Biblical Misunderstanding

picture link*

Looking back, I realize that no matter how sincere my faith, and I was entirely sincere in my faith, I was never a very good believer. For one thing, I was forever misinterpreting bible stories.

For example: The Tower of Babel. For the those of you unfamiliar with the story, it's really just an explanation of why there are so many different languages. After all, everyone on earth is descended from the same two people, why would there be many different languages instead of only one? Simple- goddidit because man scared him.

You see, all those people speaking the same language could work together to do marvelous things. The marvelous thing they agreed to do was build a tower tall enough to reach Heaven. God saw this, was afraid, and so scattered the humans all over the earth and made them speak different languages so they couldn't work together. As a child, I saw this as a testament to the power of people working toward a common cause. Working together towards a common goal, people can do anything. They can bring about equality for women, end Jim Crow, scare the piss out of god himself.

Wait, what?

We mortal beings can threaten the omniscient, omnipotent creator of everything? Apparently.

But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. ⁶ The LORD said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. ⁷ Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other."

Maybe I did get that right as a child. Sure kills the whole "omnipotent" thing, though.

*I switched to chrome because explorer was crashing every 5 minutes, but for some reason I can no longer link the picture itself. annoying.

Challenging God

Oh noez- an actual building resembles an artist's rendering of something that never existed- it must be Saytan!
god, yhwh, bible, genesis, babel, tree, christianity

There are two instances in the Bible in which man challenges Yhwh. I'm not surprised at the concept of man challenging god because human history is filled with stories of people fighting against impossible odds, and the odds don't get more impossible than going up against omnipotence. What does surprise me is that in both of these stories it is implied that had Yhwh not taken decisive action against man, man could have won.

The first takes place in the Garden of Eden. Yhwh, for no explained reason, puts two very dangerous trees right in the middle, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life. Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Knowledge and Yhwh freaks out. He says outright that if Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Life as well, they would be as "us", as gods, in other words*.

The second instance of man challenging Yhwh occurs when man builds the Tower of Babel. Yhwh has this to say about it:

5 But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. 6 The LORD said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other."

Now that is an impossibly strange thing for an omnipotent being to say. There is "nothing" we humans couldn't do if only we all spoke the same language? That's . . . odd. The only thing holding us back from being a threat to the creator of well, everything, is a lack of a common language? Just how omnipotent is this Yhwh fellow, anyway?



*This isn't in every translation of the Book of Genesis. It is in the one I have at home, which is a Tanakh printed in 1905 by the Rabbinical Council of New York, translated into English for "the new modern Jew who knows only the language of his adopted country and not the language of his ancestors." I'll trust that the Rabbinical Council would know the proper translation of their most important text.