Time is passing.  

Well, I've finished parts 5 and 6 of Genesis. For the most part, they describe family lines, which as far as I can figure represents, in part, the passage of time. In this case, it may or may not represent time coming up to a point in time that the author would find historically recent relevant.

Summary

As part 5 begins, God had just told Noah and his family to increase, and increase they do, filling the earth, covering a lot of ground and having lots of descendants speaking many language.

Just as all this is going down, a story is thrown in in which all of man is together moving eastward with one language. They decide to contradict God in two direct ways: by staying in one city (not filling the earth) and making a name for themselves, which seems to parallel Adam and Eve's desire to "become like God, knowing good and evil." Their plan for this is to build a really big tower. God ain't having it, and before you know it they're all over the world speaking tons of languages.

Part 6 follows. It's a simple family tree from Noah down to Terah and his sons Abram, Nahor, and Haran. Not much else there. We are about to get to the patriarch of the Judaism, Abram/Abraham, so I wonder if the author's mindset is about to switch from pseudo-historical to full-on-historical.

Analysis

The "Tower of Babel" story builds on man working against God. It emphasizes something that's easy to lose after all the murder and shanagins so far: that the principal reason for our problems is denying God authority in our lives and instead making our own way. This is why Adam and Eve ate from that tree, and that's why these people build a tower: to make a name for themselves. Either way, God works to put a stop to it.

The story describes how we came to have different languages. Clearly, this is not historically accurate. Here's a list of... things... Genesis has explained so far: how we got animal names, why we have sex, why snakes are hated and lack legs, why birthing kids hurts, why marriage is oppressive for women, why farming is hard, why we die, why we wear clothes, why there are nomads, whom various skilled peoples descended from, why our lives are short, where Nephelim came from, how people got all over the earth, why there are rainbows, why Canaan is cursed, the origin of big certain big cities, and why there are different languages.

Whew! That's a lot of freakin stuff!! At the same time, there is no way the explanations of all these things are historically accurate. No way no how. However, I will say this about the worldview it purports: it places dying and oppression of women as hard realities that should be obvious to everyone (hence the legend of "why") and that are not what God created (because they're explained by the fall).

Respsonse

So I have finished 6 out of 12 parts of Genesis. The only problem is I'm only about 20% through the actual text of Genesis, so I would guess the next several parts are much longer. But this is the plot so far: God, a powerful yet emotional being, created a beautiful world and man was privileged to be in it, but we were unable to accept our place in it (under God's authority) and since then things of got screwed up--violence, pride, death, etc. Through it all, God is working slowly to do something about it, once just plain starting over.

I guess I could write some lies about how it makes me think about how God is working in me despite my flaws but it doesn't really, nor do I think it's aiming to. It is, however, a much more exciting and interesting and deep plot than I ever realized before.