Trees and roots.

Genesis 2 goes back over what happened in Genesis 1 and expands a little, giving more detail to the creation of plants, animals, and humanity. I wonder why they didn't just cover this in chapter 1, really. Seems like it would be the sensible thing to do.

To me, it comes across as chapter 1 being a written version of a basic myth that everybody already knows, so details don't need to really be thrown in. Then once that's down pat, maybe people figured, "You know, this could use a little more detail. How about some specifics?" So the writers dedicated chapter 2 to that.

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. (Genesis 2:7)

Ah, one of the little joys that gets lost in translation. Man being made from dust makes Adam's name a lot more significant if you know that the name actually means dust. He started as dust, then became Dust, then dies and goes back to being dust again.

Adam also goes unnamed from the verse of his creation to verse 19. He's just called "the man" every other time he's mentioned.

And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.

The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold;

And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone. (Genesis 2:10-12)

Why we get an interlude about what precious stones exist in one part of the land, I'm not sure. Is it that vital to the creation myth to know that Havilah has good gold and onyx to mine? Or is this something like one of the old alchemical texts where there are metaphorical hints, things in the form of other things, that the wise can extrapolate from and figure out how to get to Eden while getting some gold along the way?

Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

This verse confuses the heck out of me. It's a great piece of foreshadowing, I'll grant you, but it's not completely clear as to whether Adam is doing the speaking here, since the bible has a serious lack of quotation marks. Most other versions of the bible indicate that Adam isn't speaking here, and that's it just narration.

But it's narration of the kind that hasn't been seen before. Granted, we're not far into the bible, but it references a future that Adam and his still-unnamed woman know nothing about. Father? Mother? What are these strange things of which you speak? Adam and Eve had no parents, nobody to leave.

Unless, of course, you count God. God could easily be seen as both father and mother of these two newborns, since he created them. So what it's saying, if you take that interpretation, is that Adam and Eve are going to leave God behind and stick together instead.

Which is pretty much what they ended up doing.

But aside from speculation like that, from a purely stylistic point of view, that verse is clunky and jarring. It's like when you're reading a great story, really getting to know the characters and appreciate the setting, and all of a sudden the book starts lecturing at you. We haven't gotten to the lecturing stage of the bible yet!

The first hint of God's plurality.

To most Christians, God is a singular and male figure, and no question about it. And it's true that for most of the bible God is presented that way. He refers to himself as "I" (singular) and people refer to him as "He" (masculine).

But the first few chapters of Genesis, I'm noticing, seem rife with hints about God being a plural being. Not one, but many.

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: (Genesis 1:26)

Note the use of the words "us" and "our". Plural words.

God is repeatedly presented in this way, especially in Chapter 2, but I'll get to that when I get there, since I want to do this blog in order, rather than jumping all over the place.

Some people have no doubt argued, in the past, that here God is using the "Royal We." An interesting defense, but it makes no sense when you know that the Royal We is supposed to refer to God being in agreement with the monarch saying it. If a monarch says, for example, "We are not amused," what they mean is, "God and I are not amused." They include God because of the long-standing believe that monarchs were divinely appointed, and thus what the monarch says and does must therefore be approved of by God.

So unless God is making reference here to a being even higher than himself, the Royal We argument holds no water.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. (Genesis 1:27)

This is the big hint that God is not entirely masculine, something that gets ignored a lot in mainstream religion. Man here means human, of course, and it explicitly says that God created both male and female in his image. It stands to reason then, that Gods image is both male and female.

Another thing that makes more sense when you consider God to be more than a singular being.

It's my personal opinion that calling God male constantly is a symptom of the limitation of language. English isn't one of those languages that has gendered nouns, but lots of other languages do. The original word used to God (likely something that means simply "deity", but I can only speculate on that, of course) was a masculine word, and eventually people took this to mean that God was a masculine figure. It's not a hard leap of logic to make, and I can understand how people would come to such a conclusion.

Plenty of people on the fringe of mainstream religion take this to mean that God is inherently a male and female entity, something that gains a little bit more support a chapter later in Genesis. (Once again, I'll get to that when I get to it, since I want to go in order here.) God would have to be, after all, for both males and females to be created to look like him.

Unless, of course, "in his image" doesn't mean what we think it means. Maybe the word image doesn't refer directly to appearance. Maybe it means more like "in the manner of", a theory which could also gain a little weight after Adam and Eve get booted from Eden.

Of course, there are plenty of people who don't like that notion either, I imagine. For one thing, it would so easily reconcile humanity and evolution. If we weren't made to look like God, then we could have started off looking like something else. Lower primates, maybe? But we had that God-spark, that likeness inside of us that helped us rise up and become what we are today.

That would put the Answers in Genesis people out of business, though, so I can't see that theory gaining mainstream popularity any time soon.

A Creation Sandwich.

(The bible I'm using is the King James version, by the way, which is widely considered by some to be the definitive version of the bible. I figure the definitive one would be the original, but since I can't get my hands on that, well, I'll work with what I have.)

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. (Genesis 1:2)

Interesting that before there was anything, there was water. There's a complete universal void going on, and yet there's still a bunch of water around. I'd suggest that it's metaphorical water, but yet...

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. (Genesis 1:6-10)

No, those would be literal waters, then. So before there was anything else that we can comprehend today, there was God, and there was water. The jury's still out on whether God and water were created simultaneously, or which one came first, but one thing is at least certain: water existed with God, before the world was fully formed.

This rarely gets a mention, I've noticed. It's always, "Before anything existed, there was God, because God created everything." But it's clear right from the get-go that while God manipulated the waters (and everything else, for that matter), the waters still actually existed for him to manipulate.

Interesting.

I also find it interesting how we're on the bottom slice of a creation sandwich, according to Genesis. It goes water (and subsequent land) --> Heaven --> water again. There's a layer of water above Heaven.

Perhaps this is where people originally thought that rain came from. Water's coming from the sky, but given that I highly doubt they understood cloud formations and water vapour that much, maybe people used to think that the falling rain came from the layer of water that was above Heaven. It makes a degree of sense. Following the belief that God lives in Heaven, and that Heaven is a firmament (stable place), why would a creator deity choose to live in Waterworld?

I'm sure that some people may choose to argue that the top layer is also the bottom layer, that this isn't a creation sandwich so much as a representation that the world is round. An interesting theory, I'll grant, but that then means that Heaven (and God, if you believe that he lives in Heaven) exists between the two layers, which aren't layers anymore so much as one connected circle. That would mean that Heaven is in the centre of the earth.

Now, I'm sure some people may be arguing here that God created all those waters because it says right at the beginning, before God moved across the waters, that he created heaven and earth. So God creates earth, and then there's water. It wasn't there before him.

But on some level, how does that reconcile with the fact that there's the Heaven layer and the layer of water above that? Earth gets created, and it's full of water. God sticks Heaven in the middle. You've either got to take this as meaning that when God "created the earth" he actually created the whole universe, or else Heaven really is a place on earth.

Unless you ignore the top water layer, that is.

This is why I have such a hard time taking biblical literalism seriously. Questions like this often get ignored. Literalists take everything in the bible to be 100% literally and factually true, without exception. But they ignore the top layer of creation that Heaven is sitting between. Sure, it can be explained away by saying that the top layer is where people used to think water came from, but that isn't literalism. That's being subjective. And if one thing in the bible is subjective, why can't more of it be?

And that line of thinking leads to dangerous heresy and can't be spoken of.

But the information is there. Why people choose to ignore it, I don't understand. It raises a bunch of questions for me. Is the top layer another layer to aspire to, after Heaven? Does it have land beneath it too? Is it a symbol for reincarnation, in that after going to Heaven to rest up for a bit we can go on to another place and live again, constantly shifting back and forth between two planes of living? Is that layer a mirror world that God's playing around with right now? Why is it?!

This is why I chose to start reading the bible and making notes of my adventures through it. There's a lot in here that I didn't know. There's a lot in here that most people don't know. I'm halfway through the first chapter of the first book, and already there's something that stumps me.

I wonder if the reason that top layer gets ignored so much is because it stumps everybody else, too. We have our earthly lives, and we've got Heaven to aspire to, and beyond that, well, why should there be a "beyond that"? Aren't we supposed to spend the rest of existence in Heaven, after all? Why needs to be beyond that.

But there is something, if you believe that what the bible says is true. There are people who believe that everything God does has a purpose. So what's the purpose of that other layer?

Even if it's metaphorical, it's still there, and thus still means something. Maybe it means that even if we're good in life and get to Heaven, we still have to strive, because there's something else out there to strive for. Maybe it's not better than Heaven, but it's still there, and human curiosity being what it is...

Maybe God put it there to stop us from being complacent. Maybe those in Heaven will get a little slack, thinking that they're in Heaven now so everything they do must be perfect and that there's nothing else worth doing, and when God sees them lose their motivation, he can say, "You know, there's something above Heaven. Don't you want to know what it is?"

To me, this is actually a powerful motivational symbol. Even when things are good, we have to keep working and avoid getting complacent because who knows, the next thing could be even better. It could be worse, sure, but unless we actually get there and find out, we'll never know.

Intro post - every blog needs one!

It's a sad thing, but I've never actually read the bible. I mean, I know the popular stories. Universe made in seven days, virgin birth, Armageddon, all that stuff, but I've never actually sat down and read the thing.

And I know I'm not alone. I'm sure that plenty of people who claim to believe in the bible haven't actually read it. At most, they've heard it read from, piece by piece, during church services.

The thing is, a lot of people who slander Christianity haven't read the bible either. They make a mockery of a thing they haven't studied. It seems to me that if you're going to make fun of something, you should at least know what you're making fun of. It's like me making fun of particle physics. I know squat about it except for maybe a few blurbs read in the newspaper or online, so by what right can I safely make fun of it.

Of course, that's a lousy example. Everyone knows that particle physics are no laughing matter.

It seems to me that it's about time I sat down and actually read the bible.

That being said, I want to make something clear. I am not a Christian. I have no intention of becoming Christian, and reading the bible is not a way to try to convert myself. I don't see it happening. My personal beliefs often go counter to the doctrines of Christianity. While I admit the possibility of being converted just by reading this book, it's a slim and outside chance, and I wouldn't place any wagers on it.

This blog was created as a sort of chronicle to my reading the bible. People familiar with the bible may find some interest in seeing what amodern newcomer can see in the words, and other newcomers may find some comfort in knowing they're not the only ones embarking on this quest. Maybe both groups will find some of my commentaries apt.

In all likelihood, some of my commentaries will offend. I have no doubt of that. I'm going to make jokes, to poke fun at some things, to offer some less-than-flattering views when they come to mind. I'm going to comment on God's plurality expressed in Genesis, and compare characters in Revelation to people and places that I know. I'm going to point out contradictions and take notes when I notice particular passages where biblical literalism will make absolutely no sense. While this blog is going to have some serious and thoughtful commentary and musings (because, let's face it, the bible has some good morality lessons and parables to offer that are applicable in modern times), it's also going to have a lot that people will probably get annoyed about.

To them, I say in advance that if you don't like what you read here, you're free not to read it. I accept discussion and debate, but not flames and sour criticism. There's a big difference between, "My experience with this passage makes me feel that it means..." and "You're an idiot for not seeing what this really means."

If you are devoutly Christian, I urge you not to get offended by what's said here. I urge you to try to take a step back from your own faith and see things from another perspective. Lots of people get turned away from Christianity because of bad attitudes to people asking questions and making commentaries. I was turned away for Christianity once and for all by somebody giving daily hellfire speeches, telling me that I'd be punished for all eternity if I didn't renounce my pagan ways and accept Jesus as my saviour. Like a lot of people presented with that threat, I wondered and asked what kind of loving god would condemn someone for all eternity over a comparatively short mistake.

I was given no answer. Only more hellfire speeches. Didn't do much to endear me to the faith.

But I've reached a time in my life where I feel ready and comfortable with approaching bits of Christianity again, and I figure the book that started it all is also a good place for me to start. Follow along as I try to make sense of a mess that's boggled minds for centuries, torn nations apart, and inspired immense love and charity.