Things I missed in Sunday school

I just finished reading the Book of Genesis, Illustrated by R. Crumb. For those of you too young to remember the 60's and for those of you who lived them but can't remember them, R. Crumb is an illustrator and irreverent comic book artist whose work includes Keep on Trucking, Fritz the Cat, and the cover of Janis Joplin's Cheap Thrills album.

It should be noted that Crumb only did the illustrations. He did not change the text with any additions or deletions. Some of it's from the King James version, and some from other translations, but it's all there.

I knew that the Old Testament is filled with sex and violence and that God could be capricious, mean, and pretty stupid for an all knowing being, but I'd never read the Book of Genesis from end to end before, so I wasn't directly familiar with the whole book. Quite frankly, most of it doesn't make sense, or if it does make sense, it's impossible to pull some deep moral meaning out of the stories.

Right off the bat, he's got two versions of the creation of man. Chapter 1:26-27 - Then God said,

"Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea.... So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them."

In Chapter 2:7 he created man "...from the dust of the ground and breathed life into the nostrils..." It's not until Chapter 2:22 that he made the woman from Adam's rib. In the first chapter, he makes man on the sixth day; in the second chapter he makes man, "before grasses of the field had yet sprouted," which would be on day three. Oh well, the Bible never was all that great on consistency, but to me the really weird part is the version in the first chapter when God say, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness..." US??? OUR??? I always thought God was supposed to be the one and only. But wait, there's more.

Get a load of these lines from Chapter 6:1-4.

"When men began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. Then the Lord said, "My spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal, his days will be numbered to a hundred and twenty years."

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days - and also afterward - when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.

What the hell is going on here? Sons of God (again, I was taught that there was only one Son of God) coming to earth and knocking up the beautiful daughters of men? And then limiting the offspring's lifespan to 120 years so that God doesn't have to deal with a bunch of immortal half-humans? That story I had never heard before.

One story I had previously heard about (from Megan the Elder) occurs in Chapter 34. This is really nasty! Dinah, the daughter of Leah and Jacob, went out to see "some of the daughters of the land." Shechem, the son of the Prince of that land, sees Dinah and defiles her. But he falls in love with her, and wants to marry her. After lengthy negotiations between Shechem's father Hamur, and the sons of Jacob, they reach a comprehensive agreement to share land, cattle, and women. The kicker was that all the male members of Hamur's tribe had to become circumcised. They did, and on the third day, "while they were still hurting," Jacob's men came into town and killed all the men and looted the town taking all the women and cattle for themselves.

Now what could the moral of that story possibly be?

Anyway, Crumb's Genesis is a work of art, and I highly recommend it.

And thanks to my old friend John for recommending the book to me.