even interpret it as providence that the ark, which was not exactly built for navigational purposes, managed to find landing even before a landing was obviously available. If the ark had ended up bobbing about in the ocean, Noah, his family and all the animals would have been screwed.

The other timeline note is on verses 13-14, asking when exactly did the earth dry. I think the King James is lacking a bit in its translation here, as the meaning is not made clear as it could be, but actually when looking at the Hebrew words, I'm not sure I agree with any translation, but then, I'm hardly a Hebrew scholar. Note that even in the KJV, different phrases are used in the two verses. In verse 13, "the waters were dried up from off the earth" while in verse 14, "was the earth dried." The idea here is that at first, Noah sees that there's no more standing water, but everything is pretty much mud. Later, he sees actual dry land. Many other translations say "dry" and then "completely dried". The original Hebrew uses the words "charab" and "yabesh" which of course have different meanings that can include "dry". The thing I find interesting is that "charab" is also often translated as "desolate", which seems like it could be fairly appropriate in this context; one certainly could imagine that the ground must be rather desolate. However, one of the copies of the book of Genesis I own notes that these two Hebrew words appear together in Job 14:11 and Isa 19:5, suggesting a natural temporal sequence of drying.

The SAB notes that it's rather strange that a Dove could find a living olive tree. It does indeed seem unlikely that any tree would survive such a massive flood, and if indeed there were any olive seeds that had a chance to germinate after the flood, could they have produced leaves so quickly afterwards? I really don't know. I'm thinking this is likely to be another miracle to pile on the ones of the previous chapter, but if anyone knows how long it takes for an olive seed to germinate and produce leaves, let us know if it's anywhere in the neighborhood of 50 days.

While it is a good question to wonder what the animals leaving the ark had to eat, I wonder why the SAB waits until now to ask that question. As I mentioned earlier, I think it's much harder to imagine what they ate while on the ark. If there are olive trees, there may be many other kinds of plants. I don't know what the carnivores may have eaten, but really, it's the same problem we had on the ark. Oh, I still don't have any better, more scientific answer than I had then, in case you were holding out for one.

Noah then proceeds to give a sacrifice to the Lord, which is not a logistical problem if he had more than two of each of the animals suitable for sacrifice, and of course, he had seven of each of those. God does require animal sacrifice, yes, and I covered that somewhere way back...um...here.

God promises that He will not curse the earth again, but the SAB points to a verse in Malachi that seems to be God threatening to do so. What's up with that? Well, I'm going to stick with my first interpretation of this, especially after looking at the Hebrew behind it. At the end of a previous post, I implied that what I think God is saying here is that there is an intrinsic property of the ground in general that God placed upon it to make agriculture particularly difficult for Adam, and He's reversing that decision ("not again" thus taking the connotation of "not any more"). The thing that's interesting in the Hebrew is that the words for "curse" and "ground"/"earth" are different in both cases. I think the Genesis verse is saying, as it is put "curse the ground", but the Malachi passage is carrying a meaning more like "I will destroy (or maybe take away?) their territory."

So long as I'm leaving the flood behind, I'd like to point out something I didn't point out yet, nor did I see it in the article I linked to in the last post. Fish. I don't think anyone ever assumes that Noah took marine life into the ark with him, but it would present problems whether he did or not. If he took fish and the like onto the ark, where did he store them? If the entire world was one big body of water, was it salt or fresh water? I think we'll have to lean on another miracle here as well, but it may be that a miraculous saving of marine life is a possible answer to the dilemma of what carnivores ate after the flood. Many modern carnivores do eat fish, and as a source of meat, it may have been quite plentiful at this time. It's something for people on both sides to think about, in any case.

And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth (Gen 7)

I apologize for the long delay in bringing this post for those of you, I imagine, who hang on my every word. (I'm sure I'm only imagining it, of course.) I had a busy Friday, followed by a long weekend, and while I started to write a post on Friday, I ended up getting sidetracked into a Hebrew word study on "rain". I'm not sure how germane it is to the topic at hand, but Hebrew has at least two words for rain used in the Bible. The word "geshem" is a general-use term, while "matar" is a word meaning specifically a good and useful kind of rain. The only thing of interest in that is that 7:4 uses the latter term, while 7:12 uses the former. The next three times the Bible uses "matar", (Gen 19:24, Ex9:18,23) it is also clearly in reference to God's judgment.

Okay, let me scan what's here and see what's not a repeat of what's already covered (as well as scan my last few entries to see if there's anything I didn't cover but promised to hit on here!) Noah "perfect" or "righteous"? Check. Seven vs. two animals? Check. Flood being cruel? Check. Ah, here we are...

When did Noah enter the ark? It's a very good question. I've always heard it held as a fact that Noah entered the ark seven days before the flood, as it seems to be saying in verse 10, but it indeed does seem to be saying that they entered the ark the day it started raining. This may not be reconcilable, but I'll offer some suggestions that anybody can accept or reject as they see fit.

First of all, one of the things that I think many people, both believers and non-believers, overlook about this story is that loading this many animals into the ark was probably a task that took more than one day. (The SAB notices.) I suppose it might be the case that it took a week to fully load the thing. Whatever amount of animals Noah had on that ark, it was an awful lot, and there was only one door.

Secondly, I have to admit something here that's a minus to the quality of the Biblical story, but that may offer a sort of loophole for the issue of a time line. Let me address this to believers rather than skeptics who no doubt have already noticed it: chapter seven is a muddled mess! I mean really, read it! I don't know whether it detracts from the main point of the story, perhaps it does for some individuals, but stylistically, if you really look at it, it's hard to plow through. It may be because it is, as some have claimed, two different accounts of the same story ham-handedly edited together, or it may just be bad writing, but look at it verse by verse:

6: Notes that Noah is 600 years old
7: Humans go in, because it's flooding
8-9: Animals go in
10: Seven days after (after what?) "the waters" are there
11: Notes again that Noah is 600, apparently waters come
12: Rains for 40 days
13: Humans go in (again?)
14-15: Animals go in (again?)
16: God shuts the door
17: Floods for 40 days

The problem here is the phrase "selfsame day" in verse 13, but in the midst of all this muddling of the time line, I have to ask, "selfsame" as what? You'd be inclined to guess the specific day that was mentioned in verse 11, as it's one of the few attempts in the story to be specific, but in the interceding verse, there's 40 days mentioned. My personal opinion? There may indeed be a contradiction here, but in the general mishmash of this portion of the story told in chapter seven, I'm not sure how you can tell much of anything.

Let's hit a few specifics that can be addressed more directly. How did Noah get all those animals? Clearly, this is a superhuman task. It's my belief that what the SAB suggests in jest is what happened in fact. Noah was far too busy with the actual building of the ark to bother with the filling of it. Although the Bible doesn't specify, it makes a great deal of sense that God was the one who gathered the animals together.

In verse 11, it says, "were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened." The SAB calls this an absurdity (only the second part, for some reason), joking that God opens the window in the sky every time it rains. The fact is, I don't think you'll find this sort of terminology used anywhere else in the Bible to describe rain, and you'll notice that in fact, the word "rain" isn't used much here at all. Thematically, this story is a reversal of the act of creation in chapter one, and while there we saw God creating a space separating waters above and below, now he allows this space holding the waters back to collapse in on itself. Waters rush in on the world, both pouring down from the sky and gushing up from the ground. I once heard someone protest that the amount of water it would take to flood the earth would take more than 40 days worth of rain, and I think they're right; but this is more than rain.

The SAB asks the question about how long the flood lasted. I think there is some ambiguity, but not in the verses cited. The 40 days is the amount of time that it was actually raining and the waters were rising. The remainder of the 150 days is a time frame in which the water was not apparently doing anything, and the remaining time after these 150 days was a period of drying we'll get to in the next chapter.

Not being a geologist, I can't address the geological record, but I think I can address the matter of the supposedly surviving Nephilim. The fact is, even though the passage in Numbers 13 uses the same word, there is no reason to believe these are the same people as existed before the flood. In fact, they may be giants that have nothing to do with anything supernatural. The fact that this race of giant men was wiped out in the flood does not preclude the possibility that giants could someday arise again, nor that the Hebrew scouts might not be exaggerating, for that matter. It's rather unfortunate but true that whatever reason God had for causing the flood, the beneficial effects were only temporary.

(Edited to add on Sep. 8) I was too busy on the seventh to post, but being a much faster reader than typist, I did read the article linked to at the bottom of the SAB's chapter seven, Common Sense and Noah's Flood. As a skeptic who's writing a bit more at leisure than I am in trying to make a post a day and hoping for some progress through the book, the author really gets into a lot of the details that I couldn't fully delve into, and he's right about so many of them. You have to ask yourself exactly how high were those mountains that were covered with water, and how much water it would take, where would it come from, and (a question I don't think he considered, since the thought of so much water existing in the first place seemed to ludicrous to him) where exactly did it go when the flood was over? As he puts it, "{God} chose to have a man build a boat that had to be miraculously stocked with animal life and then miraculously sustained through a miraculous flood of thousands of inches of miraculously produced rain supplemented by miraculously emptied 'fountains of the deep.'" Although I don't agree 100% with all his analysis, I also don't think you can get around this conclusion. The flood is either a myth, or it's a large-scale complicated miracle on God's part. Take your pick according to your own beliefs.

According to all that God commanded him (Gen 6:11-22)

The SAB notes the supposed absurdity of destroying all living things to make the earth less violent. I'm not sure "absurdity" would be the right category, as it should be fairly obvious that without life, there is no violence and suffering. (Note that God's not the only one to come up with the idea of removing the source of the problem.) I think I do get the gist of what is being pointed out here, though, which is that the flood itself seems like a violent act. I don't know that anyone can deny that fact, and the best that anyone can do is suggest that the good of wiping out that violent and corrupt culture outweighed the violence of the act of wiping it out.

I was reading a philosophy book on the "problem of evil" the other day, and I realized that the theodicy that I tend to operate under is that since we (Jews and Christians) assume that God is omnipotent and good, and evil and suffering exist in the world, the only explanation must be that God has a moral justification for allowing evil to exist. One writer in the book who was talking about this concept claimed that it was a position that is neither provable or unprovable, which means nothing conclusive about the nature of God, but allows theologists in general a loophole to believe in a good and omnipotent God while still accepting that evil exists. Sometimes, I find it quite easy to see the justification behind what God does, but honestly not always. That doesn't mean that the justification is not there, though.

So now come some of the first of the scientific obstacles involved in this story. The SAB points out that a wooden vessel 450 feet long would be larger than any modernly-known wooden vessels, and most vessels of that size are very leaky and require support structures to hold them together. One thing that should be said in response to this (and it may make no difference scientifically, but it should actually be said in general) is that contrary to popular images of the "ark", there's no real reason to assume that this is a ship at all. A lot of Biblical scholars have taken the stance that this is something more akin to a barge, just a big wooden box sealed up with tar. Really, this passage must be a hard one for translators to deal with, as the Hebrew word for "ark" only appears elsewhere in Exodus 2, and the word for "gopher wood" is found nowhere else at all. (I thought it was rather funny to find that it's not even really a translation; the Hebrew word is actually 'atsei-gopher!) So we only really know the size, not the shape or the materials it was made out of. In the end, though, I'll honestly have to say that a lot of this has to be left up to God's hand on the whole matter, as I suggested way back a month ago. (If you didn't like that post, you're not going to like the rest of this one either.)

I'll actually be quite honest about all of this flood stuff, at least as far as I know the details, and I'm sure others who know more things will be more than glad to put them in the comments. The SAB notes the absurdity of an eighteen-inch square window in the ark being the only source of ventilation, but doesn't explain why. Have you ever been in a crowded room even with good ventilation? It gets stuffy. Now imagine an entire building that measures about 100,000 square feet stuffed to the gills with animals of every sort with only a tiny square window in the whole thing to give fresh air. It's not pretty.

Now, also contrary to popular view of the story, Noah is actually commanded to bring seven of some types of animals onto the ark in the next chapter. This is suggested to be a contradiction, and while it is confusing, I and many others tend to view the later instruction of "seven" to be a further specification, and something necessitated to allow for Noah's sacrifice in chapter eight.

There are a few interesting oddities to be noted about this, one of them being the concept of "clean" beasts before the creation of the kosher laws. Apparently the term refers to animals acceptable for sacrifice rather than acceptable for food, and Noah apparently knew which was which. The other oddity is one to give some fodder for the skeptics. Many textual critics of the Bible talk about the possibility that the Bible is actually edited together from multiple oral histories, and indeed, I believe it may be so. This particular story has a number of other much more subtle inconsistencies in the vocabulary that I wonder if a person would notice without having it spelled out for them? In any case, I'm admitting they're there, but I'll not go into details, leaving it up to the reader to figure out on their own or research elsewhere on the Internet.

The last hard part to swallow for this chapter is the final instruction to bring food on board for Noah's family and the animals. We find when we look ahead that Noah and all these creatures were in the ark for about a year. Let's take one animal: the elephant. An elephant apparently eats 150-200 pounds of food a day. Taken over a year, that's about 27 tons of food at minimum. Now we have two elephants (yes, I know there is more than one species of elephant, but there were at least two, and my point is that even using minimal estimates, it staggers the imagination) so double that and add drinking water, and then consider that 60 tons of food should eventually become 60 tons of elephant dung, and you see that just these two animals create a logistical nightmare. So I admit right now, without even going into further details that I could go into that this whole ark thing is physically impossible.

That said, let's get full Biblical context. I'll quote a couple verses.

And I have led you forty years in the wilderness: your clothes are not waxen old upon you, and thy shoe is not waxen old upon thy foot. -Deuteronomy 29:5

For thus saith the LORD God of Israel, The barrel of meal shall not waste, neither shall the cruse of oil fail, until the day that the LORD sendeth rain upon the earth. And she went and did according to the saying of Elijah: and she, and he, and her house, did eat many days. And the barrel of meal wasted not, neither did the cruse of oil fail, according to the word of the LORD, which he spake by Elijah. -1Kings 17:14-16

The thing is, even without these verses, it should be fairly clear that if it's God's will that somebody would be able to get by for a long time on a little provision, then He will see to it that they manage to get by. Building the ark was a huge project, and it no doubt took Noah a long time to put it all together, but it was nothing compared to what God had to do to make it all work out. Why it was done that way, I do not know, but like many moments in the Bible, we see God asking a small step of faith from someone, and then He supplies the rest in a miraculous way.

The sons of God (Gen 6:1-5)

The "sons of God" is an understandably confusing phrase. It occurs five times in the O.T., and six times in the N.T., and in many of the places it appears, it's clear what it's referring to. Unfortunately, this is not really one of those times. In those appearances in the N.T., it's really a reference to our (Christians') relationship status to God due to our response to the person of Jesus Christ. I think we can pretty much rule out that interpretation here. All O.T. instances of the phrase outside of this chapter occur in the book of Job, where it is pretty much universally accepted that it is referring to the Heavenly spirit beings that we call "angels". Now, some people have tried the suggestion that "the sons of God" and "the daughters of men" refer to the descendants of Seth and Cain respectively, but I'm not sure there's good evidence for it. Whatever is going on, though, the fact that it's mentioned in two verses sandwiching a verse in which God says He's not happy with what's going on seems suggestive that it's not good.

Oh, but to answer the question that the SAB poses regarding the number of "sons" God has, you have to look at the subtleties of the language and the theology. Note that the verses calling Jesus God's only son actually say "only begotten son," and that word is important. Every other being called the "son" of God was either created by God ex nihilo, or was "adopted" into His family. In a sense, all human beings are God's children, but this terminology is talking about a special relationship, as is the relationship we find a few chapters from here between Abraham and Isaac, where I'll probably talk a little bit more about this.

Back to God's actual words in that sandwiched verse, He says of mankind that "yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years." The SAB points this out as a possible contradiction to a verse in the Psalms claiming that men live to be only seventy. There's a lot that can be said about this. One thing is that of course either number being thought of as an estimate of how long a person might live is clearly an average. Not every man is going to live to be exactly 70, many will die young, some will live to be well over a hundred, so any specific counterexamples to this number are hardly breaking the general rule. It may very well be that the life expectancy at the time around the flood was quite different. Before the flood, we see the average life span of those people whose ages are given is right around 900 years old, while after the flood, the life span seems to quickly drop to about half of that, and continues dropping, tending towards the lower 100s (although admittedly never quite getting there). But lifespans aside, there is another possible meaning to this verse, and I think it's a likely one. When God says "yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years," what He may in fact mean is that the flood is going to come 120 years after the events being talked about here. Note that in the end of chapter 5, Noah is 500 years old, and the flood comes when he's 600, so it may be that the story is saying, "Around the same time that Noah was raising Shem, Ham, and Japheth, there was some stuff going on in the world that was making God very unhappy."

So what was making God so unhappy? I'll engage in some slightly wild speculation aided by verse 4. We've got giants, we've got "sons of God", and we've got some notable sexual unions happening. What is this all about? Believe it or not, it's a fairly commonly accepted concept that what's happening is procreation between human females and fallen angels. There is a theological doctrine that says that before the world was created, some of the angels in Heaven decided to rebel against God, and God kicked them out. (As some have pointed out to me, a lot of this we owe to Milton's "Paradise Lost" more than the Bible, but there is some Biblical basis for it.) After the fall, these creatures managed to gain free access to earth. The whole idea related to this short passage is that some of them figured out how to have sex with humans, and eventually, they somehow had children that, for whatever reason, were giants. (In the Hebrew, the word nephilim, translated "giants" actually comes from a root word meaning "fallen" or "cast down". It's also used in Numbers 13:33, where it's much more clearly referring to giants.) This was apparently an important part of the whole problem of the earth that led to God causing the flood.

Let me finish today's post with a look at verse 5, and what the SAB says concerning it. I think it's odd that in comparing this verse to 8:21, it's cited as an absurdity rather than a contradiction, but I guess sometimes it's a personal judgment call. Here, God says He's going to destroy every living thing because of the evil of men's imaginations, in the later verse, God says He's going to be nicer because of the same thing. I think you have to look at 8:21 more carefully.

And the LORD smelled a sweet savour; and the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.

Note that God doesn't say that He won't destroy the world because of this evil in men's hearts initially; He first says He won't "curse the ground". I think this primarily hearkens back to the curse from chapter 3, which given this verse, may in fact show to be more of a punitive thing than I had said in my commentary there, but it's hard to say. In any case, I think the point that God may be making here is that the world keeps growing steadily more and more evil, and in the end, evil is largely its own punishment. Why does God need to add any more of a burden on to the life of man to remind him of the fallen state of the world, when mankind has to live with itself day after day? Not that things will be rosy and cheery and all good, but that things are just going to be largely left to their natural processes. Furthermore, in the case of the flood, which is tacked on as an ending clause to this verse, I think God is saying that once is enough.

And called their name Adam (Gen 5)

This is going to be fun, since despite the large number of notes in chapter 5 of the SAB, most of them are of the same nature, and so I think we can dispense of this whole chapter in one post. Let's see...

The first point that the SAB brings up is the verse I've used for the title here. "So the woman's name was Adam, too!" The SAB notes as an absurdity. Well, the answer is, "Yes." Sure, it's not something you get from a surface reading of the KJV, but most people know that "Adam" is the Hebrew word for "man", so in a symbolic sense and in a very real sense, we are all "Adam."

As I noted before, the Bible can admittedly be a bit sexist when it comes to details, and daughters are indeed very rarely mentioned. So while verse 4 contains the first mention of daughters, there may actually have been various children of both genders before Seth was born. I myself had often assumed that this genealogy was mentioning firstborns only, and that they were coincidentally only sons, but what's really very likely going on here is we're tracing the male lineage of Noah from Adam. Sons not in the lineage and all daughters are not worth mentioning by name apparently. Even Noah's wife and three daughters-in-law aren't named despite their apparent importance to the story that unfolds after this.

So the big repeated note throughout this chapter is essentially, "Man, these guys sure lived to be pretty old!" I've heard a lot of theories about why these guys had such extended lifespans, and suffice it to say that most of them boil down to simply being so soon after the fall. They were living in a world that was new and fresh, and there probably weren't all the modern problems of disease that we have in modern times. Most theologians do believe that Adam was created to be immortal, so it took some time before the system really broke down and people started dying of natural causes. Whatever it is going on here, we'll see a contrast in the next genealogy. While having no particular value, I nonetheless present a little diagram I threw together last week when I was looking ahead at this chapter:

Enoch is an odd one, isn't he? The SAB has a lot to say about him, and indeed, he's strange. Let me address the three questions raised by the SAB in response to Enoch's story.

(1) Must everyone die? I suppose the SAB ought to have included the references to the prophet Elijah that it did in the second question here. (And it might have considered even discussing some odd interpretations of John 21:22 that are out there.) Yes, there are in fact two people in the Bible that didn't die: Enoch and Elijah. This coming despite the two verses quoted in the right-hand column. While the verses on the left are in some cases misunderstood, I'm going to focus on those two right-hand verses. When the Bible says "...death passed upon all men," we have to realize that there is room for exceptions. If there are a bunch of people going to sea in a leaky boat, and you say to them, "Everyone in that boat is going to drown," that doesn't mean that they can't get out of the boat and be safe. For whatever reason, Enoch and Elijah were allowed to "get out of the boat" if you will. The second verse is another matter that, if indeed a skeptic were to reject my reasoning here, the SAB needs to add some more notes to passages like John 11. Not only do we have a couple folks (at least) who don't die at all, but contrary to being "appointed unto men once to die," we have about half a dozen people in the Bible that die more than once, Lazarus being simply the best-known of the bunch. The real sense of this verse, as taken by theologians and run-of-the-mill Christians, is that under normal circumstances, people have one physical death to look forward to. The Bible gives us less than ten people that have non-normal circumstances in regards to the matter of death, so that's well over 99.99% of the world conforming to a literal interpretation of Hebrews 9:27.

(2) Has anyone ever ascended into heaven? This is a simpler one. My take on this is that nobody has ascended into Heaven and thereafter given testimony of it on earth. We do know that two people ascended to Heaven, and in fact, a lot of others ascended after their death, but what Jesus is saying in John 3:13 is that if you're looking for someone to tell you what Heaven is like, you've got nobody other than Jesus with that firsthand knowledge. (Of course, the SAB could consider this verse next to 2Cor. 12, although it describes an event after Jesus left.)

(3) Was Enoch the seventh from Adam? Yes, if you count Adam as #1, which is not at all unreasonable to do.

As a last note for this chapter, I'd like to take a side trip into Hebrew and talk about the meaning of these names. Maybe you've heard this before, I find it all fascinating. We know from the text that "Seth" means "appointed", and "Noah" means "comfort". The other names all mean something as well. The most interesting name on the list is probably Methuselah, whose name some have said means "his death will bring it." Methuselah died the same year as the flood.

Let there be a firmament (Gen 1:6-8)

Okay, those skeptical readers that believe that all Christians are wing nuts are in for a treat today, because day two of creation is where my personal beliefs are, I realize, more than a bit out there. Of course, my personal beliefs do not reflect the whole of Christendom, but I didn't come up with this stuff on my own, and when you get to an odd passage like this, you have to develop some sort of understanding.

The SAB lists this passage as an "absurdity", and I'll be the first to agree, but once again, we're talking about the miraculous, and the stuff that happens during the first few chapters here is largely outside of the norm for the whole of natural history. Many translations find different ways to fit an English term to this "firmament", but the essence of the idea apparently is that the Hebrew word raqiya in this context denotes the idea of a large solid object that's holding up a sky full of water. Yes, the world as described by these three verses is a big underwater dome. The atmosphere is made by creating an air bubble in an endless sea, held open by this undescribed structure.

My belief? There's a theory about the antediluvian age among many Bible believers known as the "water canopy" theory. The idea here is that God originally created the world with the ocean waters suspended in the air, holding in a warm, moist atmosphere. Supposedly, this accounts for a number of things which come to their end in the flood of Noah's day. People living long, healthy lives due to a clean, oxygen-rich atmosphere and lack of cosmic radiation; largely unchanging weather conditions (it may have never rained before Noah's day!); and, some believe, the coexistence of dinosaurs with humanity. While a lot of this sounds pretty bizarre and silly, suspending your disbelief regarding this suspension of water you can see solves many other Biblical dilemmas, thus its appeal.

For probably most people, however, this passage is taken to be poetic in nature. While the sky is most certainly not a solid object as far as we know (and given that we have traveled into space in modern times, it seems we can rest pretty sure about that) the concept of haraqiya as a "bowl" shape still has some appeal. After all, even after the flood the term is still used to describe the sky numerous times; and really, isn't the sky shaped like a bowl wherever you look at it from the ground? There's a reason observatories and planetariums are domed: it's the essential shape of the sky.

And what of the "waters above the firmament"? Well, those would just be clouds. If this explanation doesn't suffice to fit your concept of "above", then I would say wait for the fourth day, I'm going to take some time to talk about translation and prepositions. It should either clear things up immensely or convince you more than ever that I'm a crackpot. Either should be entertaining.

Remember also that when God calls the firmament "Heaven", that there is some vagueness to that word. In the NT, the Apostle Paul refers to the "third heaven", and is clearly talking about what we tend to think of in reference to the word "Heaven". However, this concept of "third" is important, as there were three heavens. The first heaven is the atmosphere, the second heaven is outer space, and the third heaven is beyond space, the place where God lives. Many translations render "Heaven" in verse eight as "sky", because the Bible seems to clearly be talking about the atmosphere.

The SAB makes an interesting note that God doesn't call the second day "good." No explanation is given. I don't find this troubling, only thought-provoking. One possibility that I like, being a believer in the "water canopy" theory, is that when God creates the world with this form, He's looking ahead to the day when all this water He has put in reserve will be used to wipe clean the face of the earth. He's not happy about it, but He foresees it coming, so He makes this water canopy with a heavy heart, so to speak. Who knows?

The Alpha and the Omega (The Bible and God)

There are a few things that need to be said in an overview sort of fashion before I dive in.

The mantra of the student of the Bible is "context, context, context..." It's always important to remember to look at the context before criticising any Bible passage. One of the most important contexts is the somewhat obvious and overlooked fact that what you are reading is part of a book that's about "God", and all that entails.

I've heard it said many times that if you can believe Genesis 1:1, the rest is easy. Indeed, one of the most important things to remember about just about anything you read in the Bible is that this is the story of a being supposedly omnipotent, omniscient, and completely good. The question should rarely be, "How could that have happened?" but occasionally, one might be fair in asking, "Why would something else not have happened?" While I don't know that one can effectively second-guess God, I don't think it's wrong to intellectually question things that God does. That's straying from my main point a bit, but it's important because I don't want to fall into the pattern of "God said it, I believe it, that's all there is to it." There is a level where a Christian has to just accept, but if you aren't a believer in the God of the Bible, this will be wholly unsatisfying; and even as a believer, one runs the risk of committing intellectual suicide, which opens the door for many things, most notably heresy.

Getting back on track to the point I wanted to make at the beginning though, there are more than a few moments in the Bible where something absolutely bizarre happens, and a casual unbelieving reader is likely to shake their head in disbelief. One of the biggest ones in the book of Genesis is actually the story of Noah, which I have had various skeptics point out to me as a story that's physically impossible on numerous levels. Frankly, I think Bible believers largely miss the absurdity of the story, and envision it as a simplistic children's Sunday school tale, with a cute little boat having animals standing two by two on the deck with smiling faces--and invariably giraffes with their heads stuck through a window towering over the rest. Well, that's unkind of me, but I do think many people simplify almost to that level, when truthfully the logistics are a nightmare. The thing for the skeptic to remember is that this story is one of the works of God.

The Bible reads a lot like science fiction in a way, especially to the non-believer. It's my view that in a good science fiction story, the reader is often presented with a specific item about which to suspend their disbelief, and after they've done that, the story should flow naturally. In the movie "The Terminator", the item is that a cyborg has been sent to the present from a nasty dystopian future. If you can buy that, the rest of the story makes sense and flows pretty well. In the case of the Bible, whether you believe it as true in real life or not, you have to accept that this is a story about "God", a being as described above. Once you accept (if only for the sake of following the story) that there is a "God", the rest should make sense. Thus when we come to Noah, the answer to most of the problems comes down to, "God did it." Maybe you don't buy that God exists, but you need to accept it as a major part of the context of the story for it all to make sense.