Cont…

The telling passage in my mind is Genesis 22:12 "Do not lay a hand on the boy," he said. "Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son."

Note the word FEAR, not devotion nor worship nor love. I think Abraham’s actions shamed a rampaging God. Another clue for me was that God does not directly address Abraham but the conversation was conducted via an angel of the Lord.

I may be wrong but there is no indication of Abraham ever directly speaking to God again, nor indeed of him ever speaking to Isaac or Ishmael. It would have been an interesting conversation between the two when they met again to bury their father.

I am left with the impression of trauma dealt to all parties concerned but a power shift and a maturation occurs in the relationship between God and humans.

Therefore I would contend that the 9/11 perpetrators erred if indeed they were taking their cue from the Isaac story in attempting through their actions to show their devotion to God because from my reading devotion had little to do with it.

Might I address your statement, “God sends a flood to punish mankind for its evil. However, a flood destroys all terrestrial life. What have sheep done wrong? Is God angry because they didn’t keep off the grass?”

Are the actions of God here really about punishment or pain mitigation? Consider Genesis 6:6 “The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain.”. Once again my impression differs from yours. Think of an artist painting over an incomplete image and starting over. A Godly reboot? The question that requires contemplation is whether the those ancient acts can be properly appraised as an evil by an evolved human moral paradigm?

The answer is possibly yes but gently.

I would like to think the concept of being able to sacrifice another comes from an age when slavery was acceptable, and even family members were considered chattel.
Sadly, it's still true that while old men cause wars, it's young men who have to fight them.
Is this an attitude we learnt from the example of our God?

Dear Grim,

I agree. Stories about Gallipolli soldiers joining at 15 years of age seemed to elicit admiration from many but reading about proud parents seeing them off even when they obviously knew their lad had lied about his age to enlist bewilders me. Sacrifices to the gods of nationalism and pride?

That is not to say the Abraham/Isaac story doesn’t have an even broader more modern resonance. How many parents sacrifice their children on the altar of ambition, pride or even calling? How many politicians upon retirement from power feel compelled to acknowledge the sacrifices made by their children? Why do so many families in Australia feel the need to have both parents working? Maybe reflecting on Abraham might give us cause to examine our own lives and the manner in which we justify our work/life decisions.

One may even see the metaphor of the ties that bound Isaac in our schools with their hours originally mimicking those of our factories. Our teachers spending more time with our children than we as working parents are able to. What is particularly sad and delusional are the justifications we use. We are doing what we need to to provide the best for our children.

Dear davidf,

Sorry if this is a little cheeky but after my post to Grim I can’t resist pointing out another disconnect.

You asked, “What have sheep done wrong? Is God angry because they didn’t keep off the grass?”

Are the sheep that grace your plate permitted to ask the same question of you?

Do you really believe the docking of an appendage is painless? If so let me try it with you? Can I place a constricting ring around your testicles? May I cut pieces of flesh from your body without aesthetic? May I round you up with dogs snapping at your heels and send you through dips then force various concoctions down your throat? Finally may I send you to the slaughterhouse tightly crammed in the rear of open trucks to face terror, death and dismemberment?

What wrong have we done to you that this is permissible? It is difficult for us to distinguish you from your deity who drowned us. Like images indeed.

Put the farmer, the slaughterman and the butcher between you and the knife and you get all sanctimonious about God and Abraham rather shouldn‘t you be standing shoulder to shoulder?

We do find it interesting that of all the creatures you might have picked to make your point you chose us sheep, or to press the point, a sacrificial lamb maybe?

Jesus davidf!

Baa!

Dear csteele,

The Bible is a narrative constructed of various legends first passed on by word of mouth. These legends were put together to at various times.

Critical exegesis of the Bible that in addition to the study of the formation of the Bible by analysing its language examines these legends by comparing it with what is known of the history at the time.

Some of the legends may have had a factual basis. Others such as the Book of Esther and the Book of Ruth appear to have no verification from other sources and are pure fiction.

Modern exegesis began in The Age of Reason in 1753 when Jean Astruc of the University of Paris published “Conjectures as to the Original Memoirs Which as it appears Moses used in composing the Book of Genesis.” Astruc had to be extremely careful as he could be accused of heresy in such a conjecture.

You wrote: “Think of where he [Abraham] was at. It was just ten generations ago that Noah was floating on an endless sea surrounded by the bloated bodies of all but a few of his fellow human beings.”

In the above you wrote assuming that Abraham had knowledge of the legend of the Flood and that the time chronicled in the Bible was real time. The world is much more than six thousand years old, but it is six thousand years old if we assume the reliability of Biblical chronology. Abraham may not have known of the legend of the Flood. If he did there is no reason to expect that he placed it in a time sequence ten generations back.

There are various hypotheses about the story of the Flood. In 1997, Ryan and Pitman from Columbia University published “Noah's Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event That Changed History“, a hypothesis according to which a massive flood through the Bosporus occurred in ancient times. They claim that the Black and Caspian Seas were vast freshwater lakes, but then about 5600 BC, the Mediterranean spilled over a rocky sill at the Bosporus.

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The King James Version translates Jehovah as Lord and Elohim as God. Many biblical scholars accept the Wellhausen thesis that the first five books were patched together from four main parts. J where Jehovah appears, E where Elohim appears, P for priestly (That contains all the begats) and D for Deuteronomy. The J document was written about 900 BCE and the E document that contains the story of the binding of Isaac about 800 BCE. The oldest part of the Bible is the Song of the Well dated about 1200 BCE. Those dates are 4,000 years later than the possible origin of the flood narrative.

Two horrible notes in the story of the binding of Isaac are that there was no reason given and Abraham did not question. God was the Supreme Fascist, and Abraham was the Supreme Order Follower.

I don’t think we have evolved in morals. It is less than two centuries that slavery was eliminated from the western world, but it still exists in other places. It is also estimated in that over 90% of the casualties in current armed conflicts are civilians. The twentieth century saw the totalitarian Nazis and Marxists take over great nations. The United States made torture illegal in the eighteenth century and brought it back in the twenty-first. According to “Torture” by Edward Peters ancient Greece, Roma and China practiced torture. Ancient Israel, India and Persia did not. Human behaviour was a mixed bag then. It is a mixed bag now. I don’t think we have an evolved human paradigm.

Dear csteele,

Why should you think that I believe a docking of an appendage is painless?

I don’t eat lobster because being dropped into boiling water is a horrid death. I don’t approve of cruelty to animals. As a child I lived in an area that abounded in deer. I disapprove of hunters going out and killing deer for sport. I see nothing wrong in killing a deer with a clean shot to feed a family.

I have nine descendents. Five are vegetarians. I eat meat sparingly.