Genesis 19.1 – 22.24

And now… the main event… ladies and gentleman, in the red corner weighing in at 2 cities of several thousand people we have Sodom and Gomorrah… facing them, in the blue corner, weighing in at exactly nothing, ‘The Creator’… God… of the Desert!!!

Right, here we go again, more alleged morality from the man who knows most. 2 angels turn up and are guested by the rather unfortunate Lot, when they are accosted by ‘the men of the city’ – implication being ‘all the men of the city’. This, I’ll happily say, is a bad thing. Not sure whether there will still be 10 innocent left as the above wager suggested but I think we can let that fly. At this point Lot offers his own virgin daughters to the lecherous mob whom were refused. Gang of rapists – BAD! Prostituting your own daughters to save 2 angel’s arses – GOOD!

The mob are struck blind. Fair enough, works for me. Now it’s time to flee, without some sons-in-law-to-be who unfortunately think that this is some kind of joke. Bad move, along with Lot’s wife who made the crime of looking back when told not to. Admittedly I’d take being turned into a pillar of salt over having to put up with these loonies on a regular basis.

Just to add a final icing to this confection of depravity, the virginal sluts aka Lot’s daughters decide to get their father pissed and screw him as they seem to think that there are no other men, period. If this is a normal family I’ll be horrified, otherwise god’s antics have really played havoc with these poor people.

Back on the road with Abraham, Gen 20 sees him pulling the same ‘she’s my sister’ stunt to the king of Ga’rer. However, god is in a better mood by now and warns the poor chap not to touch her because she’s already married. For some reason this gets him in a flap about sin, and the fact that his kingdom is in this state because – same story – he’s been lied to by the prophet. Again Abraham gets handed a pile of produce, and then ‘cures’ the house because god had made them sterile due to the almost sinning (20.6). I don’t get that. God stopped him from sinning but still punished his entire house for sinning. Not a fantastic advert for moderation there, then.

More family problems are on the cards. Abe becomes a father again aged 100 – good work if you can get it – but his now satisfied wife now throws her ex-servant & Abe’s son out. The rest of 21 is a little muddled, god after having told Abe to allow the expulsion decides to take pity on the evictees, and 22+ seems to involve a well dispute with the king he ripped off in the last chapter. A strange combination of topics.

One of the more famous chapters is next – 22, the aborted sacrifice of “[Abraham’s] only son, Isaac” (conveniently forgetting the son of the ex-servant who by now is a pretty good archer allegedly). God demands the sacrifice, Abe almost seals the deal but is then halted, and the spontaneous appearance of a ram means that all go home happy. The chapter then degenerates in to more dynastic lists and comes to an untidy end not far later.

Now, we need to get this into some sort of context. The test is pretty basic – Is Abraham willing to obey anything that he is told to do? He passes this with flying colours. As a reader what are we to make of the situation. The standard line is that god is merciful for saving Isaac. To my uneducated eyes this is ‘saving’ in the same way that pulling a child that you’ve been dangling over a precipice is ‘saving’ them. Should that child have been put in that situation in the first place? I think we can call this sort of stunt ‘pulling a Michael Jackson’…

Sacrifice is a word that gets a lot of use in Genesis. We’ve had blood sacrifice of animals but at no previous time has human life been requested. If this was a punishment then something terminal would have happened so we cannot look at this event in this light. If god was truly merciful I would have imagined that a test of this nature could have been avoided, and maybe Abraham’s life alone would be put in the balance.

Unfortunately I can only come to the conclusion that this is an example for the reader – follow orders to the end, and be thankful if those orders aren’t unpleasant or immoral… and if they are, well, tough luck. I find it somewhat ironic that this fine example of ‘only following orders’ comes from the holy books of a people who were annihilated by a very efficient enemy that used exactly the same moral defence of their own actions. I also have to take the view that any Christian preacher who extols the virtues of Abraham is looking for you to suspend your own judgement in the face of a higher calling.

This is nothing, I repeat, nothing about mercy. If any other agent had made the request we would look at it as immoral. But it was god’s request, nothing god can do is immoral, god is always right. Millions of victims of Mao, Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot would certainly appreciate that line of though, a sentiment that we can trace back to the more insane of the Roman Emperors and beyond.