A Page Turner of a Book

On January first I began my year of bible reading with the guide assuring me that I can do this in one year.  Let me tell you that there is some very racy stuff in this book and the danger is that I will leap ahead of the daily requirement!

It’s not that I haven’t read Genesis before and my thoughts this time are very much the same as they were the first time I read when Abraham tells the Canaanites “take her, she’s my sister, not my wife”.  What a cowardly shit, is what I thought.  Who the hell does that to his wife?  Then his son Isaac does the same thing with his wife, like father like son.  Shitheads, both of them, is what I thought.

Oh, did I say that out loud?  Never mind Abraham and Isaac, I thought God was a shithead too when he told Abraham to go out and sacrifice Isaac.  What kind of god does something like that?   I remember thinking that when I was a little kid and we learned that story in our bible class at school.  What?  I thought.  That is just wrong.

When I studied with the Jehovah’s Witnesses they tried to tell me that there was a meaning behind it all but my stubborn mind looks at bible reading this way; this is a narrative and you cannot cherry pick what is a story, what is an allegory and what has a deeper meaning.  The story is the story and when God tells Abraham to go out and kill Isaac that is a test too great for any god to put on a man.  I don’t like it, not at all.

Furthermore, over and over again God tells the various patriachs that he is going to give them all these lands and yet they go roving around in “foreign lands” for hundreds upon hundreds of years.  What kind of shit is that?

I’ll tell you what kind of shit it is; the kind of shit that is still going on in the Middle East.  I do not like this type of mentality where everything is just a leetle bit off kilter.  I’m a straight thinking girl and I do not like this kind of sharp dealing.  There is a very sharp contrast between the thinking in the Old Testament and that of the New . . . and I am not even finished with Genesis yet!