Lecture Five - Sources

Missing out on the seminars and the discussions and just listening to the lectures doesn't give us the full value of what is possible, but the lectures are still interesting.

In this lecture, he professor described the various sources of the Bible or at least how Bible scholars explain the sources.  Depending of what words are used or what style of writing or how God is portrayed or what things are emphasized, scholars believe that there were four different authors of the Bible who wrote at four different times.  None of this is etched in stone (pun intended), but these scholars also believe that the P or priestly source was the final writer or writers and the ones that put the whole thing together.   She also talked about what sources might have been available to these four writers.  These stories had to have come from somewhere - oral tradition etc. 

While all of this is interesting, I still would like to hear more about the meaning of the stories and what they might have meant to the ancient Hebrews and what they can mean to us.

She did make an interesting comment when she was explaining the story of the Tower of Babel, when God created all the world's languages to confuse people after they (the Babylonians specifically) tried to build a tower to the gods.  This story is actually a bridge from the stories of prehistory - the story of all humankind if you will- to the stories of a particular ethnic group and the first four generations of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the sons and daughter of Jacob.  But that is next week.

Anyway, when talking about the tower story, the lecturer referred to God being on a  "learning curve" with the people he had created.  In other words, he can't figure them out.  When they disobey him, he banishes them from the garden and bars them from the Tree of Life.  Then he realizes how sinful his creation has become so he destroys them in a flood.  When the people continue to make mistakes by building a tower, he has to confuses them so they can't work together.

All of this is interesting stuff to me.  God as perfect as he is supposed to be still can't figure out what to make of this creation.  He is baffled by them and responds in ways that are almost over the top in harshness.  Complete banishment.  A life of toil.  A destructive flood.  Confusion through language.  If we just read the story as an interesting idea on how various languages came to be, then there is no problem.  The lecturer actually suggested that the people by building to the sky were not following God's instructions to spread out and multiply throughout the land.   But if we are reading the stories as a means to get closer to and more understanding of God, then I think they fail.  It gets even worse in some of the later stories.  I have read to the end of Exodus, and I find it very hard to defend God.  He does not come across as a very likeable nor a very admirable character. 

Perhaps my view will change when some of the later stories are explained, but the first 11 chapters of Genesis have put God, at least for me, in a negative light.