the other commandments

After I read Emily's post about the ten commandments I went back to look at them myself and she is right, there is gold here that we seem to have just overlooked. the bible was way ahead of its time, it answered several of the worlds problems centuries ago. Today in the united states there is a huge debate over the death penalty yes or no? the bible says yes. one half of our country fought the other over the issue of slavery, according to god slavery is ok but only for six years, and its ok to keep any slave children that are produced when you have the slaves. this is how the world should be run.

Where arth thou Wrath?

So in the story of the flood the reason for the end of every thing in existence with the exception of a safari life boat with a six hundred year old captain, was simply a world full of violence. A punishment on that level you'd think would give the people of the old testament some pause before they even squashed a spider right? wrong Genesis thirty four is just as violent and upsetting as David Plotz described it to be. so when I turned the page to Genesis thirty five I was getting ready for a divine smack down of epic proportions, only to discover i was to be disappointed again. Even after the terrific show of exceptional violence by Jacobs son's in thirty four nothing happened.All that happens is Jacob and his sons take a hike up a mountain build an alter and all is forgiven, God even graces Jacob with a his presence and gives him a bomb new name. this passage left me very confused and I gotta admit kinda concerned, because before I had known that God in the old testament was very harsh in his punishments but until this passage I had thought him at least consistent in his furry, but clearly this is not true. so who knows what will set him off again.

Titanic menagerie

OK I gotta start this post by asking what the french toast is gopher wood?
The story of the flood really struck me as interesting. I had always known the story but
upon reading it for the first time questions started to arise. The fore front of which is what did we do to deserve such wrath? seriously all it says is that the world is full of violence and that therefore all must be destroyed. which you know I get violence is bad, and violent people should be punished, but the thing that worries me is have you watched the news lately? If you haven't let me fill you in on the gist, VIOLENCE! LOTS OF IT! from car bombs across the seas to two Neanderthals in a ring with padded gloves hitting each other for the amusement of the thousands of onlookers right here at home, the world today is chalk full of violence. so this begs the question what is stopping our lord above from hitting us with another tidal wave of Divine justice?
The next issue that came to me was what happened to the fish? at first I thought 'oh its chill the world is covered in water the fish are probably stoked, getting to swim through a world normally out of there reach.' but upon telling this theory to my Bio Chem major of a roommate, she promptly disproved it by pointing out that if such a flood was to occur it would completely change the environment of the seas and lakes of the earth causing an equally devastating effect on the worlds fish population, as on the rest of creation. So while we can all be confident in the lords aptitude for mass extinction level events, I still had to wonder how did the fish survive? was there an aquarium section of the ark? and if so how bad ass would that be?
The last big issue I had with this story was this description of the size of the ark itself. In the book it is said " the length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits". OK so lets back track by asking what the F is a cubit? my curiosity got the better of me and my old friend the Internet came to my aid. a cubit is defined as one of the earliest terms of measurement, which is roughly the length of a mans fore arm, which can be further broken down into seven palm widths, which are tour digits thick each, or for those of us no longer using our limbs to measure things, its about twenty one inches. so with a little quick math I found the ark was 525 ft long, 87.5 ft wide and 52.5 tall, or 2411718.75 cubic ft or 456.76 cubic miles, or one bitching big boat. and to put that into perspective that about 43 White Houses but was it big enough? if we assume that all the creatures today were around pre-flood we would be looking at about 4260 mammals, 6787 reptiles, 9703 birds and 32000 fish. that works out to 52750 different animal species not including invertebrates and considering that Noah took two of each of dirty ones and seven of the clean ones that's a lot of beasts. but lets just assume that he took two of each, cause lets be honest all animals are pretty dirty that's 105500 animals and 8 people on this divine cruise ship. so assuming that without room for invertebrates or for the food and needed to feed all these animals and assume that the ark was wall to wall cages with no walk ways and that all creatures got the same amount of space, each animal would get about 22 cubic feet meaning each animal the great and the small would have a patch of floor space about 2.8 sq ft with 2.8 ft of clearance, yeah try fitting a grizzly bear into that.

J vs P the showdown

A week ago if someone had asked me 'hey what is the difference between P and J?' I would have promptly replied that the had left out the b and that one was a sticky condiment made from a legume while the other is a condiment l that can be made from any number of fruits, mostly berries. But that all changed after doing the assignment that Guru Sexson assigned us, now I know that P and J are in fact the writers of Genesis one and two. If no one had told me that there was two different writers I doubt I would have picked up on it, but having been enlightened to the fact that there are if fact conflicting styles at play in these first back to back passages, I started to notice some subtle differences. the first thing I noticed was that in both one and two man is created but in very different ways. In the J version man is simply created as a small part of a greater six days of creation. On the other hand the P version goes into much greater detail about our creation making it seem like god put a lot of thought into our creation, baked with love and all that. there are also several minor differences like how god is referred to and the like all giving glimpses into how the author thought we should feel about creation. But the most stark contrast in my mind was the general view of god himself. In Genesis one he is all mighty, his smallest whim is made true by now more then his wanting it to be so. and then comes a near one eighty in Genesis two when he becomes almost human, he walks and he has breath where as before he seemed almost immaterial. then if you go on to read Genesis three, which seems very similar in style to the priestly writer, you will find god not even able to find Adam and Eve when he wants to, showing he is neither omniscient or omnipotent.