Teacher’s Pets

In chapter ten we are told all about Noah’s family, and how after the flood they all separated and had their own languages and cultures. However, in chapter eleven it says that after the flood all men had one language and lived together and lived peacefully until God scattered them through the world and they became separated. I find this very contradicting and very annoying, you cannot make up your mind about a certain topic if its story is always changing.

Chapter twelve and thirteen tell the story of how, after man was one and had one language and one culture, God ordered Abram to leave his land: ‘Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee’. So Abram followed His orders like a perfect teacher’s pet and left Caanan with his wife and his nephew. Along the way he stopped to build altars and confer with God until they arrived to Egypt. Here, to avoid being killed out of jealousy he said that his beautiful wife, Sarai, was just his sister and so he was given riches and she was taken to the Pharaoh. Then plagues from God invaded the Pharaoh’s house and he found out the truth about Sarai and Abram, and they were all kicked out from Egypt. In chapter thirteen he and Lot, his nephew, parted ways- Lot to Jordan and the plains of the east while Abram was given by God all the rest of the land to govern.

It looks as if God always has favorites, he always has one man he protects and guides for seemingly no reason. But I think that it is done selfishly, He promises and protects these men and in return they follow Him, adore Him, make sacrifices to Him, and defend Him in the Earth. This is another quality that makes Lord God appear selfish, evil, and uncaring for His creations. Another point I disagree with here is that these ‘favorites’ of God never seem to do anything to deserve that treatment. Adam was stupid and just created (maybe out of boredom, we shall never know) by God, Noah just lived on earth and happened to love God, and Abram literally had nothing else going for him other than he being Noah’s descendant. Still, they can get away with anything and God jumps to defend and protect them. For example, Abram had no problem in having his wife handed over to another man, the Pharaoh in Egypt, and of having other women and men himself but as soon as God saw this, He began sending plagues to the Pharaoh in revenge. I find all this very unreasonable.

I have found the perfect word for it: ‘the Lord made a covenant with Abram’. Covenant! We can see that he made one with Noah and with Adam too, this kind of special bond with them. And we finally see what God sees in Abram, when Lot was in trouble he gathered an army and went to defeat Lot’s capturers. He did this without being told by God, so I see that there is in fact something in him that makes him stand out. Later on, God says to him ‘I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward’. He is kind of a fatherly figure to him, you could say. Anyway, what Abram asked for is to be able to have a boy with his wife, but he didn’t exactly get what he wished for. As Sarai was unable to give birth, he conceived one with Sarai’s maid, Hagar-with Sarai’s blessing too. Then Hagar ran away but was confronted by ‘an angel of the Lord’ and told to go back and have Abram’s child and call him Ishmael. It says that Ishmael would be ‘a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man's hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren’. This reminds me of our summer reading book, Ishmael, who is actually a gorilla. Both books have just become so much deeper.