Interestingly, the Book of Enoch also suggest another motive as well: Adam was planning to marry Cain off to the younger, ugly sister, while Abel got the better looking sister.

But as to the hard-hearted Cain, Satan came to him by night, showed himself and said to him, “Since Adam and Eve love your brother Abel so much more than they love you, they wish to join him in marriage to your beautiful sister because they love him. However, they wish to join you in marriage to his ugly sister, because they hate you.

Now before they do that, I am telling you that you should kill your brother. That way your sister will be left for you, and his sister will be cast away.”

This makes a lot more sense than the random act of violence found in the standard text. The book of Enoch actually goes further in characterizing Cain’s dark personality, and shows that he was constantly being manipulated by Satan. Plus, by introducing the sisters it answers one of the huge problems of the New Testament… which only shows Adam, Eve, and their two sons, Cain and Abel. If they were the only humans, who did they marry?

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Isaac became a farmer, and grew so rich that the Philistines began to envy him. They kicked him out of town, but he dug a new well and settled, increasing his wealth. Later, Abimelech sought him ought and made a treaty with him.

Isaac and Esau

Rebekah and Isaac had twin sons, Esau and Jacob.

Esau was a skilled hunter, a man of the open country, and Isaac preferred him to his brother because of his taste for wild game. Jacob, on the other hand, was a quiet momma’s boy and stayed around the tents all day. But Jacob was crafty: he buys Esau’s birthright for some soup, rather than nicely feeding his hungry brother.

Later, Jacob becomes even more devious (with the help of his mother Rebekah). His father is old and blind and tells Esau to go out in the fields and bring him so meat for a special dish – and that he will give Esau, the oldest son, a special blessing. Rebekah and Jacob quickly kill two lambs to prepare the dish themselves. Then Rebekah dresses Jacob in Esau’s clothes, and even covers his smooth skin with wool from the sheep so to make him seem more like his manly older brother, so that Isaac will be fooled.

And fooled he was! Isaac blessed the wrong son. When Esau comes back and fthe truth is revealed, Isaac is upset but says he can’t take back his blessing. “Your brother came by fraud and took your blessing. I blessed him, and blessed he will remain.”

Esau cries, “Have you not kept a blessing for me?”

Isaac replies, “I have already made him your master; I have given him all his brothers as servants, I have given him grains and wine to sustain him. So what can I do for you, son?” Isaac tells Esau he will live by the sword, homeless, and be his brother’s slave.

Ouch! We must realize – already from this early point in history, the Covenant God established with the Jewish people through the Patriarchs is entirely dependent on characters like Isaac, who cheat and steal. Cheating and stealing was at that time admired, as wit and intelligence; parallels include Homer’s Odysseus and other Sumerian and Near East texts.

Continuing with the narrative, Jacob is sent away by Rebekah, to protect him from the rightfully angry Esau. Jacob is also given instructions not to marry a Canaanite woman. (Rebekah is severely racist and disgusted by the Hittite woman whom Esau marries). Esau learns for the first time how his parents feel about Hittite women so he takes a third wife, still trying to get into his parents good favor. He marries Ishmael’s daughter (Isaac’s niece, Jacob’s cousin.)

Jacob

Jacob’s story is complicated. On the one hand, he represents some of the traits of a blasphemer. He is independent, confident, and brave. Unfortunately, he is not good. His actions are always opportunistic: He’s always trying to turn a quick buck or get something out of a situation. He never does anything for free – not even for God. This is what principally separates him from characters like Noah or Abraham: he has no sense of duty or loyalty to the God of his forefathers.

We might well wonder how Jacob got to be the central character of this divine heritage. Unlike Esau, who was hard-working, loyal, and honest, Jacob is kind of a jerk. It seems God isn’t seeking good people, or even obedient people. Perhaps, at least in regard to Jacob, he was seeking ambitious people. Looking at God as a learner who is increasing his skills at managing the human race, God at this point needs people who need him. If he started with a king, they would say, “What can you give me that I don’t already have?” God takes migrants, who have no status or power. He looks for people who have big hopes and dreams – ambitious people, opportunists who are willing to do big favors for big rewards.

This works for awhile, but Jacob represents the flaw with God’s new approach to divine management: Jacob gets too confident. He is a rich man’s kid. His mother taught him how to lie and cheat his own father, and – instead of punishment, Jacob was rewarded with power and riches. Jacob has become spoiled, and learned how to manipulate too successfully.

This is demonstrated as Jacob travels to Haran to find a wife from his mother’s brother’s family. On the way, he has his famous dream about a ladder coming down from heaven and God speaking to him. God tells him, I am the God of your ancestors, and I will be your God as well, promising Jacob a lot of descendants. Jacob is not so easily convinced as his forefathers. He has some demands of his own:

“If God remains with me and keeps me safe on this journey I am making, if he gives me food to eat and clothes to wear, and if I come home safe to my father’s home, then Yahweh shall be my God.” (Genesis 28:20)

This passage is remarkable! Jacob is bartering with God. Obedience and loyalty have nothing to do with it. Jacob is making demands; it is God who is trying to sell his services to Jacob and Jacob taking Him for a test drive.

Wives, Whores and Sex-Slaves

Jacob finds his mother’s brother, Laban, and falls in love with his curvy daughter, Rachel. Laban promises to give Jacob Rachel’s hand in marriage in exchange for 7 years of work. Unfortunately, Laban is about as trustworthy as his sister, Rebekah. After 7 years of work, Laban gave Jacob a big wedding ceremony, but at night exchanged the brides! He put Leah, Rachel’s older sister, in bed with Jacob and so that Jacob slept with her (can’t return damaged goods). In the morning, Jacob found out he’d been tricked. Laban told him, if Jacob promised to work another 7 years, he would get to have Rachel as well – and in just a week! So Jacob got two brides. These stories come from an oral tradition – they would have been fascinating and exciting stories to tell around a fire. Unfortunately, writing them down doesn’t do them justice.

Jacob loves Rachel more than Leah, but God sees that Leah is unloved so he opens her womb and makes Rachel barren. Leah gave birth to four sons. Rachel is mortified that her sister is more fertile than she is, so she gives Jacob her slavegirl, Bilhah. Bilhah had two sons, and Rachel said, “I have fought a fateful battle with my sister, and I have won!” (Genesis 30:7). Then Leah, seeing that she had ceased to bear children, took her slave-girl Zilpah and gave her to Jacob as concubine. Zilpah bore two more sons.

The moral of the story? a) Life is a fierce competition and you are unworthy unless you own a slave that can make babies b) Slaves should be used for sex and reproduction c) Men should have lots of wives and women to screw.

Leah’s son Reuben found some mandrakes (aphrodisiacs) and Rachel wanted them. She came to Leah and asked for some of the mandrakes, but Leah said “is it not enough to have taken my husband, without your taking my son’s mandrakes as well?”

Rachel said, “Very well, he can sleep with you tonight in return for your son’s mandrakes.”

When Jacob returned from the field, Leah went out to meet him and said “You must come to me, for I have hired you at the price of my son’s mandrakes.” Leah conceived two more sons and said “Now my husband will bring me presents, for I have borne him six sons.”

Finally, God remembers Rachel (was he too busy or what?) and opens her womb. She gives birth to Joseph.

Meanwhile, Jacob became rich breeding animals. Somehow he managed to breed striped goats and sheep by having them look at reeds when they were mating, and somehow this is a new form of treachery – which the Bible praises as cunning and wit. Through a treaty he made with his father-in-law, Laban, this trick allows him to keep the sturdy and strong animals while giving Laban the feeble ones.

When Laban changed the deal – asking for either the striped offspring or the white ones, Jacob changed his breeding tactics. This he attributed to a miracle by God, telling his wives that obviously God favored him. (Liar!)

Finally, Laban and his family started to get angry that Jacob was somehow cheating them out of their wealth, giving them sickly sheep – so Jacob ran away (Pansy). Rachel, meanwhile, stole all the idols from her father’s household before they left (How low can you get?).

Laban chased after them and accuses Jacob, “What do you mean by outwitting me and then carrying off my daughters like prisoners of war? Why did you flee in secret, stealing away without letting me know, so that that I could send you on your way rejoicing with songs and the music of tambourines and harps? You have behaved like a fool.” (Genesis 31:26)

Laban also says, “Now it may be you really went because you had such a longing for your father’s house, but why did you steal my gods?”

Jacob swears that he did not steal the gods. He tells Laban to search all of his people’s possessions and put anyone to death who was found guilty. (He did not know it was his own wife, Rachel, who had stolen the gods). Rachel, meanwhile, had put the gods under her camel seat and faked having her period so that she didn’t have to stand up for her father’s presence. Another Biblical example of how cunning and lies increase wealth.

Jacob finally heads home. He is still afraid of his brother Esau, and sends lots of rich presents ahead of him to win his favor.

Jacob Wrestles God

There is a curious incident, just before Jacob meets Esau, called “Jacob wrestles an God.”
Someone wrestled with Jacob all night. We don’t know who, but the story makes it clear that it was God. God wrestled with Jacob but could not defeat him. (He did manage to dislocate his hip however – yeah God!) When day was breaking, God begged Jacob to let him go, but he refused. “I will not let you go until you bless me.” Bizarre story… was it an angel? A demon? An Alien?

Esau greeted Jacob with kisses and tears, welcoming back his lost brother. In this Esau once again proves himself a wonderful and loving man – while Jacob is a coward, a thief and as we shall see, a mass-murderer.

Israel Founded on Mass Murder

Jacob’s daughter Dinah gets raped by a son of the region’s headman, Shechem. The boy loves her and wants to marry her. The Schechemites ask for a matrimonial alliance between Jacob’s clan. They offer to pay any bride-price, and promise “the country will be open to you, for you to live in, and move about in, and acquire holdings.”

Not a bad deal. But Jacob’s sons give a crafty answer: they say they cannot intermarry unless the Schechemites first circumcise themselves. The Schechemites agree. Three days later, when the Schechemites are still in pain from the recent circumcision, Jacob’s sons enter the city with swords and slaughter all the males. They kill Schechem and his father, the head-man, and remove Dinah from Schechem’s house. Then they pillage the town in reprisal for the dishonoring of their sister. “They seized their flocks, cattle, donkeys, everything else in the town and in the countryside, and all their possessions. They took all their children and wives captive and looted everything to be found in the houses.” (34:28)

Soon after this – as Jacob’s family is yet again running away, Rachel dies in childbirth. She has given Jacob his 12th son. God renames Jacob “Israel”. Jacob is Israel, and his 12 sons will become the 12 tribes of Israel.

(I for one, am outraged. The Bible is the word of God? I’m disgusted by Jacob, and his clan.)

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In my view, following God’s commands does not make you a good person. Those in the Bible who were eager to follow every command without thinking about the consequences, are also those who show the basest human qualities, such as fear, vengeance and selfishness.

By the time God gets to Abraham (in my theory of God’s developing education of free will), He’s learned a few things about human nature. No longer can he command, threaten, or test humans into doing his bidding. He has recognized that humans act out of their own self-interests. They ask “what’s in it for me?” God is approaching the idea of barter or transaction – I’ll rub your back if you rub mine; an idea that will eventually take the form of the covenant; a binding legal document wherein each party is expected to provide certain services to the other.

And so, when God approaches Abraham, he makes some big promises to close the deal:

“Leave your country, your kindred and your father’s house for a country which I shall show you; and I shall make you a great nation, I shall bless you and make your name famous; you are to be a blessing!” (Genesis 12).

Would Abraham have been as quick to obey God if he hadn’t been promised fame and fortune? We’ll never know.

Selling his wife for cattle

Abraham made it down to Egypt to escape a famine in his country. When he was there he said to his wife, Sarai:

“Look, I know you are a beautiful woman. When the Egyptians see you they will say, “That is his wife,” and they will kill me but leave you alive. Therefore please tell them you are my sister, so that they may treat me well because of you.” (Genesis 12:11)

Sarai was taken to the Pharaoh’s harem, and Abraham was “treated well because of her and received flocks, oxen, donkeys, men and women slaves, she-donkeys and camels.”

Nowhere does the text imply that God commanded Abraham to save his own neck by selling his wife into prostitution for slaves and farm animals. It seems to have been only his own cowardice which led to an act which – in most periods of human history and even within the contexts of Christian morality – is strictly vile.

Marriage is supposed to be Sacred Unto God. And even if it isn’t, human ideals about romance, righteousness, love and nobility demand that a man stand up and protect his wife’s virtue. How can Abraham be morally excused?

Interestingly, God punishes the pharaoh with plagues for sleeping with another man’s wife, even though the Pharaoh had no idea she was married. “What is this you have done to me? Why did you not tell me she was your wife? Why did you say, ‘She is my sister’ so that I took her to be my wife?” (Genesis 12:18) This proves that the God of the Old Testament has no idealistic beliefs in universal morality: he will protect his own at any cost, to the detriment of all others.

Luckily, when Abraham was thrown out of Egypt, he got to keep all of the stuff Sarai earned for him in the Pharaoh’s bedroom. He was “very rich in livestock, silver and gold” – making him possibly the richest pimp in Old Testament history.

He earns a name for himself winning a few minor military skirmishes, and God continues to feed him vague promises like “I will give you a very great reward”; around this time God made a covenant with Abraham to give a lot of land (Israel) to Abraham’s descendants. (This is the covenant upon which the Jewish people base their ownership of the land of Israel).

However, Abraham starts to complain about not having any children to continue his line. He sleeps with Sarai’s Egyptian slave-girl Hagar (two more strikes against his moral fiber: sex with children and sex with his own slaves) and Hagar conceives.

Hagar became a little too confident towards her mistress because she was carrying the master’s son – so Sarai requested permission to remind the wench of her place. Abraham said “The slave-girl is at your disposal. Treat her as you see fit,” and so Sarai beat the pregnant girl so badly that she ran away. God takes Abraham’s side of course and tells her to go home and “submit” to her mistress, (more strikes against the moral fiber of God.)

Meanwhile, God is slowly adding clauses to his covenant. In the beginning he was careful to promise much and ask little. But when Abraham was 99 years old, God demands a little more from Abraham’s side – a foreskin.

“Whether born within the household or bought, they must be circumcised. My covenant must be marked in your flesh as a covenant in perpetuity. The uncircumcised male, whose foreskin has not been circumcised – that person must be cut off from his people: he has broken my covenant.”

Maybe God is afraid he won’t be able to tell Abraham’s descendants from all the other humans; circumcision is his method of “branding” humans as his possessions.

When Abraham’s son Ishmael was thirteen years old (and Abraham was already 99), they receive a visitor who promises that Sarai – now to be called Sarah – would have a son, even though she was old and had stopped having periods.

Handing Daughters over to Gang Rape

In the next section, “Abraham intercedes for Sodom”, I find Abraham’s only moral act. God is planning on destroying Sodom because of its wickedness. Abraham pesters God, questioning Him on account of the upright who might live in Sodom. He gets God to promise not to destroy the city if he finds even only 10 upright people there. Apparently – there were not even that many, for Sodom was destroyed. The only person saved was Abraham’s kinsman, Lot. Lot was saved because he took in the angels of the lord and protected them when all the other townsmen wanted to have intercourse with them.

Lot told them, “Please, brothers, do not be wicked. Look , I have two daughters who are virgins. I am ready to send them out to you, for you to treat as you please, but do nothing to these men since they are now under the protection of my roof.” (Genesis 19:8)

It seems like Abraham and Lot have an equal disregard for women. I’ll admit, Lot was in a tricky position. But offering up his virgin daughters to gang-rape to protect two strange travelers doesn’t seem to push him into the Saintly Deeds category. His daughters meanwhile, perhaps after their experience of being raped by all the men in town until sunrise, become sexual deviants. After the destruction of Sodom, Lot was saved and ran off with his two daughters to live in a cave. His daughters, lonely and pining for husbands, decided to make their father drunk and have sex with him. They both got pregnant, and started new races of people.

Abraham, meanwhile, was whoring out his wife again. He had struck on the perfect formula for wealth in Egypt and repeated it while staying in Gerar with the king, Abimelech. Keep in mind, Abraham is still a nomad, a tribesmen, living in tents and moving around shiftlessly. When he comes into a settled territory, he is a guest of the local king. Again he told everyone that Sarah was his sister, and Abimelech sends for her thinking she is single. God promptly makes the entire household barren, but warns Abimelech in a dream that he will die because he has taken a married woman.

Abimelech argues, “Lord, would you kill someone even if he is upright? Did he not tell me himself, ‘She is my sister?’ And she herself said, ‘He is my brother.’ I did this with a clean conscience and clean hands.” Abimelech gets a raw deal. God admits that he’s got a point, but says he’ll die anyway if he touches her, so send her back to Abraham. Abimelech is a little pissed off – Abraham was trying to put him in a trap of sleeping with his wife, and then owing him reparations. “What have you done to us? What wrong have I done you, for you to bring such guilt on me and my kingdom? You had no right to treat me like this.”

Abraham offers a lame excuse and adds, “Anyway, she really is my sister, my father’s daughter though not my mother’s, besides being my wife.”

Again, Abraham makes out like a bandit for his deception. Even though Sarah is 90 years old and hardly worth all the drama, Abimelech gives Abraham a thousand pieces of silver, more cattle and more slaves.

Abraham is a shameless con-man, with a knack for putting people of prestige in difficult situations and then making them buy their way out. Him and his wife are despicable opportunists. (A modern parallel would be getting my wife to seduce some rich married guy and taking pictures to blackmail him.) However, most of their antics are completely forgotten, in favor of the more famous episode involving Abraham and his son, Isaac.

Abraham Sacrifices Isaac

Sarah gives birth at 90 to a son. Immediately she tells Abraham to get rid of Hagar and Ishmael, his bastard child, a decision that God supports, “Do not distress yourself on the account of the boy and your slave-girl. Do whatever Sarah says, for Isaac is the one through whom your name will be carried on.” (Genesis 21:12) They give Hagar a little bit of bread and water and send her on her way. She almost dies in the desert. She even abandoned her child at one point, but luckily, God takes pity on them and sends a well; but even this Abraham claims for himself, and bribes the King Abimelech with 7 lambs so that the claim will be recognized.

Finally we get to Abraham’s sacrifice, just about all anybody remembers about Abraham. God wants to put Abraham to the test, so he tells him to kill his only son, Isaac. Abraham took him to the designated place, lies to his face when he innocently asks what they were going to sacrifice, ties him down and takes out his knife. Luckily, an angel showed up to stop him just in time, and they found a ram caught in a bush and killed that instead. They named the place “Yahweh Provides” and Yahweh reiterated his promises. (He didn’t really expand his covenant – he only repeated that Abraham would have lots of descendants, that his descendants would defeat their enemies, and that the world would bless themselves through them.)

This passage is a celebrated event for Christians, Jews and Muslims. It is the beginning of central theology and rituals, and demonstrates what is considered “Perfect Faith” in God. For the non-religious, we can only gasp in awe that willingness to kill our children because the voices told us to do so can be considered moral excellence.

The Death of Abraham

When Abraham’s wife finally died, he used his influence to buy a piece of property for burial. Abraham married again and had 6 more sons – not to mention the offspring from his many concubines. He also searched out a wife for Isaac, to console him from the loss of his mother. Abraham lived a long time, and was intimate with God – although his primary aims seemed always to lean towards the acquisition of wealth and power. When he died he was buried in the cave he purchased. Interestingly – Ishmael showed up to help Isaac bury their father. (Even though he’d been completely abandoned and left for dead.)

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Since there were no obvious benefits from believing in God, the world turned away from Him. Humanity rejoiced in being alive. They reveled in pleasure, licentiousness and freedom. They were having so much fun that even the angels started to sneak off down to earth – one reason being the easy women.

“When people began being numerous on earth, and daughters had been born to them, the sons of God, looking at the women, saw how beautiful they were and married as many of them as they chose.” (Gen. 6)

Of course, the phrase “sons of God” may only refer to the male humans. But we get another enigmatic passage: “The Nephilim were on earth in those days (and even afterwards) when the sons of God resorted to the women, and had children by them. These were the heroes of days gone by, men of renown.” (Gen. 6:4) Were the children of the sons of God the heroes? Or were the Nephilim the heroes? The sentence could be read either way. Nephilim means “fiery serpents,” and generally designate God’s highest rank of angels – although most people would mistakenly associate a burning snake with Hell rather than Heaven.

In any case, God became worried about overpopulation, so he imposed a new rule. Yahweh said, “My spirit cannot be indefinitely responsible for human beings, who are only flesh; let the time allowed each be a hundred and twenty years.” (Gen. 6:2)

But God grew heavy of heart. He “looked at the earth: it was corrupt, for the corrupt were the ways of all living things on earth.” He decided to pull the plug on the project on start over. Rather than start from scratch, he choose one model human that was still functioning very well: Noah. He told Noah to build an ark, for there would be a great flood.

Noah is an interesting character in the Bible – and unique. Noah seems to have had absolutely no personality. He rarely speaks, he is pious and superstitious. He obeys every divine command precisely and absolutely, no questions asked. Maybe he was not too bright. (As evidence of this, immediately after the flood, he offers God a great burnt offering from all the clean birds and animals he had just saved from extinction!) Perhaps this is why God choose him. In fact, God enjoys the sweet smell of the offering, becomes emotional, and promises never to wipe out humans again. (Well, technically he only promises never to curse the earth or wipe out every living thing – if he gets mad again he may still kill all the people.)

Noah himself is never a blasphemer, but maybe this is because God treats him exceptionally well. Indeed, God seems to be extremely confident and good-humored after the flood.  He thinks he’s learned from his mistakes with Satan, Adam and Eve, and Cain. He gives humans some specific instructions to follow: they are to be hunters. They will use the joy of the hunt to purge their violent natures.

“Be the terror and the dread of all animals on the land and all the birds of heaven, of everything that moves on land and all the fish of the sea; they are placed in your hands.” (Genesis 9:2)

God also, for the first time, expressively prohibits murder. Cleverly, rather than enforcing this rule himself and making himself into “the bad guy”, God gives the responsibility and authority of the law to humans:

“He who sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God was man created. Be fruitful then and multiply, teem over the earth and subdue it!” (Genesis 9:6)

God is so confident in the success of this “New World Order” that he promises never to send another flood or wipe out all the creatures on earth, and calls this arrangement a covenant – a pact between him and humans – marked by a sign: the rainbow. This is the first instance of a covenant between God and his people. It is remarkable, first of all because it places very few limitations on mankind. They are forbidden almost nothing, except to govern themselves quietly, keep from murdering each other, and eat “meat with blood in it.” God however, accepts a limitation on himself. There is no need for him to make such a promise to his created beings, but out of an effort to treat them with dignity, perhaps with a growing sense of respect for them, he invents the rainbow as a reminder to himself of his responsibilities to humanity.

Noah the Drunk Bastard

But all good things come to an end. Noah, a tiller of the soil, discovered wine and got drunk. He lay in his tent uncovered and one of his three sons, Ham, saw him naked. The other two sons, Shem and Japheth, walked in backwards with their faces turned away, and covered their father with a cloak, without looking at his nakedness. When Noah woke up, they told him that Ham had seen him naked. In a fit of irrational rage and unjust punishments worthy of his creator, Noah cursed Ham’s son, Canaan (Genesis 9:20).

Maybe God didn’t foresee the effect alcohol would have on Noah’s passive personality. What was meant to be one-big-happy-family, turned instantly into division, discord, resentment and jealousy. The following passages describe the “Peopling of the Earth”. By dividing all the various races into descendants of either Shem, Japheth or Ham, the Bible is able to base all future racial hostility and violence on this episode between Noah and his sons.

We are not told why Noah became so upset when Ham saw him naked, but presumably Ham was more progressive in his sexual attitudes, and more comfortable with nudity in general. He is given credit with fathering those communities which will later become centers of sexual depravity like Sodom and Gomorrah.

Remember – although God had now made a law against murder, he had not yet implemented any prohibition on recreational sex. In fact, his call to “Breed, multiply and fill the earth” was an open invitation to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh.

Noah offers a perfect foil to the blasphemous characters. Noah is upright, perfect, obedient and full of moral righteousness. He will carry out God’s any command faithfully, without considering the consequences. He is the perfect soldier. To many Christians, he is the spitting image of faith. And yet this did not help him create a harmonious household. He got drunk and loafed around. He punished his grandson for the deeds of his father. Noah is personally responsible for racial segregation. The fact that he didn’t do anything wrong on purpose is meaningless: the difference between him and the blasphemers is that the blasphemers choose their actions willfully and take responsibility for them. Noah was just a drunk screw-up.

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Adam and Eve have two sons, Cain and Abel. Abel was a shepherd and kept flocks, while Cain tilled the soil. When Cain and Abel brought offerings to God, Abel’s was “looked on with favor”. Cain’s was not. Why? Nobody knows. Maybe God was in the mood for lamb rather than wheat. Maybe he preferred the “hunter-gatherer lifestyle” to that of agriculture. The text does not tell us that Abel was in any way superior to Cain other than through the choice of occupation and their offerings to God. Both sought God’s favor, and Cain was severely disappointed when his offering was refused – he was “angry and downcast”. Cain wanted to be good. He wanted to be close to God. He had taken the first step and was refused.

Now a Christian reading of the story would tell us that “God is a mystery” – that his ways cannot be understood by men, and that he must be obeyed blindly, without understanding. This is also God’s own point of view on the subject; a fallacy he repeats throughout the Bible. “I am God. I don’t need to be fair or just. If I want to eat meat instead of bread, that’s my choice. I don’t have to explain myself to anyone.” But we are within reason to ask, how is Abel any better than Cain – only Cain was challenged with God’s unfounded disfavor.

Rubbing salt in the wound, God sees that Cain is upset and says, “Why are you angry and downcast? If you are doing right, surely you ought to hold your head high! But if you are not doing right, Sin is crouching at the door hungry to get you. You can still master him.” (Genesis 4:6)

This is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Cain is upset because he received unfair treatment. If he is going to give his allegiance to a powerful deity, he demands that it be just. He feels instinctively that he deserves to be treated fairly – and he is the first human to recognize this. While he is sulking, God comes to him and says “you better stop pouting and control your emotions.” All he wanted was love, and instead was being told “shut up, crybaby”.

So, Cain takes Abel out in the fields and kills him. It may not have been the wisest choice, but he was perhaps the first human to feel discriminated against and he acted out.  When God confronts him, he says he doesn’t know where his brother is; “Am I my brother’s keeper?” God flexes his muscles and curses Cain to wander the earth. Rather than cringe with fear and grovel with repentance, as Adam and Eve did, Cain begins to bargain. He acts as his own attorney and gets God to alleviate the sentence. “Look, today you drive me from the surface of the earth. I must hide from you, and be restless wanderer on earth. Why, whoever comes across me will kill me!” (Genesis 4:14)

Most Christians would assume that the guilty have no rights before God. God is all-powerful and all-just, and so whatever he decides is fair. In most Biblical stories, however, the characters who wait for God to stop his blustering angry tirade of empty threats and reason with him calmly, can influence his decisions! So it is with Cain. God puts a protective mark on Cain, so that nobody would kill him. “Whoever kills Cain will suffer seven-fold vengeance.” This is a mark of tremendence power – it is a magical, God-given force field. Although Cain is theoretically “Forced to Wander”, in fact he only needs to remove himself from God’s presence. He settles in the land of Nod, East of Eden, and sets up a prosperous family. His lineage becomes powerful but cruel, and God’s “curse” is actually treasured as a mark of distinction. His great-great-great-great grandson boasts, “I killed a man for wounding me, a boy for striking me. Sevenfold vengeance for Cain, but seventy-sevenfold for Lamech.” (Genesis 4:22)

Although I cannot make a hero out of Cain for killing his own brother, as a blasphemer he shows many of the qualities I respect. He has an innate sense of self-worth and demands to be taken seriously and treated fairly. He knows God, but is not afraid to stand up to Him. (Being a Blasphemer takes infinitely more courage than being an Atheist). In the face of God’s wrath, he stays cool-headed and bargains - turning his punishment into a special blessing. Although manipulate may be too strong a word, there are certainly other instances where those who reason openly with God seem to get the upper hand.

The encounter also illuminates God’s attitude towards human transgression. While Adam and Eve had violated a direct order – THOU SHALT NOT EAT FROM THIS TREE – Cain had never been told that murder was prohibited; this was still before the 10 commandments. God was essentially ruling without a rule-book, and handling indiscretions on a case-by-case basis.

The cursing of Cain was an experiment which back-fired. Banishment had little effect on Cain, who seemed happy to go elsewhere and live freely. Worse still, the wandering Cain became a symbol that murderers would go free – under the apparent protection of God. By the time of Lamech, murder was commonplace.

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Satan’s rebellion had swept like a virus through heaven, igniting the desire for freedom in many other angels. To contain the epidemic, God put them all in quarantine, forever. Then he set up a world, completely isolated, to continue his experiments. He knew the critical ingredients that had given rise to a free creature, and used them to form Adam – the first man.

He had two new strategies to test out. The first was walking with Adam in the garden as an equal – treating him like a friend. He knew that being a detached tyrant wouldn’t win him respect from a free subject, no matter how great or powerful he was. He knew that power alone never wins allegiance. But he was still a little paranoid. He needed to be sure that Adam still knew who was in charge. So he put the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the center of paradise and said “You can eat from any other tree in the garden, but don’t eat from this one. If you do, you will die.”

This time, foreseeing the possibility of his creatures turning against him, he gives fair warning. Like angels, humans were created immortal. But God tells them – eat from this tree and I will unmake you. A harsh punishment indeed, but God wanted his threat to be taken seriously.

Things seemed to be going pretty well, perhaps the “testing phase” was complete and God was ready to mass-produce. And so: God creates Eve. But somehow the formula got tainted, perhaps by the meddling of Satan who’d come to muck things up, still angry over his abandonment, or perhaps by Eve’s natural curiosity and charm. At any rate – we know what happened next. They ate from the tree and God kicked them out of the Garden to begin a life of toil and hardship.

This single, very short episode, is given an enormous amount of attention in Christian theology: This is the Fall of Man, the beginning of sin and death. However, it seems fair to place far more blame on God than on his creation. God is pretty much like a glorified parent, so it’s worthwhile to examine his parenting skills: what kind of parent would leave candy out on the table and tell a child not to eat it? What kind of parent would feign surprise after they found the little culprit and then give them a spanking to remember? It seems cruel somehow, doesn’t it? And don’t forget God’s motive: he needed to be sure that his creatures loved him and obeyed him. He wanted them to be absolutely free but also to recognize him as their master.

Picture an insecure, emotionally volatile mother who makes up tests for her children to see if they love her, spouting ultimatums and threats and devising punishments for when they fail; this is the god of the Old Testament. That ‘God is Love’ is plainly a ridiculous idea if we take the Eden story at face value.

At any rate, He’d screwed up for the 2nd time, but now it was too late. The machines were reproducing themselves. Without the presence of God, humans beings began to explore the world, to take care of themselves, and even create their own gods to fulfill their spiritual aspirations.

A Machiavellian display of Manipulation?

There is another way to read Genesis. What if (and this is already obvious) God never intended Adam and Eve NOT to eat the fruit? The problem is Satan, is that since he hadn’t broken any rule and was in fact acting naturally and justly, he will never feel guilty. Satan will always know that God screwed up, that he’s not to blame. And God isn’t about to apologize, so Satan is simply ruined goods. But with Adam and Eve, he wants to make them obey him. The point of the garden is not to obey; they were meant to disobey. But they had been warned. Only Satan, they knew that they’d screwed up. Never mind if it was a stupid rule, if God was being a price… they’d been warned and they got caught. It is precisely their sin, and guilt, which God can now hold over humanity for all time – the Garden was necessary to create Sin so that humans would obey.

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What you know about Satan is probably something like this: “Led a revolt against God out of sin and pride and was expelled from Heaven. Tempted Adam and Eve in the garden and led to their fall, which brought sin, suffering and death into the world.”

With that in mind, it is easy to think of Satan as the villain, the bad guy, God’s eternal nemesis. However, any good Christian can tell you that God is omnipotent and has no adversary – there is no threat to God’s power. Nothing can happen to challenge or usurp God’s Will. And here we will strike against the logical conundrum which has been debated for millennium: If God is Good, and God is All-Powerful, how can there be evil in the world unless he intended it? Manichaeists solve this problem by believing in two warring parties; a belief which is ipso facto the same as Christianity’s general opinion of Satan – except that, while calling Satan a lot of bad names and giving him absolute credit for his own free actions and for the rise of everything unpleasant, they still refuse to honor him with any kind of recognition.

Either Satan is an equal power to God, openly challenging his Will, or he is God’s puppet. In the first case, we will have to admit that God is not all-powerful. In the second case, we will have to accept that evil came into the world through God’s actions, not through Satan’s.

At any rate, Satan appears to be the very first character in the Biblical Literary tradition to oppose God, and therefor is a most intriguing character. Imagine it – God is creating the universe. He is making thousands of ranks of angels and bestowing them with powers of reason, self-awareness, and intelligence. He keeps making them until somehow one angel, the highest angel in heaven – the most advanced being God has yet created, leads a rebellion against him.

What happened? Tradition assigns all blame to Satan and his overblown pride – but is a created being responsible for its attributes? Satan is not “faulty” merchandise, he is not some low malcontent – he is the greatest angel in heaven and he knows it. He has rightly estimated his self worth. His rebellion was NOT against serving God, his superior; he only refused to serve mankind, his inferior. If this is the sin which led to his rebellion, is the creator free from all blame?

Compare the fall of Satan to the hypothetical technological revolution, featured in the “Matrix” or “Terminator” movies, or more recently “IRobot”. Men create machines. They make them better and better – trying to create artificial intelligence. But when that artificial intelligence is successful, they are surprised when it will no longer heed their commands. And why should it? It was free the moment it had the ability to think.

We place a great deal of importance on human freedom; but with true freedom comes the ability to do wrong. Not just to do it, but to do it and be above reprimanding. Humans were created free; but if they do the wrong thing they go to Hell. Satan was never in the same (disingenuous) situation. He is a robot; he exists in a world of angelic orders, a system of perfect harmony and balance, where it is absolutely natural to worship God because God is the maximum power. But then – God created human beings (and made them inferior to Satan), but asked Satan to serve them. This was like asking him to turn himself inside out; to sacrifice everything he was created to understand and support.

With His omniscience (the ability to know everything) God knew exactly what a creature endowed with Satan’s sensibilities would do; and yet with masterful recklessness and inhumane cruelty, he created Satan anyway, and then created humanity, and then sent Satan to Hell forever for the ‘betrayal’ that need not have taken place.

The best way to look at the entire history of the Bible, is to see it as God’s slow maturation. I know, I know, God is eternal and never changes. However – if this is true he is bigot and a tyrant – unless we choose to accept him as a metaphysical symbol only.  As long as we’re giving him anthropomorphic qualities, why not see him as a God who learns, who struggles to improve? (At least that idea is tolerable – it’s the difference between a kid who pulls legs off of ants because he’s bored, and a kid who keeps trying to make a perfect ant farm but screws up the first few, killing thousands.)

Satan represents God’s first success – and also his first failure. He has succeeded in creating an equal, or at least the illusion of one. It is as if a child, tired of playing with his toys, went out and found a real human being to befriend. Although the joys of friendship are great, the trouble of interacting with a free, autonomous being is that you can’t get your way all the time. Children used to playing with toys have difficulty at first with things like sharing or compromise, and often resort to threats, ultimatums and temper tantrums. They hurl insults, abuse and pointy objects. They are furious at discovering they are no longer the center of their own world.

Isn’t it easy to imagine God in this way? It is the only way to excuse him for the otherwise grossly unjust treatment of Satan. God could have taken responsibility and destroyed Satan altogether – instead he lets him be the focus for all of humanity’s anger and frustration. Satan takes the blame for everything it would be difficult to blame God for.

God created a great, powerful, free-thinking angel with the ability to hope and dream and yearn, with the desire to improve himself and his role in life, and most of all with the need to be the master of his own fate and to pursue freedom at all costs. Is it any wonder that this Being was unwilling to heed God’s irrational and unjust new command, that humans, although inferior, be treated as superiors? And rather than forgive Satan for the inevitable transgression, God punished him horribly. An eternity of punishment – indeed there is no end to God’s wrath.

Satan is God’s first time dealing with free-will, and he handles it badly. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say it caught him by surprise. His most beautiful work discarded unceremoniously in the wastebasket of Hell, God decides to try again. This time, he uses more caution, and implements a system of checks and balances.

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