God wants our faith, not our moral perfection

One of the biggest things that I’ve noticed so far in Genesis is that God seems to value our faith much more than our moral perfection.

First God tells Abraham to pack up and leave his whole life behind. Then in Abraham’s old age God insists that he will provide for Abraham a son through Sarah, even though she is barren. Isaac is finally born, and then God asks Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. All through this, Abraham obeys.

One thing that is interesting though, is that God seems to give a little leeway at times. Abraham and Sarah both laughed at the notion that they would conceive a child in their old ages, yet God provided for them anyway. Yet when it came to Lot and his family, Lot’s wife merely looked back at their former home, and yet she was turned to a pillar of salt for it.

God seems to be merciful in some cases, yet entirely without mercy in others. It’s interesting that He has so far given no rules to his worshippers so far, he only demands that they be obedient to Him. God was merciful to Cain, and He was entirely without mercy for Sodom and Gomorrah.

Although Abraham seems to be set up as a paragon of faith, Isaac seems almost to lack importance in his entirety, barring his place as an instrument in the test of Abraham’s faith.

Far more interesting than Isaac are his two sons: Jacob and Esau. The Lord blesses Jacob even before his birth, yet Jacob seems to be one with whom we would not normally identify as being a model to look up to. Jacob denies his brother food in order that he may steal his birthright, and then he tricks his father Isaac into blessing him in Esau’s stead.

Fortunately, Jacob gets his come uppance as he is tricked by Laban into marrying Leah before he may marry Rachel. Poetic justice perhaps (how horrible it must have been to have two wives).

Yet still, even after years of maturing, when Jacob attempts to gain his brother’s favor, he shows a distrust of his brother and flees to Succoth rather than follow Esau to Seir.

So, what do these stories teach us? God seemingly uses all types of people for his work, but then what should we aspire to be? The story of Abraham clearly suggests that God favors those who are faithful to him, yet God also favors Jacob, who was manipulative. Jacob even expresses a degree of indifference to murder, when Simeon and Levi murder all the Shechemites. Jacob’s response to their murder is only to rebuke them for bringing trouble upon him. Jacob seems to express no remorse over their deaths.

So far, one of the only messages that can be implicitly drawn from the text is that God rewards faith, perhaps, I would argue, above moral excellence in it’s own right.

The Tower of Babel and my ambitious writing

The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” - Genesis 11:6 and 11:7

Genesis 11 is an important passage for it gives us a characterization of God. It shows us a God who is jealous. Despite God’s omnipotence, God feels affronted by the Tower. He accordingly scatters man across the Earth and confuses man’s tongue.

I believe, that lest the Bible become a chore, and these writings take more importance than the actual readings, that I will have to lessen the intensity of this exegesis. Rather than detail my thoughts over every single page, I’m going to have to read a bit further and reflect on the larger picture.

I initially read half of Genesis in one night, but then each time I sat down to detail my thoughts on the first half of Genesis, I got bogged down on a single concept and devoted an entire post to merely a page or two.

Well, now that Genesis has become centered on longer stories, there’s more detail and there’s less to comment on explicitly. If I try to write too much over merely a page or two of content, I will get bogged down, and I’m certain that I’ll never finish the book.

As such, I’m going to try to read further, maybe get closer to the end of Genesis before I make another post. Hopefully this will keep my posts interesting and insightful, since my fear that these posts may devolve into mere summaries of the text is very real.

Like the Tower of Babel, I set before myself a task that was too great. If I were to continue upon this path, it would only lead to more problems and confusion. By grounding myself in reality, I can better navigate my way through this text. I must remember, exegesis of the text is the important thing, not the narration of the text that is supplied in these writings of mine.

Genesis 4-10: The Eternal Fallibility of Man

Then the Lord said to Cain, “why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it.” - Genesis 4:6 and 4:7

The position that Cain was placed in deserves critical reflection. It seems odd that God would look upon Abel’s offerings with favor, yet not upon Cain’s. The only distinction between the two offerings is that Abel’s was an offering borne from his livestock, while Cain’s offering was borne of the soil. Does God prefer herdsman to men of the soil? Or is it rather that it was test? By looking upon one brother’s offerings with favor and not upon the other, is God testing the first born generation of Man? Either way, we see that it is not long since Man has left Eden, and already sin has reached the climax that is murder. The first man born becomes the first man to kill. The very next chapter we see God cleansing the Earth already of his creations! Man has become so sinful that God has decided to create a great flood which will eradicate mankind!

So the Lord said, “I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth – men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air – for I am grieved that I have made them.” - Genesis 6:7

Not only does God decide to eradicate mankind, He even expresses grief at having created man! Which is extremely odd if your conception of God involves Him being omniscient. Regardless, the Bible launches into the story of Noah, who is a righteous man, and who God creates a covenant with. However, it once again does not take long for Man to prove his fallibility. Noah gets drunk and lies naked. Enraged that Ham saw his nakedness, while Shem and Japheth stayed their eyes and yet covered their father, Noah curses Ham and with him all of Canaan, while blessing Shem and Japheth. The message from these chapters seems quite clearly this: Man is fallible, and even the most righteous may sin.

Genesis 2-3: The Fall of Man

“And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.” – Genesis 2:16 and 2:17

Genesis 2:17 has that peculiar trait of being at once immediately disturbing and yet somehow righteous and comforting. God plays the role of concerned parent has he warns his creation of something potentially dangerous. Admirable. Yet, why would man be forbidden knowledge? Why would knowledge be so unfortunately linked with death?

The answer, it seems, is because knowledge of good and evil belongs to God, as does immortality. Man must choose between one or the other. Knowledge of good and evil or immortality? Which would you choose? Would you rebel against God and choose your intellectual independence? Or would you remain his servant and live in perpetual peace?

Prior to Man’s Fall, existence must have been blissful. There was no good and evil, for man had no conception of such. There was only true and false. Things are as they appear, and there can be subjective judgments regarding them. Only God’s word existed as judgment, and his judgments must have been understood as exact. This must have been a transcendental existence; oh! to be able to comprehend monism! To be able to comprehend noumena and understand things as they are in themselves!

However, when man fell, he gained knowledge of good and evil, and I believe this signifies man’s perception becoming layered by dualism. No longer could the world be understood simply through the schemata of true/false! God’s word no longer held the power that it once did, for it can be (and it was) disobeyed. Man’s perceptions of the world would from then on be schematized by judgments of good and evil.

What does this mean precisely? Should we regret our fall? Should we lament the failure of Adam and Eve? Metaphorically, I believe that The Fall of Man symbolizes humanity’s coming to terms with itself on a deeper level. At some point in our evolution we no longer saw the world the way animals do; in there being merely truth and non-truths. Rather, humanity became the first species to view the world in terms of good and evil.

But dualism means more than just seeing the world through the schemata of good/evil. It is an entire way of viewing the world through relationships between mind and matter.

It is my conviction that there is an absolute way of viewing the world, and it is a way in which humans are now incapable of seeing. There are limits to reason, and we can never know the absolute. As such, dualism should be rejected as ontologically valid, though it should be accepted as a working distinction that can be cast as being functionally valuable, and therefore of pragmatic necessity.

Although we may never be able to comprehend a monist or absolute view of the world, dualism affords us working distinctions, without which man would scarcely render his existence more valuable than that of the sheep he tends. Whether you lament or praise the Fall of Man and our condemnation to dualism, it must be posited that the Fall has given man purpose.

Genesis 1: The Beginning

And it begins! And what a beginning it is. Genesis 1 is a very straightforward passage, narrating the path God takes in fashioning the world. However, Genesis 1 immediately brings to light one of the most important questions, namely the form in which God is manifest. Obviously, the Bible speaks of God as a figure who creates, who can speak, who can physically interject his will into the world that he has created. This is no philosopher’s God, this is no Logos.

But is that really the case? When one speaks of being chased by Death, one does not actually assert that a hooded dark figure baring a scythe is chasing one around. Rather, Death is used as a personification of an idea. Does the manifestation of God serve a similar purpose? Is God as a physical incarnation merely a heuristic for thinking about a being (being?) which we cannot conceive (or only not adequately?)?

The Bible makes no attempt to answer this question (as far as I have as yet seen). But it is worth keeping in mind that although in the text God is referred to explicitly as a being with which one can converse, perhaps he is merely an idea with which one metaphorically converses. If this is so, then the personification of God is not without merit, yet it is a distinction with which one should dwell on.

In a similar vein, Genesis describes the world as being fashioned in seven days, but it may be valuable to consider that the world was not literally created in six days, but rather that this is yet again a metaphor for the work that “God” did in fashioning our world. God as a personification may stand for (amongst other things) the idea that the world as we know it gradually came into being through a series of occurances which we do not fully understand. What may seem to be seven days to God may to us appear to be eons, which resonates perfectly with the fact that our lives but merely a blink in life of our universe.