Gosh, I love Genesis. Such great stories! What's better is that the more deeply you dig into them, the more profound they become. It is so much more interesting to learn what God has to say to His people by reading Genesis than by, say, memorizing catechisms.
One thing I love about Genesis is trying to imagine what certain recorded events were really like. For example, in Genesis 26:19-22, it talks about Isaac's herdsmen, the herdsman of Gerar, and the ownership of some water wells in the desert. My NIV translation uses the word "quarrelled." Without doing a big-deal word study, I have to wonder what constituted "quarrelling." Was it trash talk? Fisticuffs? Or could it be full-on warfare between two large groups of nomadic tribes, sort of like skirmishes among Arabian tribes of today?
Some stories are hard to believe. Forget about the Garden of Eden or Noah's Ark stories. I'm talking about Genesis 27, when Jacob and Rebekah, his mother and accomplice, deceive Isaac into giving his blessing to Jacob instead of Esau. The text says Rebekah covered Jacob's hands and neck with goatskins to trick aged, blind Isaac into thinking he was Esau. Really? Goatskins? Makes you wonder how hairy Esau was.
There's a lot of ambiguity in Genesis about what is Right and what is Wrong, and a lot of it has to do with marriage and families. Without any judgmental comment, the Bible shows that Abraham, Jacob, and a few other people had more than one wife. Yet, the dysfunction in the families seems to demonstrate the problems with that. Or in Genesis 28:8-9, it says that Esau, who had irritated his mother by marrying a Hittite woman, went and married his cousin Ishmael's daughter. I have no idea whether this would have better or worse than a Hittite!
Perhaps these accounts are a set-up for Exodus and Leviticus, where God gives the Law to Moses as a way to delineate Right and Wrong.
This time as I read Genesis, I was struck by how much deception takes place. Some of the deception is people tricking others--such as Jacob and Isaac, or Jacob and Laban, Jacob and Esau after their "reconciliation," Jacob's sons and the men of Shechem, Eve and the serpent, Cain who tricked Abel into going to the field with him, Lot and his daughters, and so on.
Even more fascinating is the number of incidents where someone deceives someone by concealing his or her identity. Sara in Egypt and later Rebekah in Egypt. Leah on her wedding night. Jacob with Isaac. Tamar and Judah. Even Joseph and his brothers in Egypt.
So many stories, so many life lessons. I never get tired of reading Genesis. But how many people, committed to read through the Bible in a systematic fashion, have zoomed through Genesis and maybe even Exodus, only to get bogged down in Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Sigh.
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