For most of what happened this time, I've posted a new link! This link (Biblical Family Tree), will be updated whenever I come across another set of genealogical information. I cheated a little and didn't include the universe's... I figured we'd keep it to people. A couple notes on it:
1. If the box is blue, the person has been referred to as male.
2. Red for ladies.
3. Black for nations, or due lacking clarity as to whether the name listed was for a person, or a nation, or which gender the person was.
4. Occasional notes within the same box as a person are things that came up while reading. Age, something specifically attributed to that person/nation, name meaning/name wordplay.
Unless I forgot everything about how to draw a basic family tree, it should follow the standard, but please let me know if I'm gravely mistaken. It can be fixed! (It'll also eventually be a cleaner image. I'm workin' with a netbook and Word Starter here.)
So before I got thrown into long accounts of who fathered whom and when, there's a little anecdote about Noah post-covenant. The first thing he does is plant a vineyard, make wine, and gets plastered. Noah gets so drunk that he passes out naked. And then what happens? His son Ham walks in and sees Noah in all his drunken, naked, comatose glory, and warns his brothers. His brothers go cover up dear old drunky dad with their eyes averted. When Noah wakes up, he knows "what his youngest son had done to him." Yep, this is knows as in some sort of sexual something or other again... Actually from here on out, if you see me italicize any form of "to know," know that somethin' kinky is going on. Might make things easier. Anyways, because Ham peeped on his dad, he and all his descendants (the Canaanites) are marked as slaves to their brothers (or brothers' descendants). Dear Noah, God just wiped the earth clean because of the wickedness of man. You probably shouldn't drink until you pass out naked, accuse your youngest son of voyeurism when he was probably just trying to help, and then condemn him and all of his children to slavery. Love, your progeny.
After that little gem that no one mentions, we've got family histories and who begets which nations...until Ham's descendants in Shinar want to build a great city, with a big tower in it. You guessed it: Babel. I remember being told this story. Let me tell you, what I was told is so not what I read. I was told that the people wanted to build a tower so tall as to touch the heavens and be like gods, and when they were succeeding (but not finished), God punished them for their pride by scattering them, and causing everyone to speak in different languages. What I read went a little different. The people in Shinar started to settle there, and they made bricks together. Then, they built a city from those bricks, and a high tower in the city (yes with it's top in the heavens), and a name for themselves, lest they be scattered to the winds and not part of a larger community. They were afraid of being separated. And God saw that they built a city, just like people had before the flood. Then God decided that history was not going to repeat itself, confused their language, and scattered them. Not quite the pride story I thought it was. It read like God saying "Now don't start that again!" And you know what struck me about this? God learned. God saw what happened before, and changed tactics based on that. Are so-called omniscient beings allowed to learn and still be considered all-knowing?
After that bombshell, we get tossed back into genealogy. Shem's specifically. Which brings us to Abram and Sarai.
<3 Agnostic in the Pews
No comments:
Post a Comment