An interesting piece of literature 


This is the first in an occasional series of reviews of sections of The Bible . 

My wife works in a Catholic Hospital. She works 12-hour nights and often works Friday nights. Last night, as I am wont to do when I don't have to go to work the following day, I took her to work, and then picked her up this morning when her shift ended.

She was a bit behind in paperwork, so I retired to a lounge for patient's families and looked around. There was a copy of the Good News Bible in there. Although I read some books of the bible as a child, I confess that my knowledge of the book itself is somewhat limited. So I started reading it. I started at the beginning of Genesis and made it through to the Tower of Babylon (translated in other books as the Tower of Babel.) I am not speaking to the accuracy of this translation over others. I kind of glossed over the sections that said A had child B, who had child C, and so on down the line, but other than that, I did read everything up to the point where I stopped.

Thus is born the first of an occasional series of reviews of the Bible. Feel free to tell me I'm going to hell for this commentary...

If the first seven days are any indication, human beings came onto the scene kind of late in the life of the earth. That's not really inconsistent with the theory of evolution, is it?

Why did god put the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden, if nobody was allowed to eat its fruit? Even as such, why did god lie to Adam and Eve about what would happen if they did eat the fruit? He told them they would die. If everything in the garden was immortal, they wouldn't have had any concept of death to begin with, so it sounds like an empty threat. Why not threaten them what he would do if they did eat from the tree, instead? That's more forthright, honest, and, if I may say so, godly...

If all the snake did was tell her what the fruit of the tree of knowledge would do, and Eve still wanted to eat the fruit, she was either very smart or very stupid. Besides, why wasn't Eve ashamed of her body between the time she ate the fruit and when she gave it to Adam?

The punishment for eating the tree was banishment from Eden, the soil would become more difficult to till, pain in pregnancy/childbirth, and, for the snake, he would have to slither along the ground, eating the dust. How, then, did snakes get the taste for mice and small rodents? I can't imagine childbirth not being painful for the female of any species. And isn't it important that we have to sweat to earn what we have, lest we take it for granted?

Moving on to Cain and Abel... Cain was a farmer and Abel was a shepherd. Both of them offered some of their respective toils to god as a sacrifice. Why did god accept the meat but not the grains? Surely god would have had some sense that Cain would have resented being passed over, so couldn't the murder of Abel have been prevented if god, again, had been a bit more, um, godly?

Noah. The translation I read gave no clue as to what made Noah a good person and the rest of the world evil, warranting a mass extinction in a flood from 40 days and nights of rain. Judging by what happened after the flood (which I'll get to shortly), I don't see Noah as all that great a person...

At any rate, what did Noah and family (and all of the animals) eat while they were on the ark? (This translation called it a boat...) Additionally, when you consider all of the different kinds of animals out there, it was way to small to carry two of everything. More importantly than having sufficient food and water, how did they dispose of their waste? Did they just throw what they could, overboard? Considering that some animals breed quite quickly, were any offspring born on the ark? What did the place smell like by the time they could disembark? What happened to the fish in the seas during the storm?

After things settled down, Noah gets drunk and passes out naked in the street. (This is what I was talking about above, when I questioned what makes him so good in god's eyes, above...) Noah's youngest son sees him, tells his brothers, and they carefully cover him. Seems reasonable, given the fact that their forebears ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge, thus making them aware that they were naked... Rather than thanking his son, he curses him and his children. Why? What did he do that was so wrong (at least in comparison with his lying naked and drunk in the street to begin with)?

Finally we have the tower. This is the first time we actually see god threatened by humans; we were building a tower to the sky, and he didn't want us to do so. Never mind that the laws of nature wouldn't have let us get a tower up that high -- especially using simple bricks and mortar -- I don't understand why this was such a threat. The solution to this problem was to make it so that no two people spoke the same language and therefore couldn't understand each other. That's actually not how languages change. Geographic isolation causes languages to diverge, and proximity helps keep languages similar.

And human language is naturally lazy. So if person A, in one part of the world starts pronouncing a word one way, and person B, somewhere else, is using the same word but pronounces it differently, they could eventually become two separate words. And languages add and remove words from their dictionaries as needed. And the meanings of words change, as times change. I think the best example of this is the divergence between German and English. Both languages have a certain word, which their common Germanic ancestor translated as, simply, "animal." Both languages contain three phonemes for this word: a palato-dental stop, a high vowel, and a glide. As the languages diverged, English took the voiced version of the stop and German took the voiceless version. The vowel and the glide remained constant. As the languages diverged, the German word, "Tier," remained (and remains to this day) the word for "animal." The English word, however, is a specific kind of animal: deer.

That's as far as I made it before Jenn was ready to go. I have no interest in buying a copy of the bible myself, so I will read it as the occasion warrants. Then I will continue my commentary and questions... 

Posted: Sat - September 10, 2005 at 12:32 PM          

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