2nd Week of Epiphany

Genesis 9:18-12:8
The Daily Office

Due to a busy schedule, I'm going to try and give you a bird's eye view of the Genesis story covered in the daily readings, which you can access by clicking on the Daily Office link.

To understand Noah's story of his sons, you need to realize that Canaan was Israel's primordial enemy. It was the Canaanites whom Israel first encountered in the Promised Land. The Canaanite religion was one of many gods, male and female. And one of their religious practices was ritualized prostitution. A priest and priestess would have sex in imitation of the male and female gods, in the hope that such imitation of the gods' fertility would result in fertile crops. The Israelites rightly recoiled at the idea that God could be manipulated in such a crass way by human beings. And while the Israelites objected to sex outside of marriage, it was the use of sexuality as a means of power that they most objected to.

After this, we see human beings striving for unity, symbolized by the Tower of Babel. But again, it was a unity based on power, in this case the power of numbers, and the striving to be like God. God has resolved to help his human creatures, not destroy them. But rather than impose, by a divine fist, a false unity on humanity; God resolves to start small. God will start with one man and one woman. And as those two seed become a tree, from which more seeds fall, root, grow tall and generate yet more seeds; then hopefully the whole world will be saved through this one man and one woman.

Keep that in mind when you get to Genesis 12:3, one of the most important verses in the entire Bible. It is a promise, not just to one man and one woman, but to all men and women. It is the promise which keeps us going, and the goal toward which God is still leading us today, some 4,000 years later.