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Week 3 Exodus

Chapters seven to twelve tell the story of the ten plagues of Egypt.
One of the things I hadn’t seen before was that three times Moses is told to speak with Pharaoh in the morning. The Lord said: go to Pharaoh in the morning as he goes down to the river. Stand on the river bank and meet him there. That was before the first plague – blood. Moses didn’t meet Pharaoh in the morning before the second & third plagues – frogs & lice.
Then the Lord told Moses: get up early in the morning and meet Pharaoh as he goes down to the river. That was before the fourth plague – insects. Moses didn’t meet Pharaoh in the morning before the fifth & sixth plagues – pestilence & boils.
Then the Lord told Moses: get up early in the morning. Go to Pharaoh and tell him… That was before the seventh plague – hail. Moses didn’t meet Pharaoh in the morning before the eighth & ninth plagues – locusts & darkness.
It’s hard to know what to make of those morning meetings. And it’s hard to know what to make of Pharaoh getting no advance warning at all before the third, sixth, and ninth plagues. Boom! They just happened.
But it seems like there’s a distinction being made between the first second and third sets of plagues.
What exactly it is I don’t know for sure. It’s too complicated a distinction if you’re just reading through.

Note: quotes from Exodus 7:15, 8:20, 9:13 (NLT)

Week 3 Exodus

By January 16th – two days ago – I knew I was falling behind. You don’t have to be much of a mathematician to know that if a) you need to read 100 chapters in January, and that if b) you’ve only read 36 by the 16th then you aren’t exactly in good shape.
So I wasn’t surprised when I did a mid-month check-up. I spent too much time on Jacob’s trek from Shechem in thirty-five. Ditto for thirty-six – who can afford to spend a day on Esau’s family-tree?
My solution wasn’t a real good one but I did it: on Sunday I read Genesis 37-50.
Fourteen chapters  is a lot to absorb in a day. But if I had to read fourteen all at once then Genesis 37-50 was a Lucky 14. It’s the story of Joseph, one of the great long stories in the bible and one of my favourites.
And finishing Genesis yesterday helped me get back on track.
I read Exodus 1-3 today. It’s a pretty sobering story.
The Egyptian state was unsettled by the rapid growth of the Hebrews so they turned them into slaves as an indirect means of population reduction. Then they legislated abortion/infanticide-at-birth. When babies kept being born, follow-up laws required that boys were to be drowned.
When you brutalize and grind down and use up and exploit and end other peoples’ lives then something is going to happen. I read Exodus last January and I know that something awesomely destructively terrible is going to happen in Egypt.

Week 2 Genesis

Chapter 36 is a list of mostly names of Esau’s clan members.
If you weren’t reading through you’d likely skip the chapter.
There are pencil lines crisscrossing the pages where I’ve tried connecting the names sometime before. Today I get a pad of paper and on the left write Esau-Adah, in the middle Esau-Oholibamah, and on the right Esau-Basemath. Esau’s three wives.
Below that I write Eliphaz (left), J-J-and-K (middle), Reuel (right). Esau’s sons.
Then the thing pyramided out dizzyingly into grandsons and beyond. So I quit writing.
There’s one thing here that I’ll try to keep in mind.
After Isaac died Esau & Jacob put their bad blood behind them and lived in the same territory for a while – brothers, and maybe kind-of friends. Eventually the rangeland couldn’t support all their livestock and so: Esau…went into another land away from his brother Jacob.
Esau moved away, far enough away that his clan pretty much completely disconnected from Jacob’s: so Esau lived in the hill country of Seir; Esau is Edom. My bible map shows that Edom is a big sprawling territory south of the Dead Sea. I’ll try to keep that in mind.
I check my word book and see that Edom is mentioned more than eighty times after Genesis 36. Esau and Edom and Seir are different names for the same group. I remember them from before. They don’t just quietly disappear.
They’re important enough that I’ll try to keep them in mind.

Notes: quotes from Genesis 36:6, 8 (NASB)

Week 2 Genesis

In chapter 35 the Lord told Jacob to leave Shechem and go to Bethel.
I wasn’t sure of the geography so I checked a map in the back of my bible.
Shechem was approximately in the geographic centre of the region. Not far away I found Bethel – about 30 kilometres to the south.
Bethel was where Jacob had his Jacob’s Ladder dream / vision, and now years later the family settled there for a while.
After some period of time the family moved on from Bethel and again headed south toward Bethlehem. On my map Bethlehem looked to be about 30 kilometres south of Bethel. Rachel died in childbirth on that trip. Jacob stopped there to bury the wife he loved most, and put a memorial pillar at her grave.
Eventually the family travelled farther south to the tower of Eder (which I couldn’t find). But as I read on I realized that Jacob was headed for home: and Jacob came to his father Isaac at Mamre of Kiriatharba (that is, Hebron), where Abraham and Isaac had sojourned. Hebron was another 20 kilometres south of Bethlehem.
When I first read the chapter I thought the trip was a more or less continuous journey from Shechem to Hebron. But looking at it again I think it might have taken years. And so after roaming far and wide to the north-east Jacob goes back home to settle in the south country.

Note: quote from Genesis 35:27 (NASB)

Week 2 Genesis

Isaac’s wife Rebekah first showed up in chapter twenty-four. She was a very beautiful young woman and a considerate, helpful and hospitable host to Abraham’s servant. She seemed to be brave and venturesome too, willing to head into an unknown future with an unknown guy from an unknown country. A beautiful, nice, strong, young woman.
There’s a twenty-year gap in the story. Then Rebekah had her twin boys Esau & Jacob. Isaac loved Esau; Rebekah loved Jacob. Maybe not the best situation in a family, but not the worst either – depending on how it played out.
Years later when the boys were grown-up Isaac decided to give the family blessing to Esau. But in the best-known episode in Rebekah’s story she and Jacob colluded in deceiving Isaac – the blind old man is tricked into giving Esau’s blessing to the devious Jacob. It was a cold piece of domestic treachery and a side of Rebekah we didn’t see before showed up – she was dishonest ambitious self-interested unscrupulous conniving.
I think it’s easy to get the sense from the little bit of info the writer tells me that Rebekah started stronger than she finished. But that’s hard to say. Maybe her ambition was there from the beginning.
Either way, in the end she was more than a match for her older husband.
And whatever the quality of their relation was before, it’s hard to imagine it got better after that.

Week 2 Genesis

If I was a bible-reading business man and wanted to write a book called Bible Principles for Wealth Acquisition and Management I wouldn’t include Abraham.
It’s odd because Abraham was obviously a very wealthy guy. Before he left his home in Ur he had personal wealth. Later he’s described as being: very wealthy in livestock and in silver and gold. He had his own army of 318 men to protect him. He refused a bounty offered by the king of Sodom – he didn’t need it. His Hittite neighbours called him: a mighty prince.
The fourteen chapters of Abraham’s life tell me that he was rich. But not how he got rich. The only explanations I found were thing like: the Lord had blessed him in every way. Which is a whole lot different than practical things like working hard, investing, saving, controlling debt, budgeting, avoiding luxury purchases, etc.
When it comes to info on building and preserving wealth Abraham is a dry well.
But…while I was discovering that Genesis 12-25 had no real information on wealth building those chapters talked almost non-stop about Abraham’s family. Family issues are in every chapter: Lot, night visions and promises of a son, Hagar, Ishmael, Lot’s girls, Isaac, the Abraham-Isaac sacrifice, a wife for Isaac, Sarah’s death, Abraham’s remarriage. In fact I’d be tempted to say that the whole point of 12-25 is to show the progress of the Abraham family (which is maybe a slight exaggeration).

Note: quotes and references from Genesis 13:2, 14:14, 22-24, 23:6, 24:1 & 35 (NIV)

Week 1 Genesis

Genesis twenty is a stand-alone story, the story of Abimelech king of Gerar.
When Abraham’s company arrived in his territory Abimelech: went and took Sarah.
Just like that.
I’m not sure how Bronze-Age guys negotiated these kinds of arrangements but you get the feeling that Abimelech had the power to get whatever he wanted.
So the Lord used the medium of a dream and told Abimelech: you are a dead man because of the woman you have taken.
Abimelech must have sensed what he was up against because he started back-tracking immediately – I’m innocent! I’m blameless! I didn’t have sexual intercourse yet!
And the Lord tells him: I know that in the integrity of your heart you have done this, and I also kept you from sinning against Me; therefore I did not let you touch her.
Which meant two things were happening at once. One, for some reason Abimelech had decided not to have sexual intercourse with Sarah, and two, the Lord had intervened to prevent the king from having sexual intercourse with Sarah.
So who decided? It’s a bit of a mystery how that works. Doesn’t seem compatible with regular decision-making.
In this story Abimelech made – as far as he was concerned – a personal sexual decision, but as free as it seemed it wasn’t independent of the Lord, who acted as a kind of prevention-ensuring intervener.

Note: quotes from Genesis 20:2, 3, 6 (NASB)

Week 1 Genesis

A couple of days ago I read the short bio of Enoch.
Today I read the short bio of Melchizedek.
Enoch is four verses, Melchizedek three.
Halfway through Genesis fourteen Melchizedek suddenly materializes and meets Abraham as he headed home.
Melchizedek wasn’t a phantom. He was the king of Salem. I checked a word book to see if Salem had even been mentioned before chapter fourteen. It hadn’t. I looked at my bible map and it showed the city of Salem about 25 kilometres west of the north-end of the Dead Sea. In brackets below Salem it said Jerusalem. I wasn’t sure if that was some cartographic guessing. Maybe, maybe not. Either way Melchizedek is still a middle-eastern man of mystery.
In my word book I see his name is only mentioned twice in the OT. Genesis says that: he was priest of God Most High. This is the first time the word priest appears in the bible. I guess there were probably all kinds of religious agents doing what they did. I don’t know how many were acting for God Most High the Creator of heaven and earth but that’s whose camp Melchizedek was in.
Melchizedek ghosts in and just as fast ghosts out of Genesis. And even though I think the bible sometimes goes on too long in some stories his isn’t one of them.

Note: quotes from Genesis 14:18, 19 (NIV). Melchizedek is mentioned eight other times in the NT – all in book of Hebrews.

Week 1 Genesis

The Noah story takes up a big chunk of the first section in Genesis. I wondered how big so I tallied Genesis 1-11 and came up with an estimate of 289-verses. Of the 289 129 were about Noah. Meaning Noah got the lion’s share of those chapters – almost 45% . That’s way more than any other story; twice as much as the creation of the whole world story.
So Noah & the Flood is long. It’s also kind of bleak; sobering; frightening.
One thing I saw right at the beginning – almost like an explanatory intro – was this: the Lord saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain.
I guess lots of people read the Flood as a story of a god who’s ruthless tyrannical unfeeling destructive hateful murderous genocidal – like that. So the God-with-the-pain-filled-heart bumps up against that idea. The God-with-the-pain-filled-heart is a part of the mix. Which reminds me that while I’m reading through I need to keep all my pieces in play. I don’t know how many rules there are for reading through but that’s gotta be one of them: you don’t get to keep or discard what you want.
Which is one thing that makes reading through a bit more demanding than it already is.

Note: quote from Genesis 6:5-6 (NIV)

Week 1 Genesis

One plan for reading through the bible is called the Reading Through Except-For Plan. The RTE-F Plan allows me to make the content-exclusions of my choice. For example I might decide to skip long prophetic passages, histories of terrible people, pointless legal-ceremonial detail, tedious or demanding chapters. I might decide to skip name lists.
All of Genesis five is a name list and if I was excluding name lists I would leap-frog five and go right into chapter six.
Chapter five lists people in Adam’s family (the Nutshell Version: Adam Seth Enosh Kenan Mahalalel Jared Enoch Methuselah Lamech Noah).
The first and last names are familiar. But it’s Enoch who really stands out in this list: after he became the father of Methuselah, Enoch walked with God 300 years…Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him away.
No other man in the list is said to have walked with God. The text doesn’t say the others didn’t, but it doesn’t say they did either. But Enoch walked with God.
When you start reading through it’s easy to have the sense of being in for a 1334-page grind – like observing evolution in real time – before landing on NT shores. But here I’m just over a hundred verses in, long before the Lord or prophets or kings or Moses or Abraham or the flood and I find an antiquity-guy who had what he needed to walk with God.

Note: quote from Genesis 5:22-24 (NIV)