The Bible Project - Genesis - Chapter 46 - Jacob leaves for Egypt
Jacob leaves for Egypt. On the way, he has a vision from God that tells him it is indeed God’s will that he go there, that God’s will make his family into a great nation and that he will see Joseph before he dies. His family (all his sons, and their wives and the grand-children) go with him.
So of course, it is the occasion for a genealogical litany - or maybe more of an inventory, I mean, you’ve got the list of names, and then the subtotals, and the final total (70 persons).
Jacob arrives in Egypt, Joseph goes to meet with him, everyone is moved and Joseph coaches his family on what to say when they meet Pharaoh.
There’s not a lot of profound things to be said there - except that God’s timing in revealing things to his believers is still iffy, in my opinion. I mean Jacob was such a believer that he got a nation named after his new name (I don’t think I’ve made a big deal out of it so far, but Jacob was renamed Israel, and his twelve sons are the twelve tribes) and yet God leaves him to believe that his favorite son is dead for a very long time (I don’t remember exactly, but it must have been at least 10 years).
And yes, I get it, that back then things happened which didn’t seem to make sense, therefore it makes sense that God is the explanation, but God as the explanation cannot make more sense that the things that didn’t make sense in the first place. (Does this sentence make sense?).
On the other hand, I remember the Greek and Roman mythology as making sense, perhaps because their Gods were closer to superheroes than the Judeo-Christian God - by which I mean that they had humans motivations in doing what they were doing. Their stories were a more convincing way of explaining the world. Which leads me to wonder: what leads a civilization to posit the sort of God that the Judeo-Christians posited, and another civilization to go with surhuman (but still human) Gods?
(I am aware that the faith-based answer would simply be that the Judeo-Christian God is the One True God and therefore the Greek-Roman Gods were nothing but what ordinary humans could imagine but still, even when believing in God, the stories that were chosen to be told about Him and the peculiar light they paint Him under, do lead to some questions.)
I would also be interested to look at fantasy stories and classify their mythologies. I have a feeling that most of them are closer in nature to Greek-Roman than to Judeo-Christian. (Although this might be because I’ve read of lot of fantasies where the gods are actual characters, and it’s difficult to have protagonists of a story that don’t make sense.)
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So of course, it is the occasion for a genealogical litany - or maybe more of an inventory, I mean, you’ve got the list of names, and then the subtotals, and the final total (70 persons).
Jacob arrives in Egypt, Joseph goes to meet with him, everyone is moved and Joseph coaches his family on what to say when they meet Pharaoh.
There’s not a lot of profound things to be said there - except that God’s timing in revealing things to his believers is still iffy, in my opinion. I mean Jacob was such a believer that he got a nation named after his new name (I don’t think I’ve made a big deal out of it so far, but Jacob was renamed Israel, and his twelve sons are the twelve tribes) and yet God leaves him to believe that his favorite son is dead for a very long time (I don’t remember exactly, but it must have been at least 10 years).
And yes, I get it, that back then things happened which didn’t seem to make sense, therefore it makes sense that God is the explanation, but God as the explanation cannot make more sense that the things that didn’t make sense in the first place. (Does this sentence make sense?).
On the other hand, I remember the Greek and Roman mythology as making sense, perhaps because their Gods were closer to superheroes than the Judeo-Christian God - by which I mean that they had humans motivations in doing what they were doing. Their stories were a more convincing way of explaining the world. Which leads me to wonder: what leads a civilization to posit the sort of God that the Judeo-Christians posited, and another civilization to go with surhuman (but still human) Gods?
(I am aware that the faith-based answer would simply be that the Judeo-Christian God is the One True God and therefore the Greek-Roman Gods were nothing but what ordinary humans could imagine but still, even when believing in God, the stories that were chosen to be told about Him and the peculiar light they paint Him under, do lead to some questions.)
I would also be interested to look at fantasy stories and classify their mythologies. I have a feeling that most of them are closer in nature to Greek-Roman than to Judeo-Christian. (Although this might be because I’ve read of lot of fantasies where the gods are actual characters, and it’s difficult to have protagonists of a story that don’t make sense.)
This entry was originally posted on DreamWidth.
Comment there ||
comments
You can post on DreamWidth using OpenID.