Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Incest in the Bible: like finding hay in a haystack

I've run some of these "bad" passages past proselytizers in the past; they told me that these passages are in the Old Testament, and therefore that the New Testament kind of cancelled them out. Ok, but we're still supposed to revere the Old Testament prophets, and when God told us what to do in the Old Testament, was he really intending to give a mae culpa 1000 years later? And even if He did, He repeatedly describes Lot as "righteous" in the New Testament ... even though Lot fornicated his daughters, getting them both pregnant. It praises him for resisting the "filthy" ways of the Sodomites, but says nothing critical of his own recreational activities. And there are plenty of other instances of incest among the prophets. Consider, for instance, Nahor and Milcah, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Esau and Mahalah, Reuben and Bilhah (sort of), Jacob and Tamar, Amram and Jochebed. And, let's consider that Darwin did NOT consider incest necessary for any stage of procreation. But according to the Bible, how do you think the first generation of Adam and Eve's children was created? You got it. That's exactly what the Bible says. Also, their children were all male. Granted, it's possible that these incestuous relationships aren't supposed to be viewed favorable. When God decided the world didn't turn out the way He would have wanted it, He created a giant flood that killed everything except for selected males and females from some of the large animals that would have existed in the Middle East that time, in addition to Noah, his wife, their sons and their sons' wives. So after the flood, prophets only engaged in incest between siblings, not between parents and children.