A whole lot of begatting is going on in Genesis Chapter 10 with the descendants of Noah. Joktan begat Almomad and Sheleph, and on and on. Chapter 11 is more of the same. We meet Abram and Sarai whom we follow for a few chapters. They are married but childless.
10/10/11 EDIT: Today I realized I missed something significant in Ch. 11: the Tower of Babel, which is a pretty enduring image from the bible, so I'm breaking some blog rule and editing an old post. You know, I have wrestled with getting into too much detail in these posts because I don't want them to go on ad nauseam, but then when I try to be concise I miss something. Also, this book is effing boring at times.
OK, so... everyone on earth speaks the same language, which is really handy for building a tower to heaven. Makes it easier to assign roles and such. When God gets wind of this, he makes it so that people no longer speak one common language. And wa-la, foils their plans to build a tower to heaven. Why not just tell them it isn't possible to build a tower that tall because heaven doesn't exist?
In Chapter 12, God tells Abram it's time to leave his father's land. He will be greatly blessed and have a great nation. Well all right then. Let's do this thing. With that, Abram and Sarai hit the road. When they reach Canaan, they build an altar and God promises Abram his descendants will inherit this land.
Abram and Sarai head to Egypt where there is a horrible famine. Things get seriously fucked up at this point. Abram tells Sarai that she is so beautiful the Egyptians will kill him if they think that she is his wife, so he will pass her off as his sister. What? Pharaoh is smitten and starts getting it on with Sarai. Because Abram is her "brother" he is taken care of by Pharoah's folks. He is provided with servants (again, slavery presented as a ho-hum no big deal) and animals including she asses and camels. All is well until God gets involved. He is pretty pissed at Pharaoh for sleeping with Abram's wife and plagues him and his house with some sort of horrible illness. Now, if this is somehow the appropriate penalty, why not punish Abram for lying about Sarai instead of afflicting Pharaoh for what he didn't know?
Pharaoh confronts Abram about his lies and shoos them out of Egypt.
Seriously, what in the hell kind of story is this?
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