Good Family Role Models, yeah right!

May 25, 2009, 2:53 pm by dc-agape.

Commentaries on Genesis (Part 2)

I finished the first fragment yesterday (5/24/2009), but this post will be on the other eight fragments of this Tractate.  These fragments are in terrible condition, none of them exceed five lines.  Compared to the first fragment that had a total of closer to sixty lines this material is much shorter.  Three of the fragments are about the flood, one fragment covers the incident with Ham and Noah, two more fragments are on Israel’s “blessing” on his sons Issachar and Dan, another is the blessing on Joseph, and the last fragment maybe about the blessing on Judah.

The first and second fragments on the Flood are the dimensions of the ark.  As I have posted before, these dimensions are extremely too small to hold a pair of all living animals.  Here the dimensions are 300 cubits in length (150 yards or 137 meters), fifty cubits wide (25 yards or ~23 meters), and 30 cubits high (15 yards or ~14 meters).  Even when considering that this ark had three levels, the total area would have been 2.32 acres.  This tiny area had to not only hold the animals, but their food as well!  Plus eight people, if you get picky.  Even a supernatural being can’t do that, unless he created some sort of spatial anomaly.  This would have been like making the inside of the ark larger than the outside!  It is just a Tall Tale, nothing more.  The third fragment on the Flood is about when Noah left the ark after spending one full year in that cramped area with a lot of animals shitting everywhere.  Oddly the raven was released after Noah left the ark not before in this story.  This has been the only difference I have read from the modern day Book of Genesis.  But then again, this fragment is also different from the first fragment.  So this may be scribal error or translation/editing error.

The fragment on the Ham incident is identical to the Book of Genesis.  The loving father, Noah, who has spent the last year in a cramped boat with the only survivors of humanity and life on earth, curses his youngest son descendants for seeing his father drunk off of wine and nude.  I’m sure am glad my father was never that cruel.  In Noah’s hangover from his first alcohol binge in over a year, he curses 1/3 of the human population to eternal slavery.  Not the role model I would like to have people look up to.

The two fragments on the “blessing of Israel” for Issachar and Dan are not to inspiring.  Little is left of Issachar’s “blessing”.  About all that is left is something about Issachar descendants becoming slaves.  What a blessing!  Most of the fragment is about Dan’s “blessing” from his father.  The kindest thing that Israel tells his son is that Dan’s descendents will be numbered as one of the tribes of Israel.  The other thing that Israel tells Dan is that his descendents will be like vipers by the roadside, striking at passing horses and presumably the human riders.  You just have to love a dad that is so willing to give out such wonderful blessings!  Here is just another example of how not to be a father, straight from the Word of God.

For Joseph the “Blessing of Israel” truly is something a father should tell his son on his death bed.  Israel blesses Joseph with an agile hand and a strong bow.  He continues this blessing with the promise of help from the one and only, YHWH.  I guess if you can’t love all your children, loving one is good enough?  What a great biblical example of parenthood.

The final fragment is has a connection to Zechariah (Zech 4:14).  The editors of my copy of the Dead Sea Scrolls seem to think that this also is related to the blessing on Judah.  How this is linked is beyond my layman’s comprehension.  I can see the link to Zechariah, but I do not see anything to do with the blessing on Judah (Gen 49:8-12).  The one thing this fragment does do is claim that the men of Yahad (the Dead Sea Scroll sect) were present from the time of the Book of Genesis.  Somehow I get the feeling that this was religious tampering with the Word of God for human pride.

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