Peter on Reading Genesis (part III)

The Human Face of God

People talk about the God of the Old Testament being grand and majestic and cosmic, in contrast to the New Testament where Jesus takes on human form so that we can relate to him. And, yeah, the chapters prior to the Flood have God doing things like creating Heaven and Earth and establishing day and night. But those creation stories really seem like an afterthought. Gods seem to pick up creation myths the way saints pick up miracle stories. It’s sort of a literary convention, to show that your guy is the real deal. In Genesis, it’s only after the Flood when YHWH picks up Abram that the dramatic narrative really begins. And what floors me all through that narrative how YHWH keeps walking around the landscape and striking up conversations with people like just another character on the stage. God gets mistaken for an ordinary human, even at points in the story when you’d expect him to be at his most fearsome and godlike. When YHWH and two angles of destruction go to Sodom to turn the whole city into a smoldering crater, they get there by walking. They walk for days, long enough to get hungry and thirsty and tired, and Abraham stops them and offers refreshment and a shady spot to rest their weary feet. He doesn’t realize who they are, and when one of them (who turns out to be YHWH) prophesies Sarah’s pregnancy, she actually laughs at him. He’s so down-to-Earth with his hosts that he makes Jesus at his earthiest look kind of stiff and awkward.

And the LORD saw what He had made, and said, “Oh crap!”

People often criticize the God of the Old Testament for being violent and vindictive, but you never hear about him being indecisive or insecure. Yet he keeps changing his mind. He creates the world and sees that it is good…but it’s missing something. What is it? I know! “It is not right that man should be alone. I will make him an aid fit for him.” (Gen. ii 18) And then later, “Yahweh regretted that he had made man on earth, and there was sorrow in his heart. And Yahweh said, ‘I will blot out from the earth the men that I created, man and beast, the creeping things, and the birds of the sky; for I am sorry that I made them.’” (Gen. vi 6-7) But then he hems and haws and decides to obliterate only most of them.

But what you really never hear people talk about are the times God actually feels threatened by human potential. But they’re there, clear as day. Why the expulsion from Eden?

And why the scrambled languages at the Tower of Babel?

And weirdest of all, why the Flood?

That phrase “divine beings” is ’^elohim, the same Hebrew word that gets translated as “God.” All of the commentaries I’ve ever seen insist that while ’^elohim is technically plural, it’s clearly being used to signify a singular God. Except here, where (get this!) YHWH decides to destroy humanity because the other ’^elohim are having sex with his humans and siring a race of half-God, half-humans. The Greeks would have called them Titans, and made them the subject of some of their most powerful stories, but in the Bible they’re sort of like the madwoman in the attic that no one wants to talk about.

What do I do with a story like that? Where does that leave me in trying to understand the writers’ experience of their God?

More tomorrow. Thanks again to those who commented.