I finished Genesis yesterday. Big picture: I'm amazed and reassured by how delightfully imperfect God's chosen people were, and how tolerant God was of them. Right off the bat Adam and Eve disobeyed and ate from the wrong tree and thought they could hide from God. Then Cain kills Abel, then the whole world is so evil it needs to be purged by flood, then there's johns and prostitutes, liars, cheaters, manipulators, incestuous relationships, etc. etc. God was obviously not looking for perfection, just general trust and obedience.
The creation story begs a lot of questions for me though. First there's two accounts of the creation of man (ch 1 vs ch 2). They sort of work together but mismatch a bit. Then you get into who was Cain afraid of when God banished him? And where did Cain find a wife (that wasn't his sister)? And who were the "sons of God" (ch 6)? Angels? Or were Adam and Eve and their descendants the "sons of God" and other people that God may have created were the sons and daughters of men?
And don't get me started on the age of the earth question. According to the Bible the earth is less then 10,000 years old, but that doesn't jive with geological evidence which seems to suggest the earth is billions of years old.
The flood and Noah's ark... just doesn't seem plausible from a logistical standpoint. Thousands of animals couped up on that boat for almost a year? With enough food for everyone? Nobody is eating anyone else? Then they repopulate the whole earth in a very short period of time (this was only a few thousand years ago). How'd they get to Australia? This story especially gives me a hard time.
First paragraph, I totally agree. You said it much more eloquently than I had been thinking it in my head. I took pause at some of these actions from my Bible Heroes.
ReplyDeleteAs far as the creation story, bigger question yet, in 1:26, who is he talking about when he says "let us make man in our image, in our likeness"? I guess I interrpreted it as he created man (ch 1) then in ch 2, a parallel, there was one man he designated as Adam, who was a chosen man, such as Noah and some of the others later to come.
The age of the earth: I was slightly in amazement at the time aspect of some of the stories. We can get very modern by thinking that it takes only a few hours to travel from here to Ca, or Australia, but if you think about it, back then it may have taken months up to a year to travel even what we may consider small distances. They had all their belongings, all their families. I am sure they made camp in favorable places for long periods of time, letting life happen. So it is plausable that a year unit of time may be reflected differently on paper.
With that said, as far as Noah's ark, same thing could be used as explanation. If the animals are 2x2, i bet they mated and had young that could be used for food. I did think the dimentions for the ark seemed kinda small. Genesis 18:14 is anything too hard for God, no! is my only explanation. Sometime we just need to believe. I feel confident things on the ark were not pleasant, it wasn't a cruise ship by any means. They probably had sickness, they may have mated and had more babies themselves. They probably suffered deaths.
I feel along with you that there are some unanswered questions. Do we linger on the technical, if we do, do we miss the theme or the lesson? Or even the big picture. Which brings me full circle to Joseph. He got the bigger picture. Maybe we need to reserve judgement on some of these things until after we have more information.
Where did Cain get his wife?
ReplyDeleteHe married his sister. Gasp! Just remember that the gene pool at this time in our history was pure, so to speak, and marrying your sister was not as tabor as it is now.
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