An Atheist Reads the Bible: Like Father, Like Son

This is the third installment in my series reading the Bible cover to cover as an atheist and ex-Mormon. If you missed the second, you can find it here.

A brief housekeeping note: upon reaching Chapter 32, I switched from the English Standard Version to the New American Standard Bible (NASB). My understanding is that the NASB is the translation most accepted among scholars. I don't think it changes much of what I've written so far, but I want to be transparent about it.

This stretch of Genesis — chapters 25 through 42 — marks roughly the halfway point of the book and beyond. It's also where the patriarchal story becomes something closer to a family saga: cycles of deception, favoritism, and moral compromise passing from father to son to grandson with uncomfortable regularity.

Genesis 25–27: Like Father, Like Son

Abraham finally seems to have a moment of altruism shortly before he passes away — giving many of his possessions to Isaac and sending his servants away with gifts. It's the most generous I've seen him, and it comes at the very end.

Ishmael, it turns out, was the first to have his twelve sons enumerated. The text records them dividing into tribes, much as Jacob's sons will later. I find that detail easy to overlook, but it's worth noting: the lineage that would become associated with Islam gets its own moment of legitimacy in the very text that later marginalizes it.

Rebekah feels the struggling of her unborn sons in her womb and goes to inquire of the Lord. I found myself wondering where, exactly, she went. Ancient peoples associated the tops of mountains with the gods — so did Rebekah make some kind of pilgrimage? The text doesn't say, but the act of going somewhere to ask the question implies that speaking with God required a specific location or ritual, not just a quiet prayer as is contemporarily accepted.

Isaac was forty years old when he took Rebekah as his wife. Jacob and Esau were not born until he was sixty. That's twenty years of waiting, and the text glosses over it entirely. I wonder what kind of anguish that brought to Rebekah — it was enough for her to make a journey to speak to God. But maybe there's more to it than what's recorded.

The story of Jacob and Esau's birthright is one of those Bible stories I thought I had figured out. Reading it now, though, I can't help seeing Jacob as conniving. Why would he seek his brother's birthright unless he was jealous? It is not virtuous for Jacob to take advantage of Esau's hunger to obtain what he wanted. The framing is that Esau is impulsive and Jacob is clever — but "clever at another's expense" is not a virtue.

In Chapter 26, we see that either the author really likes this motif or the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Isaac is now the one lying about the relationship between himself and his wife — and for the very same reasons as Abraham. It's even to the same king, Abimelech. You'd think Abimelech might have been more skeptical of Isaac's claim. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

The whole story of Jacob disguising himself to steal Esau's blessing from their blind father raises a question I couldn't shake: Esau had already sold his birthright to Jacob. So why the deception? Why trick his father when he'd already secured what he wanted? And supposedly the blessing given by Isaac would be granted by the Lord. Would the Lord truly be fooled by such trickery? I think not.

Genesis 28–30: Racial Purity

As I began reading Chapter 28 — seeing Isaac's instruction to Jacob not to take a Canaanite wife — I found myself wondering: are Israelites Canaanites? I turned to the internet and found that yes, the Israelites are, in fact, a subset of Canaanites. This makes the whole racial purity instruction deeply strange. Why create humanity and then start splitting them into groups? Or maybe the argument is that God didn't separate them — they separated themselves. Either way, the result is the same.

The instruction not to mingle raises another question. Power structures throughout history have often used the marriage of the ruling class as a tool to bind conflicting peoples together. The insistence that Jacob not marry a Canaanite woman — and that his lineage remain within approved lines — looks a lot like ethnic consolidation by another name. I don't believe such a thing was necessary. But the logic of the text seems to point that direction.

Jacob has a dream where the promise made to Abraham is reiterated. When he wakes, he's lying in the open air, having used a stone for a pillow. Upon waking, he says the place is a temple, the house of God.

I can't help contrasting this against the later temples built by Solomon — and then by the LDS church for the last almost two hundred years. In Mormonism, the temple is where you can speak to God and be in his presence, if you're worthy. Jacob's experience makes all of that feel unnecessarily elaborate. If there is a God who created the world without temples, the earth itself could be his temple. No worthiness interviews. No intermediary communications. God could just speak with his children wherever they happen to be sleeping under the stars.

Rachel is the first woman named in Genesis who doesn't seem to be immediately prefaced by her beauty or her virginity. Instead, she's introduced as a shepherdess — a role, a responsibility, something outside of home and childbearing. I noticed that, and I liked it.

The story of Jacob, Leah, and Rachel has never sat well with me. It was always a dirty trick for Laban to substitute Leah for Rachel on Jacob's wedding night, obligating Jacob to serve a total of fourteen years. But there's also something worth noting: Leah didn't choose to be the pawn in that arrangement either.

Jacob produces several children with Leah, Bilhah, and Zilpah before Rachel finally conceives. One verse that made me stop: "God remembered Rachel, and God listened to her and opened her womb." We've seen this before — the challenging of divine memory. How does an omniscient God forget anything?

Genesis 31–33: Man Sees the Face of God

Jacob says he'll take the spotted or striped sheep and goats from Laban, so Laban immediately has all the spotted ones removed and given to his own sons. Jacob's solution is to selectively breed the remaining animals so that their offspring come out spotted and striped anyway. It's a clever bit of husbandry, though the text attributes it to divine instruction.

The broader exchange in Chapter 31 reads like two men both claiming divine favor to justify their competing interests. This isn't uncommon in human history. Mankind is always using God as justification for whatever cause they're already pursuing, and to say that they were favored while their enemies only had what was coming to them.

This verse struck me: "Laban had gone to shear his sheep, and Rachel stole her father's household gods." What gods did she steal? It's an amusing detail — Laban, who has just been invoking the God of Abraham, apparently also had household deities sitting around. And when Laban pursues Jacob and searches his camp for the stolen gods, Rachel sits on the camel's saddle where she's hidden them and says, "I cannot rise before you, for the way of women is upon me." Way to use biology for personal gain.

This little detail also seems to point, very subtly, to the fact that the ancient Israelites were polytheistic. This is something I remember being a revelation in a college course I took whose curriculum was based around A History of Western Civilization. It was one of the first cracks in my testimony, though I didn't see it as such at the time. It was just one of the first moments I remember having the thought, "Did God make men, or did men make gods?"

There are many instances in these chapters of a place being named because of something someone said. The beginning of Chapter 32 has Jacob seeing angels and naming the place Mahanaim — "God's camp." It shows how cultures explained the origins of names, which I find more interesting than the supernatural framing would suggest.

It makes me think about where I live. Cache Valley gets its name from the western trappers who used to hide their caches of furs here before taking them to trade. The Shoshone people called it Willow Valley, and I like that better. It's named after nature rather than after something commercial.

Jacob is afraid of meeting Esau again, and it makes sense. He took the birthright through a transaction, and then the blessing through deception. Dwelling with Laban for those years may have provided him distance from his brother's anger. Now, returning home, it's no wonder he dreads what might be waiting for him.

Then comes the strangest story so far: Jacob wrestling through the night with someone — and winning. The wrestling is so significant that Jacob's hip gets dislocated. Whoever he's fighting has enough physicality to wrestle a mortal man, and enough limitation to lose to him. How does this square with the omnipotent God of mainstream Christianity?

Mormon theology does allow for God to have a physical body — though it's described as perfected and exalted — could it still be overpowered by an unexalted mortal man? I wouldn't think so. But this story makes it sound like it's possible.

One of the first post-Adamic appearances of God is recorded here when Jacob says he "has seen God face to face." I'm aware of later scriptures that seem to contradict this. For a book that is supposed to be divinely inspired, this doesn't feel like a minor inconsistency. Has man seen God or not? If they have, why does he only appear to a select few if he wants all to believe and return to his presence?

The contradiction deepens when Jacob meets Esau and is received warmly. Jacob says to his brother: "I see your face as one sees the face of God, and you have received me favorably." It couldn't be read more plainly. Jacob is saying that seeing a man's face — in warmth and forgiveness — is what seeing the face of God looks like.

Genesis 34–36: The Rape of Dinah

Dinah is raped by Shechem, and then to make matters worse, Shechem asks his father to seek her as his wife.

Jacob's sons handle the matter by refusing the request — not because their sister was violated, but because Shechem isn't circumcised. A woman is violated and the reason given for refusing her rapist's proposal is that he hasn't undergone a religious procedure. The gravity of what happened to Dinah is treated as a secondary concern to the mark of the covenant.

Shechem agrees to be circumcised. Not only he, but his entire people. While they're still in pain, the sons of Jacob come upon the city and execute every male. They take the surviving women, children, and livestock as captives.

The text moves on. Just like that. Dinah disappears from the story without a word about how she fared. The chapter that bears her name barely pauses to register what happened to her. I'm giving her about the same amount of space the Bible does — which is itself the point.

Chapter 36 offers a genealogy of Esau's descendants, which I read dutifully and found exhausting. Of all the things God needed preserved in scripture, these lists take up considerable real estate.

Genesis 37–39: Joseph Sold into Egypt

I want to be honest about something before getting into these chapters: I was in a performance of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat as a teenager. That show carries real significance for me. So I'm arriving at Genesis 37 with more hesitancy than anywhere else in this project so far. I knew I was getting close for a couple of days before I got there, and I remembered the line from the musical: "It's all there in Chapter 39 of Genesis."

There's something strange about holding real affection for a story while trying to read it with the same critical eye I've brought to everything else. The version of Joseph I grew up with — the dreamer, the forgiving son, the man of virtue surrounded by moral mediocrity — is not exactly what Genesis offers. The musical is a love letter to the character. The text is something more complicated.

Joseph makes a bad report about his brothers. The text doesn't specify what the report contained, but it sets up everything that follows. Jacob — now called Israel — loved Joseph more than all his other sons, the legacy of his long-desired Rachel. He made this favoritism visible with a multicolored tunic. It's one thing to suspect your parents love one sibling more than you. It's another to watch them hand him something you were never offered.

Then Joseph has dreams of his brothers bowing to him. He tells them that he's the favored younger brother, and he has the audacity to announce that they'll bow to him. It's not hard to feel a measure of understanding for the brothers. They couldn't even speak to him peaceably — the text says so — and then he tells them they'll kneel at his feet.

The brothers conspire to kill him, but Reuben talks them out of it. They'll throw him in a pit so Reuben can come back and save him later — likely hoping to curry some favor from Israel. But then the Ishmaelites pass by, and the opportunity presents itself to sell Joseph instead.

Chapter 38 is an interlude about Judah that seems inserted with little ceremony. In it, God takes two lives. The second is Onan, who refuses to impregnate his brother's widow and instead "spills his seed on the ground." I remember this story being used as a biblical argument against masturbation — foundational, even — in the religious culture I grew up in. Reading it now, the actual offense seems to be Onan's refusal to fulfill a specific cultural obligation to his dead brother's wife, not a condemnation of the act itself.

Judah then mistakes Tamar for a temple prostitute. A temple prostitute — but whose temple? Surely not Jehovah's, but one of the Canaanite gods. Which raises the question of how many competing religious practices were operating side by side in these stories. The leaders of the tribes of Israel are already showing themselves to be morally complicated, at least by the standards Christianity later claims to derive from these texts.

Joseph's refusal of Potiphar's wife is one of the few clear moral stands a man takes in all of Genesis. Joseph had earned the trust of his master and had no interest in violating it. I give him credit for that. But I also found myself asking: was what he feared the loss of his virtue — or was there some consequence for a slave sleeping with his master's wife that he was equally motivated to avoid?

Genesis 40–42: Joseph Interprets Dreams

Growing up, I remember wishing I could interpret dreams the way Joseph could. I wondered what it would be like to hear a dream from someone and have its meaning revealed. I used to think dreams were a channel through which God could reach us when the mind is unguarded, the static of daily life quieted.

Now I understand that dreams are how the brain consolidates memories. It's a continuous process, a kind of nightly maintenance. Memories are stored, archived, some deleted. Hard to see anything supernatural in them anymore. And yet Genesis asks us to believe that God gave specific dreams to specific people so that Joseph could interpret them, rise to prominence, and eventually sustain his family through famine.

The fate of the baker — to have his head removed and then be hung on a wooden post for the birds — made me wonder at first if this was an allusion to crucifixion. But the sequence (decapitation, then displayed) makes it sound more like being skewered as a public warning. Grim either way.

What I found hard to accept was the premise that Pharaoh, surrounded by the priests and scholars of Egypt, found no one who could interpret his dreams to his satisfaction. None of them. Only when the cupbearer finally remembers Joseph does an interpreter appear. It's convenient for the story in a way that's hard to read as anything other than narrative necessity.

One detail I'd always skimmed past: Joseph was given an Egyptian wife by Pharaoh — the daughter of a priest of On, the city known for its devotion to sun worship. Israel was specifically instructed not to take a Canaanite wife. But when God's providential hand is steering Joseph's story, the prohibition seems not to apply. Joseph marries an Egyptian priest's daughter. The text gives her a sentence.

There's a part of me that finds Joseph's rough treatment of his brothers — demanding they leave Simeon behind as collateral, accusing them of being spies — more understandable than the text seems to intend. They conspired to kill him. They sold him into slavery. He waited in prison for two years after the cupbearer forgot about him. Making his brothers wait three days seems like a small price by comparison.

And yet — these are the sons of Israel. The grandsons of Isaac. The great-grandsons of Abraham, the man promised descendants as numerous as the stars. The reader is supposed to understand that the whole house of Israel will be preserved through Joseph's position in Egypt. The personal and the providential are wound together so tightly it's hard to know where one ends and the other begins.

Nearing the end of Genesis, I find myself thinking about what kind of book this actually is when you read it without the inherited assumption that it must be divine. I've already touched on some of these themes, but I think they're worth repeating.

What emerges is not a story about a perfect God and his faithful people. It's a story about people in a particular time and place trying to make sense of the world, establish their origins, explain the names of the places they lived, and justify the arrangements of power they already inhabited. God is invoked constantly, but his behavior keeps resembling that of the people who wrote him. He has favorites. He forgets. He tests without reason. He hears the boy and not the weeping mother.

And yet — there are moments. The way Jacob names a campsite after angels he saw in the night. The way Rachel is introduced as a shepherdess before she's described as beautiful. Joseph's refusal to betray a man who trusted him.

I'm still reading the Bible with the hope to understand what's actually there.