Genesis 1-20

Genesis is, as the title has come to mean as a word in general, the foundation.  We begin with the story of how the world was made, and then the introduction of man and woman.  Among the interesting quirks to be found is the fact that the names Adam and Eve are not used when man and woman are first introduced.  It's Eve whose name is featured first, and as such is the first of many ways Genesis seeks to explain the origin of things Jews would have already known but perhaps didn't remember where they'd come from, sort of like Greek myth with such terms as narcissus and halcyon days or even the phrase "between a rock and a hard place" (Scylla and Charybdis, in other words, from The Odyssey).  Even the part of how she's formed from Adam's rib seems to be a way of explaining the old "chicken and the egg" riddle in a rather ingenius way.  It's just as striking to read the way Cain's story is described, almost as a way of explaining not so much the first murder but defining the difference between God's people (the Jews) and those who aren't (everyone else).

The garden, with its famous attributes of the Tree of Good & Evil (which symbolizes independent knowledge) and the Tree of Life (which is the real reason Adam and Eve are banished from Eden, so they no longer have a chance to access it and therefore theoretically still have a chance to undo the damage caused by the fruit, which is not so much a case of repudiating God's will as being a kind of his equal, the same way theology tells us Satan came into being because he was an angel who tried comparing himself to God, much as the story of the Tower of Babel is about man once more attempting to reach beyond his ken), is less a source of banishment and more a kind of exile, the homeland the Jews would spend their days trying to find someplace else.

There are several notable starts and stops, as others have observed, where the story seems to repeat in order for an oral tradition to have kept it easier for the listener to comprehend.  It's the repetitions that create the emphasis, but otherwise you may know what's most important when the narrative pauses on certain individuals, Eve and then Cain, for instance.  When Seth is described as being in Adam's image, it's a reminder of what God created in the first place, and not to say he looks more like Adam than Cain or Abel.  That Cain's offering wasn't as pleasing to God as Abel's, and God's way of urging Cain on even while admitting he probably wouldn't have accepted it anyway is another way of describing the basic difference between the Jews (who carry God's mandate) and everyone else (who don't have that same relationship).

The tenets of Jewish faith start to solidify around Noah.  What does it mean when God says humanity has grown wicked?  That its relationship to him has been all but forgotten.  In the early days God always had someone he could talk to directly, whether it was Adam and Eve or Cain (it's striking that God spends so much time talking to Cain, when he's the simple of rejection in any other context).  The idea of sin is that it entertains destructive thoughts above all others, and it considers life only as suffering, when God originally gave mankind the idea of toiling for its sustenance as a challenge to be overcome.  Mankind ceased to want to overcome its challenges, and so God gave it apparently what it wanted, believing humanity to after all have been a failed experiment.  He decided to bring the whole thing to an end.  Except he discovered Noah, who kept the original tradition alive, and accepted the biggest human challenge ever in the building of the ark and the preservation of all life via representatives within it, recreating the conditions of Eden.  If it hadn't been for Noah, if there had not been one human still capable of the original relationship between God and man, that would be the whole story right there.

It is a little sketchy how later generations started extrapolating a lot of their beliefs from incidents they assumed to be precedents.  The idea that Africans were born to be slaves was taken from a curse Noah leveled against Ham.  Patently ridiculous.  In those days slavery would have been common, an entirely acceptable form of relationship between man.  These were imperfect times.  God didn't condemn Cain for murder, but rather used him as an example of those who stood apart.  It wasn't until Moses where the commandment said "Thou shalt not kill," which is not to say that until then murder was acceptable, but that all sins become multiplied the larger the community grows, at least in those days, although ironically they become less offensive as the community grows larger still.  Their impact lessens, becomes less about the community and more about the individual.  All sin is best understood in how it impacts the community as a whole.  That's why Christians have Jesus's Golden Rule to live by, which states the community is the most important thing, a mutually beneficial relationship between individuals, the closest humans can come to the perfect balance that is God's existence.

Woman is another fine distinction.  Some people (men) take a lot of the early roles women take in the Bible to mean that woman is inherently inferior to man.  It was Eve who caused original sin.  It was Sarah who was the feisty troublemaker.  And yet they were only performing necessary functions, much as Cain did.  These people would have a far stronger case if Cain had been female.  But then they would still be committing the same logical fallacy.

After Noah the basic foundations of the greater communities are related, and by the time of Abram the first wars are described, so that it's no longer about specific individuals but rather nations, such as they would have been in the Jewish tradition.  It's interesting to note that Sodom and Gomorrah (from the descendants of Ham, no less) are described basically as the German state following WWI.  They end up on the losing end of the conflict and are impoverished and basically subservient as a result.  One of Abram's good deeds is to show them lenience.  Yet they are the next most famous site of God's apparent wrath.  They happen to be home to Abram's cousin Lot, who becomes a sort of Noah in being singled out to survive a purge.

It may also be worth noting the previously and very briefly described Nimrod, who is like a prototypical Samson, or even predecessor to Abram; or the oblique reference to a man named Peleg, whose significance is not really explained other than in an indecipherable comment, much like the existence of the Nephilim in the time of Noah.

Anyway, Sodom and Gomorrah are, like Cain, symbolic of the peoples who were definitely not Jewish.  They were presumably all turned to salt, like Lot's wife was when she lingered to have a look despite warnings against doing so.  Around this time angels begin to be referenced as God's earthly agents, a gage of how strong someone's connection to him really is.  Abram passes it.  Lot passes it.  Sodom and Gomorrah do not.

Interestingly, Abram's first son isn't to his wife Sarai but to the handmaiden Hagar, which results in the birth of Ishmael.  Abram is the first of the Jews to travel to Egypt, which is the scene of Sarai's first bit of mischief.  Abram, however, is partially responsible for this, as he correctly guesses they'd have a better time of it if she were represented as his sister rather than wife.  She was apparently a great beauty in her youth, and the Egyptians would have been wildly jealous of Abram and thus not particularly receptive to his needs at the time.  Sarai plays the part a little too well, too eagerly, perhaps.  The Egyptians find out what's really going on, and expel the Jews.  No doubt setting a precedent in the relationship they remember years later.

The relationship between Abram and Lot appears geared toward illustrating better than some of the strict genealogy work elsewhere how different tribes helped spread the Jewish state.  They are described more or less as equals in prosperity, and clearly they both have excellent working relationships with God, who is so keen on them he sets up the whole Jewish faith around them, specifically promising Abram (and even Ishmael) the kind of prosperity the whole faith has since geared its entire outlook on, its idea of the messiah.

And that explains the key difference between the Jewish and Christian faiths.  The Jews always expected the last and greatest of their leaders to create a lasting earthly paradise.  That's why their key figures were men like Abraham, David, and Solomon (the new Cain in a lot of ways).  When Jesus came around and flipped that message, explaining that in effect the endless years of struggle would be exactly what any human could ever expect in life, that paradise existed elsewhere, it was a giant repudiation of the whole thing.  And then Muslims come along and basically try to say it's both ways, and so you can see how none of them particularly gets along with each other.

Jesus, by the way, was very carefully described to have descended from the line of Shem, Noah's chosen heir, whose line in turn includes Abraham.  Insofar as that, and every other way he was described as the answer to all the classic scripture, the Christians did everything they could to make him square with Jewish faith.  Except making him an earthly king.

It's very easy to see how outsider perspectives could view all of this as the same as any other old religion, which we know of as myth.  There's the origin of the rainbow as something other than scientifically explained.  There's the reason circumcision exists, one of the key cultural developments for Jews.  There's, in effect, everything necessary to explain why things had to develop in the way they did, the relationships and precedents.  Not to mention the extremely long-lived folk of the early days.  When fundamentalists try to explain how the world is as young as it apparently must be according to the genealogies of the Bible, they don't really take into account the nuances that are in-between the lines.  Cain finds a new home and apparently people unrelated to his father.  This would be patently impossible given a strict interpretation.  Genesis does not go out of its way to describe every single individual and how they came to be.  To simply accept that all those people lived to be 900+ is to believe what it means to us today is what it meant when these stories were first told.  This is not to say the truth of it is invalidated, but rather the cultural significance becomes different over time, much in the way it was assumed everyone would automatically know exactly what it was meant when the name "Eve" was supposed to explain itself.

You will always walk into a heap of trouble when you interpret things too literally, all the time believing what appears to you to be obvious is in fact the correct version.  Ham did not validate the existence of African slaves.

This is what you can expect from my so-called "objective believer" approach to the Bible.

Abram becomes Abraham (and, really, we don't tend to give him nearly enough credit for how expansive his story in Genesis really is; it's to that point the longest narrative of the Bible, clearly the most important one), Sarai becomes Sarah.  Hagar was Egyptian, by the way.  I'm sure there's great significance to that somewhere.  I'm not a theologian.  This is all independent thought.

I was originally intending to make a note of all my observations, including the far less famous elements, but I guess hitting the bigger points is just as well.  I'm not intending to anger anyone's religious beliefs here, or convince you to believe where you don't already.  This is my perspective.  Take it as such.