There were so many questions piling up, and confusion mounting (check out Genesis 9:3-5) that I decided to search for some answers online. Well, maybe just suggested explanations, 'cause I don't want to take anything random on the Internet at face value when it comes to the Bible. It's the most well-read and probably the most messed-with with book ever. My idea was to read it with an open mind and not be influenced (yet) by any third party. But I needed some idea of what the heck is going on right from the beginning.
Anyway, I did find this website that has a breakdown of each chapter, and I will reference it and other sites if I'm just totally confused. Seriously, Genesis 9:4. Is God saying we should eat meat, not eat meat, what's the deal?
Check it out: www.searchgodsword.org
Seems it's not about meat at all, really... well, it is, sort of. As of that moment, God condoned eating animal flesh (before that it was all grains and fruit) but warned about the sacredness of human life. He warns that He will avenge the death of anyone who is unjustly killed. And He also warns that people shouldn't do anything to take their own lives, since it's only up to God when we die.
Mnkay, that makes a lot more sense. I'm going to have to look into the whole Babel thing, though. It seems like every time things start settling down for the folks in Genesis, God comes along to smite everyone just to spice things up. It's like a Far Side cartoon in which the fat kid just has to shake up the ant maze when they stop fighting and being interesting.
According to Heartlight's website, above, God was upset (He gets riled a lot in the Old Testament, doesn't He?) about the sons of Adam building a city/tower despite His ordering them to disperse and spread out over the earth and get on with populating the planet. So he disables their understanding of each other by what I understand to be giving them different languages so they'll be more inclined to move away and make separate tribes. Despite the explanation, I'm still frustrated by this one. It just seems like a cheap way of explaining why humans around the globe speak different languages. And I think, by now, linguists, archeologists and historians can pretty adequately explain it as, we scattered, THEN developed different languages and dialects. Not the other way around. Anyway, there's bound to be a bunch of fundamentalists just waiting to jump down my throat for being inappropriate about the Torah, but I'm just honestly trying to get at what the Bible is all about, and I've got to ask the questions, dumb as they may seem to those who've studied it before. Forgive me my ignorance. I make no apologies for the questions (or observations), however.
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