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Atheist Bible Study
A podcast where two Atheists discuss the bible. We focus on the messages, textual inconsistencies, and pseudohistory that is often overlooked. Follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/AtheistStudy
Atheist Bible Study
Genesis 1: Everything is Eve's Fault
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For the very first episode of Atheist Bible Study, we look at Genesis Chapters 1-18. We talk about the creation myth, Noah's ark, incest, and circumcision. Find us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/AtheistStudy
Hey, everyone, I'm Nicole Demaree.
Ashton:And I'm Ashton Demaree.
Nicole:And welcome to our Atheist Bible Study, where two former Christians take a second look at what the Bible taught us growing up.
Ashton:Yeah, so this will be sort of a critical analysis of the stories and messages of the Bible, and all of the religions that are based on it, I'm also really interested in looking at the secular political interest of the writers and influence of the Bible and how that all plays into this. And we're gonna be looking a lot at the historical inaccuracies and inconsistencies throughout the Bible, to break down this idea that the Bible is inerrant and divinely inspired.
Nicole:And we're also going to be doing a wee bit of shit talking, mostly for therapeutic reasons.
Ashton:Yeah, this is our atheist safe space, to avoid ruining family dinners.
Nicole:And speaking of that, before we get into like talking about what edition we chose to read, we just want to make it like super clear that this is not an attack on individuals, but the religion itself and more importantly, the Bible.
Ashton:Right. We think it's really important to respect and treat people fairly in general. But we don't think that ideas are ever deserving of any kind of special respect. So if you avoid talking about things, just because people identify closely with those beliefs, we're not going to really be able to grow or learn or change anything.
Nicole:Yeah, absolutely. So Alright, let's talk about what edition we chose to read, because we really dive into some of the way things are worded. And that can get kind of complicated, because they're like so many editions of the Bible all with varying wordings.
Ashton:Right, so there were three main versions that I researched. Those were the King James Version, the New International Version, NIV. And the New Revised Standard Version NRSV. King James version was the first widely distributed Bible, it was translated in 1611, mostly translated by one individual. And since then it's been mostly unchanged. For that reason, it's really widely owned. Probably this is the one that your grandparents own and use. And it has a really loyal following. Among the those who use it,
Nicole:yeah, cuz it was the first ever made for the people. Because before that Bibles were mostly for only like holy men to read from like priests and such. So this was the first time where anybody could get their hands on this and read it. And since it's so old, people just think that that makes it closer to what it should be, even though it's still relatively far from the actual events that happen, because it like you said it was made or produced in 1611.
Ashton:Right for the New International Version, that one was translated in 1978. It was translated by 15 evangelical scholars based on the alexandrian textual manuscripts. And it generally prefers a interpretation and translation that is friendly to evangelical ideas. That's the one you'll commonly see in Protestant bookstores. Or if your church has a store where they sell Bibles or distribute them.
Nicole:Yeah. And so that's why we didn't want to choose that one is, even though it was translated by scholars and is like a fairly newer version, it there seemed to be some bias there towards the evangelical viewpoint.
Ashton:Yeah, and some obscuring of possibly what the original text were actually saying. Mm hmm. The last one is the nrsv version. That's the one we chose to use. It was translated in 1989 by a multifaith group of translators included Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, as well as Jews. And it's generally preferred by biblical scholars, and is also based on the Alexandrian text. It also attempts to use gender neutral language, for example, using person or people instead of man when man was intended to mean person or people.
Nicole:Yeah, like mankind. Yeah, we're here for that.
Ashton:Right. And this has been pretty heavily criticized by the Catholic Church as well as different Protestant denominations as well. Some of them really don't like that. Hmm. All right. So we start with the creation story, the one that everybody knows In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and so on.
Nicole:Amen.
Ashton:Amen Yeah. So I guess to summarize the story, God creates the world in seven days. He starts by creating The Earth itself in the heavens, and then he creates day and night and then later creates the sun, which doesn't make any sense, hmm. And he creates the waters and the animals, and he creates people. And then interestingly, the story starts over. After the seven days, they start again from the beginning and tell the story without breaking it into seven days. But this time in the telling, it's a little bit different. And I have some more to talk about that later. But it is an interesting note that they seem to start the story all over again, and tell it a little bit differently.
Nicole:And they do that a lot in Bible, honestly,
Ashton:Yeah, there's a lot to be discussed about why that happens. So Adam, in the second telling, at least, there's this very personal idea of God creating Adam and sculpting him from clay. He's the first and then later, Eve created from Adam's rib. And Adam, names her Eve. Yeah, like his pet.
Nicole:Yeah, like all the other animals that he rules over. Yeah, I think the main thing that I take issue with in this story is like, and this I used to see, this as like a positive thing. And it's that we're taught this so that we believe that humans are on this earth to rule the world. And like, we own everything and everything that we do, we have a right to do that to the earth, because this was all made for us. So whatever we want to do with it, however, we want to fuck it up. Like, it's ours for us to do. And I mean, there is kind of like this idea where God wants us to like, take care of things. But I think what really gets the message that gets driven home more than this is our world to take care of. It's that this is our world to own. And this was made for us. And yeah, I like, after we like the book, Ishmael started to, like, really question that idea for myself. And like, I don't really view the world that way anymore. Like I again, I guess, you know, there's obviously something tiny bit more special about us than other animals. And that is just because of our big brains and our communication skills and things like that. But I still don't think that that necessarily makes us better than and that we should go around thinking that we, it's our right to do what we're doing.
Ashton:Yeah, I think that might be one of the most harmful aspects of Genesis and the Old Testament. It has really created what we have modern day with our- with the christian right, really this universal denial of climate change. And even if they accept it, a disinterest in doing anything about it, because this is our earth to do with what we will and it's going to be gone anyways, because the revelations are gonna, you know, the world's gonna end soon, and God's gonna make it happen. So...
Nicole:Yea, when I say Ishmael, I mean, like, I'm pretty sure the author is Daniel Quinn. I'm not talking about because obviously, there's person in the Bible named Ishmael to but talking about a separate book.
Ashton:So let's move forward to the original sin story. You want to talk about that?
Nicole:Oh, yeah, that's my favorite. Um, so basically, woman, ruined everything for everybody. As always, through out all the Bible stories. So Eve gets tempted by the serpent to taste the fruit of the tree of good and evil Knowledge of Good and Evil, which is the one thing God said that they couldn't do. And so she tries, it realizes it's not that bad, and then gives it to Adam and Adam tries it and then they realize that they're naked, and that they need a cover up, and then God finds out what happens and then kicks them out
Ashton:Kind of the message here seems to be one, it's the tree of knowledge. So in seeking knowledge and understanding, we have sinned against God.
Nicole:Yeah. Okay, hold on. Obviously, we have lot to say about that, but I need to backtrack a little bit and go back to before how we mentioned how Eve is created from Adam. And its from his side. And I want to talk about that really briefly. because growing up as a woman in the church, you kind of like always like, so am i less than a man and they always kind of try to like, massage it. So they're like, because I was made from Adam's side, and not his foot, that I am equal to him, because the side somehow makes me makes me equal to him, which makes no sense because if I were truly to be equal to Adam, we would be made, I don't know, at the same time and from the same substance. So that leads me to a really interesting side story that isn't in this version of the Bible. It's a story of Lilith. She shows up before as like, just like a demon woman who has sex with demons and men and kills babies and pregnant women. And then her story kind of transforms in this account. It's called like the alphabet of Ben Sira. And in that version, which is my favorite, she is made from the clay the same as Adam. And she sees herself as equal to Adam, which Adam does not like. And basically the story goes is she when they're having sex, she wants to be on top. And Adam won't let her he likes to have her on the bottom and says that she should fulfill her wifely duties and stay on the bottom. And so she gets so fed up with Adam's bullshit that she says it's basically she says the Lord's name. So she says Yahweh. And then this gives her magical powers because she spoke the word of Lord gives her wings that she can so she flies like jams out of the garden of Eden, then God says she needs to come back, or I'm gonna kill like 100 of her babies every single day or something like that. And so basically three angels go after her and she tells them all right, I won't. I won't kill children, as long as they're wearing like my amulet of protection. She's kind of like a feminist icon, if you ask me. And she is used that like later on, like women mostly just kind of look at the fact that, you know, she's just someone seeking independence and didn't see herself as beneath a man. And so yeah, that's the origin story of Lilith. And then they were like, sorry, well, I guess we'll make you another girl, then Adam. And that's how they make Eve.
Ashton:Okay, punk rock.
Nicole:Yeah. And that is also how some people bridge the connection between the two creation stories is because like, he made. Sorry, man and woman that was the first woman that he made. And then obviously, they messed up and made it too much of an independent woman and tried to make Eve the next time. Yeah. Yeah. And so anyways, I guess what I'm really getting at is like, no matter how you try to work it, the fact that in this version woman is made from man, and it's not like her own separate thing. It's like, that's always gonna be used, like against woman as like a sexist thing. Like, there's really, I just don't see how you can like, ignore that. And like, kind of look away from that as seeing it as like, Oh, well, because it was from his side that makes you equal like, now you made as a piece of him, and then he named you. So,
Ashton:Right. And that's not even really what is taught in churches, is that they're actually equally, they spin it in a different way. But moving back to wait.
Nicole:And then I have one more weird thing that I was taught. So I was also taught that because because Adam lost a rib or whatever to make Eve that like women can do this one thing that man can't and that somehow, like proves that this story is real. It's like something like so women can like, bend their torso, like a certain way or something like that. And that if you try to get a man to do it, then he can't do it. And that's because he was like missing that rib or whatever.
Ashton:Man has the exact same number of ribs, as women. I just want to make that clear. for everyone. That's a scientific fact.
Nicole:I'm pretty sure they would have us like demonstrate this too. And I feel like there were I mean, there were boys. I guess I can call them boys at the time since we were young, who like couldn't do it. And I just feel like it was just because like they just weren't as flexible or something like it was Yeah,
Ashton:yes. Anyways,
Nicole:okay, now we can go back to
Ashton:The original sin story.
Nicole:Yeah.
Ashton:Did you have anything else about that, that you wanted to talk about?
Nicole:Oh, about the fact that it's a problem that it's it's Eve who is the one
Ashton:I mean? I think we've - that's pretty clear to everybody what they're trying to say. And that's common in a lot of mythologies. But my favorite line from Genesis so far, is"Who told you you were naked?" Priceless. That's my favorite line. It It sounds like a hostage situation. It sounds like God just like (he likes to look at Adam and Eve) as his like, little naked man and women that I don't know what he's doing with these two, but he has them running around watching them and then they're like, hey we put some clothes on. He's like, "Who told you you were naked? you been talking to that serpent?" You know?
Nicole:No, yeah. Okay, I made a note about this too. It's so weird that we're taught this story of like, God intended for you to be naked, like that is your original form. And it's our like, pride or embarrassment or whatever that makes us cover up. But then yet the religion takes it so so far that we should always be covered up like women especially like you need to cover them titties like dresses past your knees. You know, not all churches, you know, but like that is kind of the thing that is taught to women is that you need to be conservative, like cover yourself up for the Lord, but like the Lord wanted us naked.
Ashton:Yeah. That's another one of those things. It's
Nicole:so weird how that just got like quite
Ashton:you can't really like mesh those things together. Yes
Nicole:using that's like all of the Bible. There's so many things that it's like you said this, but now you're saying this?
Ashton:Yep. Another line that I think is really interesting and I want to hear what you thought about it. Mm hmm. In God's discussion of the punishment for man and women for eating of the fruit, he tells Eve that she will have more pain in childbirth. Hmm. And then he tells her that your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you. Yeah. And, for the husband Because you listened to your wife. Yeah, that's the end of that line is because you listened to your wife. What do you think about all that?
Nicole:right, so basically, that your, what they're trying to say is, man, if you listen to your wife, rather than to God, then you're going to be punished for that. And then the other thing they're trying to say is like, some kind of like origin story, like some kind of like, you know, what myths do? I mean, the whole Bible is a myth. But to explain why women have a hard time giving children, which like, it's not that really hard to understand why women have a painful experience giving birth to children, because we have fat heads that have to come out of a tiny hole. And like, I don't, I'm trying to imagine. So say we didn't do that. And Eve has her first child in the Garden of Eden. So her childbirth is gonna look different, like, does her vagina just get so huge, so they can just reach inside and pull? You know what I mean? Like?
Ashton:Yeah, it's just such
Nicole:a weird way to be like, you know why it hurts when you have a kid?
Ashton:You've done fucked up.
Nicole:And sorry, yeah, I guess like, this is just like the start to this whole, like propaganda against women that we need to be like, beneath men. And we should just look to our guys to lead us and show us the way.
Ashton:Yeah, the line about your desire shall be for your husband, how do you interpret the word desire?
Nicole:Like you only? What do you mean? Like you only want to have sex with your husband?
Ashton:Yeah, is that how you understand it? Yeah, I guess. Okay. That's what I was. I thought that was a weird line and I was trying to make sense of it. So I did some research on this. And some people do interpret it that way. They, they understand it as a sexual desire. Mm hmm. For her husband, but that results in the pain of birth. But the more common understanding of this from what I found is that word desire is not meant to be about sex at all. Okay? The word desire because a sexual desire for your husband generally considered to be a good thing and wanting to have children. That's a good thing, generally, in most religious faith, the word desire here is very similar to the use of the word desire, later on in a Cain and Abel story. So God says to Cain, why are you angry? And why has your face fallen? If you do, well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door, its desire is for you, but you must rule over it. So it's sort of this animalistic. sin wants you it wants to get you Mm hmm. And most of them interpret the other desire, using that phrasing from Cain and Abel to try to understand it as being she desires for his position. The woman wants to be man's equal, wants to be able to rule the household as well wants to have all of what man has and that is a sin to desire after the man's position and for man's part his new sinful nature that is added to him is that that of being a benevolent ruler, he will now try to be controlling and a sort of brute as a man instead of this nice benevolent, but still in charge, man.
Nicole:Oh my God, I hate them for that. Because they basically like wrote it in to be like Yeah, I get I get that you want to be equal to me that it's in the Bible, that that's what you want. but you can't
Ashton:it's very explicit. So and that's not just me as an atheist putting spin to try to interpret it the worst way possible. That is when I was looking into it, the most common understanding of what that line means by both Christians and Jews.
Nicole:Yeah, man, I mean, we're gonna have to do a whole episode on like things that made us like what actually turned our head away from religion, but God add that one to the books for me.
Ashton:All right, let's get out of Eden. Okay, so they get kicked out of Eden for all that. And where do we go next?
Nicole:We go to Cain and Abel so they have so they. Adam knows his wife. And they have Cain and Abel. So cain is a farmer. Abel is a shepherd And they both make an offering of like what they do to God. So Cain gives some stuff from his farm and Abel gives one of his sheeps. And God really likes Abel's. And he tells Cain to fuck off that he doesn't want his plants. So Cain gets really upset about this kills his brother over it. And this is this is my favorite part of the line in the Bible is when God asks the our all seeing God, you know, our omniscient God asks Cain, a like, Where is your brother? What have you done to him? And Cain says to God, bitch, Do I look like my brother's keeper?
Ashton:One of the most quotable lines.
Nicole:That's a direct (quote) no just kidding. So then God curses, Cain banishes him, but he also makes it a rule where if anybody kills Cain, that he'll be doubly cursed. or seven, seven foldly cursed, which brings up a lot of questions, you know, because who is Cain so afraid of killing him? Like the only people we know exist Are Adam and Eve, and then their two sons. Those are the only mentioned in the bible of like people that God has created. But now cain is all of a sudden worried that if he's banished that people are going to hunt him. And so I did some digging for once. Oh, yeah. And I found that some people think that Adam and Eve did have other children before Cain and Abel, they just weren't of any notable mention, like nothing really happened to them. And Cain and Abel were the first who had like a significant story to tell. So they just like, didn't talk about those older brother and sisters. And then that also kind of answered his question is like, later on, it goes into like, Cain finds a wife and they go into the lineage and everything. And that's another thing is like, who did Cain marry? Like, they just go through this lineage, just they had a wife, and then they had a wife, and then occasionally there'll be like, in their wife's name was this, but there is no reason for us to understand, like, where these other people are coming from.
Ashton:Yeah, my only comment that I had on the Cain and Abel story, is... God essentially tells Cain, that he will be a wanderer and not have a home. That's sort of the prophecy or the command that he has to leave the Garden, well, they're not in the Garden of Eden anymore, but he has to leave. And he has to wander the desert forver. And then it goes on to say that Cain essentially founds a village, and he marries, he settles in, has land, and he's got a whole people that are birthed from Cain. So it doesn't really make any sense. Either Cain rejected God's commandment or God's prophecy just didn't come true. I thought that was strange. That's all I really had to say about it.
Nicole:Yeah, so Ishmael also addresses this story. And he uses this idea of takers and leavers to kind of explain it. So takers are people who till the land and farm and leavers are people who don't do that. They leave the land alone. So in this story, Cain represents takers, and Abel represents leavers, okay. This is actually a leaver story. So the leavers use this as an explanation for why the other group of people, the takers, are killing them. So they explain it as the takers who are descendant who think they are descendants of Adam and Eve. And they think that Adam and Eve ate from the tree of good and evil, and so that they now know the difference between good and evil, they have God's knowledge of what is good and what is evil, therefore, whatever they do and whatever they deem good is actually good. And also, they think that they were kicked out of the garden of Eden, where everything was just given to them. And so now they're cursed to this life where they have to till the land and fend for themselves. So the takers are farmers who think that they know everything and that whatever they do is good. And so, that's how the leavers explain why the takers are killing them, because the takers think that they have a right to the land and that if these people are there, they can just kill them. And it doesn't mean anything to them because they have the knowledge of God.
Ashton:So from Ishmael's perspective, is this like a leaver story, but it somehow just slipped its way into the takers history?
Nicole:Yeah, so they go into that and in the book. So it's a leaver story that was eventually appropriated by the takers because they didn't successfully kill off all of the leavers. And so their story stuck around and circulated until eventually, like, the takers took it as their own.
Ashton:Okay, interesting.
Nicole:Yeah. And then another interesting thing, too, is it's also theorized that the mark of Cain is white skin. So anybody with white skin was to be seen as like, that was a warning sign to the leavers to stay away from people with white skin because they're takers, and they're going to kill you for your land.
Ashton:Mmm, okay.
Nicole:Makes sense when you put it like that, huh?
Ashton:Yeah. It's really interesting, because it does seem to counter what my intuition would would say, I guess the common intuition is that the Bible and Christianity are very closely associated with agriculture and farming. And this is sort of the opposite of that.
Nicole:Right. That's why I when I read this initial, it totally blew my mind because it made everything make a little more sense when you think about it as this is an actually one of our stories. This is someone else's story. And we just did a really bad job of making it our own
Ashton:Hmm.
Nicole:Yeah. Also, if you got really confused listening to that, I encourage you to read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. They do a much better job of explaining it. I basically condensed several pages into two or three minutes.
Ashton:So the only other thing I had of note from sort of after Eden segment of the Bible, is Nephalem. You remember that word?
Nicole:The Nephalem roamed the world?
Ashton:Yes. So the Nephalem, it says here. Genesis 6:4, "the Nephalem were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God went into the daughters of humans who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown." So essentially, angels had sex with women on earth. And they created Angel, human crossbreeds, known as Nephalem. And further it says that these were the heroes of old. I mean, that's, that's mythology. That's like...
Nicole:Yeah, that seems straight up out of like, other religions. Yeah. Like this is like Hercules. And they say like, these are our heroes of old, right? That's every Greek myth.
Ashton:Right, which all came later than this. But it does sort of reinforce this idea that these... Christianity and Islam and Judaism, are seen as very distinct from a lot of these mythologies still had a lot of the same ideas. They're popular ideas for people to come up with and they end to be found in almost every religion. But I thought it was really interesting, because I don't remember ever learning about that in church. It's not something, it's something that gets skipped over intentionally because it's embarrassing. They don't like the idea of angels having sex with humans because it feels mythological. And also a little bit polytheist.
Nicole:Yeah. And like, we'll get into this more and like later shortly, but something that I started to realize, too, as we're now reading the Bible again, is, I thought I knew the Bible backwards and forth, but there's definitely some stuff that they never talk about. Like, maybe we read the passage, and then they don't, that's not what the homily is on. Like, it's on another thing.
Ashton:Yeah. So we get to Noah and his family and the entire story of the ark.
Nicole:Yeah, and basically, the story of Noah and the Ark is God doesn't like what's going on on earth, He thinks everybody's evil. So he tells them, he tells one person, Noah who he likes, he's gonna wipe out the earth. And so Noah should build an ark. So he's gonna flood the world, and then Noah has to bring like two of each animal onto the boat. So he floods the earth, they're on the ark for a while, then he sends a dove to find the land and then rainbows. This is how God made rainbows to promise that he was never going to flood the earth ever again. Alright, so here's some kind of like wild out there things that I was taught about the ark itself. So there was a videotape that I was shown from my Protestant friends, not from the Catholic friends, that dinosaurs who were on the ark. So people were alive when dinosaurs were. And another one that I heard was that - so one of the big questions is like, how did he get one of every single kind of animal that we know today exist? And so like one explanation that was given to me for that was that animals actually evolved on the boat. They were on the boat long enough for like them to evolve into other species. And this is me all going off of like memory, so I may just be like completely misquoting the things that I was taught, but this is what I have retained of the things that were like shown to me in my youth. So yeah, those are just some of the weirder things that I was told about the ark.
Ashton:Yeah, you're gonna have to get pretty creative if you want any Bible make any sense with modern science.
Nicole:Oh, and I also - Okay, this one. I don't know where this one comes from. But this is also something that I have in my head is like a thing. And it might come from the movie that was made off of no on the ark. But I remember somewhere along the line being told that it was like a rule on the boat -l ike if you were on Noah's Ark, that you could not have sex while you were on the ark.
Ashton:I mean, it's not written in Genesis.
Nicole:No, it's not in the one that we read. I just remember that. And I have a couple of those were things that like they weren't they're not in the version that were reading, but I remember it being a thing and I don't know where it came from. So that's probably from the movie, probably got that from the movie.
Ashton:It was in the movie. Christians hate that movie.
Nicole:Yeah.
Ashton:So, can we get to "Naked Noah"?
Nicole:Yeah, alright. Do you want me to explain that story? Yeah, okay. So the story of naked Noah is a doozy. So what happens is, Noah drinks a lot. He gets really, really drunk and he passes out naked. Then Ham comes along and sees his father's - sees his father naked, leaves and tells his brothers "Hey, I just saw dad naked." His brothers come back without looking at Noah. They don't look at him because
they're not gay. :No homo, bro" They cover up their father without looking at him. And then they leave or whatever. And then no one wakes up and somehow finds out that Ham saw him naked and gets really pissed about it and curses Hams son, Canaan, and says that his descendants will be slaves forever. Discuss.
Ashton:So the literal understanding of this story makes no sense. As you pointed out, how would he know that Ham had seen him naked from waking up? It's an extreme punishment for seeing someone naked? So a more accurate understanding of that is that he did not just see him naked.
Nicole:Oh, see I - I saw some things like this. And I was like, I don't even want to go down here.
Ashton:Oh, we're going there. So foreshadowing to Leviticus, the same phrasing is used later in the Old Testament when you're talking about sexual intercourse, you say, "saw their nakedness." That's what that phrase generally meant at the time. It was a common euphemism.So most likely, what happened was that Noah was drunk and asleep and Ham raped him while he was asleep. This is where the story gets interesting. And I credit a lot of this discussion to Rabbi David Frankel at Torah.com, where I found it. The passage says "when Noah saw what his youngest son had done to him..." Ham is not Noah's youngest son, Japheth is in fact Noah's youngest son. He then goes on to say, "cursed be Canaan, lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers." And when he goes later to bless Shem and Japheth, it explicitly says that Canaan will be a slave to Shem, and Shem is not Canaan's brother. Canaan is Ham's son and Noah's grandson, and Canaan's brother is Egypt.
Nicole:Okay, so like a lot of like - did they just like mispeak, or...?
Ashton:So, it's possible that there was a mistake in the editing that occurred somewhere along the lines.
Nicole:But that's like quite a few mistakes, right? Right, that's like, one calling Ham, your youngest son when he's not, and then also saying, like messing up another relationship too in there.
Ashton:Right. So what is believed to have happened or what Rabbi David Frankel suggests may have happened is that this was originally a story about Ham and Canaan and would have occurred later in Genesis when Ham gets introduced. Mm hmm. Somewhere along the lines, it was edited and became a story about Noah and Ham. If that's the case, it seems you would just make Ham the one to get cursed. Right? But this is kind of where the political interests of the Israelites comes in. Because that telling of the story with Ha m and Canaan would make the Canaanites slaves to Egypt. Okay, in this telling the story, even though it's about Ham and Noah, if you maintain Canaan, the one being cursed. You make Canaan, the slave of Shem and it's believed that the Israelites are descendants of Shem.
Nicole:Okay.
Ashton:So what the editor was really trying to do here is to maintain the idea that the Canaanites are the God ordained slaves to the Israelites. That the Israelites are they're masters, and that is a God ordained relationship. The other thing that's really interesting is that they also very explicitly say that Shem and Japheth walk backwards with a blanket to avoid looking at Noah, which is strange, considering the understanding that Noah was raped by Ham.
Unknown:Mm hmm.
Ashton:So that was likely another edit that took place to sort of make this a little more PC of a story, it seems like - to make it a little more palatable.
Nicole:So yeah, they didn't like the rape, so they were like, actually, this is a story about him seeing him and he really did freak out over him seeing him naked, not because he raped him.
Ashton:Right, which just sort of makes the story read a bit bizarre.
Nicole:Right. That kind of feels like the whole story in itself, it just feels... If both of those edits, if it got edited twice, to somehow fit a different story, they left so many mistakes behind, it's just so obvious that they changed it,
Ashton:Right, I think that really comes out of the fact that this is probably not one editor that did all this. And there were probably some of these things were intentional and some of them were also actual mistakes. And other editors didn't know how to sort of make all these mistakes mesh together and left it as it was.
Nicole:Yeah, it's funny too, because either way you look at it, whether you think like it was edited or not edited, there's still a ton of mistakes that don't make sense in there.
Ashton:Right. And it should erode your trust in the idea of this book being the Word of God.
Nicole:Yeah. And okay, so earlier, you mentioned how like, this story may have been edited, and use to explain like, why Canaanites were slaves. And we can see in our own American history that this is used for that same purpose again. So in the start of America, when we brought people over from Africa to work our farms, and do everything for us, this story is used again to explain why Black people are slaves, like it's used by white people to justify why it's okay for us to make Black people our slaves. And they teach it as Black people are descendants from Ham, and so that's why we get to do this, which is super fucked up. And it bothers me - our ancestors did that, we did that shit, and people today will say, that's not the Bible's fault. That's, man interpreting the Bible in that way and like taking it out of the way it should be used, or whatever. You know, that's like always the thing is like, religion - my favorite quote from the Da Vinci Code, religion isn't flawed, man is flawed - or, "religion is flawed, because man is flawed." And, I don't care like if you think that's the fault of man, that shit is still in the Bible to be taken that way by somebody. It's saying in the Bible that some people were intended to serve other people and be inferior and be slaves. And if that - to a larger point of that is, if you can sit there and say that,"that's fucked up, people shouldn't be slaves", and everybody in america should be saying that slavery is wrong. So, if you can sit there and say that nobody should be a slave to another person, then you can decide for yourself like, morally, that's wrong. And then why do you need this book to tell you the difference between good and evil? If you can pick that out of the book and say, like, I think this is wrong, then. Then clearly, you don't need to be told what is good and bad, because you know, what is good and bad.
Ashton:Right. It's sort of like, pick a story. Because on one hand, you have Christians saying, "Look, a religion has what it has in it, and then people are going to interpret that however they want, and go and do good or evil, because they're humans, and that's what they do." But on the other hand, you have them saying you NEED religion, you need Christianity, in order to have morals. They use whichever one works for them in the in the given discussion. All right. Well, I guess that's"Naked Noah".
Nicole:Mm hmm.
Ashton:It's a fun one. The next thing that I have here is the Tower of Babel.
Nicole:Yeah.
Ashton:So the tower of Babel, is a story in which the people of all the world, essentially, were coming together and building this great city. And they were going to build a tower to the sky, so that they could...
Nicole:Reach - I learned it as reach God, like they wanted to build a tower to the heavens.
Ashton:Yeah, I think I remember- So, in the original teaching to me as a Christian, it was sort of this idea that they were prideful and they wanted to be equals with God. I didn't really get that from the words in Genesis. They wanted to build a great tower for all of the world. And God says, "nope, we're gonna scramble up your languages. So you all speak different languages." And so this is the idea of how the world ends up with all kinds of different languages. In reality, we can track pretty well the evolution of different languages throughout history. So obviously this, isn't it. But..
Nicole:Yeah, again, I think this like further underlines that the Bible is a myth and this is a myth made up to explain something that we didn't understand at the time, which is where languages came from.
Ashton:Yes. But what I what I like about this story, is that it's kind of playful.
Nicole:Haha, okay, tell me why.
Ashton:I don't know, it's - it just feels like this playful rivalry, like God... So the quote I have from it is "God looks at them and says, 'Look, they are one people, and they have all one language. And this is only the beginning of what they will do. Nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.'" And then he scrambles up their languages and makes them all speak different languages. And I don't know, it just feels very much more personal than you see God in other parts of it. And it's like, "these rascals trying to build a tower, I'll get 'em."
Nicole:Yeah. It is just weird when you read it. It's just like, why God?
Ashton:Yeah, "nothing will be impossible to them, and I can't have that."
Nicole:Yeah. To me it just says God hates teamwork and tall towers. And he loves to be divisive. So I got the same message that you did growing up there. This is just supposed to be because this was punishment for being prideful.
Ashton:Yeah, I didn't have anything else on that. I just thing it's a funny story. So we're moving to all of the stories about Abram and Sarai.
Nicole:So it starts with God - I mean, there's lots of people in the world right now. But God seems to really, really jam with Abra and Sarai with an "I". And so he wants to give them all these things. And he says, he's going to give them land and lots of descendants - I not the descendants part is in there yet. But basically, the first story we hear about them is they go to Egypt and Abraham thinks that his wife is so hot that if the Pharaoh knows that, that's his wife, he will kill Abraham for his wife. So he says, "Hey, honey, will you do this favor for me? Will you tell them when we get there that you are my sister? And she goes, Okay." So they get there, everybody thinks she's super hot. Pharaoh is like"sweet, a hot single lady. I will give Abraham a ton of gifts for her and I will take her as one of my wives." And then the Pharaoh starts getting like, cursed and he doesn't understand why until he finds out it's because Sarah is not a hot single lady. She is a hot married lady. And so, yeah, when you read this, from this version, I think the - the dialogue is so funny to me. Like, he's basically like,"Dude, why did you do this?" He's like, "I wouldn't have fucking cared if she was your wife. Like, and I would have not tried to have sex with her." Yeah, he finds out. He's like,"whatever, dude, like, just get the fuck out of here. Like, I don't care." And then he gets to leave with his wife and all of the gifts that the pharaoh gave him for his wife. And they just get off scot-free.
Ashton:Yep, I, that's another - it's another one of those, where it's like, "You're omniscient God looked down, and he had no idea that the reason Pharaoh was having sex with Sarai was because Abram lied. And he decides it looks to me like Pharaoh is the one at fault." It's either God is omniscient, and he knows, but he still thinks Pharaoh is responsible for this. Or he just doesn't know for some reason, and it doesn't make any sense. It's a bizarre story.
Nicole:And the moral is, if you pimp out your wife, nothing bad will come of it.
Ashton:Yeah, not for you.
Nicole:as long as you are chosen by God.
Ashton:As long as you're chosen. Another thing about this- So I looked into like, I'm trying to understand what this is. What they're trying to say, and why was this included? What is the purpose? And some of the things I saw that kind of make sense, are that it's sort of, whether it happened or not, it's just put in there to make you have a sense for the idea that Egypt was not a God-fearing place.
Nicole:Yeah. And they kind of, again later
Ashton:These are people that don't fear God and so Abram can't feel safe bringing his wife in there. He doesn't know what people are going to do. And also sexism because Abram protecting himself is more important than his wife having a choice in who she's going to have sex with
Nicole:Yeah, okay, so they leave Egypt and they want to have a kid and they haven't had one yet. And they're both like getting up there and yours. And both of them on separate occasions are like, told my god that they are going to - God is going to give them a son and they both kind of like laugh at this. Now, I feel like I haven't having like the Mandela effect happened to me multiple times. Because this is another thing where it wasn't - I didn't see any of it in this version of the Bible. But I definitely remember it being a thing, where when Sarai - so they both laugh, but when Sarah is the one who laughs, that God punishes her and doesn't let her like speak or doesn't let her laugh or something until she has the kid.
Ashton:I've never heard of that. So there's two separate points where Sarai laughs. They both laugh once, and then Sarah laughs later.
Nicole:Okay. Yeah, I just. I don't know, I should have looked into it more. I thought maybe you might have heard it too.
Ashton:No, I've never heard that.
Nicole:That was something, where it was like - but yeah, okay, this no, I did look into it. And then when I looked it up, all the discussion was about how God didn't punish her. But yeah, like, I don't, I don't know where I'm getting this shit from. But I definitely remember there being like a thing where it's like, God was like, well, you laughed at me. Now you can't speak until you have the kid.
Ashton:Weird. Yeah, well, it is possible - I mean, that people just interpreted based on the fact that he doesn't speak again in the Bible until she has Isaac. I'm pretty sure that's true. So yeah, she tells Abram to take her slave girl, Hagar.
Nicole:Which means, do you know what it means? Hagar means, in Egypt, it means like stranger.
Ashton:Okay. Well she tells him"take my slave girl Hagar and have a child with Hagar or have sex with Hagar. And you can have an heir through Hagar, and I will consider that my child." And so he does. And then they have Ishmael and God prophesizes that Ishmael will also be a father of Nations.
Nicole:Yeah. And I think that another thing to note in there is that Hagar, once she becomes pregnant, she kind of starts to like, look down on Sarai. And Sarai gets really mad about this, Sarai with an "I", and she's gets super pissed and tells her husband. Her husband, Abraham is just like, "Whatever. She's a slave, do whatever you want to her." So Sarah beats her. And then - beats her so bad that then Hagar runs away. And that's when God is like, "hey, go back to your master. Your son's gonna be, be really" - well, he doesn't say he's gonna be awesome. He says that he's basically gonna fight a bunch of people. He's gonna be a really rough child, and that everybody he meets he's gonna have problems with, but he will have lots of descendants and rule a nation.
Ashton:Yeah, okay. I remember that now.
Nicole:Yeah.
Ashton:Okay.
Nicole:That's like maybe my least favorite story. It's just like, there's just a lot of like, women - Again, it's just, there's just no good - So far, there is no good female protagonist in the Bible at all. Like, all these women are just like, okay, yeah, we'll do your thing, that's really cool with me, we'll do that. Yeah. And then in this, it's just, you know, women being jealous of other women for having kids and then just doesn't sound very compelling to me as a woman listener or reader of this.
Ashton:Yeah. The next thing from this,
Nicole:God says, cut your penis skin and also y'all get new names.
Ashton:Yes, that's - okay, so that's where we get into circumcision. Where God tells - renames him Abraham and does he name Sarai again at the same?
Nicole:Sarai is no longer Sarai with an "I". She's Sarah, s-a-r-a.
Ashton:Right. So he renames them both and makes a covenant with Abraham, in which Abraham must circumcise himself and all the men in his house, including Ishmael. Interestingly, it's not only a thing in the Jewish faith, there has been circumcision practice in African cultures and elsewhere throughout the world, as well. But this is the supposed source in the Jewish faith.
Nicole:Yeah, I know you haven't seen this movie but in the movie year one, they like - they play out the scene and kind of like imagine like, what it would be like for all the men to hear, Abraham come out. So basically, Abraham comes out and says, like, "Hey, everyone, I just got this message from God. We need to cut our dicks up." And it was like, "what, why? Like, and he's like, I don't know. God says that we need to do this to show our love for him. And then I think that's at the point where like, it's like jack, Jack Black and... What's that skinny dudes name? Michael Cera. I think that's when they like dip out of the village at that point, when everybody starts cutting their penis skin off.
Ashton:Nice.
Nicole:Yeah.
Ashton:Yeah that - I thought this was really interesting. I did a lot of research into circumcision after this, because it is a really weird thing to bring up in the Bible. And this is such an important thing to go ahead and circumcise your penis. So I was sort of looking into why - what circumcision means. So a couple of things I came up with was, it is sort of a patriarchal thing. It's this-It's only men who do this. It's a male only covenant with God, thank God, they symbolize their covenant with God, through their penises. And going along with that, in the Jewish faith, specifically Orthodox Jews, other not all Jews, they'll practice this, but only a circumcised man and read from the Torah, the oral tradition of the Torah. And go up to the front during their services,and read. Orthodox Jews do not allow uncircumcised men or women to read from the Torah. That would be a - an embarrassment. It would hurt the sense of reverence in the room if you had a woman walking up there and speaking in front of them. Additionally, there is this idea that they're sacrificing pleasure in the name of their devotion to God, because it is true that your foreskin contains a lot of your sensory cells.
Nicole:And like lube to, right? Doesn't it help with lubrication?
Ashton:Yeah, it helps the lubrication. And when you when you circumcise yourself, there is nerve damage that is done. So you will not have the same level of pleasure once you circumcised yourself. And this goes going forward in history. The Greeks were very anti circumcision. There were Jews among them who circumcised themselves and the Greeks did not like it. So much, in fact, that they at some point made it illegal to circumcise yourself. But they didn't like it for a couple of reasons. One was that it hurt the amount of pleasure you could have during sex. They were really about pleasure. The other was that a man in Greek culture, interestingly enough, is not considered naked unless his prepuce is retracted.
Nicole:I'm not familiar with uncircumcised penises. So are you trying to say - does it come out? I know there's like a little like, kind of covers it like a little hood, almost. Are you saying that it comes out of that?
Ashton:Yes. So a circumcised penis when a man is erect, it will come out of that. Additionally, if a man is peeing and he is circumcised, he doesn't need to retract that otherwise, he's gonna make a mess.
Nicole:Okay, so that goes to like, why I was taught that God said to do this, and it was for cleanliness. Because apparently, if you don't clean it properly, you can get infections and stuff. So the solution for God and people at that time, I guess, was just cut it off, and then you don't have to worry about cleaning it.
Ashton:Yeah, that is a popular secular understanding of why circumcision was popular in various cultures, the idea of cleanliness and preventing infection. So another thing about this is that many Greek - or, many Jewish boys living in ancient Greece, and Rome, would try to cover up their circumcision. So you could do this by pulling what remains of the foreskin, because the ancient style of circumcision did not remove as much, you could still pull the skin over - pull the skin over and make it look like they had an uncircumcised penis. That allowed them to participate in things like, what's the word... Gymnasia, in which the practice was to be -
Nicole:-The Olympics, right?
Ashton:Yeah, Olympics, or not necessarily at, like, major games, but to do those kinds of things. Because the practice was to be naked. So, many Jewish boys would try to cover it up. The Rabbi's did not like this at all. They introduced a new practice, called pariah. It's a second step in the circumcision. It causes significantly more neurological damage. And it didn't allow - there was nothing you could do once you have this done. There's no way you're covering up your circumcision. And I'm going to read a quote from how this occurs. "Periah consists of tearing and stripping back the remaining inner mucosal lining of the foreskin from the glands and then by use of a sharp fingernail or implement removing all of the inner mucosal tissue, including the excising and removal of the frenulum from the underside of the glands." That makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. As a circumcised man, terrifying. That sounds excruciating, and it does cause, I think I said already, it causes much more nerve damage. It's completely irreversible.
Nicole:Yeah, there is a couple of words in there that I am not familiar with, but I did understand the word fingernail and that's nasty.
Ashton:This, the Periah
Nicole:-Oh, okay, so what is done today? Are you gonna get into that?
Ashton:That's what I was just about to get into. Periah is what is practiced today by most medical circumcisions done in the US and abroad. Now some discussion on the medical aspects of circumcision. There is some evidence that it can prevent things like urinary tract infections and can help with the spread of HIV. The American Association of Pediatrics states that the benefits are sufficient to - for them to support allowing it as an option in hospitals, but they do not support it being universally practiced on all males. So basically, they're saying that, like, there are some benefits. In general, their medical opinion would probably be no, what I understand from it, but there's enough debate about it, that they think that they can have it as an option and let people decide. Also, there's probably some political aspect of that too, because if they make the claim outright, that you shouldn't get circumcised thenpeople are probably gonna be very angry.
Nicole:Yeah. Okay. So can I ask you, because if it were me, and I grew up and found out that I might be missing out on some extra pleasure that I could be experiencing, but I'm not because of a surgery that was done to me when I was a baby that I had no say in, I would get kind of upset about it. So do you ever like, think about that, and how do you feel about being circumcised?
Ashton:Yeah. I don't know that I think about it all the time. But when I do, it does bother me to think that it was probably a decision that didn't have a whole lot of thought put into it. I doubt anybody really thought a lot about the what the ramifications were of it or did any research on it? It was probably just an assumption. This is what's going to happen, because this is what everybody does.
Nicole:Yeah, and it's - it's weird to think that it is so common because it's genital mutilation, which is typically seen as kind of a barbaric thing, but it's super commonplace here in American.
Ashton:Yeah, I guess just one of those things that it's become a tradition, and it's no longer questioned.
Nicole:Mm hmm.
Ashton:All right. So I guess that's where we can call it for today, and we'll pick up next time, continuing in Genesis, with more on Abraham and Sarah.
Nicole:Yep, bye ya'll.