Month: September 2020

This week, I was introduced to two very similar stories that I had no idea existed. In my childhood, I was told all about Sodom and Gomorrah and how Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt–but never the lead-up to their demise. Who knew that there was such a controversy about gang rape in Genesis, AND that they taught it in Sunday school?

Reading the story of Sodom and Gomorrah at face-value is much different than the other interpretations out there, especially on the internet. Homosexuality in the Bible is a hot topic, one that I never knew was referenced much outside of Leviticus’ long-winded, fire and brimstone law book. Turns out, there are lots of discussions out there that made me wonder–was this really about the men wanting to “know” the other men?

No, it wasn’t. During class, it hit me more clearly that it didn’t even matter what sexuality these men were, or if that specifically is what made the city evil. It was a story of violence and rape, and total lawlessness that garnered the interference of God. The argument surrounding the nature of “abomination” that the Sodomites had committed was much more black and white to me than it had been after a few Google searches. I was reassured that indeed someone else thinks the gang rape of a woman is more pressing than the exact sexuality of an entire town.

After reading Genesis 19 and Judges 19, I was surprised. I had heard this story before in Sunday school, However I was only told the prettier version. Many if not all sacred texts have some type of violence and gruesome details. Typically those stores are sugar coated. However after reading the stories and going over it in class it was very interesting to see these things. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah really is a great example of the brutality that a part of the bible entails. I was in disbelief as I noticed a multitude of things.  Lot had just met these men and while the other men of the city are outside requesting Lot let them go so they can do things to them he offers up his “virgin daughters”. It was concerning to see Lot offer up his own blood, his own kin to help two strangers. But after you see the wrath that God took out on these people and it puts you in a little bit of disbelief. God punished these people not for their hospitality but because of stuff that Lot had heard and seen been done over time. I don’t believe it was just directly related to the attempted rape or current savagery but the decay of the people over time.

After reading Genesis 19 and Judges 19, I was shocked. I never knew the Bible had such gruesome and graphic stories in it. It was interesting to read very explicit acts occurring in something as sacred as the Bible. I always thought of the Bible being a happy book with stories and tales of good deeds and other similar things. After reading the brutal gang rape and murder of an innocent woman, I was in shock and disbelief. I also noticed how much sexism is in the Bible as well. They want to protect the men in these stories so badly, they sacrifice their “virgin daughters”. While I am not necessarily shocked that there is obvious objectification of women in the Bible, it is still disappointing. There are so many people that have read the Bible, it is no wonder the objectification of women still exists today.

Growing up in church, I have gone through several different Sunday school classes each of them teaching the students how to be a good person and how the Bible gave us an example of this. So, I was taught the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, but in a much more PG-rated way. It was based on the lesson of how people were not leading virtuous lives as God wanted and basically being inhumane, and that we could learn from their behavior that we should be kinder to others and act in a way that was helpful to all. They cut out the part of death and destruction to not scare us when we were kids, but as we got older and progressed through the higher classes more of the controversial topics were explained to us and the violence was discussed. Not until high school was these stories fully read through and explained and discussed in our weekly Sunday school classes.

One of the more thought-provoking questions that were posed in the class today that really hit me was that if you edit out all of the violence in some of the stories of the Bible, what is really left, and does it change the story as a whole? I think that to some point you are going to have to read through the hard stories that are more violent, especially the way that religion is taught and even how you proceed with your life. You take on the task of learning and deducing meaning from things that you take in and using it for your own experiences. By teaching the moral of the stories from the Bible to younger children is a place to start because as a child you really could care less about what a big old book has written in it and what directions it gives you for life. Then incorporating in the stories from the Bible later when we start to understand more. To the point of if editing the story, yes, I do think it could change the meaning if you have the full context because there are more factors to consider when analyzing and understanding the text for what it is. Sometimes when taking little snippets of stories there is only one way to understand the story, but when the whole thing is put together it is much more complex than you would have realized when just reading the small part. The small parts lead to a lack of analyzation and creativity for the reader, they are told one way and that is it.

The story of Sodom and Gomorrah was much more violent and disturbing than my preconceived exposure to this story. In class we talked about a few strange sentences that are in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah: these were that Lot would give up his daughters to save his guests, several men of Sodom came to Lot’s house with the intent of gang-rape, and that Abraham appeared to be more merciful than God. Abraham pleas with God to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if he could find at least 10 righteous men. The Lord told Abraham the purpose of his journey to Sodom and Gomorrah was, “Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous.” To me, this implies that others have witnessed the crimes that we read about later in Genesis 19, which also means that there are righteous men within or around Sodom and Gomorrah crying out to spiritual authority. This story is something that I didn’t expect to find in the Bible, nor did I expect there to be a similar story in Judges 19. The second half of Judges 19 reads much like Genesis 19.

I enjoyed reading the Enuma elish. I think that it is interesting learning about this lore because I used to be very interested in the Percy Jackson book series so I knew a lot about the ancient Norse, Greek/Roman, and even some about Egyptian mythology. It’s also interesting to learn about this because I’ve heard many stories about the Babylonian exile but not what what the Babylonians believed in. Reading this passage you can see some similarities and many differences between Judeo Christian and Babylonian creation stories. Right of the bat they are semi similar in the fact that the stories start before there was anything and Apsu/our God creates something. After that the stories grow different from each other. The many Gods of the Babylonian faith is definitely something different from the Judeo Christian beliefs. I see parallels between Ea and Zeus as they’re both multiple generations down from the creator, but are the most powerful. Something I see different between the Enuma elish and Greek stories is the eerieness of it all. I suppose I wasn’t consuming the same sort of translations of the Greek stories but diction in the Enuma elish like, “Transmitting the sleep it then made Apsu sleep,” and “He shot therethrough an arrow, it pierced her stomach,
Clave through her bowels, tore into her womb.” It just gives me an uneasy feeling that all sorts of other texts don’t produce for me.

I really learned a lot about the Butler library Lib guides. This section was very beneficial as we went into excessive details. Personally I have had librarians come into or Zoom in some of my classes however, none had gone into as much detail and showed us the important things like in class today. These techniques and shortcuts will help everyones papers and research in the upcoming months. I greatly appreciated the time that was taken to show us these.

The reading for today was Adrian Thatchers The Savage Text. The most intriguing thing I came across was the role of Children in the bible. The most notable was the story of sacrificing Issac that we had previously talked about in class. Adrian brings up the significance of this by stating “may require a stiff drink just to get through it. God tests Abraham’s obedience by telling him to kill his son Isaac”(84). In the end this task is not completed as an angle stops Abraham and congratulates him for being so obedient. However I find it scary that someone would carry through with this. I must emphasize Issac was Abraham’s son and he was willing to sacrifice him to God. I can only imagine how many children were sacrificed in the name of God.

It was very interesting how these readings portrayed different views of how homosexuality is portrayed in the Bible, if it is even portrayed at all. In “Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19 1-29) on the Internet,” I found very fascinating how they talked about the different viewpoints on Sodom and Gomorrah that can be found on the Internet. There were some sources that viewed this story in a literal sense and some of those claimed how being gay is a sin based on what they were accused of in the story, and other sources that viewed the story in a literal sense claimed that what they were accused of wasn’t because they were gay, but because they were idolatrous and inhospitable. It is fascinating to me how this one story carries such a big importance on how people view the whole Bible regarding homosexuality. If someone interprets the story as the city of Sodom being destroyed because the people of Sodom were gay, then they interpret the Bible as anti-homosexual, and whoever interprets this story like this and believes that the Bible is the true Word of God, then they many homophobic themselves. If someone interprets the story as the city of Sodom being destroyed because of the inhospitality and idolatry the people of Sodom have, then there is no connection to homosexuality in this story, and the people who interpret it this way most likely don’t believe the Bible doesn’t advocate anti-homosexuality. It’s amazing how this one story has influenced so many people’s views of the Bible so strongly when it is not even proven to be calling homosexuality a sin.

In the reading of comparing the Yahwist and the Priestly Writer’s version of the flood story in the Bible, there are striking differences, which accentuate a belief system that was part of the writings of these. Each of these descriptions makes it a point to say that God was not happy with the proceedings of the humans on the land, and he wanted to make a clean start, so the most fitting human that God saw was Noah and his family. At least, there is that similarity, but there are many more differences. For example, the differing types of animals that were brought onto the ark to keep for repopulating the land. The Yahwist version has seven of each clean beast, while the priestly writers have two of every animal. This certain delineation paints a picture that the Yahwist derive worth from if the animal was clean or not, and the priestly writers see that the animals were not the problem with the Earth it was the people living on it. Which comes to the next point, once the animals and Noah’s family were on board the ark, according to the Yahwist version, the waters were over the land for 40 days, but in the priestly version, the flood was over the land 150 days. This difference might account for how long it took God to decide what was sufficient rain and decide what was the next step for the receding of the flood and repopulating the Earth. And in the end, the Yahwist version has Noah sacrifice one of the clean animals and being satisfied with the smell and promising to never do this again, and the Priestly Writer’s version reestablishes God as the sustainer of Earth and then the same promise. In the ending of the Yahwist, sacrificing is the belief that there are certainly clean and unclean things, but God is in favor of the cleanliness affirming that there are clean things in the world even when some others might not be as clean. Then the Priestly Writer’s hone in on the fact that God is the ruler and that as humans we should all be followers even though that we will never have to go through a catastrophic event such as the flood ever again

The fall of Adam and Eve, I have heard the story many times growing up in the church. Going through the story on an academic level put a spin on the train of thought that I had usually gone through when reading and analyzing the story. Some of the questions from the discussion that really struck me were if the tree of knowledge was really a tree, is ‘the fall’ just a transition from child-like innocence into adulthood or to disobedience, and did the fruit have meaning, or was it just a test of obedience.

I think that the tree was not an actual tree, but a metaphorical one to represent the knowledge that God had and that was intentionally kept from Adam and Eve to keep them innocent. This was kept away because God knew that if the humans could have this type of knowledge that he would not be able to keep them in his presence in the Garden but put them down on Earth away from the presence of God. Therefore, he just had one big rule for them to stay listen and to not take from the tree of knowledge.

The fall of Adam and Eve was not a transition from child-like innocence to adulthood, it was more an act of disobedience. It is a flaw of humans to want more than they should and disobey the set rules because of the curiosity that is inside of us. This was a curiosity that was fulfilled, but not in a good way. They were tempted and fell into the trap, and they got knowledge. While it might be seen as a transition into adulthood, this does not strike a chord with teaching a lesson and if God was telling them not to eat from this one tree knowing that one day they would eventually transition into adulthood, this knowledge probably would not have been forbidden.

For the fruit of knowledge, it stood for something that humans could not have because they could not enjoy the fullness that it brought. This fruit of knowledge was reserved for God, who knows all things and can comprehend it. It’s almost like going out to a high-end restaurant with five-star food, as a child, all that you are looking for is something that tastes good and fills your hunger you don’t comprehend the beauty of the food and the effort that was put into everything, but as an adult, you know the price, about the food itself, and you enjoy it more fully. God knows, and as limited humans, Adam and Eve did not know what knowledge would bring, which is why God intentionally told Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree. Once Adam and Eve would gain knowledge, it would be good in some aspects such as gaining a sense of yourself, but on the other hand, it would bring strife because of the differing views that would develop as a result of gaining knowledge.