I've really gotta ease up on the notes.Starting tomorrow, of course.
- Genesis 17:5 - a name change. See yesterday.
- In Genesis 17:11 God institutes circumcision as a way of identifying His covenant with Abraham and his descendants. Really? Circumcision? There's not a better way of identifying the "chosen people"? There's not a less-painful, less-traumatic, perhaps more-noticeable way? Ideally - most people will never know whether a person is circumcised or not, correct?
The other freaky thing is - context suggests that circumcision was already a thing.
I mean - God and Abraham didn't invent it here, they just adopted it.
Somebody else, at some point, thought it would be a great idea to take a flint-knife to their foreskin... or someone else's.
-Genesis 17:15 - another name change.
God: "I will decide who you are. Nobody else."
- Why is it so ridiculous to Abraham and Sarah that they would have children at 100 and 90, respectively? Abraham's own father was 70 when he was born. Only 10 generations ago, Shem - who was still alive at this point (do the math! Or check out this chart) - had a child at 100 years of age.
- Genesis 18:13-15. This exchange between Sarah, Abraham and God made me laugh.
- Genesis 18:20-33 is Abraham bartering with God to spare the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. A few observations here. 1) Abraham actually believes his conversation with God can affect the outcome. 2) It does. 3) Why does he stop at 10 faithful men? Why doesn't he go all the way to 1? Especially since he knows Lot and his family are there.
- Genesis 19:8. That dude Lot sold his daughters out to a porchload of sexual deviants a little too quickly for my taste.
- Genesis 19:13. Where is this "outcry" against Sodom coming from? The neighbors? Lot's daughters?
- After their Mom is turned into a pillar of salt, Lot's daughters get him drunk and take turns getting pregnant by him. To them, it seems a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Like a post-apocalyptic, last-man-on-earth scenario. To me, it sounds like the kind of scarred-psyche thinking that results from knowing your father would hand you over to a city full of angelphiles with a penchant for buggery.
- In Genesis 20, we again have Abraham saying that Sarah is his sister, so that the locals don't figure her for his wife and kill him for her. She's taken and almost taken advantage of by the local prefect. What I don't get is that, at this point - SARAH IS MORE THAN 90 YEARS OLD!
- Genesis 24:3. The phrase "put your hand under my thigh", sounds a little pull-my-finger-ish. The textual note in my Bible says, "Near the organ of procreation, probably because this oath was related to Abraham's last will and testament, and called for obedience on the part of Isaac."
Either way. Ew.
- Genesis 25:25. Esau, also known as Edom. Edom means "red", and is a version of Adam, which means "dirt". Both are plays on the word for the red clay indigenous to the region.
- Genesis 25:26. Jacob means, literally, "heel-snatcher", and figuratively, "trickster". What's in a name?
- Genesis 26:7. Wife? Sister? Wife? Sister? Like father like son, I guess. Weren't Abraham and Isaac ever afraid that somebody would eventually sleep with their wives because they didn't realize they were already married?
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