Atheist Bible Study 1: Genesis

[GrandizerII]

Ok, now for my commentary on Genesis 4.

Having read this passage just a short while ago, I noticed something about it I never noticed before in any of my prior readings of it, and that is that Genesis 4 does not really flow that well from Genesis 3. There seems to be some disconnect going on, in that (in Genesis 4) Adam and Eve were probably not the only humans directly formed by God as the passage seems to contain references to human outsiders, those not a part of the tribe of Adam and Eve. In Genesis 3, however, Eve is deemed the mother of all human beings. Furthermore, it doesn't feel like the fall (depicted in Genesis 3) was a thing in Genesis 4. If anything, it seems like Adam and Eve and their children were all very much "in the presence of the LORD" irrespective of what happened in Genesis 3, whereas other human beings living at the time were not (i.e., they were not in an intimate relationship with God). At least that's how I'm currently seeing it.

As for the story itself, it was a good one. And in fact, you could consider this passage the first indicator of the fall/depravity of humankind. It's just, without much context, it's not really clear what led Cain to kill his brother Abel. Was it simply because Abel's offering was accepted by God while Cain's offering wasn't? And was Cain willingly defying some unwritten divine requirement by offering God only some of the fruits? Or was God just not happy with fruits and needed more blood sacrifice to appease his aversion to human sin?

Whatever the case may be, I feel nothing but empathy towards the character of Cain, if only because it feels like there's something more to the story than what's actually written. I'm doing nothing but projecting here, but perhaps Abel was not as innocent as it seems in the text. He may have been the type of person who did all the right things in God's eyes but went about it in a way that continually provoked jealousy and bitterness in Cain. Or perhaps God accepted Abel's offering simply because he liked Abel, whereas God's like of Cain was conditional on whether or not he did the right thing (Genesis 4:6).

What Cain eventually did to Abel was extreme, but I can still sort of understand [intellectually] why he would be driven to kill his own brother in a fit of rage, if he felt he was being treated unfairly by everyone especially God. It may explain why God went easy on him as well, so that instead of imposing a death sentence on him or something like that, he simply banished Cain out of the paradise he was in while making sure Cain was protected from harm by outsiders.

But anyway ... that's the first depiction of murder in the Bible.

Now for the rest of the passage:

Cain makes love to his wife (hopefully not also his sister), and they give birth to Enoch (not to be confused with the more popular Enoch). A city built by Cain is named after Enoch (probably the first city ever built in biblical mythology). From Enoch, a man by the name of Lamech was an eventual descendant. This Lamech had two wives: Adah and Zillah. Adah, through her son Jabal, was the mother of the people of tents and livestock and, through her son Jubal, was the mother of the people of stringed instruments and pipes (thus, the presence of such people is now explained in this particular genealogical myth). Zillah, on the other hand, was the mother of Tubal-Cain, who was known for forging tools of various kinds out of bronze and iron (the first blacksmith perhaps).

There is also a very brief substory about how Lamech, after killing a young man for injuring him, informed/warned his two wives that "if Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy-seven times". I'm not going to pretend to know what the point of all these apparent irrelevancies is supposed to, so I'll leave it at that.

Finally, we find out that Adam and Eve have given birth to a third son, calling him Seth, making a happy woman out of Eve once again. Seth grows up and brings forth Enosh into the world.

The last part of the last verse of the passage:

"At that time people began to call on the name of the LORD."

Does this mean not all people at the very beginning relied on the God of the Bible? Or is it supposed to be taken more literally to mean that people finally began to refer to God as the LORD when they didn't before?

The LORD knows ...

[Minimalist]

There is the interpretation for why YHWH preferred Abel's offering is he sacrificed the good stuff while Cain only gave "some". I also heard Robert M. Price make the point that livestock was the preferred offering because the Israelites were sheepherders. Also notice later on Cain wandered to the land of Nod and nod means wandering. He wandered to the land of wandering.

Just more northern and southern kingdom bullshit.

"Israel" or whatever they called it was a primarily agricultural entity while the Judahites were a bunch of goat herders.  After the Assyrians overran the "Israel" only the goat herders were left to tell the fucking stupid ass story.  So they made themselves the heroes.

Just plain old propagandistic bullshit, as always.

[Drich]

Talking snake, yeah right.  I don't buy that it's allegorical or metaphorical or whatever figuratively preposterous apologetic theists wish to attribute to it, because it's either a complete work of fiction or to be taken literally.  I'm not delusional, so I will go with the former.

This is sort of a false dilemma. The thing with allegories is that they contain symbolisms pointing/referring to events and observations that may be true, and these allegories can be in the form of clear fictional or mythical stories. The question is whether these stories, at the time of writing or later compiling, were intended as allegorical or not. If yes, then literalist Christians are not understanding these scriptural passages right at all. If no, then we can say that allegorical interpretations of these passages happen to be post-hoc interpretations rather than originally intended.

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This has always struck me as - to put it mildly - a morally bankrupt story.  God punishes Adam and Eve for doing something they could not possibly have known was wrong.  Yes, he told them not to eat of the Tree Of Knowledge Of Good And Evil.  But until they gained that knowledge, they couldn't have known that disobeying God was an evil act.

Boru

My thought exactly.

Drich (I know, I know, it's effing Drich, lol) had this to say earlier:

You do not have to have knowledge of Good and evil to understand death. God said eat and this will kill you, he did and died for it. everything that he was.. was over all that was left was a primal husk of a almost defiable being.

To Drich, that's a satisfactory answer. But to me, it still doesn't address how committing an act out of a lack of knowledge of good and evil can warrant such a harsh consequence. Such a punishment doesn't seem to be just.

Of course, this is assuming a literal interpretation.

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Thank you! That's what I needed!

What do you think...? I'd say the entry there doesn't rule out my preferred version. The full entry includes things like "to know by seeing," "to be acquainted with," etc. Which would include not just ideas popping into A&E's heads but knowing through experience. 

And it reminds me of the line from Isaiah, quoted in Handel's Messiah: "[He was] a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief." That might be relevant.......

That's not a bad way of looking at it. It's a reasonable interpretation at least.

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I will make my own brief commentary on this passage soon.

think of how much harsher the consequence could have been. dude died but live in one form or another for 930 more years. could have sent him to hell.

in truth the consequence was intended to bring fourth and populate heaven and earth with 'free range' being who wanted to be there.

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My simple thoughts on Genesis 3 (I'm going to do a bit of both literal and allegorical here):

In the last chapter, we found out how both man and woman came to be (sort of like an introduction to the story of humankind). Genesis 2 was basically a happy chapter, of youth and innocence and companionship and such, reflecting some of our heavenly fantasies and desires. Genesis 3 continues on from Genesis 2 but has a dark theme to it, whereby we are reminded of the suffering and cruelty of this world and how we are to be held accountable for the acts we commit.

the biggest take away here is to note there is no time line between the end of day 2 and the beginning of day 3. why is that important? because remember we established that day 2 was garden only narrative and it was created apart from Chapter 1 7 days of creation tat in chapter two adam with a soul was created day 3ish.. and placed in the garden and man made by God the Father on day 6 was simply man made in the image of God. Why is this important because day 6 man created by the father could just as well be 'evolved man.' who met up with adam and eve's children 6000 years ago upon the exodus.

In this passage, there's a reminder of such things as temptations, betrayal, blaming, deception, fear, pain, punishment, and exclusion. These are things that happen in the real world all the time, and they lead to negative and severe consequences.

we only consider these acts severe because we have nothing else to compare them too.. Imagine a world where white lies are the biggest sin... then to us white lies would be aki to rape and murder now! We only look at these things in such a light because of adam and eve/meaning we know how perfect things in the garden would have been, but outside I would suggest this was the norm as it was the reason they were cast out. meaning we only know they are bad because of the fruit.

We blame some of all this on the actions of our species, but others we attribute to the cruel impartiality of nature. The serpent, later to be seen as the devil himself by Jews and especially Christians, seems to represent the influential forces of nature that eventually led us to finally "open our eyes" and realize the harshness and evils observed in this world. At the start, you could say we were innocently "naked", we'd do things without realizing how bad they may be and without thinking of such things as the consequences of these actions, like the other animals. But as if to highlight the marked differences in cognitive capacities between humans and other animals, the passage seems to symbolically describe how we have awakened/evolved to become such cognitively advanced beings. Belaqua and Vulcan already made several of these points, so I won't restate them here.

Nevertheless, we should also look at this whole passage as an attempt to explain/justify more specific/literal things as the traditional patriarchical structure of marriage (whereby the man is deemed the head of the woman and their offspring), slavery and mandatory hard work, how we have traditionally viewed women as the ones with the tendency to cause troubles (very unfortunate but a reality of life), the killings of other animals, the human enmity towards snakes, the pains of pregnancy and giving birth, and the limits of our lifespans.

more or less agree.

Other thoughts (and questions to ponder):
I want to go back to the first verse in this chapter, where a distinction is made between the serpent and the other animals. I find this rather curious, because what did the ancients see that was so special about a serpent? Why was the serpent considered craftier than the other animals? I think it may have something to do with how we've often subconsciously viewed these creatures. To us, they seem so sinister and devilish that they may as well have been remnants/descendants of some evil entity in the distant past.

Another thing about the serpent in the passage is that it seems like it initially had legs or something, and then it was doomed later to be without limbs because of what it did. But it's not completely clear that this was the implied meaning of Genesis 3:14.

Snake=reptile no legs.. serpent=dragon serpent describes movement/how the animal moved. this 'dragon' spans all ancient cultures even 'science.' (think before you speak)

Christians also tend to point to a Messianic passage in this very chapter, specifically: Genesis 3:15. But, in this case, it really feels like this is indeed simply a post hoc interpretation after the Christian church was established, especially as you have to disconnect this specific verse from the surrounding verses to "see" some Messianic interpretation in it. I could be wrong, though. And perhaps the Jews also saw this as a Messianic verse, can't remember. Will have to google this later on.

the dead sea scrolls contain several copies of the book of genesis dating from 300 bce (300 years before christ) to 1 ce and mirror each other almost perfectly. which are consistent with our modern translations.

Genesis 3:21 I find interesting. It gives you one specific example of what happened as a result of what Adam and Eve did. Animals can now be slaughtered for the benefit of man and woman. Note that they previously covered themselves with fig leaves (and in an earlier passage, it was noted that all living beings were basically vegetarians), but now they get to be covered with the skins of lions and God helps them with that (even with the Fall happening). And we see later that God indeed grants permission to slaughter animals for food and clothing.

Well no.. it says everything in the garden was a veggie-tardian

Another thing that I find interesting: it seems like, literally speaking, man and woman had to continually eat from the tree of life in order to live forever. I guess this could be interpreted as immortality being intrinsically a property of the divine only, but that the divine can reward mortals with conditional mortality.

I do not see that as the case at all. they at from it once, then ate from the tree of knowledge DIED.. then had to eat from the tree of life to live again.

We also see, once again, reference to God as a plural being. Now there are many speculations on that one, and you can read all about that in your favorite scholarly article or book or whatever. I'm not going to dwell on this here.

Elohim=Father, YHWH=Jesus

From a very literal perspective:
Yes, that serpent sure talked.

why not eddie murphy made a 'dunkey' talk.

Yes, God is just a very super version of man who likes to walk in the cool of the day and doesn't seem to know everything that can be known.

or we are little mini version of God.. (kinda how the bible describes.) Just because God does not share doesn't mean he does not know...

Yes, it mentions cherubims and a revolving(?) flame sword. No, the fruit wasn't necessarily an apple or a pomegranate.

comes in other books of the ot.

All in all, another chapter that I enjoy reading. After all, this is where it all started to fall.

[Drich]

Ok, now for my commentary on Genesis 4.

Having read this passage just a short while ago, I noticed something about it I never noticed before in any of my prior readings of it, and that is that Genesis 4 does not really flow that well from Genesis 3. There seems to be some disconnect going on, in that (in Genesis 4) Adam and Eve were probably not the only humans directly formed by God as the passage seems to contain references to human outsiders, those not a part of the tribe of Adam and Eve.

this disconnect is usually referred to as a paradox and atheistic 'proof' genesis was made up.. (forgetting people back then understood continuity, they assumed adam and eve and their children were either incestious or God went on an undocumented creating spree. ) when in fact as I pointed out Adam and eve were created day 3 in the garden apart from day 6 man created by the Father who live worked and died outside the garden apart from A&E.

In Genesis 3, however, Eve is deemed the mother of all human beings. Furthermore, it doesn't feel like the fall (depicted in Genesis 3) was a thing in Genesis 4. If anything, it seems like Adam and Eve and their children were all very much "in the presence of the LORD" irrespective of what happened in Genesis 3, whereas other human beings living at the time were not (i.e., they were not in an intimate relationship with God). At least that's how I'm currently seeing it.

personal experience.. when I ws judged for a momet I felt all of the love and completeness and warmth a child of God could feel. which is miles above and beyond the best feeling this world has to offer. just for that moment I felt true bliss. where as now I am in contact with God and don't get me wrong when we sing right or pray it can be awe inspiring.. however it is nothing like being apart creation aware of God. I can only imagine having God over for dinner and walks is as different as knowing a super model from a magazine and being married to her.

As for the story itself, it was a good one. And in fact, you could consider this passage the first indicator of the fall/depravity of humankind. It's just, without much context, it's not really clear what led Cain to kill his brother Abel.

having God's approval/continence shine down upon you.. being allowed to take in his approval verses being a disappointment. Cain was trying to lower the bar rather than meet God on his terms something that alot of you all like to do. you want God to meet you half way when he makes a decree or sets a standard. Without abel cain does not have to work outside of his comfort zone, or so the logic goes..

Was it simply because Abel's offering was accepted by God while Cain's offering wasn't? And was Cain willingly defying some unwritten divine requirement by offering God only some of the fruits? Or was God just not happy with fruits and needed more blood sacrifice to appease his aversion to human sin?

there was no law. whatever deal they made was with God directly so there was no excuse. Cain simply fell short of their deal.

Whatever the case may be, I feel nothing but empathy towards the character of Cain, if only because it feels like there's something more to the story than what's actually written.

i use to feel sorry for cain too then i realized that no matter the deal abel did not have to die.. that was an extreme over reaction no matter what God promise to abel.

I'm doing nothing but projecting here, but perhaps Abel was not as innocent as it seems in the text. He may have been the type of person who did all the right things in God's eyes but went about it in a way that continually provoked jealousy and bitterness in Cain. Or perhaps God accepted Abel's offering simply because he liked Abel, whereas God's like of Cain was conditional on whether or not he did the right thing (Genesis 4:6).

later either jesus or paul says God like abel's sacrifice because it was like that of the one made when their parents first sin. abel gave the best of his flock in blood not having outright sinned as there was no law but knowing the difference between good and evil gave out of knowing at some point he was making up for his own sin. Cain could have traded able fruit for animals but gave what he had. God set the standard when he made the loin cloths.

What Cain eventually did to Abel was extreme, but I can still sort of understand [intellectually] why he would be driven to kill his own brother in a fit of rage, if he felt he was being treated unfairly by everyone especially God.

wow,we are worlds apart on this how can you ever say it is ok to kill your brother? hate to be a member of your household if it were known i voted trump if being killed over a few goats is ok in your mind! when is 100 goat lives equal to 1 person? Especially if he is up standing guy

It may explain why God went easy on him as well, so that instead of imposing a death sentence on him or something like that, he simply banished Cain out of the paradise he was in while making sure Cain was protected from harm by outsiders.

one God crused the ground so nothing would ever grow for cain again, two Cain ran off to a city. God 'marked him' Cain said if you do not protect me these 'evolved men' will hunt me down and kill me.. the God aid if anyone kills you God will kil them 7 generations out. so God marked cain so everyone knew who and what he was. so yes
screw cain.

But anyway ... that's the first depiction of murder in the Bible.

Now for the rest of the passage:

Cain makes love to his wife (hopefully not also his sister), and they give birth to Enoch (not to be confused with the more popular Enoch). A city built by Cain is named after Enoch (probably the first city ever built in biblical mythology). From Enoch, a man by the name of Lamech was an eventual descendant. This Lamech had two wives: Adah and Zillah. Adah, through her son Jabal, was the mother of the people of tents and livestock and, through her son Jubal, was the mother of the people of stringed instruments and pipes (thus, the presence of such people is now explained in this particular genealogical myth). Zillah, on the other hand, was the mother of Tubal-Cain, who was known for forging tools of various kinds out of bronze and iron (the first blacksmith perhaps).

There is also a very brief substory about how Lamech, after killing a young man for injuring him, informed/warned his two wives that "if Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy-seven times". I'm not going to pretend to know what the point of all these apparent irrelevancies is supposed to, so I'll leave it at that.

Lemech is showing how the evil root is spreading.. he said he was justified in killing a man for hurting him
meaning if cain could be avenged 7 generations his behind is that much more valuable and should be protected up to 70 generations of death..

Finally, we find out that Adam and Eve have given birth to a third son, calling him Seth, making a happy woman out of Eve once again. Seth grows up and brings forth Enosh into the world.

The last part of the last verse of the passage:

"At that time people began to call on the name of the LORD."

Does this mean not all people at the very beginning relied on the God of the Bible? Or is it supposed to be taken more literally to mean that people finally began to refer to God as the LORD when they didn't before?

The LORD knows ...

no Adam and his family brought yhwh into the world. they may have worshiped some form of the father before (sandscit nonsense) but wasn't till adam did God reach out to the people.

[GrandizerII]

From Adam to Noah
Genesis 5

I'm going to be quick here, only because this chapter doesn't have much for me to comment on.

Basically, we see in the early times of Biblical "history" that men used to live up to almost a millennium ... and that it was possible to have kids at the age of 180 or even 500 years of age. Quite outlandish from a literal perspective, so perhaps the numbers are meant to be symbolic, who knows. One also wonders whether these numbers were randomly assigned, or there is a pattern to them.

Anyway, if you're not a fan of genealogies and amazingly long lifespans, this chapter will be boring to you. I personally like this chapter, though. And it does briefly mention Enoch who "walked faithfully with God" and thereby was taken away by God after only (lol) 365 years of living on earth.

And, yes, Methuselah is the man who lived the longest time on earth (969 years). According to the Bible, at least.

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What Cain eventually did to Abel was extreme, but I can still sort of understand [intellectually] why he would be driven to kill his own brother in a fit of rage, if he felt he was being treated unfairly by everyone especially God.

wow,we are worlds apart on this how can you ever say it is ok to kill your brother? hate to be a member of your household if it were known i voted trump if being killed over a few goats is ok in your mind! when is 100 goat lives equal to 1 person? Especially if he is up standing guy

I didn't say it was ok to kill one's brother. I said that I can somewhat intellectually understand why one would be driven to kill their own brother, given a set of assumptions that I admitted to projecting of course.

Christians also tend to point to a Messianic passage in this very chapter, specifically: Genesis 3:15. But, in this case, it really feels like this is indeed simply a post hoc interpretation after the Christian church was established, especially as you have to disconnect this specific verse from the surrounding verses to "see" some Messianic interpretation in it. I could be wrong, though. And perhaps the Jews also saw this as a Messianic verse, can't remember. Will have to google this later on.

the dead sea scrolls contain several copies of the book of genesis dating from 300 bce (300 years before christ) to 1 ce and mirror each other almost perfectly. which are consistent with our modern translations.

I'm not sure you understood my argument here. I'm suggesting that Genesis 3:15 was not meant to be a Messianic prophecy.

[Drich]

From Adam to Noah
Genesis 5

I'm going to be quick here, only because this chapter doesn't have much for me to comment on.

Basically, we see in the early times of Biblical "history" that men used to live up to almost a millennium ... and that it was possible to have kids at the age of 180 or even 500 years of age. Quite outlandish from a literal perspective, so perhaps the numbers are meant to be symbolic, who knows. One also wonders whether these numbers were randomly assigned, or there is a pattern to them.

Anyway, if you're not a fan of genealogies and amazingly long lifespans, this chapter will be boring to you. I personally like this chapter, though. And it does briefly mention Enoch who "walked faithfully with God" and thereby was taken away by God after only (lol) 365 years of living on earth.

And, yes, Methuselah is the man who lived the longest time on earth (969 years). According to the Bible, at least.

---

note the gregorian calendar (the 365 day year) was not the measure of a year. it was a lunar based calendar that some say was close while others counted full moons or harvest moons while others still says it was longer than our solar year. not talking about the hebrew clendar which is basically the same as ours but some ancient moon based system..

wow,we are worlds apart on this how can you ever say it is ok to kill your brother? hate to be a member of your household if it were known i voted trump if being killed over a few goats is ok in your mind! when is 100 goat lives equal to 1 person? Especially if he is up standing guy

I didn't say it was ok to kill one's brother. I said that I can somewhat intellectually understand why one would be driven to kill their own brother, given a set of assumptions that I admitted to projecting of course.

the dead sea scrolls contain several copies of the book of genesis dating from 300 bce (300 years before christ) to 1 ce and mirror each other almost perfectly. which are consistent with our modern translations.

I'm not sure you understood my argument here. I'm suggesting that Genesis 3:15 was not meant to be a Messianic prophecy.

that seems to be the trend with some..

[GrandizerII]

Wickedness in the World
Genesis 6:1-8

This short passage is basically a prelude to the story of Noah and the Flood. It emphasizes the wickedness of humankind, and how disappointed God is with them. When God first created the world, everything he saw was good, but once sin started to taint the world, the world was no longer perfect in God's eyes. And now, God plans to destroy the whole world with a flood, but not without informing his best buddy Noah first.

The passage also mentions the mysterious "sons of God" and how they mated with human women, giving birth to the even more mysterious Nephilim (i.e., "heroes of old, men of renown"). I know there are plenty of theories out there as to what these sons of God and Nephilim were meant to be. Anyone got a favorite theory they wish to expound on here?

[The Grand Nudger]

The authors explanation of others cultural heroes and narrative traditions, lol.

[Minimalist]

and how disappointed God is with them.

How can an All-Knowing "god" be disappointed?

[GrandizerII]

and how disappointed God is with them.

How can an All-Knowing "god" be disappointed?

That's the million dollar question.