The first eleven chapters of Genesis consist of important pre-historic oral traditions included in the Torah because of divine inspiration. They express the efforts of early humans to understand why things were the way they were, how they came to be, how they were to live.
In the Bible, recorded human history begins in Genesis 12:1-4 – Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 2 I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”[a]4 So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. (NRSCCE)
As my Lutheran Seminary OT/Hebrew professor phrased it, “Recorded human history in the Bible began when God told Abraham to get up and go, and he got up and went.”
In a pagan world, those stories recorded in the Torah teach what would have been revolutionary theology, that one God created everything and that it was good, that God loved and cared for his creation, that God created humankind in his spiritual image and expected his love to be returned and shared and his creation cared for, that men and women were to join together and become one in marriage and love and care for each other, that humankind is subject to temptation and always fails to live up to God’s expectations, and that there is a price to be paid for those failures. That is a lot of truth. There is a more detailed summary in an earlier post on this blog.
That is a decent summary of the first ten chapters, but what about Genesis 11:1-9, a short story attempt to explain why the people were scattered all and speaking different languages and therefore unable to cooperate and just didn’t have the power they thought they should have. Their story has God playing a role that shows they have completely forgotten the truths learned about his loving nature and power and are thinking he is afraid of competition from his creation: Genesis 11:5-7 – 5 The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. 6 And the Lord said, “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. 7 Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.”
The human problem being revealed and condemned here is egotism, humans thinking they are in competition with their Creator and that God fears their power! I believe we can comfortably say that was never true and is an excellent example of words falsely attributed to God in Sacred Scripture. I suppose we can say that it is literally true that the people egotistically thought that God feared them but not true that he said so and acted on it. I guess the writer was thinking of one of those pagan gods and not about God. Recognizing this is an opportunity for better understanding of the Bible.
We can remember that even the disciples of Jesus, standing face to face with him, often misunderstood what he was trying to tell them so it should not be surprising that many things attributed to God in the Old Testament represented failure to understand and to still think of God as being in their image, like them, rather than understanding that they were created with the possibility of being like God but failing to do so. Even within the Old Testament we find the understanding of divinity progressing from belief in many gods (paganism) to belief in only one god of the many for the Jews (henotheism) to one God period for everybody (monotheism) and from the importance of continuing the pagan practice of animal sacrifices to being told that God was wanting mercy rather than sacrifice (Hosea 6:6).
Some Bible scholars see the Pentecost story in Acts 2 as clear refutation of any suggestion that God prefers we not have the ability to talk to each other. And even then, there was misunderstanding: “All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” 13 But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.” – Acts 2:12-13
As usual, one man’s opinion. Comments and suggestions welcome.