BIBLE CRITICISM & INCONSISTENCY

There is no reason to assume that you are crazy when reading a message that says, ‘Whoever reads this is crazy!’* There is also no reason to assume that what the Bible says is the word of God and says the truth, just because the book itself says it holds the word of God and says the truth.

Whereas believers think that the Bible is the word of God and says the truth, skeptics say it is a book like all other books, but they do not judge it like other books: they think it is worthless because not everything it says is the truth.

Seekers – people who look for a better comprehension and question religion as much as science** – try to read the Bible without any prejudices. What interests them is to discover what the author tries to transmit with his stories. Whether the stories are true is a different matter. It is, for instance, not because animals don’t speak that fairy tales are worthless.

A believer, a skeptic and a seeker react very different when they read in Genesis that Adam died when he was 930 years. Whereas the believer assumes that an ancestor of us indeed lived for so many years, because in his opinion the Bible is the word of God and says the truth, the skeptic rejects this idea, because today people do not get older then a hundred and twenty years.*** The seeker neither sees a reason for accepting this idea nor for rejecting it. What interests him is why the author of Genesis invented these old ages and what they contribute to his stories.

Genesis says when the twenty patriarchs from Adam to Abraham had their ‘heir’ and when they died. This enables us to draw a graph and see that many generations coincided in time. Noah, for example, may have known the 18 generartions between Enosh, Adam’s grandson, and Abraham.

Being aware of how many generations coincided with each other, enables us to see that the Enoch in Cain’s supposed genealogy (based on the formula ‘Cain knew his wife and she became pregnant and gave birth to...’) and in Seth’s real genealogy (based on the father begot son principle) may refer to the same person: Cain’s wife may have had Enoch from Jared, a great great grandson of Seth.**** This is important because it is by investigating how the Enoch and Lamech in Cain’s genealogy and in Seth’s genealogy – both also offer similar names for Lamech’s father – Methushael in Cain’s genealogy and Methuselah in Seth’s genealogy – may refer to the same people that we discover several cases of incest, endogamy and extramarital relations. These secrets prepare us for others, such as the one regarding Jesus’ father.

There are several things we have ignored about the old ages in Genesis. These ages for the first twenty patriarchs were not taken randomly. They clearly demonstrate that the author (authors) of Genesis was a genius.

*One indeed has to be crazy to believe that.

**Since Bible believers and Bible skeptics are only interested in demonstrating that their ideas are right, they do not evaluate information right and is therefore difficult for them to obtain a better comprehension of the world they live in.

***Many Bible skeptics lack humility. They think that this book makes no sense because they cannot admit that they do not understand it.

.**** This woman may have been much younger than her husband Cain and then we should also not ignore that Noah was five hundred years old when he had Shem.