Category Archives: Old Testament
God preserves his promise—Genesis 12:10-20
(This continues a series of posts on this section of Genesis: God’s promise, God’s call)
In obedience to God’s call, Abram journeyed to Canaan (Gen 12:4). Genesis names some of the places where Abram journeyed (e.g., 12:6), places that would be significant for Abraham’s descendants when they settled there. (I use the earlier name Abram for passages before Gen 17:5 and the later name “Abraham,” given in 17:5, after that passage; Sarai becomes Sarah in 17:15.) Genesis also often reiterates the promise of the land to Abram (e.g., 12:7, where the Lord appeared to Abram), reinforcing a theme that God wanted his people to remember as they settled the land.
Obeying God’s call, struggling with life
Many travelers journeyed from Mesopotamia to Canaan in this period, but Abram went specifically in obedience to God’s call. Unlike Egypt, which is blessed with the Nile, Canaan depends on rainfall, and thus is more vulnerable to famines (as noted by my colleague Bill Arnold in his Cambridge commentary on Genesis). Canaan may be the land of promise for Abram’s household, but Canaan is not ready for them just yet.
What could they do? Although God later warns Isaac not to travel to Egypt during a famine (26:1-2), he later instructs Jacob to do so (46:3). Here he simply seems silent—at least so far as we know, since the narrative does not tell us everything that was once known. At least we can say that the narrative offers no indication that leading one’s people to Egypt temporarily during a famine was disobedient or faithless; it may have simply been the wisest course available.
Obedience pleases God, but it does not solve every problem or imply perfection in every other area of our life. At some points God directly commands Abram, but when Abram, and later his son Isaac, present their wives as their sisters (12:13; 20:2; 26:7), the biblical text offers no indication that this strategy was divinely ordained. In fact, God had to rescue Abram and Sarai from this strategy! (Some find in the multiple occasions signs of sources; in this post, though, I am exploring the narrative as it stands, as typically in narrative approaches; in 20:13, Abraham later explains, perhaps truthfully, that this was their regular practice.)
Abram’s deception
Although a man of wealth and status such as Abram often married multiple wives, and customarily did so if one wife could not bear children, Abraham did not marry another woman so long as Sarah lived (25:1, 6). Abram and Sarai may have been following a custom from Mesopotamia. There a wife of means might give her female servant to her husband as a concubine, and most relevantly, as attested in a Nuzi tablet, a wife unable to bear a child would have her woman servant bear in her place (cf. also 30:3, 9). If Abram and Sarai attempt to follow this custom, certainly they did not attempt it as a first resort; Genesis suggests that Ishmael was not born until Abram was 86 and Sarai 76 (16:2-3; cf. 17:1, 25). Sarah thus was presumably extraordinarily special to Abram.
Nevertheless, Abram wanted her to claim to be his sister—to protect his life (20:11), but perhaps at the long-term expense of their marriage (if an Egyptian wanted to marry her) or at least her sexual integrity (if some Egyptians wanted to sleep with her). Perhaps Abram expected God to deliver them, but then why not trust God to protect them without this ruse? The narrative suggests that passing Sarai off as Abram’s sister was a bad idea (12:18-19; 20:6, 9-10), even though it was a half-truth (she was his half-sister, 20:12). Then again, the alternative, which they perceived as real, of Abram being killed and Sarai being taken as another’s wife anyway, was not desirable either. Sometimes life presents us with only uncomfortable alternatives on the human level, none of them good.
Sometimes, at least, the ruse might be the best viable alternative. Years ago Kokeb, an Ethiopian Jewish friend of mine, was fleeing persecution in Ethiopia and was trying to reach Israel. Unfortunately, soldiers in the Sudan intercepted him and his wife. Kokeb and his wife knew many men were being killed so as to make their wives lawful booty. Following the example of this story in Genesis, his wife claimed that she was his sister; instead of executing him, therefore, they left him and his wife together overnight. That night they escaped together to the north, and after some years in Khartoum and then Egypt they finally did make their way to Israel. (My wife Médine and I once joked that if we were intercepted by white supremacists who opposed interracial marriage, we could just joke that we are just siblings. I’m just lighter because I accidentally fell into a pool of bleach when I was younger.)
Sarah’s beauty
But Pharaoh’s officials took her into his harem. Younger readers, in particular, may wonder how a woman past 65 years of age might be considered beautiful to a king (though he may have been even older). Cyrus Gordon suggested that Middle Eastern nomads tended to overestimate their ages, and she was younger in literal years than the text sounds to us.
I must say, however, that physical beauty may persist older in age than we in the West sometimes think. One friend from India introduced me to her mother, who was an active jogger in her seventies, and I was astonished at the mother’s extraordinary physical beauty; I was then in my late thirties. (Of course, some of us have a different advantage. I have joked with my African-American friends that as I age I simply get blonder. The joke unfortunately works less as my hairline continues to recede …)
When Sarah is nearly ninety and another king takes interest, the issue may be more her nobility than her physical attractiveness, although the reason for the interest is not specified there (20:2). One consideration is that kings often did want women in their harems who established ties with a range of other princes; Abram had enough servants to constitute, by the standards of that era, a small army or militia (14:14). Sarai was thus from a wealthy and high-status Middle Eastern family, even if they were seminomadic pastoralists. Her bearing and her status as a high-class representative of another culture might be part of her beauty and appeal to Pharaoh.
Then again, Genesis may simply depict a time when some people aged more slowly (certainly in this family line; in 11:32 their father Terah is said to die at age 205). As scholars often note, even the longevities of antediluvian patriarchs recorded in Genesis are quite brief by comparison with Sumerian king lists depicting the same period!
God rescues Sarai
Pharaoh gave Abram animals and servants as a brideprice for Sarai, this nomadic princess (cf. 17:15; “Sarah” means “princess,” though that is because, in v. 16, royalty descends from her). Undoubtedly one of the servants is the Egyptian woman named Hagar, who figures prominently in later chapters (16:1). But even by ancient standards, none of this could compensate for taking one’s wife (cf. 2 Sam 12:9; the sequence in Deut 5:21).
Although God has not yet told Abram that his promised descendants (implied in Gen 12:2) must come through Sarai, that is still the presumed expectation here. And God sees to it that this happens, just as he later does at the very time when Sarah might already be pregnant with the promised heir (20:3). Pharaoh sends Abram and Sarai away, but they are able to retain the gifts that Pharaoh had given them (12:20). They also profited on the later occasion (20:14), and in that case were even welcome to remain in the land (20:15).
Perhaps the first positive outcome was why Abram unfortunately tried the ruse again later (20:2) and why his son Isaac, who had undoubtedly heard the stories, did the same (26:7). (Isaac’s case required no direct divine intervention and no one took Rebekah; 26:8.) But in this world, divine intervention does not always come. God rescues Sarai from male sexual exploitation in 20:1-18, but in the paragraph immediately preceding does not rescue recently widowed Lot, who had raised his children in an immoral setting, from being exploited sexually by his own daughters. (By today’s standards, getting someone very drunk to have sex with them without their knowledge is considered rape, though it’s most often the man or the elder who perpetrates it.) God had intervened to save Lot’s life, but the incest scene sadly reminds us that dramatic interventions do not always happen.
God watched over the promise to Abram and Sarai, however; this was part of his plan for a wider hope for the future for all of humanity. Israelites who heard this story of deliverance would look back and celebrate God’s faithfulness that had allowed them to come into existence as a people. They would also note some important analogies in this and other narratives in Genesis–some pre-echoes of their experience.
Deliverance recalls deliverance
God often acts in similar ways at different times. Here, God plagues Pharaoh’s household to protect the promise of Abram’s seed (12:17). Similarly, in Exodus, God will plague Pharaoh’s household to bring Abraham’s seed from Egypt and establish the promise of the land. (In 20:18, by contrast, God closes the wombs of the family of Sarah’s unwitting oppressor for an observable length of time—at the very time Sarah is pregnant with the promised heir [21:1]. That king might be more reluctant than he admits; God rather persuasively assures him that he will kill him and his family if he doesn’t return Sarah to her husband voluntarily [20:7].)
This plaguing of Pharaoh’s household signals one of several foreshadowings of the coming exodus of Abram’s descendants. In 15:7, God reminds Abram, “I brought you out of Ur to give you this land,” just as God would later remind Israel, “I brought you out of the land of Egypt to give you the land of Canaan” (Lev 25:38). Later Joseph’s exaltation from slavery in Egypt will foreshadow that of the Israelites during the exodus, in the same way that Sarai’s liberation from Pharaoh’s harem does.
The narrative does not invite us to follow Abram’s example (though in the extreme case of Kokeb, noted above, it seems to have been a good idea). It does invite us to trust Abram’s and Sarai’s God, because God kept his promise to imperfect followers who did their best to obey his explicit commands. Sometimes, even when in difficult times we have made unwise choices or even the best possible choice out of only bad ones available, God has kept us. The moral is not that it is safe to be unwise; the moral is that God is more faithful than we deserve.
Other recent posts on Genesis include: creation as God’s love, God’s goodness messed up, the flood, Babel; and, briefly, Peleg (in addition to Abraham comments on Gen 12:1 and Gen 12:2-3, noted above)
Verses out-of-context, part 1
This 8-minute video includes some samples of verses often taken out of context, and what they really mean. These include examples from the Old Testament, including Psalms, Song of Solomon, Joel, etc.–texts such as “the cattle on a thousand hills”; “this is the day that the Lord has made”; “great as the army that carries out his word”; “let the weak say I am strong”; etc.
God’s promise to Abram—Genesis 12:2-3
(This post continues a discussion on God’s call to Abram.)
In Genesis 12:2-3, God offers Abram a twofold promise: a land and a seed. These motifs dominate much of the rest of Genesis, as God ensures that his promises come to pass. The passage also includes some other blessings.
The promise of the land
Abram leaves his own familiar homeland to go to the land that God promised (12:1). The promise of the land is repeated to Abram in 12:7; 13:15; 15:7, 18; 17:8, and mentioned also in 24:7, 37. God also reaffirms the promise to Isaac (26:3) and Jacob (28:13; 35:12; cf. Isaac’s blessing of him in 28:4; Jacob’s recollection in 48:4). Like Abram, Jacob is called to leave Mesopotamia and go to Canaan, although in Jacob’s case, this is the land of his birth (31:3, 13). The promise is reiterated so often that one gets the impression that the patriarchs needed to be reminded, and so did Genesis’s first audience. This could be a great encouragement to them as they prepared to enter the land.
Ancient Israelites knew the names of the places where Abraham sojourned, and even some places that he bought, such as the field of Ephron (23:16; 25:9; 49:29-30; 50:13), a foretaste of his descendants owning the wider land. God preserved the right land for Abraham and his descendants, even through the choices of Lot and Esau (13:8-12; 33:16-17), which left the land of promise for Abraham’s chosen line (13:14-17).
Lot chose the land near Sodom because it was fertile, like Eden and like Egypt’s Nile Valley (13:10)—but ignored the immorality of the land (13:13). He was more concerned with material prosperity than with the moral character of his neighbors, an unhealthy influence on his family that he lived to regret (19:26, 31-38). This account also served as a warning to Israel, when, in the wilderness, they wanted to return to Egypt’s fertility (Num 11:5; 16:13), rather than pressing on to the promised land of milk and honey (Exod 3:8, 17; 13:5; 33:3; Lev 20:24; Num 14:8; Deut 6:3; 11:9; 26:9, 15; 27:3; 31:20; Josh 5:6; Jer 11:5; 32:22; Ezek 20:6, 15).
The promise of descendants
God likewise promises the seed, or descendants, and reaffirms that promise repeatedly (Gen 13:16; 15:5, 18; 17:7; 22:17). All the nations would be blessed in his descendants (18:18; 22:18). God reaffirms this promise also to Isaac (26:4, 24; cf. 17:19; 21:12), including the nations being blessed in his descendants (26:4). (Ishmael’s descendants would also be multiplied, though the promise is different than to Isaac; 16:10.) The promise of multiplied seed (46:3) and blessing in his seed is again reaffirmed to Jacob (28:14), who also recalls this promise in 32:12; 48:4.
Even during his lifetime, Abram became a blessing to other people, for example by liberating slave captives from their enslavers (to rescue his nephew Lot; 14:13-24). When Abram negotiated with Hittites for Sarah’s burial place they recognized him as a great man among them (23:6). Abram pursued peace with Lot (13:8-9), and his son Isaac, being a minority in the land, kept peace with others by backing down (26:15-22). (Proverbs 25:26 warns against the righteous giving way before the wicked on matters on important principle, but sometimes it’s better to just let things go!)
God ensured that the promise of the seed would be fulfilled. God causes the matriarchs Sarah, Rebekah and Rachel to conceive, even though all three had been unable to do so before (17:19; 18:10; 21:1-2; 25:21; 30:2, 22). God protects Sarah from other aggressors (12:17-20), including right before Isaac’s birth (20:3-8); he later also protects Rebekah (though from a less immediate danger, and apparently after she had born children; 26:7-11).
Other aspects of God’s blessing
God promised to make Abram’s “name” great (12:2). At the tower of Babel in the preceding chapter of Genesis, people tried to make a great name for themselves (11:4) and failed, but God himself would make a great name for Abram. It is better when another honors us rather than ourselves (Prov 27:2); but the ultimate exaltation comes from God alone (Ps 75:6-7).
God promises to bless those who bless Abram, and curse those who curse him (12:3). In previous times of rebellion curses had been pronounced on the serpent’s seed (3:14-15) and on Canaan (9:25); now it was on all who opposed Abram, which, for much of Genesis’s early audience, included Canaan.
Abram obeyed God in what he knew, and God promised blessings far beyond what Abram could have known (more descendants, for example, than he could count—15:5; 22:17; cf. 32:12). God’s desire to bless us is always greater than the finite acts of obedience he asks from us. Abraham did not live to see all these promises fulfilled. Indeed, he had just one child for the chosen line and two grandchildren in this line; he did not possess all the land in his lifetime. But he did see God’s faithfulness in the miracle of Isaac’s birth, and he could know that this faithful God would fulfill all his promises.
Other Genesis posts include: God’s love in creation, God’s goodness messed up, the Flood, Peleg, Babel, and God’s call
The call to go in faith—Genesis 12:1
(This post continues a series on Genesis, including on the Flood, Peleg, and Babel; it is continued with God’s promise to Abram.)
God calls Abram to leave behind everything familiar to him from his past—his country, his relatives, and all that he had cherished locally—and entrust his destiny to God’s promise. Today many who have followed God’s clear call to some ministry have made similar sacrifices. Others have had all security taken from them by circumstances beyond their consent, but, like Abram, have had to learn to trust.
God demands not only sacrifice of much of what mattered to Abram but faith, the basis for the sacrifice. The LORD told Abram to go—perhaps without initially telling him where. The command to leave precedes here the command to go to the “land that I will show you.” In Hebrew as in most English translations, “I will show you” comes at the end of the sentence. Perhaps this just means that the promise will materialize later, when Abram sees with his own eyes the land he has heard of and that God has promised; this call invites faith. But perhaps it means that Abram does not yet know even where he will end up—and has to trust God for yet a future revelation. This call would even more clearly invite faith!
Biblical faith is not like what our milieu today often considers faith—make-believe, wishing hard, subjectively hoping without a secure basis or even object. Biblical faith depends on God’s faithfulness—on God’s dependability. It is not clear how much Abram yet knew about God; his father’s family apparently served other gods (Josh 24:2), yet at some point focused on this true God as their family or tribal god (Gen 31:53). Sometimes Abram experienced God in visions (15:1); sometimes the text says that God appeared to him (12:7; 17:1; apparently in physical human form in 18:1). Whatever else this means, Abram had more than a subjective feeling depend on. (Of course, because believers today experience the Spirit within, this leading is often enough for us. But God can make dramatic matters clear in dramatic ways, when needed.)
His entire family had planned to travel to Canaan at one point, a time when many were migrating from Mesopotamia there. They ended up settling in Haran, however, still in Mesopotamia, and never made the rest of the journey (11:31). Generations later, Israel in the wilderness would be tempted to stop short of entering the land of promise, leaving the promise to be fulfilled instead to their children in the next generation. Abram’s father stopped short of the goal of Canaan, though we do not know whether in his case it was a divine call. For Abram, however, this was his mission, a divine call.
We do not know whether Abram was the first in his family to hear from God. Terah may have served other gods (Josh 24:2), but Nahor seems to have known the true God at least as his highest God (Gen 31:53), perhaps through Abram’s experience with him (Gen 12:1 mentions God speaking to Abram, but we cannot argue from silence that he had never revealed himself to Abram before). In any case, Abram obeys God’s costly call.
But a call is also a promise. Faith is not sitting around hoping for God’s call to come to pass. Faith is active obedience (as in 12:4), because we depend on God to fulfill what he has said. If we obey to the best of our knowledge, we can rest in the reality that God will bring to pass what he has called us to do, the parts that are beyond human effort. For God rarely calls us—and shouldn’t really need to call us—to do what we can do on our own.
God offers Abram a direct promise in 12:2-3, a promise that will invite more discussion in the next lesson.
Democracy does not equal human rights
By itself, democracy does not automatically guarantee human rights. Nor—although this is not the point of this article—is democracy specifically endorsed in Scripture. Democracy doesn’t appear in ancient Israel, although we may have some examples of groups choosing leaders, possibly by voting, in the Book of Acts, following the widespread Greek example. (Even then, though, Greek “democracy” meant the majority vote of free adult male citizens, always a minority of the population.) This does not mean that Scripture opposes democracy; my point is simply that it does not mandate it.
Democracy as majority rule
Although I may be quoted out of context, I do appreciate and value democracy. Accepting the decision of a majority is a peaceful way to resolve problems. If we are speaking of human rights, self-governance may be among them, as a form of “liberty.” Moreover, a truly democratic system motivates greater public ownership of and therefore commitment to making the political system work.
But our U.S. tradition sometimes speaks of democracy as an end in itself (e.g., “making the world safe for democracy”), when in fact spreading democracy cannot be the highest ideal of justice, trumping all others rights, even from a purely humanist standpoint.
Democracy as normally practiced is not simply self-rule (since autonomy taken to an extreme can deconstruct into anarchy), but majority rule. And majorities can become as tyrannical as individuals (such as kings) or minorities (such as oligarchs). One need look no further than the history of the United States itself for Jim Crow-era suppression of African-American rights in states controlled by whites who abused their (usually) majority status to keep complete control of the local political system. A majority of nations in the world today have significant ethnic minorities, and in a majority of cases those minorities face some prejudices.
“When a foreigner stays with you in your land, you must not mistreat them. The foreigner who stays with you must be for you just like someone from your country, and you must love them the same way you love yourself …” (Lev 19:33-34)
“Woe to those who write unjust laws …
So as to turn aside the justice due the needy
And rob the poor among my people of the justice due them …” (Isa 10:1-2)
Majority rule versus minority rights
The rule of law is necessary to limit majority choices in cases where majority rule curtails individual or group human rights. That is, while self-determination may be to some extent a human right, it must also be balanced against other human rights (including others’ rights to self-determination), especially rights to life and freedom more generally. If a majority curtails others’ religious freedom or other freedom of conscience, this is a more fundamental violation of human rights than is the failure to embrace a majority decision that curtails others’ human rights. (By curtailing minority rights, I am not thinking here of exposing minorities to majority culture or views, but of limiting their own views or expression thereof.)
How to balance such concerns and where to draw the line is obviously a matter of debate. If one expresses one’s personal beliefs by blowing up an airplane, one has certainly infringed on others’ rights and harmed the public interest. The same is true of falsely yelling, “Fire!” in a crowded theater in the interests of demonstrating free speech or practicing female genital mutilation in the interests of honoring one’s traditional culture. Incendiary rhetoric that directly incites others to blow up airplanes likewise harms public interest.
In general, beyond cases of infringing on others’ rights many of us would prefer to err on the side of allowing freedoms rather than risking their curtailment. I believe that my freedom to share my faith, for example, does not infringe on others’ right to reject it. Because there is a range of speech practice between kindly sharing one’s faith and yelling fire in a crowded theater, however, consensus on precisely where to draw lines remains elusive. A Democrat may believe that a Republican’s views harm public interest and vice-versa, but ordinarily we do not legally curtail either one. (Ideally we might even hope for respectful dialogue to resolve issues, if that were possible in today’s polarized environment.)
Political Corruption
“Your rulers …each love bribes and pursues rewards.
They do not render justice for the orphan
Nor is the complaint of the widow allowed before them” (Isa 1:23)
“Woe to those who pronounce innocent the guilty for the sake of a bribe,
And turn aside justice for the innocent!” (Isa 5:23)
“Her leaders judge for a bribe,
Her priests teach for a price,
And her prohets tell fortunes for money …” (Mic 3:11, NIV)
What happens to the value of majority rule when shrewd academicians, politicians or media magnates learn that people can be manipulated by marketing information only very selectively? Do we speak then of a rule of the majority, or a rule by shrewd marketers? (Informed and cynical people in most mature democracies do not prove as malleable in practice as this summary sounds in principle, but propaganda is pervasive.) We all speak from given perspectives, hopefully from perspectives we believe are right; some selectivity is inevitable. But when does legitimate persuasion slide into covert manipulation and unfair caricaturization?
What happens when statespersons themselves no longer feel free considered choices based on detailed policy analyses because they are first beholden to opinion polls in turn shaped by what is marketed? They might remain in office in order to do good, while their ability to do good is curtailed by their concern to remain in office. If false propaganda is widespread, the system itself requires political appeals to what is essentially an often poorly-informed consumer market.
What is the difference between a political system run by such interests driven by shrewd marketing and one run by plutocrats whose wealth allows for bigger bribes? Is corruption of justice wrong only when the favor is monetary?
The social necessity of virtue
The system can function the way it was meant to only if a measure of trust can be established, and such trust requires some public consensus about virtue. Ancient philosophers often complained about rhetorical skills used to argue either side of a case equally; rhetoric, communication and marketing are amoral, capable of being employed in the service of truth or untruth, virtue or vice. When a society becomes cynical about authentic truth or virtue, its political system can easily become corrupted.
Working for human rights means more than working for majority rule. Majority rule can be perverted, like any other system, if it does not begin with a more fundamental recognition of human rights—which in turn rest on human worth and dignity. Humans are conspicuously finite and mortal, but Scripture confers on us a special dignity, that of being formed in God’s own image.
The language of “human rights” does reflect some of the Western individualist Enlightenment tradition. Nevertheless, Anabaptists’ emphasis on freedom of conscience preceded and probably informed this tradition. Moreover, if one defends the rights of minorities, one may speak of corporate as well as individual rights. One need not use the specific language of the Western philosophic tradition to support what promotes human flourishing; whatever language one uses, people are precious and matter. Certainly in Scripture, humans are the pinnacle of God’s creation and God invites us to love our neighbor as ourself.
In the Bible, all systems of government failed—from the anarchy of much of the judges period to the monarchy that followed it—due to human corruption. The Bible points toward true and ultimate justice in God’s kingdom. Both the Bible and subsequent history show that even purported theocracies in the meantime have also failed due to the corruption of the human purported agents of God. Insofar as we genuinely work for God’s kingdom, though, we must work for the welfare of what God values most—people formed in his image.
Why did God scatter the peoples at Babel?—Genesis 11
(continued from the post about Peleg)
Why did God scatter the peoples at the tower of Babel? He had already commanded people to fill the earth in a positive way (Gen 1:28). But now God divided peoples in a negative way because they wanted to build a tower reaching to heaven (11:4). Technically, this may have been a ziggurat, which people of this region understood as providing a connection between heaven and earth, inviting visits from the gods. But in the context of Genesis, their action of trying to reach heaven echoes the primeval sin of trying to take the place of God (3:5; cf. Isa 14:13). Ultimately, God himself was the one to establish a conduit between heaven and earth, as in Jacob’s dream about the place where angels were ascending and descending (Gen 28:12). (In John’s Gospel, Jesus is Jacob’s ladder, the way to the Father; John 1:51 with 1:47.)
Further, the people sought to make a name for themselves, to establish their own honor (Gen 11:4). By contrast, God soon promised to make Abram’s name great (12:2). As in the case of connecting to heaven, the issue was not whether God could bless such a connection or such honor. The issue was the recognition that it must come from God, not from human determination. God chose to exalt and bless his obedient servant, not those who simply took their destiny into their own hands without seeking to obey him.
Just as God did not want the primeval sinners to seize perpetual life in their fallen state (Gen 3:22), he did not want fallen people to achieve everything within their potential reach (11:6). If we are tempted to ask why, we need only consider the past century. Technology has produced wonderful benefits for humanity that are surely God’s gift, especially in medicine, agriculture, and the like. But it has also degraded the environment, particularly conspicuously in Nigeria’s Delta, Congo’s Pool region, and elsewhere. It has produced weapons of mass destruction. While we may suggest that possessing them functions as a deterrent against aggressors, the very reason for needing a deterrent is that some people will use them irresponsibly. In other words, whereas technology itself is a blessing, it is amoral in itself—it can be used for good or for evil. And humanity’s moral character has not changed. Like the people at Babel, today we can do more and more things; despite an increasing global economy, humanity’s continuing division has so far prevented one unscrupulous empire from controlling everything (whether that be a Third Reich, a Soviet empire, ISIS, or even an absolute oligarchically-controlled consumer market).
But God’s kingdom offers a different approach to the global diversity of languages and cultures. Whereas God came down at Babel to confuse people’s languages (Gen 11:7), at Pentecost Jesus, now exalted to heaven, sent the Spirit to his people, empowering them to worship in others’ languages (Acts 2:4). The Babel narrative follows the Bible’s first listing of the nations (Gen 10); the language groups represented at Pentecost reflect a first-century updating of the same geographic spheres (Acts 2:9-11). At Babel, God scattered peoples into disunity to keep them from a dangerous unity. At Pentecost, God honors the diversity of peoples by empowering his people to worship him in all languages. That is the point, after all, of Spirit empowerment in Acts: inspiration to speak God’s message among all peoples (1:8). As Denzil Miller and others have pointed out, this empowerment further is available to members of all peoples, who thus become partners, sharers together, in God’s mission (Acts 8:15-17; 10:44-47).
In the same way, Revelation depicts an evil empire that seeks to control and exploit all peoples and languages, epitomizing a world alienated from God (Rev 11:9; 13:7; 17:15), echoing Babylon’s empire of old (Dan 3:4, 7, 29; cf. 5:19). But, as also in Daniel (Dan 7:14, 27; cf. 6:25-26), God himself would have a multicultural people from all peoples and languages who would honor him (Rev 5:9; 7:9; cf. 11:15). Babel illustrates the unity of an evil empire; God’s kingdom, by contrast, is the ultimate, perfect, eternal unity of those who will worship him.
Other Genesis posts in this series include: God’s love in creation, God’s goodness messed up, the Flood, Peleg, God’s call, and God’s promise
How was the earth divided in the days of Peleg?—Genesis 10:25
My observation this time is very brief. What does Genesis 10:25 mean when it says that Peleg was so named because in his day the earth (ha-aretz) was divided (nifelegah, from the verb root plg)? To some, the answer might be obvious, but others may have heard various alternative answers, such as the view (which I heard years ago) that it refers to the physical separation of the original continents (though technically this happened quite a bit before humans).
The context supplies what is probably the best answer. The following context narrates how God scattered the peoples and confused their languages (Genesis 11:1-9). Although that narrative concerning the tower of Babel does not use the same term for dividing, the term probably functions is a functional synonym for the one used for God confusing the languages there (cf. plg applied to languages or speech in Ps 55:9 [MT 55:10]). Ha-aretz often means “the land” or even “the people of the land”; here God scatters the people and so divides the earth.
Why did God scatter the peoples? I’ll turn to that subject in a slightly longer way in the next post.
Why would God send judgment?—Genesis 6—9
(This post continues others about Genesis: God’s love shown in creation, God’s goodness messed up)
People write about the biblical account of the Flood from different angles (even the recent Noah movie, which, despite its departures from the biblical text, did helpfully emphasize the narrative’s theological balance of judgment and mercy). My interest here is in the text’s narrative theology.
A messed up world
It’s important to start a few chapters before the flood narrative, to catch the context of why God’s world had gotten so messed up. God intended for people to have direct access to him (cf. Gen 2:16-22; 3:8), but sin progressively alienated us from his presence (4:14, 16). Without his presence, we end up depending on either ourselves or our fellow humans to try to find the way, and that way can end up pretty messed up—kind of like the world we still often see around us.
Most other ancient Near Eastern cultures also had flood narratives, though the one in Genesis is shorter and simpler ways than most tales of their contemporaries. Some cultures attributed the flood to overpopulation; perhaps people were being too noisy, disturbing the gods’ rest. Genesis, however, uniquely attributes it to the one God’s dismay over the violence on the earth (6:12-13). Modern readers as opposed to ancient ones might be tempted to think God too harsh to send this flood, but God was only taking back what he had given to begin with. Only his mercy had held the destructive forces of nature at bay so long anyway.
Although God had warned that disobeying him would bring death (2:17), he initially showed much mercy to those who had done evil. When Cain killed Abel in Genesis 4, God punished Cain by alienating him from the soil, which had received his brother Abel’s blood (4:10-11). This judgment extended the curse on the soil already declared in 3:17-19. Humans were taken from soil and so were close to it (2:7; 3:19); they would return to soil in their death (3:19). Cain loved the soil (4:2), but his farming career was now terminated (4:12); driven from the land as his parents were driven from Eden, he would wander (4:12, 14). (The implicit warning to Genesis’s ancient Israelite hearers was that sin could expel them from the holy land in the same way; cf. e.g., Lev 18:28; Deut 28:64).
Cain pleaded that his punishment was too great, and that someone who found him would kill him (4:13-14). (The narrative does appear to assume that there were other people, and I have my guesses about them, but these are ultimately irrelevant. Where the killer would come from, or Cain’s later wife, or people for his city, are not important enough to the narrative’s point for the narrator to elaborate.) What is remarkable here is that God show mercy to Cain and provides him protection (4:15). Unfortunately, others exploited God’s mercy on Cain to expect that God would protect them when they killed others also (4:23-24).
More immediate causes
This sets the stage for the violence noted in Genesis 6. Because God has been so benevolent, people by this point are ignoring altogether his warnings of judgment. God ultimately makes matters stricter: those who kill others who are made in God’s image must die (9:6). That’s not because God really wants anyone to die (Ezek 18:23, 32), but because without this rule there would be more bloodshed. God’s ideal from the beginning was not so strict, as we see with Cain, but he wouldn’t let people continue to take his mercy for granted. God summons us to recognize each other human being as no less formed in God’s image than ourselves.
Another reason for the flood was the sexual immorality noted in Gen 6:1-4. Scholars explain the sons of God mating with human women in various ways. One view is that the godly line of Seth mated with Cain’s descendants; this view seems unlikely, though, since the “sons of God” here hardly sound godly. The most common ancient Jewish interpretation was that these were fallen angels mating with women, a view to which many scholars find allusions in 1 Pet 3:19-20; 2 Pet 2:4-5, Jude 6-7, and (much less likely) 1 Cor 11:10. “Sons of God” sometimes does refer to angels (Job 1:6; 2:1; 38:7), and both Greeks and most ancient Near Eastern peoples had stories about gods (whom Israelites would understand as demons) raping and seducing women. (Whatever the case, this account may also serve as a warning to Israel about their own conjugal practices, warning against intermarrying with worshipers of false gods, who would turn their hearts away; Deut 7:3-4.)
The need for judgment
Humanity’s practice of evil spread, so that all they ever thought about was evil (Gen 6:5). Humanity became so corrupt, with the spread of malignant evil so impossible to turn back, that God regretted having made people (6:6). The Hebrew text says that he grieved or felt pain in his heart. God had made people to be like his children (cf. the significance of being in one’s image in 5:1-3), but now things had turned out so badly that God was anguished and bitterly disappointed. His children had grown up to be murderers, apparently far beyond the level of Cain. (On the premise that God knows the future, some argue that God condescends to deal with people in their real time. Clearly God is able to know more than he sometimes lets on, as in 4:9-10. But again, such questions, valuable as they might be, digress from the point of the current story.)
The world does not belong to us. Even our very lives are a gift from God. When we abuse the gift of life to harm others or the world that God has made, instead of investing in serving others, we squander his gift and break his heart. We forget that we are mortal, and we must return the gift of life God has given us, and answer for how we have used it.
In this case, God took back the gift of order in creation. The refrain of Gen 1 is that God made everything “good” (1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31); humanity, however, had made itself progressively more “bad” or “evil” (6:5). God had graciously taken a primeval chaos (Gen 1:2) and made it habitable. When he started making the world liveable, darkness was over the “deep,” and his Spirit hovered over the waters (1:2). But now, in judgment, the fountains of the “deep” erupted, inundating the earth with water (7:11). (The Hebrew term translated “deep” is significant here, since Genesis uses it only four times.) God was the one who had given the breath of life (2:7); now he took it back (6:17; 7:22).
The Israelites would understand such judgments, because they had seen something like this in their own experience as a people. They watched God unravel Egypt’s ecosystem with plagues, plagues that simply took back the blessings God had provided to begin with. They watched as God drowned their oppressors in the “deep” (Exod 15:5, the same Hebrew term). They celebrated how God’s “wind” (the same Hebrew word as above) raised up the waters and cast them down, sparing God’s people while punishing those seeking their deaths (Exod 15:8, 10). The Pentateuch uses a particular Hebrew term for “dry land” only for the flood (Gen 7:22) and Israel’s crossing of the sea (Exod 14:21).
New beginnings
But God planned a new start. One person served God and found favor in his sight, so God was going to restart humanity through him (6:8-9). Noah’s father had named him Noah, “rest,” in the hope that God would use him to reverse the curse against the soil (5:29). (The Hebrew letters for Noah—nch—are related to the Hebrew verb for rest. Noah’s father hoped he would bring “comfort”—nchm; but that term, which also means “relent,” appears again when God is sorry he made people in 6:6-7. Noah’s ark, however, also “rested” in a good way after the flood; 8:4.) Eventually God did receive Noah’s offering and promise not to curse the soil any further (8:21).
The new start came. Just as God’s Spirit hovered over the waters in the beginning, so in Gen 8:1 God sent a “wind” (the same Hebrew word as “Spirit”) over the earth to lower the waters of the flood. God closed the fountains of the “deep” (8:2). God had protected those with the breath of life who were with Noah (7:11).
Moreover, the narrative describes Noah as receiving a new commission, just like Adam; unfortunately, sin appears again soon afterward (9:21-25). God later chooses Abram for a new start, with a new commission, because he knows that Abram will raise his promised line rightly (18:19). God’s plan was always meant to lead back to Eden, to restore us to the purpose for which he made us. (I have taken the following chart from my Acts commentary, vol. 2, p. 1361.)
| Adam narratives | Noah narrative | Abraham narrative |
| Blessed (1:28a; 5:2) | Blessed (9:1) | Blessed (12:2-3) |
| After creation | Recreation after the flood | After Babel |
| “Be fruitful and multiply” (1:28) | “Be fruitful and multiply” (9:1, 7) | Promise of seed (12:2; 15:4-5) |
| Fill the earth (1:28) | Fill the earth (9:1) | Promise of the land (12:1) |
| Curse: serpent (and its seed; 3:14-15) | Curse: Canaan (9:25) | Curse: those who curse you (12:3) |
| Followed by a genealogy with about ten generations ending in three sons (5:3-32) | Preceded and followed by a genealogy with about ten generations ending in three sons (5:3-32) | Preceded by a genealogy with about ten generations ending in three sons (11:12-27) |
Making Abraham’s name great (12:2) contrasts with the people at Babel seeking to make their own name great (11:4); they were scattered after seeking not to be scattered (11:4, 8-9), whereas Abraham went in obedience to God (Gen 12:1, 4).
Even this did not restore Eden, but it was a step forward. When Israel disobeyed God, he threatened to start over with Moses’s descendants (Exod 32:10). Although God again showed mercy (see http://www.craigkeener.org/gods-forgiveness-exodus-327-14/), it was a promised seed to come through whom God himself would make all things right. Ultimately, one descendant of Abraham would be a new Adam to lead us back to Eden. Conformed to his image, we become the sons and daughters of God he meant us to be.
Other posts in this series include: God’s love in creation, God’s goodness messed up, Peleg, Babel, God’s call, and God’s promise
God’s goodness messed up—Genesis 2—3
Genesis lavishly depicts God’s goodness, but also warns of the consequences of choosing to reject that goodness. Genesis 1 emphasizes that God, the master artist, exquisitely designed what was good and beautiful, including diverse creatures that could reproduce and fill the world. In this narrative, it appears that God delights in such creativity. He also designs it practically and in complex, interwoven ways: he created some things for the benefiting of others within this larger system of nature (1:29-30).
Genesis highlights that what God did was “good.” With each phase of creation, God sees that what he has made is “good” (Gen 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25), but after he makes humans, the climax of his creation, he sees that it is “very good” (1:31). (In some circles someone might accuse me here of “species-ist bias” but this special role for human beings is really in the biblical text—☺.)
Genesis appeals to a different recounting of creation in ch. 2 to provide a different but theologically complementary picture of origins. Here the man is formed before trees and apparently even plants (2:5-9), at least in the man’s sphere of the world. But God provides trees that are pleasing to look at and “good” for food (2:9)—welcoming us to delight in creation’s beauty and tasty fruit. Genesis even mentions the goodness of gold from a region in 2:12.
Moreover, when God sees that something is “not good,” he remedies it. Seeing that it’s “not good” for the man to be alone, God provides him a suitable companion (2:18).
In this opening section of the Bible, God makes a good world and blesses us beyond measure. He delights in the people he has made like a parent might delight in their infant child.
Yet he gives one—just one—prohibition: people are not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (2:17). The man and woman in this account already experience good from what God had created, but they have no way to distinguish it from anything else because they don’t yet know evil. (Thus nakedness, considered shameful in Israel’s culture, is not yet a problem, 2:25.) They will experience the difference between good and evil only once they know evil as well as good. God here warns them because he wants to protect them, just as we want to shield our infants from what is harmful to them. God of course knew the difference between good and evil himself, but in his case not by doing evil; by this point in the narrative even a previously uninformed reader can recognize from God’s works that he is purely good.
In Genesis 3 the serpent, however, challenges God’s motives (3:5), so that the woman recognizes that the tree is good for food and beautiful to look at (3:6). Keep in mind that in this respect the tree is no different from what we know about the garden’s other trees (2:9)—other trees from which they were allowed to eat. The key differences were that this tree’s fruit could also make one “wise” (3:6)—in knowing good and evil (3:5)—and that this one tree’s fruit was prohibited (2:17)! That the woman’s husband, who is with her, already knew that the penalty was death (2:17) and eats only after her (3:6) might suggest that he waited to see if the fruit would kill her before eating it! In any case, these mortals are now cut off from continual life. God would not let humanity live forever in that fallen state (3:22).
This narrative shows how the human propensity to mess up goes way back a long time; we still mess up today, and often for the same kinds of fundamental reasons, though now we already start with this huge deficit as our heritage. In striving to experience equality with God, however, the man and woman lost their role. (When people today ignore God, they seek to displace him with other things—things that will never truly fulfill us, because God created us for a greater, ultimately eternal, purpose in relationship with him.)
By mistrusting God’s goodness, we squander the precious gifts he has laid at our disposal. God had made humanity stewards of the earth, like a vizier subordinate only to him (1:26-28), higher than most gods appeared in ancient pagan pantheons. In 2:15, God put the man in the garden to “keep it” (NRSV and NASB; “take care of it,” NIV), a term that could also mean to “guard” it; but in 3:24 the same Hebrew term is applied to the cherubim stationed to guard the tree of life—to keep people away from it.
Consistent with the themes in Genesis, Paul traces humanity’s blindness to lack of gratitude (Rom 1:21). God has been good to us. We humans messed up his good world, but God still loves us (cf. Gen 3:21) and seeks to restore us. The text’s message spoke to ancient Israel and still speaks to us today. Ancient Israelite hearers of these accounts knew that God blessed them with a good land flowing with milk and honey; but if they disobeyed, God would expel them (Lev 18:28; 20:22) as he expelled transgressors from the garden in Genesis. However else we read Genesis 2—3, its theology invites us to recognize God’s goodness and eagerly turn to follow his way. Even in this world that we messed up, with all its troubles, signs of his goodness remain. Let’s recognize them and thank this one who loves us most.
(See also Creation as God’s lavish love.)