June 9, 2009, 6:39 am by dc-agape.

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Tales of the Patriarchs (Part 9)

Today I have reached the end of the Tales of the Patriarchs and also the end of the Genesis material in the Dead Sea Scrolls.  Two last stories exist in this Tractate.  The first is the battle between Sodom and Kedorlaomer.  This begins by setting the scene, of how the king of Elam was attacking every city that did not pay tithe to him.  It ends just as in the Book of Genesis (Gen 14), with Abram rescuing Lot and freeing all of Sodom’s property and people from Kedorlaomer.  The second story is about how YHWH promises Abram that he will have a son and that YHWH will protect Abram against his enemies.

Now the story starts with how the King of Elam had 14 years earlier conquered all the surrounding nations.  But now Kedorlaomer is on the war path again, due to the King of Sodom rebelling he has ransacked all the way from the Euphrates to the Rephaim, the people of Amman, the Emim, the Horites, and all the way to El Paran.  Then they attacked En-mishpat and Hazazon Tamar.  All these places (nations?) must be between the Euphrates and Sodom.  At this point Kedorlaomer must have been getting close to Sodom and Gomorrah because these kings went out to battle the King of Elam.  Now you would think that an army that had been on the attack all the way from the Euphrates and fought at least seven nations already would be weakened, but they destroy the Kings of Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim, and Bela.  Unfortunately, in the process Lot and all his livestock and slaves have been kidnapped.  Abram feels horrible about this and gathers 318 of his best warriors???? He also brings along three friends: Armen, Eschol, and Mamreh.  The King of Elam continues his battles up to Damascus where Abram confronts him at night.  Then another Tall Tale is told.  These 322 men (where did Abram get his warriors from?) route this entire army that has ransacked multiple other kingdoms.   In the process Abram frees Lot and returns to Melchizedek.  Odd how Melchizedek is at Salem (Jerusalem) right in the path of this brutal warlord and does not get attacked…I guess this great King of Salem, this priest of the Most High, had paid his tithes to Kedorlaomer!  But the King of Salem does not help Abram; Abram destroys this warlord with 321 men.  Now it must be obvious to you, as it is to me that by the time Abram reaches Kedorlaomer, his army is pretty much spent all its power.  Of course, attacking at night is also not the most heroic actions. 

More is told about this Tall Tale, why does Abram go to Melchizedek when it is the King of Sodom that has lost his men, livestock, and other property to Kedorlaomer?  How is Melchizedek related to YHWH?  Is he a descendent of Shem?  He is living in Canaan which would indicate that he is actually a descendent of the cursed Ham.  How is he the priest of the Most High?  And isn’t interesting that he is the King of Salem, which will be the location of Jerusalem after the invasion of the Israelites.  At this point the King of Sodom, that most wicked and vile city comes to Abram at Salem and begs Abram to return the men of Sodom.  The king is not worried about the cities livestock or other property, for he offers it to Abram for a reward.  Abram turns down the offer and frees all the captives and property claiming that he does not want it to be told that his wealth comes from the King of Sodom.  Obviously he is already running into trouble with the fact that all his wealth actually came from lying to the Pharaoh of Egypt! 

In the final story of the Tractate, Abram and YHWH have a little one on one.  YHWH promises to protect Abram from his enemies.  Yet by the time YHWH gets around to telling Abram the man is 85 years old.  Talk about waiting for YHWH to do things in his own time!  Abram basically tells YHWH so what and he is close to death and has no heir, protection who cares.  The last sentence to the Tractate is a promise from YHWH that Abram will have a child.  Thankfully Abram still has 90 years to live, he doesn’t die until he is 175 years old.  Whatever happened to YHWH dictating man’s life to be 120 years (Gen 6:3)?   There has got to be an error somewhere in this, YHWH saying one thing and yet the complete opposite happens.  How can this be?  Could the Word of God be in error?  With the Tall Tales told in the Book of Genesis and this glaring error about human lifespan, how can anyone take the Bible as infallible? 

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June 7, 2009, 6:22 am by dc-agape.

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Tales of the Patriarchs

( Part 8 )

Today I want to focus on the two biggest lies ever believed by Christians.  I will be able to finish the Tales of the Patriarchs and the Genesis material from the Dead Sea Scrolls in two posts.  My post today will be one and the second post will be tomorrow.  After that I will start on the Book of Exodus.  What are the two biggest lies?  One that YHWH would give the entire Middle East to the descendants of Abram, but only the Jews.  The second lie that the Christians believe is that the Word of God is accurate. 

But first I need to deal with the short section on Lot and Abram splitting up.  In the Word of God, Abram and Lot separate because both men have too much livestock and they are competing against each other and the Canaanites and Perizzites (Gen 13:6-7).  Now, in the Book of Genesis, Abram allows Lot to choice the best fields (Gen 13:10-11).  Yet in the Tales of the Patriarchs, the only reason they split was the arguing of their shepherds. Now wouldn’t you think that the two most holy men alive at the time could teach their hired help how to get along?

So what about the lies?  The first one is that Israel has any portion of the Middle East!  When YHWH tells Abram to look upon his descendant’s eternal inheritance, Abram sees from the Red Sea to the Euphrates River.  Even though somehow the author(s) of this Tale believe that the Euphrates spills into the Red Sea!  But instead the two are parallel.  Abram’s descendants do inherit this territory…but after 70CE it was the Muslim (Ishmael’s descendents) who would inherit this land.  Only in 1945 did the UN give any of this land back to the Israelites.  But, of course, to inherit something for eternity would mean that YHWH was not going to destroy the earth at Judgment day!  It would mean that the earth would never cease to exist. 

The second lie that YHWH tells Abram, and Christians believe, is that Abram’s descendants will be “like the dust of the earth that none can count”.  Guess how many Muslims exist in the world today?  The Muslim population is 1.66 billion.  What about the Israeli population (Jewish)?  The Jewish population of the world is about 0.906 billion.  And for those of you who believe that Christians are also the descendants of Abram, what are their total population in the world?  The Christian population is 2.14 billion.  Sorry YHWH, you lied, we can still count the number of descendants that Abram has!  And if you claim that three significant figures is not accurate enough to claim that we can count them all, does your speedometer read more than two numbers?  Do you count time in 1/10 of a second?  Three sig figs is standard operating procedure when dealing with numbers in the billions.  What it means is that these numbers are significant to within ½ a percent.

I find it quite humorous that in the Tales of the Patriarchs the author(s) claim that Abram walked from Hebron to the Red Sea, followed the Mediterranean Sea to the Euphrates, and then followed the Euphrates to the Sea of Persian Gulf.  After that he came back to Hebron.  Let’s look at that in detail.  The first distance was short: only 367 km (229 miles).  In this link it takes 5 days to bike, think about how long that would be to walk.  The next leg of his journey is actually about 300 km (186 miles) more, he was backtracking. The next leg is somewhat difficult to determine, the Euphrates River never joins with the Mediterranean Sea!  Through Israel it is about 208 km (130 miles).  He then had to pass through all of Lebanon, which is another 210 km (131 miles).  From the tip of Lebanon to the Euphrates River is about 700 km (421 miles).  He still had to get to the mouth of the Euphrates from there…about 475 km (286 miles).  Then all he had to do was travel the last 1300 km (2150 miles) back to Hebron!  Total distance…~3500 km (5700 miles) all on foot!  It would have only taken him about 2 years to complete, so I guess at the ripe old age of 82-85 years of age this was a short trip for him!  Can anyone say bullshit! 

As an Atheist, I just can’t believe that people fall for this crap.  The Tall Tales, the shear fantasy, and the gross geographical errors are astounding!  Yet in the United State, we have people who believe that YHWH promised the entire Middle East to the Israelites.  We also have people here in the US that fall hook, line, and sinker that these stories are the Truth.  If I can’t even get out of the Book of Genesis without finding the most egregious errors, why should I trust the Word of God to be inerrant? 

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June 6, 2009, 10:39 am by dc-agape.

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Tales of the Patriarchs (Part 7)

I want to take a particularly close look at the story of how Abram lied to the Pharaoh and as a result two things happened: Abram became enormously rich and the Pharaoh and his entire court suffered terribly for two full years.  I know from a Christian or Jewish point of view this story is about how YHWH protects his people and punishes those who do not worship him.  But this story proves that the protection does not occur, that YHWH’s people rarely trust him, and more troubling is that YHWH punishes unjustly.

After Hyrcanos goes back to the Pharaoh with the news of how beautiful this 70+ year old nomadic woman is, the Pharaoh has to see for himself if this is true.  Well, it turns out that the Pharaoh is also into weather beaten old women, he thinks she is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen and is completely amazed!  Since Abram and Sarai have been lying for the last five years about their relationship (the lie is that they are siblings), the Pharaoh sees nothing wrong with requesting Sarai to be his wife.  He immediately marries her.  That very night Abram cries out to YHWH and begs that the Pharaoh be punished for not knowing that Abram had been lying!  Can you image the audacity?  Instead of tell the truth and trusting YHWH to protect him, Abram has been lying for five years!  When the lie is finally done its damage, then Abram calls upon YHWH. 

Now YHWH does something and punishes an innocent man, who was acting within every acceptable standard ever written.  But to make thing even worse, YHWH punishes everyone in the Pharaoh’s court with the same disease.  To spread the unjustness even further, YHWH punishes anyone who attempts to elevate the court’s pain and suffering.  The unjustness of these actions is atrocious!  There can be no greater evil than what Abram and YHWH have done. 

But it goes further than that.  It takes a full two years before Hyrcanos figures it out what the source of the painful curse is.  So YHWH does not even answer Abram’s prayer for two full years.  When the Pharaoh hears that Abram has been lying for the last seven years…you would think that he would go ballistic.  But instead, he comes with great courtesy and humbleness before Abram.  This is how the Pharaoh approaches the evil that Abram has perpetuated:

1 QapGen Col20 row 26-27 So he called to me and asked, “What have you done to me because of your wife Sarai?  You told me, ‘She is my sister’, yet she was actually your wife!  

The Pharaoh shows no sign of being the most powerful man on earth, as the Pharaohs were.  Instead he is the perfect gentleman to the vile and corrupt Abram.  For years the Pharaoh had been offering gifts and great courtesy to Abram, yet Abram pays him back by lying and asking YHWH to punish the Pharaoh.  In the end, Pharaoh does tell Abram to get out of Egypt, but in the process continues to give Abram many more gifts. 

Abram leaves Egypt, after overstaying his welcome, and heads back to Bethel.  At each of the spots where he worshipped YHWH he stops and repeats the act again, until he reaches Bethel.  But then comes the most ludicrous thing yet.  Abram praise YHWH for the ill-gotten flocks and goods that the Pharaoh gave him during the seven years of living a lie!  YHWH had nothing to do with these stolen goods.  It was the lie that Abram told that provided the shelter and the goodwill of the Pharaoh!  In fact, Abram does not even call upon YHWH until the lie takes a turn for the worst! 

As an Atheist, reading this story without the god-bias, I just cannot see how anyone misses the true evil that is perpetrated in this story.  Lies are told, unjust punishments are doled out, and ill-gotten wealth is retained by the villains of the story – YHWH and Abram! The Pharaoh in this story is blameless, yet he and his court have to pay the heaviest burden of all.  This story caused me great trouble in justifying when I was a Christian, but now that I am an Atheist it proves two things.  First, this story proves that YHWH is a capricious villain and no better than Zeus or Quetzalcoatl.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that both Zeus and Quetzalcoatl were better Gods.  YHWH is just as fictitious as these other supernatural beings.  Second, that the “god bias” deeply twists humanities ability to recognize great acts of evil.

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June 4, 2009, 8:00 am by dc-agape.

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Tales of the Patriarchs (Part 6)

Unsurprisingly, when the Tractate switches to Abram, we again know nothing of his youth.  The Israelite authors of every religious text seem to have an aversion to discussing childhood.  The Tale of the Patriarchs catches up with Abram when he is 75 years old (Gen 12:4).  The 19^th column of the Tales is pretty drab stuff.  It starts off with Abram making an alter at Hebron and claiming that Hebron had not been built yet.  Oddly we know that a town existed there, prior to Abram changing the name to Hebron.  The Canaanites called it Mamre (Gen 13:18) and also Kiriath Arba (Gen 23:2). So here we have the author(s) of this tractate completely covering up that this location had been occupied by other humans prior to the arrival of Abram.  Here are more examples of making the old stories more palatable to the reader.

The Tractate moves on to the famine in Canaan.  Isn’t it odd how there are many famines in Canaan, yet Egypt always seems to have extra grains and food stocks?  In the process of heading down to Egypt, Abram has a dream.  In the dream a cedar and a date tree are combined by a single root.  People come to cut the cedar down but the date tree begs them not to.  Abram wakes and believes that this is a portent of future events in Egypt.  He warns his wife Sarai to lie to anyone about their marriage.  He tells her to tell everyone that she is his sister! 

They spend at least five years in Egypt, teaching people with great wisdom from a book called the Words of Enoch.  At this point Abram must be at least 80 years old and we know that Sarai was 10 years younger than him (Gen 17:17), making her at least 70 years old.  We also know that Sarai dies at the age of 127 (Gen 23:1), so she is not a young woman.  We can be pretty certain that life back then was pretty hard on the aging populace so Sarai could not be that beautiful by this time in her life.  She was certainly past the age of childbirth, for she even knew that she was barren (Gen 11:30).  Yet, the Pharaoh learns of Abram and his wife/sister and three of the Pharaoh’s councilors come out to meet Abram.  During this process, and due to his wisdom and his wife/sister, the Pharaoh had been giving many gifts to Abram. 

I will end this post with just the message that Hyrcanos gives to the Pharaoh about Sarai.  Hyrcanos is one of the three councilors that meet with Abram and Sarai.  This is what he tells the Pharaoh about Sarai:

1QapGen col.20 row4 How shapely is her breast, how gorgeous all her fairness!

1QapGen col.20 row6 How perfect her thighs!  Neither virgins nor brides entering the bridal chamber exceed her charms.

Now either someone likes older (very older woman) or someone is lying!  There is no way, even with supernatural help that a 70+ year old woman exposed to nomadic life could have shapely breasts, perfect thighs, and exceed virgins and brides in charm.  It is impossible.  I may be gay, and my opinion slightly skewed about women, but this is just the most unbelievable tell.  It has got to be another Tall Tale from the inerrant Word of God!  I may also be an Atheist, but at some point doesn’t everyone start to see that these stories are identical to Alfred Bulltop Stormalong or Paul Bunyan?

Posted in Dead Sea Scroll, Genesis Material, Tales of the Patriarchs, Word of God, Inerrancy - My Ass, Tall Tales, Family Values?, Readings | Print | 8 Comments »

June 1, 2009, 7:32 am by dc-agape.

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Tales of the Patriarchs (Part 5)

Unsurprisingly, one more section about Noah exists in this Tractate (QapGen).  It would seem that while drunk, Noah had a vision from YHWH.  It takes an additional paragraph, also from YHWH, to explain what Noah saw.  The last part about Noah is how his sons Japheth and Shem will split the world.  Ham is left out, from the first section purposely, no fragmentation exists.  From the second, an entire Column, of a least 20 rows, is missing.  Maybe we get some information about the Canaanites in that section that is now destroyed.

In Noah’s vision he sees a cedar tree that is stripped by creatures of gold, silver, and iron.  It was also being stripped by the sun, moon, and stars.  In the end it was completely consumed.  Noah then sees an olive tree.  It is battered by the four winds (western, eastern, northern, and southern.   The leaves are stripped from the tree and scattered in all direction.  Well, if you were hoping for a proper translation of this drunken vision, you would be wrong.  As far as fragmentation goes, there really isn’t much missing.  But the interpretation is not related to what the vision was.   What is told is that the three sons of Noah will spread out, but only one will be righteous.  Most of the shoots that spring up from the scattering, both from the cedar and the olive, will apostatize and become evil.  There is something about a man of goodness coming and hurling fire at those who became apostates.  But the details are spotty at best.  It is missing a lot of words that are difficult to get the full meaning of this section.  On the other hand, Noah was drunk!  It is possible that this was just a drunken nightmare.

Now the most interesting thing about the two sections about Noah’s sons and grandsons is what is missing.  Ham is completely missing.  Do you have any idea why?  From the Book of Genesis Noah curses Ham’s descendents into slavery to his brothers (Gen 9:24-27).  But of course this did not happen.  Just to fill you in Ham’s descendents were: Babylon, Assyria, Philistines, Hittites, Jebusites, Amorites, Hivites, and Canaanites (Gen 10:6-20).  Notice that they were all the big enemies of Israel.  So it would make sense that this was “edited”.  The Word of God had been violated and in error, so the author(s) of this Tractate attempted to correct the errors that time had proven. 

To an Atheist reading this section of the Tractate two things become extremely clear.  First, humans will always attempt to correct their “Holy Books” to fit what is happening in their lifetimes.  When YHWH makes a mistake you cover it up quickly, before anyone realizes that all religion is based on fiction.  Second, that the Bible is truly a piece of fiction and very little of it is meaningful or factual.  In an attempt to read it literally, the massive falsehoods stare out from the pages directly at you.  How anyone can pretend that the “Holy Book”, the Word of God, the Bible, can save their souls is beyond my comprehension.  If the blasted thing can’t get history right, why should we trust it to our immortal soul (and the existence of that is in question as well)?

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May 31, 2009, 7:27 am by dc-agape.

Tales of the Patriarchs (Part 4)

After the Flood, Noah does his hocus-pocus of burnt offerings (blood sacrifices) to YHWH.  Here it says that all the deaths caused by the Flood were not enough atonement for YHWH.  Even though his anger was his own fault for chaining the rebellious angels to earth!  The Most High did truly enjoy the smell of burnt flesh; I guess that covered up some of the stench from the drowned and rotting animal carcasses. 

Then Noah debarks with a lion at his side, I wonder how much fresh meat they had on hand to keep this beast sated for an entire year?  But the even bigger Tall Tale is that Noah then “walked about the length and breadth of the land”.  Walking even a few 100 miles would not have been the “length nor the breadth of the land”.  So this is obviously a metaphor or exaggeration, because we know from this Tractate that he also planted a winery and within 4 years it was producing the wine that would get him drunk in Gen 9:20-21.  But the Tall Tales don’t stop there!  As soon as he leaves the Ark “the whole land was filled with grass, herbs, and grain”.  None of these seed can withstand the conditions of the Flood.  Just reading the previous linked abstract, it is obvious that the high water and high nitrogen (rotting animal flesh) would make the soils completely inimical to plant life.  So not only is the Flood, itself, a huge Tall Tale, but the survival of plants after the flood is impossible.  When you combine all the different parts of the Tall Tale it could not have happened!

In the next section of the Tractate YHWH comes down to see how Noah faired for after the Flood.  Here is where some people believe that humans were vegetarians prior to the Flood but changed to eating meat after the Flood.  In Gen 1:29 YHWH gives all plants to Adam, here in this Tractate, just as in Gen 9:3, YHWH gives Noah all the animals as food as well.  This unchanging YHWH certainly changes his mind a lot!  Since of course, we know that many Jews and Catholics are forbidden to eat certain foods, after YHWH gave all plants and animals to us.  Of course, the rainbow is brought up in this Tractate as well, as if water particles did not make rainbows before the Flood (another Tall Tale). 

The two sections that follow this will end this post.  The second to last section I want to cover in this post is about the children of Noah.  It would seem that at least two grandchildren of Noah survived being on the Ark.  Can you imagine having two young children on an overcrowded Ark for an entire year?  I wonder how many more were loaded on the Ark and accidently became food for the lions, tigers, and bears!  But Noah was prosperous in the flooded world and his children were as well.  In total recorded number Noah only had three sons, but an unnumbered of children were born to him after he turned 640 years old!  To add to that Noah’s three named sons had 32 more children.  So if this is true, it should not be Mitochondrial Eve but Mitochondrial Emzara (Noah’s Wife)!  Most of Eve’s Mitochondrial DNA died out in the Flood.

The last section I want to talk about in this post is the next sacrifice that Noah made, and no it is not in the Book of Genesis.  That same vineyard that would be the cause of such fatherly love later in Ham’s life was the source of this next sacrifice.  After four years of toiling the soil, Noah had his first batch of wine ready.  Except it really wasn’t a great sacrifice…Noah invites all his family to the alter and they all get drunk off the first crop of wine!  Sounds like worshiping Dionysus or Bacchus.  Even more to the point: Dionysus has a holy day on Jan 3^rd…Noah celebrated his “sacrifice” on Jan 1^st!  When you realize that Roman/Greek influence had already reached the authors of this Tractate…it is obvious that they were writing from personal experience and not “spiritual” guidance.  Yet these Tractates were taken as literally as the writings of Moses!

As an Atheist, reading these texts clearly show how religious materials are written by men to describe their surroundings.  When you combined the knowledge how Scientology and Cargo Cults developed, not a single religion in the world has any supernatural source.  Scientology was created for one purpose: to make money!  The Cargo Cults of the South Pacific were created by accidental exposure to modern technology.  Religion is created by man for man’ own power…nothing supernatural about it!  For another example of how religion is man-made take a look at this post by yunshui at Right to Think entitled “Lies, damn lies, and Catholics”.

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May 29, 2009, 7:50 am by dc-agape.

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Tales of the Patriarchs (Part 3)

Childhood does not seem to be very important to the Jewish writers of Religious materials.  Just as in the case of Jesus, this story of Noah tells of his birth and without fragmentation jumps to his adult life.  Unlike Jesus, Noah brags about his birthright and how righteous he is.  Then we find out that he marries a woman by the name of Emzara.  They have three sons and an unknown number of daughters.  Then we get to a confusing part, a Watcher who is a messenger from the Holy Ones comes to Noah after he has had a vision about the Flood.  The last section I will cover in this post is again the Flood, a repeated topic in these Tractates.

The first thing we read from Noah, as an adult, is his bragging about how righteous he is and will always be!  Isn’t that pride?  And marrying off your children to your brother’s children is, of course, now considered a sin (but I will get to that in a second)!  He also killed all his daughters by not allowing them on the ark (that is coming up in the next paragraph as well).  And we know that he gets drunk off the first wine after the Flood.  I guess these small flaws are OK, and that he is still a righteous man, both in his eyes and in YHWH’s eyes.

Cousin marriage was acceptable at the time, even though YHWH would eventually decide that it was a sin worthy of death (Lev 18:6)!  So remember that either YHWH does change or go for it, marry your cousin…YHWH approves.  The worst thing about this section is that it clearly states that Noah had daughters, yet we know that they did not join him on the Ark.  This means that he sacrificed his own flesh and blood, because of the Flood that YHWH created.  What a loving father!  Even more what a loving YHWH to force a man to do such a hideous act, can you imagine the pain Noah felt as he watched his daughters drown?

Noah has a vision, which he shares with no one.  And then a Watcher comes to give him a message from the Holy Ones about the flood.  I will have to amend my last few posts.  The Watchers are different from the Nephilim, which are different than the Sons of Heaven.  It seems from this passage that it is the actions of the Nephilim that cause YHWH to create the Flood that kills all live on dry land, except plants.

I will close this post with the most horrific description of the Flood presented in any Religious Document:

1QapGen Col.6 row 25-Col.7 row 4 until the Floodgate of heaven [opened…destroying] humanity and cattle and wild animals and birds […] […] upon them.  The earth and all that was upon it, in the seas and on the mountains […] all the constellations, the sun, the moon, and the stars.

So in this version the flood gates did kill all the animals in the seas as well as all the animals on the dry land.  Since some of the fragmentation occurs at critical points we cannot tell what happens to the sun, moon, and stars.  Are they witness to the horrific actions of YHWH or could the Flood be so intense that even they were destroyed?  The worst is yet to come.  One of the Watchers then tells Noah

1 QapGen Col.7 row 5 “I hereby grant you your reward from me”

Noah’s reward was to be the only man standing after such horrific violence.  He was King of the World.  And of course, what does Noah do?  He rejoiced and “shouted for joy”!  He was overwhelmed with excitement that YHWH had destroyed the entire planet.  He was ecstatic that his daughters had drowned in the Flood.  He was all bubbly because even Methuselah was now dead.  If you calculate the age that Methuselah died it was in the year of the Flood.  Noah was the one and only leader of the entire human population, I bet he was excited! 

As an Atheist this tale is so horrific I cannot see how anyone could worship this monster named YHWH.  He is twisted, has horrible tastes in righteousness, and punishes innocent people due to his own actions.  The destruction of the planet by a Flood has got to be one of the worst ways to kill every living thing, including the sea life (due to fresh water mixing with the salt water).  But to chose Noah as the living representative of Humanity?  Noah was so flawed that it is no wonder that the world is so fucked up now!  Maybe this really did happen.  It does explain why some humans are such a mess.

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May 28, 2009, 10:15 am by dc-agape.

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Tales of the Patriarchs (Part 2)

The next section of the Tales Tractate is pretty beat up.  The gist is that Lamech is still not totally convinced that Noah is really his son.  Fortunately, both the grandfather and father of Lamech are around.  Lamech goes (actually runs) to talk to his father, Methuselah.  For some reason he needs Methuselah to go and talk to Enoch (the grandfather of Lamech).  So Enoch tells Methuselah so that Methuselah can tell Lamech the truth about Noah.  Pretty convoluted and you would hope that the answer to the question was recorded, but in both cases that is exactly what is missing/been destroyed.  Whatever the answer was it seems to have settled the issue, because only two lines later (on the column) we jump to the story about the adult Noah.

One thing that we get from this part of the Tractate is that the Holy Ones do live among humans and are not the Watchers.  We find this out because Methuselah has to travel “the length of the land of Parvaim” to speak with Enoch.  I guess when you have the entire earth and you live for centuries you just get tired of living close to other family members.  But Enoch lives with the Holy Ones, yet it is the Sons of Heaven that sleep with human women.  In fact, Enoch is “beloved and a friend of YHWH and the Holy Ones”.

Another point that seems to come from this is that the Sons of Heaven are responsible for the sins that cause YHWH to massacre the entire world’s population of animals and humans.  In Enoch’s reply, it seems that these Sons of Heaven are “confused” and “doing great violence”.  So it would seem that YHWH is responsible for the causing his own anguish that brings the Flood!  It is his own Sons of Heaven that he cast down on earth that cause humans to sin against him.  Now is that a just god or is that just a stupid god?  “I got rid of my problems up here in heaven by sending them to you.  But since you actually couldn’t handle them either, I’ll just wipe you out.  Maybe this Noah kid will be OK.”  What type of logic is that!  And we are supposed to worship this monster idiot?  I think not.

Before the flood humans, the Holy Ones, and the Sons of Heaven co-inhabit the earth.  YHWH does not like the Sons of Heaven (he cast them out of Heaven) and it seems the Holy Ones are useless.  Enoch is the only human that is friends with them, even Methuselah has moved away from the Holy Ones.  So it would seem that YHWH loses nothing by destroying his own creation including all the innocent animals and humans that did not associate with the angels that YHWH throw out of heaven.  I sure am glad only  ten generation of humans have been born before YHWH loses patience.  

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May 26, 2009, 8:30 am by dc-agape.

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Tales of the Patriarchs

Our illustrious editors are kind enough to let us know that this is a rewrite of the Bible.  The original author(s) of this Tractate “improved” upon the stories from the Book of Genesis.  This starts as a story of why YHWH destroyed humanity and all the other living creatures on the planet with the Flood.  I won’t give you the reason yet, but let’s just say it’s a spectacular example of the stupidest thing a supernatural being could ever do!  The first Patriarch in the story is Lamech, Noah’s father.  The Tractate then turns to Noah himself.  Noah’s sons are mentioned but only to describe how they spread across the world.  Abram is the last Patriarch of this tale.  From the use of the name “Abram” it can be foreseen that this tale ends before YHWH changes his name to Abraham.

The opening of our story is the reason that YHWH drowned the entire world in his anger with the Flood.  It is actually quite simple…YHWH bound fallen angels to earth.  That’s right, to get rid of the angels that YHWH did not like he sent them to earth in fleshly bodies…where the humans lived.  Well of course these fallen angels, called Watchers (or more familiar term…the Nephilim), intermingled with humans.  This show how either naive or stupid YHWH was.  What else would you expect evil angels to do except corrupt humanity?  Worse than that YHWH did not strip them of their heavenly knowledge, so the Watchers used this knowledge to their own benefit.  They also, being angels, must have been more intelligent, more hansom, and more powerful than the humans.  So the women, of the time, sleep with these supernatural beings!  This only produced more evil offspring and the whole world was corrupted by YHWH own action.  He sent the angels to earth, what else would he expect to happen?

Here enters our first Patriarch, Lamech.  In a fit of jealousy he demands that his wife prove that she had not sleep with one of the Nephilim.  She had just given birth to Noah.  Something about Noah was surprisingly different than a normal baby, and Lamech thought that Noah was a child of the Nephilim.  Here we learn that Noah’s mother’s name was Bitenosh.  Why she should have a name in this story and not the Bible is of great curiosity.  Reading the response of Bitenosh is much more racy than anything in today’s Word of God:

1QapGen Col.2 lines 9-10 She said, “Oh, my brother, my lord, remember my voluptuousness […] in the heat of lovemaking, and my ardent response. I am telling you the whole truth […]. 

Sorry about the brackets, this is the symbol for where the scrolls are beyond recovery and the words have been lost to eternity.  Let’s hope that the term “my brother” does not mean she married and had sex with her brother!  But if this section were in the Bible I bet more people would read that Book.  Bitenosh continues the discussion of Noah’s conception, guaranteeing that Lamech is truly the father of Noah. 

One oddity appears in this section.  The author(s) use numerous terminologies for men who are not human.  To being with, when Lamech is worried about who fathered Noah, they use the term Holy Ones or Nephilim.  But when Bitenosh defends herself, she uses the term Watcher and differentiates that from the Sons of Heaven.  So it would seem that there were two extra sources of sperm in the days before the Flood other than human.  I can see how the Holy Ones and the Sons of Heaven might be the same, but then the Nephilim and the Watchers might also be the same.  We know from the Book of Genesis that the Sons of Heaven/God did have sex with human women (Gen 6:1-2).  But from reading that section of the Book of Genesis it would seem that it was the offspring of the Sons of Heaven that were the Nephilim (Gen 6:4).  Why would the Sons of God/Heaven be evil?  Why would the children of that union be evil?  In fact verse four claims that the Nephilim were “heroes of old, men of renown”.  Nothing from the Book of Genesis would indicate that humanity had any reason to become evil.  Yet right after the part about the Nephilim the Book of Genesis declares that humanity had become evil (Gen 6:5-7).  Remember that only 10 generation of humans had been born by the time YHWH grew angry (Gen 5).  It is a good thing that Noah didn’t let his children forget how to please such a temperamental YHWH!

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