One of my goals this year is to read the Bible. Why read the Bible? It’s foundational literature, of course. But religious texts have an unpretentious nature to them. Reference Anna Karenina in conversation and it’ll be passed over and forgotten. But everyone knows at least some part of the Bible, so pretty much anyone can connect a Bible reference to some previously known background context.1
I’m reading Robert Alter’s translation with commentary. Alter also reads the Bible like literature and his commentary is refreshingly detached from strong theological convictions.
A surprising fact that people tend to miss: in Eden, the Tree of Life and Tree of Knowledge are different trees, both in the center of the garden. The Tree of Life was fine to eat from, only the Tree of Knowledge was forbidden. When God expels Adam and Eve from the garden, it’s explicitly to prevent them from eating from the Tree of Life, which supposedly grants immortality.
In Impro, Keith Johnstone gives this advice to improvisors for generating narratives:
If I say ‘Make up a story’, then most people are paralysed. If I say ‘describe a routine and then interrupt it’, people see no problem. A film like The Last Detail is based on the routine of two sailors travelling across America with a prisoner whom they have to deliver to a prison. The routine is interrupted by their decision to give him a good time. […] ‘Walking through the forest’: Red Riding Hood presents an interruption of the routine ‘Taking a basket of goodies to Grandma’.
Many people think of finding more interesting routines, which doesn’t solve the problem. It may be interesting to have a vet rectally examining an elephant, or to show brain surgeons doing a particularly delicate operation, but these activities remain routines. If two lavatory attendants break a routine by starting a brain operation, or if a window cleaner begins to examine the elephant, then this is likely to generate a narrative. Conversely, two brain surgeons working as lavatory cleaners immediately sounds like part of a story. […]
I was thinking about this as I read Genesis. Humans exist to break God’s routine. God commands Man to not eat from the Tree of Knowledge, they immediately mess it up. Afterwards we get Cain and Abel, the first siblings, in short order one of them kills the other. The human population grows, turns rotten and evil, and God decides to scrap the whole project:
And the LORD saw that the evil of the human creature was great on the earth and that every scheme of his heart’s devising was only perpetually evil. And the LORD regretted having made the human on earth and was grieved to the heart. And the LORD said, “I will wipe out the human race I created from the face of the earth, from human to cattle to crawling thing to the fowl of the heavens, for I regret that I have made them.” (Genesis 6:5-7)
God has a degrowther antinatalist phase!
Between Noah and the Tower of Babel we get Genesis 10, ostensibly a boring list of nations and their genealogical origins. Then Genesis 11 opens with contradiction: the Earth is united in one language. Alter’s commentary:
The whole Table of Nations is devised to explain how the many separate nations came into being. The immediately following verse, which begins the tale of the Tower of Babel, announces a primeval unity of all people on earth. This seeming flat contradiction might reflect a characteristically biblical way of playing dialectically with alternative possibilities: humankind is many and divided, as a consequence of natural history; and, alternately, humankind was once one, as a consequence of having been made by the same Creator, but this God-given oneness was lost through man’s presumption in trying to overreach his place in the divine scheme.
God doesn’t joke, but that doesn’t prevent people from thinking he’s joking:
And Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in years, Sarah no longer had her woman’s flow. And Sarah laughed inwardly, saying, “After being shriveled, shall I have pleasure, and my husband is old?” And the LORD said to Abraham, “Why is it that Sarah laughed, saying, ‘Shall I really give birth, old as I am?’ 14Is anything beyond the LORD? In due time I will return to you, at this very season, and Sarah shall have a son.” And Sarah dissembled, saying, “I did not laugh,” for she was afraid. And He said, “Yes, you did laugh.” (Genesis 18:11-15)
This gets mirrored with Lot’s family, when they get warned of the destruction of Sodom:
And Lot went out and spoke to his sons-in-law who had married his daughters and he said, “Rise, get out of this place, for the LORD is about to destroy the city.” And he seemed to his sons-in-law to be joking. (Genesis 19:14)
I’ll do the rest of Genesis in the next post. Until next time!
- Tyler Cowen claims knowledge of the Bible is useful for appreciating movies and literature ↩︎
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