Sodomy is a homosexual act. We get the word from the story of Sodom, where the typical understanding is that God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because of homosexuality. But that’s just one sin, and God said the sins were great in number. Did God remove Sodom and Gomorrah because of the repeated acts of one transgression or because many different sins were happening?
Continue readingComments Off on Genesis – TP #4.2 – The Destruction of Sodom, part 2
Posted in Addendum, Torah Portion
Tagged Ashteroth, Baal Peor, Balaam, blood, children, commandments, false gods, fertility, homosexual, innocent, Law, Molech, Raphaim, rebellion, sex, sexual, sin, transgression, worship
Genesis 9:3 “And every moving thing that is living will be yours for food; like grassy vegetables, I give you all things.”
That sounds self-explanatory. Where’s the controversy?
There are no contradictions or errors in the Torah. If there were, then God made a mistake, and He is not perfect. If our understanding of some Scripture causes contradictions with other Scripture, Scripture is not the problem; our comprehension is.
The Torah provides a list of animals for food and animals we are not to eat, otherwise known as clean and unclean animals. Genesis 9:3 makes it sound like all animals are for food. And therein lies the controversy. Is it a contradiction, or can it be reconciled?
Continue readingComments Off on Genesis – TP #2.4 – The Genesis 9:3 Controversy
Posted in Addendum, Torah Portion
Tagged cattle, clean, creeping things, eat, food, livestock, unclean, wild beasts
The deluge began on the twenty-seventh day of the second month, and the ark ran aground on the twenty-seventh day of the seventh month. The total is five months. The text also says the time was 150 days. That would make each month 30 days long. With the moon cycle repeating every 29.5 days, the months usually alternate between 29 and 30 days. What is going on here? There are a few possibilities, and we will go through each one.
Continue readingComments Off on Genesis – TP #2.3 – Days and Months
Posted in Addendum
Tagged conjunction, Enoch calendar, moon cycle, seasons, tilt
As promised, here is a chart of the Genesis 5 and 11 genealogies. As you’ll see, there are blue columns and white columns. The blue columns contain the numbers provided in the Septuagint; the white columns contain the numbers from the Hebrew Masoretic. Those pairs of columns have six categories. They display the age of the fathers at the time of the births of their respective sons, then years for the rest of their lives, and the total number of years that they lived. From those numbers, we can determine the numbers that fill the following two columns, which show each person’s birth year and death year, counted from the creation. They are not BC (BCE) years. The last column is from Adam to Lamech only because it shows the number of years before the flood in which they died.
Continue readingThere’s one more thing to say about this Torah portion, and that is about the timing of a day and when a month begins. There are many different beliefs about how to calculate and keep the calendar as it is described in the Bible. You may know that today we keep the Gregorian calendar that was established in the 16th century. But that calendar won’t help us with understanding the timing of things in the Bible because it is a solar-based calendar. The calendar of the Bible is lunar-solar based, meaning it uses the moon and the sun to calculate the days and months of the year. I won’t go into all the variants and beliefs, but only share what I have discovered in reading through God’s Word and observing the moon cycles myself. So here goes.
Continue readingGenesis 3:8 says, “They heard the sound of the Lord God walking about in the garden in the evening, and both Adam and his wife hid from the face of the Lord God in the middle of the tree of the garden.”
That would suggest that God was in the habit of walking with Adam in the garden. Is that reading into the text? Possibly, but consider this. The text suggests that Adam and Eve hid from God because of the guilt of their sin. Adam’s answer to God for why he was hiding was because they were naked and ashamed. Adam said that he heard God walking in the garden. If that hadn’t happened before, then how would Adam recognize that sound?
Or look at it this way, if God were not in the habit of walking with Adam in the garden, then wouldn’t it make more sense that Adam and Eve were hiding because they didn’t know who else would be in the garden? Why would Adam say they hid because of the shame of their nakedness since they had already covered themselves? And why be ashamed in front of a stranger? No, the One they were hiding from was one they were familiar with walking in the garden.
God communicated many things to Adam. He could have done it audibly from the heavens, or He could have spent time with Adam in the garden. The reasoning for this conclusion may make more sense in the next post on Cain and Abel.