Genesis 1.1 – 9.29

And so we begin… or something equally prophetic, profound, or more likely Pythonesque. Anyway, it can’t be worse then Dan Brown. I digress…

The start is rather cryptic. We have heavens, earth, and a somewhat mysterious deep that seems to be spread both above and below. This all gets separated, and we get plants, although oddly we get these springing up before the Sun, Moon, and stars. Animals are brought forth from the water - again, it seems that we only get birds & fish on day 5 but land animals and our good selves have to wait until day 6.

1.27 throws us on a curve already “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” then gives them the ‘be fruitful/multiply/dominion’ spiel before the end of day 6. Apart from a huge amount of needless repetition the main area of interest is that men and women have been created simultaneous…

This gets all the more confusing after his day of rest (2.1) – why does a being that powerful need to rest? – when 2.4 starts with a different creation story. 2.4 same day earth was created, 2.5 no plants, 2.6 mist watering ground, 2.7 man formed from dust, 2.8 Garden of Eden, 2.9 good stuff and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The rest of 2 involves the creation of animals and finally woman from man.

Now, correct me if there’s something fundamentally incorrect with the above. We have 2 conflicting stories, which even if you take story #1’s man/woman part at the most flexible you still have birds being created out of turn (with fish for #1, with animals for #2).

You’ve got to love creationists. Next time you speak to one ask them which is correct – Gen 1.20-23 or Gen 2.19-20. They are contradictory. End of story.

Gen 3 is god’s first strop, and women are to blame (this becomes a recurring, and rather tiring, theme). God’s already created something – man – and then given orders, I dare say knowing full well that they’ll be broken, and punishes duly. It gets worse with Gen 4, when god isn’t pleased with Cain’s agrarian offerings. Of course Cain got pissed off, and it seems that god’s definitely prodding the poor lad. Seems like another excuse for a creative punishment to be handed out.

The rest of 4 and 5 gives us wives appearing out of thin air – well, thin air if you accept creation #2, maybe not if you accept the first go… We get a lot of generational nonsense (which goes a long way to explaining the creationist timeline) and by the time we hit Gen 5 Noah is on the scene.

Somehow by 6.5 man was continually evil. Great job, god, you made a fantastic creation! Now let me think… do I detect a throwing of toys from the pram? Er, yeah, what else do you think’s going to happen. 7 gets us saddled up, and it looks like a very selective 150 day bath that does away with animals – flesh - but not plants. Spooky. I suppose that explains the olive leaf. What also impresses me is that as soon as the boat land, 8.20, Noah builds an altar and sacrifices a whole bunch of the animals that he’s just saved. Nice. The fact that god likes the smell (no stomach, has god, another on-going theme) is equally disturbing.

Gen 9’s pretty entertaining. We get more rules, including the kosher one, and the creation of the rainbow to remind god not to drown everything again. Can’t have heard of global warming at that point. Noah now invents wine, and also ‘getting pissed and passing out naked’. I like this man. Ah, hold that a second, he also curses his son Canaan to be a slave for walking in on the unclothed drunk and telling his brothers. With god having wiped out the rest of the human race I suppose that there’s no-one else around to be a bastard to. This is yet another one of these all too familiar themes…

Here endeth the first lesson.